

Huntbnb finds illegally sublet properties on Airbnb - taitems
http://www.huntbnb.com/

======
minimaxir
It should be noted that this startup has tried to astroturf Hacker News with a
voting ring _three times today_. If you see any weird sockpuppet accounts in
the comments, that's why.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173540)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173611)
(OP deleted after being called out; if you read the thread title on my second-
most recent comment, you'll see it was a Huntbnb submission. A little HN
protip :) )

Can't find the third thread unfortunately.

~~~
dang
Thanks for pointing that out. I was away all day and didn't see any of this.

The third link was
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173504).
I haven't seen people trying to game HN so outrageously in a long time.

Looks like I'll be up late banning sockpuppets.

~~~
taitems
Hi all, apparent third OP here. I saw this on Designer News and was surprised
to see it wasn't on HN. I did the old "submit once with the URL to be
redirected to the existing post" and it turned up nothing. Is there a better
way to know if you're submitting a moot/dead link?

------
dang
This post was killed by user flags. See minimaxir's comment for the likely
explanation.

I noticed that someone in one of the deleted threads accused us of having
censored the post. That is false. We didn't touch any of their posts [1]. It
was the submitters who deleted it. Perhaps they noticed that our anti-
sockpuppet mechanisms were preventing their throng of fake accounts and
upvotes from working.

In general, we penalize posts _less_ , not more, when they are critical of YC
and YC-funded startups—precisely because we don't want to be accused of venal
censorship. That doesn't stop people from accusing us, of course, but at least
we can in good conscience say it's not true.

When people try to game HN this horribly, though, it's a different story. I
take that personally.

Edit: I just banned 22 sockpuppets. (Edit: 26.) The apparent ringleader is
also banned until we get a promise that this will never happen again.

1\. We may not even have seen them. I didn't, at least—I was away from my
computer all day. On the one hand, it's dismaying to see something like this
at #1 when I come back after 14 hours. On the other hand, it's reassuring to
see HN users taking care of it by the time I refresh the front page. Thanks!

~~~
berrangi
Hi dang,

We (huntbnb) apologize for the confusion. This is some genuine work we did and
have been getting some great attention from the media folks
([http://pando.com/2014/08/13/thanks-to-huntbnb-people-who-
sec...](http://pando.com/2014/08/13/thanks-to-huntbnb-people-who-secretly-
list-their-apartment-on-airbnb-have-nowhere-to-hide/)) and several users
across the country. Our only motive behind getting on HN is to get more
visibility and take this to more users. This is our (at least mine) first time
posting something on HN and obviously we didn't do it right. We initially
posted it but couldn't view it and re-did it again twice. We had no intentions
behind scamming the voting process nor we tried to up vote. It's just that we
didn't do it right. And we apologize for one of our members accusing you guys
for censoring our post, because we genuinely were frustrated for not letting
us post something. Again, that was uncalled for and we apologize.

The recent post by "taitems" was by someone who read one of the articles about
us online; it wasn't any of our members. We were so excited about a) someone
thinking that our feature is a HN material, and b) getting good attention from
a lot of HN users. Unfortunately, it didn't last longer since we were mistaken
for astroturf'ing HN. Again, we sincerely respect your decision and this is a
good learning lesson for us to be careful from hereon. The only reason I'm
writing back is we strongly believe in the value HN brings to any new and
upcoming ideas by giving them the right visibility and want you guys to
realize that we aren't any sock puppets trying to move up HN for fun. That'd
be the last thing we do.

Thank you for your time!!

------
iamshs
I enter first two digits of an address, the search box suggests some addresses
through autocomplete, and upon searching one of the suggested address it says
"Zip Code not found". It has thrown this error for even a complete address
listed on AirBnB and same goes for searching only zip codes. Frustrating.

Can Airbnb pull a plug on the site? (technology wise and not in any lawyer
kind of way).

~~~
as7494
Unfortunately as of right now we only support complete street address with a
valid street number. Thanks a lot for the feedback, you can shoot me an email
at contact@huntbnb.com with any other questions/feedback!

We are using a publicly available endpoint so they could always pull the
access but we think that end point is used by other services too.

~~~
loopdoend
It doesn't work in Canada. Zip not found. I hope you're continuously scraping
them and not relaying live queries!

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codystebbins
Great idea. Making it easier for property owners to enforce their contracts is
a good thing that should not interfere legal Airbnb usage (I say this as happy
Airbnb user).

It is a shame that Airbnb does not provide such a feature, but I see the
conflict of interest. They may be able to even charge for such a feature. If
it provided features like alerts for illegal listings based on the exact
addresses, hands-off customer service on behalf of the property owner to
remove the post and contact the poster, and was priced right it might be
worthwhile to avoid the hassle.

------
ianphughes
As a property owner, the idea is appealing. Especially if you could configure
watches and alerts. This example is poorly executed however.

------
mmaunder
It would be interesting to know how often illegal subletting happens.

