The question now is will this be the Hindenburg moment of this type of services, or is it just a speed bump?
We'll see how all this bad press is going to spread across the rest of the mainstream media and tabloids. I know we are all disappointed with the way airbnb handled the situation, but we really shouldn't be happy if all the sensation seeking press starts using this to boost their sales, and in the process damages this market beyond repair.
I think this may be the Hindenburg moment for services like this built purely on trust. Trust alone is a naive defence that only works when your user base is small and well aligned with your core concepts. In many ways its the coming of age of the concept when it starts appealing to crooks. Mandatory insurance and more strict user verification is the only way this kind of service will survive.
Crooks? Someone that would seriously vandalize someone's home is not really a "crook" but a victim of some sort of mental health problem. There will always (in any area of life) be a small percentage of people who do that sort of thing.
Someone who would do that is more likely suffering from some sort of mental health problem than simply being mean. Do you know any normal, healthy, reasonable person who would do that?
As a nonreligious person I just don't agree with that statement at all. The idea that there is some sinister force flowing around the earth is bizarre and medieval.
More accurately, non-insane people behave as they do in order to achieve a goal that they think will bring them happiness. Unless there is a motive of revenge or bad PR then there is no way that the degree of vandalism done in this case could possibly make the vandal happy. Anyone who would go to great lengths to destroy all traces of a stranger's personal property is mentally ill.
Mental illness has a material cause, not a supernatural one.
As everyone keeps telling you, you can't attribute that vandalism to mental health problems. It may be the case but you don't know. I guess you need counter examples to stop saying it:
1. Drugs
2. Thieves who knew/thought they'd get away with this, thus
also wrecked the place (Occam's Razor will suggest this)
I use the word evil as a descriptor of people without guilt or shame when hurting others. Maybe they are down on their luck, addicted to drugs, or just hateful, but I don't think you have to be religious to believe in evil.
I find it curious that you say that. A thief is not just someone who shifts a few numbers in a spreadsheet, a thief tends to break things in order to gain access to valuables, or threaten people's lives. The line between that and willful vandalism is not so terribly thick.
These services are great as long as it's part of a small, insular community of like-minded people. Once the criminal element sees it for the opportunity it is, it's over.
There's an obvious analogy here to email and spammers.
I suppose it could still work if the vetting process is better, but there will always be those who mask their identity and "sneak in". The cost of this to a criminal is probably minimal while the potential rewards are great. Perhaps the key is to create smaller "circles" of trust within the wider community.
Maybe I'd buy this if you used Google+ as an example instead. As far as I'm concerned I get many times more spam on Facebook than through email - only once every few months does a message from a Nigerian prince slip through gmail's spam filter, but multiple times a week I get a FB message that someone I vaguely knew 3 years ago lost their phone and needs numbers, is having a party thousands of miles away, etc.
Facebook encourages its users to add lots and lots of friends to your main friend pool, and always has. It's spent most of its existence trying to get lots of users and build a huge social graph. Having hundreds upon hundreds of "friends" is the norm, not the exception - there's no emphasis on keeping your set of facebook friends small and tight-nit.
I wouldn't argue that email was 'destroyed' by spammers, but it definitely helped reduce its relevancy from my perspective considering that I assume 75%+ of all emails I receive on my non-work address to not be worth looking at.
Not to get offtopce, but spam is not "solved". Solving spam would be something that does not require a user to implement filters and other mechanisms to auto-sort things into a junk box.
A solution would be one which prevents the sending of the spam in the first place, or an auto-rejection mechanism that was 100% passive and 100% accurate.
Spam is merely a problem that is manageable with some ultimately clunky tools.
I disagree. All sorts of things use filters to solve problems. From my point of view (an end user), I don't have to configure or manage my spam filters, I just end up not getting spam. I used to, it sucked. But now I don't and it's the same email address. I consider the problem solved.
Right. Just like the internal combustion engine is a kludge because you need to change the air filters in your car. A real solution would be an engine that didn't need filters, anything else is just a clunky hack.
An IC engine would run just fine for quite a long while with no air or oil filters. The filters are there to prolong its lifespan, but are not strictly necessary for basic operation.
How long would your email be usable if you turned off your spam filters?
Engine aire filters are also preventing the INGRESS of foreign contaminants. Most spam filters are much closer to the receiver than the sender. So the spam email volume still moves through many servers, routers and networks before it is finally filtered out and stopped.
One is managing _your_ inbox. Yes, the tools are there, and if you're using any largish email service provider, you've probably got pretty effective filtering going on.
Try getting on the other side of it, though, and start _sending_ email from a new domain. The same mechanisms which "solve" the inbound problem create a _huge_ issue for outbound. Especially if, say, your business is somehow reliant on being able to reach out and communicate a message to people (I'm not even talking about marketing -- think of status notifications, account mailings, etc., etc.).
I'm a huge believer in email, don't get me wrong. I dislike most of the tools that have come along to "replace" it to some degree or another (how fast would SMS disappear in a mushroom cloud if spammers were to hit it like mail?). But it's gotten really, really creaky.
> 75%+ of all emails I receive on my non-work address to not be worth looking at.
If you use any of the major mail providers (gmail, hotmail, yahoo), you should not see 75% spam in your inbox. It's worth noting that email that's "not worth looking at" is not necessarily the same as spam. The group you mentioned includes both real spam (phishing, pills, etc) and gray mail (newsletter, notifications, etc). If most of your inbox is gray mail that you're not interested in maybe it's worth setting up some filter rules or consider unsubscribing to those mailing lists.
Gray mail is generally a difficult problem for spam filters to solve since a critical email to one person might be junk to another. There are evolving ways to improve this filter but it usually requires action on the user, such as clicking the junk button or deleting them without reading.
Email's taken a considerable hit. The challenge of running your own email server (even as a business) is considerably higher now than it was, say, in 2001. Hell, a lot of major ISPs won't even talk to you unless you jump through a lot of hoops (SPF, DKIM, and more).
Spam doesn't break into my house, pour yellow-brown crud all over the background, smash the walls, and take all my stuff.
It's shown me a few things that can't be unseen, though console-mode clients have distinct advantages sometimes.
Email is not a reliable way of communication anymore, because of the spammers. I have given up on checking my spam folder, which means there is a probability of ham getting lost.
Spam is just one of many things that slightly reduces the reliability of email, and Bayesian filtering has reduced it to a minor nuisance. The implication that email was ever completely reliable is false, there has always been a risk of mail servers going down, for example, but it was also reduced to a minor nuisance by modern redundancy techniques (for example).
The implication that there even exists an actually reliable way of communication I don't think is true either, that's why email is still so widely used.
I think it's a trade off of having a decentralized system vs. a centralized system. Just imagine if we could only use Gmail or Facebook for email--now that would be just plain scary.
I think the important thing to note is that this might be Airbnb's Hindeburg, however this was entirely preventable had they dealt with this sooner and correctly. This could be and (already is) a lesson on how to (not)deal with PR on a business built entirely on trust and community.
I remember the early days of ebay and stories of fraud. I don't think this will be the end. They need to make adjustments, but I don't think this is the "end" of this type of service.
I tend to agree. While the largest unknown independent variable here is how the Airbnb handles this crisis, I feel that they will be able to steer the ship through this.
I find it interesting how people handle crisis. You can act on feeling, or you can act on logic. They (airbnb) need to be more logic based in their approach and state the facts: Our system is not perfect. We are making adjustments. We will compensate this person for their loss. Instead, they are providing tons of great coverage to the press.
This is great practice for airbnb. Far worse things than this will happen as the service grows and they will need to be prepared to handle the absolute worst (eg craigslist killer type stuff). Get enough people together and bad stuff is certain to happen. It's just a matter of time.
Why or how have they failed? Even the person who was the victim in this case has basically had nothing but good things to say about AirBnb. I haven't been following this as closely as I follow some things, so maybe I've missed an angle.
Yikes, if the implied allegations are true, they managed to do worse than bad press. They lied to generate good press. Did they not realize that would fail to stifle the truth and even worse, amplify the bad news?
The second blog post (linked above/below) is the problem. Before that, I thought this was a major crisis, but could be survived. After that (and the FT article), I really think they will be incredibly lucky to survive, much less continue their growth trajectory.
People who use startups early do so because of the human interactions. AirBnB destroyed that by not being humane with the woman (EJ?). Sure, she has culpability, but I guarantee making her "right" would have cost one or two orders of magnitude less than this is costing.
I would also expect the board to replace the CEO as a symbolic gesture. Somebody has to take the blame or they will not be able to get the next round raised.
Fwiw, you got an up vote from me. Your comment was out of date, not trolling. I'm really wondering if down voting needs to be removed from most people.
Oh, I'm not really worried about it. I seem to find that most people on HN, even when disagreeing, are happy to stay neutral or upvote for discussion. I suspect it's lurkers weighing in with their opinion that vote. It was pretty disheartening yesterday when a discussion turned nasty and was full of accusations that I was downvoting (and even in a place where it's impossible to downvote child comments).
I thought I'd go for a plea of sanity for those who are downvoting to consider why they're downvoting. It's so rare that I find anything worth downvoting and it's usually someone just being off the wall rude, mean or ignorant. Oh well.
We'll see how all this bad press is going to spread across the rest of the mainstream media and tabloids. I know we are all disappointed with the way airbnb handled the situation, but we really shouldn't be happy if all the sensation seeking press starts using this to boost their sales, and in the process damages this market beyond repair.