Any platform that extracts money from X has the incentive to get rid of any negative reviews about X. Reviewers are not the revenue source. That's why AirBnB, Yelp, Glassdoor, etc will get rid of bad reviews for the right price.
Read all bad stuff about AirBnB on reddit, you see where airbnb is heading. People should stop using that platform, whenever you find an alternative.
There was a line from Jeff Bezos, ""One of the early examples of this is customer reviews. Someone wrote to me and said, 'You don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Why do you allow these negative customer reviews?'
"And when I read that letter, I thought, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."
The incentives are different at different levels of the business. There could be someone with a shorter-term outlook making these decisions, or (more likely imo) it was a very quick misapplication of the policy based on skimming the review. Acting as a first reviewer actually seems like a great application of LLMs, where attention won't flag + they can hopefully be tuned to only focus on the policy-relevant pieces.
That Bezos quote is insightful. For companies that just help people pick which product to buy, steering customers away from bad products will increase satisfaction and repeat business.
> We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions
If those reviews help you decide to buy from someplace other than Amazon... perhaps in short term or narrow circumstances it still helps Amazon (reduced refunds/etc).
It's hard to completely trust platforms that can massage reviews in this way, but I think that AirBnB can provide the right incentives and policies to avoid most scammy behavior by bad hosts.
AirBnB needs to immediately get rid of all fees for rentals and enforce that there's just 1 base price charged. The price you see on a listing should be the only price ever possibly charged. Between silly cleaning and toilet paper and checkin and other fees, there's too much of an opportunity for scummy people to try and take advantage of people that are tired and desperate after traveling.
Virtually all of the conflicts, scammy behavior, and confusion would be resolved if there was just 1 base price that was ever charged.
When AirBnB became public, it wasn't about growth anymore but purely profit. These services were only "good" for the time they had to build positive buzz, now the bill is coming due and they are making as much profit as possible, at the expense of the guest. After all, what is the alternative now they have a monopoly in their niche? "Disruption" my ass... since Airbnb owns no property, the host is their lifeblood and they will always favor the host's reputation in order to make money.
AFAIK, Yelp has not and does not remove negative reviews for the sake of improving a business's score, but they will remove "spam" reviews (like if a celebrity dies at a hospital and their fans leave bad reviews). There certainly have been minor incidents where certain employees have behaved against policy.
Unlike Airbnb, if users lose trust in their reviews, Yelp loses their entire business.
I've read 100s of comments from variety of sources over the years that Yelp is in the business of extortion. It extort money from restaurants by threatening to remove positive reviews and other such tactics.
Those sources seem like hiersay. A recent story I heard was by Loius Rossmann [0] claimed that he found the family member of a Yelp sales rep left a bad review after he turned down a yelp offer.
That just doesn't make sense to me? Like Yelp is telling their sells reps to ask their family to give bad reviews for businesses that don't buy ads?
There might be an argument for Yelp to adjust incentivizes for their sales people to discourage that behavior, but AFAIK they are acting on their own and not because Yelp said to do that.
Here is an example: One Yelp employee had his friend write a negative review for the business that said 'no' to Yelp extortion/tax.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQAAauJlPq0
Yeah, this is a perfect example of why Yelp is not instigating this.
Do you really think Yelp is asking their employees leverage their friend's network to leave negative reviews or do you think this sales guy is at risk of losing his job for not converting enough and so he on his own asks a friend to help him keep his job?
If Yelp wanted to extort businesses, they wouldn't need employees to ask their friends. They could just adjust the search ranking to down rank businesses that don't want to pay.
Even though whatever Yelp does is not illegal, it engages in unethical practices:
"[R]emoving positive reviews wasn’t extortion because Yelp didn’t have to publish those reviews at all. Third, publishing or showcasing negative reviews wasn’t extortion because Yelp has the legal right “to post and sequence the reviews.” Finally, the plaintiffs claimed Yelp wrote bogus reviews to punish non-advertisers, but the plaintiffs didn’t provide adequate evidence that Yelp wrote those negative reviews instead of someone else. For example, even if a business couldn’t find records matching the reviewer’s details, that doesn’t mean Yelp falsified that review (compare the Yelp v. Hadeed case, which in a different legal context gave more benefit of the doubt to an aggrieved business with similar claims)."
This feels like such a hard problem to solve; as a company (Airbnb) grows larger and larger this feels inevitable.
I was a very early user of Airbnb and started using it back in 2012, when the platform was still mostly folks renting out extra bedrooms in their homes, and occasionally full house rentals (less commercially-run than nowadays). For a good few years it was always a positive experience, and most of them had a human touch to them (good interactions with hosts, etc.).
A few years later it has gotten commercialized enough that I basically just consider it a commercial short term house rental platform. In the past few years, stories like this post is so common that I'm hesitant to book one unless absolutely needed (can't stay at a hotel at my destination for various reasons, e.g. large group wanting a house, etc.).
What's the future path for this? There's obviously a market need for something like this. Is it a move toward more decentralized small boutique short term rental management companies (maybe geographically dispersed too)? And for platforms like Airbnb to move back to strictly renting out extra rooms in a house you live in?
We used to stay at airbnb places all the time, but no more. The fees have reached a ridiculous level (hint: set your location as Australia, but your currency as USD to see the true cost). The alternative we have switched to is… hotels.
I converted a van to an RV, and now we stay in RV sites. Never going back to AirBNB/VRBO/Hotels! I know, useless for international travel, but within the USA it has become--by far--the most congenial option.
It would be in AirBnb's long term interest to promote accurate reviews to increase trust. If a host is bad and they don't get rid of them it will lose customers.
Read all bad stuff about AirBnB on reddit, you see where airbnb is heading. People should stop using that platform, whenever you find an alternative.