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HN has been pretty disgusting the last few days: the level of schadenfreude here has hit ridiculous new highs. It seems that every time a story breaks about a

by kyro 15y ago

HN has been pretty disgusting the last few days: the level of schadenfreude here has hit ridiculous new highs. It seems that every time a story breaks about a successful company, a bunch of envious and disgruntled people come out of the woodwork and jump onto the bandwagon headed straight for the founders' heads. A community of seemingly intelligent and rational individuals turns into the most rabid, emotionally-charged group of catty girls I've ever seen. We only have one side of the story here. What if the've offered help and she's rejecting it? What if there are some very legitimate reasons that AirBnB is not going totally public about it? You don't know, and you have not heard the other side of the story. The same thing happened with Dropbox. You guys were so ridiculously quick to foam at the mouth with your theatrics and conspiracies. It's pretty revolting. Envy is just not a good color on many of you. Edit: Spelling. Thanks, Jacques.

swombat 15y ago
At the risk of being considered a complete troll, Reddit used to be very anti-commercial (I remember some of my best posts being ripped as too commercial there), and there has been a lot of influx of people from Reddit over the last year or two. Perhaps the anti-commercialism has seeped in too.
jacquesm 15y ago
It's 'schadenfreude'. This issue is very emotionally charged because: - everybody that uses AirBNB thought 'this could be me' - everybody that has a sister thinks 'that could be my sister' - everybody that runs a start-up thinks 'this could be a shakedown' (including some preposterous claims about hotel chains putting her up to this) - everybody is wondering if AirBNB is sitting on a huge stack of cash why they didn't just put it right and changed their terms of service / signup process Being the 'ebay of spaces' means that you will be doing the same things that ebay spends the most of its time on: battling fraud. AirBNB is coming of age with this incident, from now on the stakes will be raised considerably in how they deal with the reputation of their hosts and tenants. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Looking forward to the period after this incident has blown over when AirBNB will be a company that is that much stronger and that will put action to their claims of transparency and being a 'trusted marketplace'. If they can make that work they'll be fine.
- adw 15y ago
  One extra issue: a bunch of startups concerned with splashover reputational risk (in extremis, and we are nowhere near this, 'why should I use/partner with/fund you, you're associated with bad actors so I don't trust you'. This isn't rational, but we're talking about hearts not heads here. Look at the damage Dow Jones has taken by association with the News of the World.
- diolpah 15y ago
  " everybody that has a sister thinks 'that could be my sister'" Because ransacking the home of my brother is no big deal, according to modern gender politics, right?
  - kyro 15y ago
    Nah, probably because EJ is most likely female.
    - rkalla 15y ago
      She is, she confirmed it in her followup blog post.
- raganwald 15y ago
  Being the 'ebay of spaces' means that you will be doing the same things that ebay spends the most of its time on: battling fraud. This is the most old-school HN insight I've seen so far, thanks. Quite often, what a business appears to do for it's users (allow you to read your mail on line, hook landlords up with renters) and it's competitive advantage (spam fighting, ad targeting, fraud detection, &c.) are very different things. Back when I was young and rode a nice, sporty dinosaur to work, I made software for publishing classified ads. On the surface, it's a publishing business. But in reality, it's an operations business, because classifieds used to have very high revenue per column inch, but the transaction costs were also very high. So the profitability of a page of classifieds was driven by how efficiently the paper could take ads. Anyways, I agree with your speculation. Running a c2c business is going to be all about fraud and other bad actor detection as well as operation efficiency.
jcunningham 15y ago
Maybe it's as simple as being angered when you see someone outrageously victimized and then doubly wronged by a startup that you previously had a lot of respect for?
jamesteow 15y ago
I agree with the overall sentiment of your statement. I think people have blown this situation far out of proportion. People touting their model is broken or that the company is going to fail over this one inciden... Same with Dropbox. It does have something to do with their successes. That said: People attacked the founders because, for better or worse, they got directly involved in this. And if one of the co-founders really did tell her to take down that blog post to make sure their valuation doesn't take a hit, that'll draw a lot of ire. Plus, Airbnb has millions of dollars. They have the PR capacity to deal with these scenarios. If they aren't framing their true side of the story, whose fault is that? Like it or not, people are going to speculate especially when there is a long history of corporations side-stepping responsibility. (I am not at all suggesting that Airbnb is not trying to help. I'm saying why I can see how people can assume the worst) The fact that PG has to publicly defend them is ludicrous. It's like a father defending a fully-grown son. The core issue here beyond the Dropbox security folly and the previous Craigslist/Airbnb debacle (which both sparked a ton of vitriol) is that this exact scenario this woman went through was bound to happen and should not have gotten out of hand. Credit cards get stolen. The process is: phone a 24-hotline, cancel a card, get a new one in the mail, challenge the fees, hopefully get money back. With this Airbnb scenario, the woman had to contact Airbnb through a freelancer who worked for them because no one initially responded to her e-mails or phone calls! Craigslist does a very good job of warning people of the dangers all across the process. If you click on sublets, there are huge links at the top warning of fraud, scams, and personal safety tips. If you click on a post, there is a giant yellow box that warns the user of scams. On Airbnb: Nothing on the homepage, nothing on the lists of properties, and nothing on the listing itself. Airbnb isn't liable for the damages (as stated by their agreement) but they should have made more of an effort to educate the users of the potential hazards of the site and liabilities for the buyer. Hell, I used Airbnb in Paris and I genuinely thought that Airbnb would have a very responsive team in case shit hit the fan. With Craigslist, there is no false sense of security: every step of the way, they warn you. The whole situation far bigger than it needed to be.
pg 15y ago
This is the most intelligent comment I've seen about this whole business. The phenomenon isn't limited to YC companies-- we saw it in e.g. the reaction to Zuckerberg (at 20 or whatever) calling users "dumb fucks" and to Biz and Ev (jokingly) asking if they could cut in the food line at Facebook-- but the problem is at its worst with YC companies because we have to scale back on moderation. When users work themselves into a frenzy over an ordinary issue and upvote a stream of mostly duplicate stories about it, we can just kill most of them. But with controversies about YC companies we can't or we'll get accused of censorship. I don't know if there's a solution. We may just have to resign ourselves to the collective IQ of HN decreasing for a few days whenever there is a controversy involving a YC company.
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  A comment that broadly accuses the HN community of jealousy, and questions the motives of everyone commenting, is the most intelligent comment you've seen about this? Huh. > ...an ordinary issue... Nice. I think this is a good illustration of part of what's wrong here. To the woman whose life has been upended by this, this is not "an ordinary issue". Similarly, everyone that's said so far that this has not been handled as gracefully as it could have been, and that there might be something we could all learn from that, should not be dismissed as just being envious of another company.
  - jmtame 15y ago
    A comment that broadly accuses the HN community of jealousy, and questions the motives of everyone commenting, is the most intelligent comment you've seen about this? Actually, it is. Nobody here should be making personal attacks or accusations without knowing the full story. And nobody here knows the full story, yet everyone feels entitled to act as Airbnb's PR team. It reminds me of the redesign attempts where the guy comes in and says "here's what you should do!" and they don't really understand why the decisions were formed or what lead up to them. Weren't we just here with Groupon and Yelp being ripped apart for supposedly being involved in extortion? It turned out to be a bunch of flailing business owners who were on their way down, Groupon and Yelp were just the catalyst. For every one of those complaints, you can find another happy business owner who says those companies have helped them tremendously. What do we see now? This woman is pissed off, and you can see another person who had the same problem happen to his apartment. Everything stolen, horrible experience. With meth addicts. Exact same story, Airbnb settled, he's happy and using Airbnb again. Airbnb has no financial obligation to this woman. Yet we all still feel entitled to let them know how to run their business because of what happened to one of their customers, and with hardly any information. As if that's bad enough, some people have gone as far as calling Brian psychotic. I hope you realize how absurd that sounds to those of us who know him.
freshfunk 15y ago
This story comes soon after the issue with AirBnb being outted where they were emailing/spamming listers on Craigslist and posing as fake people. Not only is this illegal (CAN-SPAM act) but also unethical and dishonest. One thing I didn't see from this was a response by PG. Only silence. But I didn't assume his stance. After all, there's a lot that happens behind the scenes. (And I can't track all responses to stories on HN.) But now we have this story. I'm still open to seeing how things play out and finding out what's really happened. But, so far, it's not looking good for AirBnb or PG. All the sympathy is going to EJ IMO. And I did see a response by PG which essentially called Arrington's reporting "bullshit." His comments also seemed to directly contradict what EJ said. So someone's not being completely honest. Given that EJ's the victim and PG's an investor, most readers are likely to be biased in favor of EJ (unless they are an HN/YC/PG fanboy). So I wouldn't call it shadenfreude. I see it as AirBnb/PG having at track record based on other, recent, controversial events. I think to blame HN or its "collective IQ" is somewhat ignorant and self-serving.
- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  Eventually pg did repeat AirBnB's line blaming a rogue sales team, which I found utterly credulous (what else did anyone think they were doing? why haven't they been outed and nailed to the wall?)

by kyro 15y ago

swombat 15y ago

At the risk of being considered a complete troll, Reddit used to be very anti-commercial (I remember some of my best posts being ripped as too commercial there), and there has been a lot of influx of people from Reddit over the last year or two. Perhaps the anti-commercialism has seeped in too.

jacquesm 15y ago

It's 'schadenfreude'. This issue is very emotionally charged because: - everybody that uses AirBNB thought 'this could be me' - everybody that has a sister thinks 'that could be my sister' - everybody that runs a start-up thinks 'this could be a shakedown' (including some preposterous claims about hotel chains putting her up to this) - everybody is wondering if AirBNB is sitting on a huge stack of cash why they didn't just put it right and changed their terms of service / signup process Being the 'ebay of spaces' means that you will be doing the same things that ebay spends the most of its time on: battling fraud. AirBNB is coming of age with this incident, from now on the stakes will be raised considerably in how they deal with the reputation of their hosts and tenants. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Looking forward to the period after this incident has blown over when AirBNB will be a company that is that much stronger and that will put action to their claims of transparency and being a 'trusted marketplace'. If they can make that work they'll be fine.

adw 15y ago
One extra issue: a bunch of startups concerned with splashover reputational risk (in extremis, and we are nowhere near this, 'why should I use/partner with/fund you, you're associated with bad actors so I don't trust you'. This isn't rational, but we're talking about hearts not heads here. Look at the damage Dow Jones has taken by association with the News of the World.
diolpah 15y ago
" everybody that has a sister thinks 'that could be my sister'" Because ransacking the home of my brother is no big deal, according to modern gender politics, right?
- kyro 15y ago
  Nah, probably because EJ is most likely female.
  - rkalla 15y ago
    She is, she confirmed it in her followup blog post.
raganwald 15y ago
Being the 'ebay of spaces' means that you will be doing the same things that ebay spends the most of its time on: battling fraud. This is the most old-school HN insight I've seen so far, thanks. Quite often, what a business appears to do for it's users (allow you to read your mail on line, hook landlords up with renters) and it's competitive advantage (spam fighting, ad targeting, fraud detection, &c.) are very different things. Back when I was young and rode a nice, sporty dinosaur to work, I made software for publishing classified ads. On the surface, it's a publishing business. But in reality, it's an operations business, because classifieds used to have very high revenue per column inch, but the transaction costs were also very high. So the profitability of a page of classifieds was driven by how efficiently the paper could take ads. Anyways, I agree with your speculation. Running a c2c business is going to be all about fraud and other bad actor detection as well as operation efficiency.

jcunningham 15y ago

Maybe it's as simple as being angered when you see someone outrageously victimized and then doubly wronged by a startup that you previously had a lot of respect for?

jamesteow 15y ago

I agree with the overall sentiment of your statement. I think people have blown this situation far out of proportion. People touting their model is broken or that the company is going to fail over this one inciden... Same with Dropbox. It does have something to do with their successes. That said: People attacked the founders because, for better or worse, they got directly involved in this. And if one of the co-founders really did tell her to take down that blog post to make sure their valuation doesn't take a hit, that'll draw a lot of ire. Plus, Airbnb has millions of dollars. They have the PR capacity to deal with these scenarios. If they aren't framing their true side of the story, whose fault is that? Like it or not, people are going to speculate especially when there is a long history of corporations side-stepping responsibility. (I am not at all suggesting that Airbnb is not trying to help. I'm saying why I can see how people can assume the worst) The fact that PG has to publicly defend them is ludicrous. It's like a father defending a fully-grown son. The core issue here beyond the Dropbox security folly and the previous Craigslist/Airbnb debacle (which both sparked a ton of vitriol) is that this exact scenario this woman went through was bound to happen and should not have gotten out of hand. Credit cards get stolen. The process is: phone a 24-hotline, cancel a card, get a new one in the mail, challenge the fees, hopefully get money back. With this Airbnb scenario, the woman had to contact Airbnb through a freelancer who worked for them because no one initially responded to her e-mails or phone calls! Craigslist does a very good job of warning people of the dangers all across the process. If you click on sublets, there are huge links at the top warning of fraud, scams, and personal safety tips. If you click on a post, there is a giant yellow box that warns the user of scams. On Airbnb: Nothing on the homepage, nothing on the lists of properties, and nothing on the listing itself. Airbnb isn't liable for the damages (as stated by their agreement) but they should have made more of an effort to educate the users of the potential hazards of the site and liabilities for the buyer. Hell, I used Airbnb in Paris and I genuinely thought that Airbnb would have a very responsive team in case shit hit the fan. With Craigslist, there is no false sense of security: every step of the way, they warn you. The whole situation far bigger than it needed to be.

pg 15y ago

This is the most intelligent comment I've seen about this whole business. The phenomenon isn't limited to YC companies-- we saw it in e.g. the reaction to Zuckerberg (at 20 or whatever) calling users "dumb fucks" and to Biz and Ev (jokingly) asking if they could cut in the food line at Facebook-- but the problem is at its worst with YC companies because we have to scale back on moderation. When users work themselves into a frenzy over an ordinary issue and upvote a stream of mostly duplicate stories about it, we can just kill most of them. But with controversies about YC companies we can't or we'll get accused of censorship. I don't know if there's a solution. We may just have to resign ourselves to the collective IQ of HN decreasing for a few days whenever there is a controversy involving a YC company.

thaumaturgy 15y ago
A comment that broadly accuses the HN community of jealousy, and questions the motives of everyone commenting, is the most intelligent comment you've seen about this? Huh. > ...an ordinary issue... Nice. I think this is a good illustration of part of what's wrong here. To the woman whose life has been upended by this, this is not "an ordinary issue". Similarly, everyone that's said so far that this has not been handled as gracefully as it could have been, and that there might be something we could all learn from that, should not be dismissed as just being envious of another company.
- jmtame 15y ago
  A comment that broadly accuses the HN community of jealousy, and questions the motives of everyone commenting, is the most intelligent comment you've seen about this? Actually, it is. Nobody here should be making personal attacks or accusations without knowing the full story. And nobody here knows the full story, yet everyone feels entitled to act as Airbnb's PR team. It reminds me of the redesign attempts where the guy comes in and says "here's what you should do!" and they don't really understand why the decisions were formed or what lead up to them. Weren't we just here with Groupon and Yelp being ripped apart for supposedly being involved in extortion? It turned out to be a bunch of flailing business owners who were on their way down, Groupon and Yelp were just the catalyst. For every one of those complaints, you can find another happy business owner who says those companies have helped them tremendously. What do we see now? This woman is pissed off, and you can see another person who had the same problem happen to his apartment. Everything stolen, horrible experience. With meth addicts. Exact same story, Airbnb settled, he's happy and using Airbnb again. Airbnb has no financial obligation to this woman. Yet we all still feel entitled to let them know how to run their business because of what happened to one of their customers, and with hardly any information. As if that's bad enough, some people have gone as far as calling Brian psychotic. I hope you realize how absurd that sounds to those of us who know him.

freshfunk 15y ago

This story comes soon after the issue with AirBnb being outted where they were emailing/spamming listers on Craigslist and posing as fake people. Not only is this illegal (CAN-SPAM act) but also unethical and dishonest. One thing I didn't see from this was a response by PG. Only silence. But I didn't assume his stance. After all, there's a lot that happens behind the scenes. (And I can't track all responses to stories on HN.) But now we have this story. I'm still open to seeing how things play out and finding out what's really happened. But, so far, it's not looking good for AirBnb or PG. All the sympathy is going to EJ IMO. And I did see a response by PG which essentially called Arrington's reporting "bullshit." His comments also seemed to directly contradict what EJ said. So someone's not being completely honest. Given that EJ's the victim and PG's an investor, most readers are likely to be biased in favor of EJ (unless they are an HN/YC/PG fanboy). So I wouldn't call it shadenfreude. I see it as AirBnb/PG having at track record based on other, recent, controversial events. I think to blame HN or its "collective IQ" is somewhat ignorant and self-serving.

prodigal_erik 15y ago
Eventually pg did repeat AirBnB's line blaming a rogue sales team, which I found utterly credulous (what else did anyone think they were doing? why haven't they been outed and nailed to the wall?)