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I learned back in 2008 that you never, ever attach a review to your real name. Any review, negative or neutral, runs the risk of damaging AirBnB, too many nega

by SLWW 4y ago

I learned back in 2008 that you never, ever attach a review to your real name. Any review, negative or neutral, runs the risk of damaging AirBnB, too many negative reviews might have the effect where AirBnB has to address the allegations, when it's much easier to just keep making money off of the bad host and ignoring negative experiences. I feel less likely to rent an AirBnB because of this article, simply by the fact that there is more than one negative review placed off-site. They don't want to deal with it; you are just a number, always have been. DO NOT post negative reviews with your real name

kube-system 4y ago
This is wise. Bad reviews only serve to make enemies, with nothing positive in return.
- croes 4y ago
  > Bad reviews only serve to make enemies, with nothing positive in return. How about warning other customers? Just don't use your real name.
  - ziddoap 4y ago
    Presumably they meant nothing positive in return to the reviewer.
    - nocman 4y ago
      Except a lot of people find helping others to be a positive thing for themselves.
      - ziddoap 4y ago
        If you get that feeling out of leaving negative reviews, by all means my comment doesn't intend to detract from that.
        nocman 4y ago
        It actually takes a fairly high bar for me to leave a negative review of a product or service. But some sellers/providers are just so awful to their customers, you're dang right I enjoy helping other people avoid suffering from a business deal that is certain to be terrible.
        Jenk 4y ago
        I get a positive feeling when others have honestly reviewed a product/service, whether that be positive or negative feedback. I most certainly do not get a positive feeling when watching someone recommend just keeping your mouth shut because "there's no point leaving a review" Have Airbnb become the corporate mafia or something?
        ziddoap 4y ago
        >recommend just keeping your mouth shut because "there's no point leaving a review" Did anyone say that? I know I didn't. The parent I was replying to (and simply to offer clarification on what they might have meant) said: >This is wise. In reply to the suggestion of using a fake name to leave a negative review. >Have Airbnb become the corporate mafia or something? I'm not sure how this follows from what I commented? I don't have a reply.
    - atoav 4y ago
      You can always try do do the Kant thing for questions like these: Would it be good for you if everybody followed your advice? Compared to the chances of getting fucked for writing a bad review, aren't the chances bigger to get fucked by a bad actor in a world where nobody left bad reviews? It is simple. If the answer to the question: "How would it be if everybody acted like me?" is "It would be worse", this means you are acting in a way that makes society worse for your own advantage.
      - workingon 4y ago
        It's really unfortunate that this simple principle can't work in real life, just because people's idea of "what is worse" are so different. One has only to look at the very different outlooks people have politically to know the answers to the question "Will this make the world worse?" are going to be wildly different, and some of them downright nonsensical to most people.
      - dale_glass 4y ago
        A bit pedantic, but that's not really the Kant thing. Kant is a proponent of deontology, which is utterly unconcerned with consequences. His thing was more checking if it would still make logical sense. That is, when he asks "What if everybody lied?", what he's getting at isn't that it'd suck if you couldn't even ask for the time and get the right answer, but that it'd destroy the concept of truth, and with that what does "lying" even mean? Kant answered the specific scenario of "What if the Gestapo wants to know if you're hiding any Jews?" (his actual scenario was with a murderer looking for a victim, since Nazis weren't a thing yet), and said that yup, you do not lie, because to him the morality of an action is unrelated to its likely consequences.
      - samatman 4y ago
        This is where the limits of the categorical imperative become apparent. If there were a fund (assume a spherical, frictionless, voluntary society) that was the only way to feed the hungry, everyone should donate to it. Unfortunately it's set up by an evil game master, and one in ten thousand donations is answered with a bullet to the spine. Of course the categorical imperative says we should do it anyway. I wouldn't. You wouldn't. Rational defection on bad payoff matrices is correct behavior.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Meh, the 2 seconds of warm fuzzy feeling I get from helping others is nothing in comparison to the risks from making enemies with someone. And using a fake name is not a great solution because there’s often enough circumstantial data to tie a person to a review, whether that be metadata or even just the content of the review itself.
    - vincnetas 4y ago
      Writing a review to warn others is like "i scratch your back, you'll scratch mine". There is no imminent benefit for you instantly when leaving negative review, but you benefit when others warn you later.
      - b112 4y ago
        Quite. This is how systems break down, and is realistically a bit selfish. Further, the more everyone does honestly review, the more outrage occurs if that process is interfered with. The less acceptable it becomes to maliciously go after an honest review.
    - Ma8ee 4y ago
      The reason we help other people is not because it gives us warm fuzzy feelings. It is because it make the world a better place to live in, not only for the people you help, but also for yourself. Airbnb should understand this. If no one dares to give bad reviews, there won't be any way to filter out bad hosts, which make people in general have much worse experiences (not to mention attracting more bad hosts), which make people use AirBnb less.
    - 2-718-281-828 4y ago
      you're a wuss :D I do leave bad reviews if necessary and never got any problems.
  - rpigab 4y ago
    Just copy paste a positive review from a bot. It's a win-win, the platform (Airbnb here) and service provider (owner) can't hate you because it's positive, won't harass you for not leaving a review and the other customers aren't fooled if they actually read it because it's obviously fake. Reviewing someone's work is not my job, I'm the customer here. And by increasing the number of dishonest reviews, you are warning customers that you can't trust user reviews and there's no actual way of having actually verified reviews (e.g. Amazon brushing). Be a bot. Become one with the dead internet. I don't even know if this comment was written by my hand or by GPT-3. Who am I?
    - elzbardico 4y ago
      Be passive-aggressive: Get on the most glowing reviews and just copy and paste. It will look absolutely shady and make people think twice before booking.
- sshine 4y ago
  I rented an airbnb room where the host had forgot to update the pictures since there was now a wood workshop in the room behind a curtain. He was a nice guy, but it turned out to be a negative experience for my girlfriend. I mostly blame myself for not picking a more expensive place, but I still felt like other guests should know that they’re sharing the place with model ships and fishing equipment that aren’t in the pictures. Didn’t try to make enemies; gave five stars with a redeeming comment phrased positively. But clearly a flag for anyone who cares.
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    I doubt that the host "forgot" to update the pictures...
    - sshine 4y ago
      Right. That’s the polite way of saying it. :)
- septimus111 4y ago
  This is why there is such “grade inflation” in reviews. The way I read reviews is now: - look at the reviews with lowest ratings. They have the most signal (the walls were paper thin and the bathroom was dirty) as opposed to positive reviews (beautiful room in a great location). You can usually tell if the reviewer is being unreasonable. - search for specific negative keywords in the other reviews - “noisy”, “loud”, etc. Often people will leave a five star review but discreetly complain about something.
  - scarab92 4y ago
    Be mindful of confirmation bias when searching reviews. Finding 10 reviews mentioning noise might be because it's noisy, or it might be that they have thousands of reviews and a small percentage experienced noise
    - septimus111 4y ago
      This is an excellent point! I suppose I could normalize by the number of total reviews. It hasn’t been an issue so far as I am only filtering out cases when there are multiple reports of the same issue, and I care more about eliminating bad options than detecting all good options.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
bambax 4y ago
AirBnb seem to have a different policy now: they simply delete the bad reviews. In June I had my first bad experience. The owner was nice but the property was absolutely awful (yet it was a "superhost" with glowing reviews). I left a bad review (my first). Two days later I received a convoluted message from support, telling me that my review was incorrect and wouldn't be published, because it pointed out "things the property owner couldn't change". This is sinister, but funny at the same time. If the property is dirty it can be cleaned. But if, for example, it has walls so thin you can hear the neighbors breathing, or the slope of the bathroom is in the wrong direction and water flows into the bedroom every time one takes a shower, you can't say that in a review! Because it "can't be changed". I learned from that experience that AirBnb reviews can't be trusted, and "superhost" doesn't mean anything (except the power to kill bad reviews). I haven't been to an AirBnb since; the best properties are very often on Booking.com as well, and those which aren't, are questionable.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  It's such a shame how short-sighted profit motives ruin everything. User reviews are such a wonderful thing -- until companies figured out it's more profitable to hide negative reviews and just sell people crappy products. Booking.com is the worst in my experience, and it makes me sad to hear that Airbnb isjust as bad...
  - yuvalr1 4y ago
    Since Airbnb couldn't verify my credit card due to technical reasons, I started using Booking a lot (with the same card - no problem whatsoever), and it was a pretty good experience. Why do you think this way about Booking?
    - hiq 4y ago
      What's your minimal rating when you book? I found out that anything lower than 8/10 is really bad on Booking, which was counterintuitive to me.
      - 4y ago
l2silver 4y ago
I wonder if their review system is just biased towards the user with more activity. When I first signed up for airbnb 2 years ago as a host, I didn't know what I was doing and accidentally allowed the default option of instant bookings, which means you just automatically accept what ever booking comes your way. So of course the next day someone booked the place at 3am in the morning, which wasn't going to work because we still had tenants there for another week. I had to cancel. And the person I cancelled on left a wonderfully concise review. "Cancelled day-of booking" I thought this was true, but disingenuous because I had also cancelled the day it was booked, but airbnb refused to intervene. I ended up creating a new account.
- pb7 4y ago
  “Cancelled day-of booking” is an automated review left by Airbnb, that’s why they didn’t intervene.
toss1 4y ago
Seems it is well past time for a 'Glassdoor for Online Lodging' to take it out-of-band for the online lodging apps. It'd have to be properly moderated, and vetted for having actually stayed there (automate with Google/Apple timeline?), but it could be very valuable.

by SLWW 4y ago

kube-system 4y ago

This is wise. Bad reviews only serve to make enemies, with nothing positive in return.

croes 4y ago
> Bad reviews only serve to make enemies, with nothing positive in return. How about warning other customers? Just don't use your real name.
- ziddoap 4y ago
  Presumably they meant nothing positive in return to the reviewer.
  - nocman 4y ago
    Except a lot of people find helping others to be a positive thing for themselves.
    - ziddoap 4y ago
      If you get that feeling out of leaving negative reviews, by all means my comment doesn't intend to detract from that.
      - nocman 4y ago
        It actually takes a fairly high bar for me to leave a negative review of a product or service. But some sellers/providers are just so awful to their customers, you're dang right I enjoy helping other people avoid suffering from a business deal that is certain to be terrible.
      - Jenk 4y ago
        I get a positive feeling when others have honestly reviewed a product/service, whether that be positive or negative feedback. I most certainly do not get a positive feeling when watching someone recommend just keeping your mouth shut because "there's no point leaving a review" Have Airbnb become the corporate mafia or something?
        ziddoap 4y ago
        >recommend just keeping your mouth shut because "there's no point leaving a review" Did anyone say that? I know I didn't. The parent I was replying to (and simply to offer clarification on what they might have meant) said: >This is wise. In reply to the suggestion of using a fake name to leave a negative review. >Have Airbnb become the corporate mafia or something? I'm not sure how this follows from what I commented? I don't have a reply.
  - atoav 4y ago
    You can always try do do the Kant thing for questions like these: Would it be good for you if everybody followed your advice? Compared to the chances of getting fucked for writing a bad review, aren't the chances bigger to get fucked by a bad actor in a world where nobody left bad reviews? It is simple. If the answer to the question: "How would it be if everybody acted like me?" is "It would be worse", this means you are acting in a way that makes society worse for your own advantage.
    - workingon 4y ago
      It's really unfortunate that this simple principle can't work in real life, just because people's idea of "what is worse" are so different. One has only to look at the very different outlooks people have politically to know the answers to the question "Will this make the world worse?" are going to be wildly different, and some of them downright nonsensical to most people.
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      A bit pedantic, but that's not really the Kant thing. Kant is a proponent of deontology, which is utterly unconcerned with consequences. His thing was more checking if it would still make logical sense. That is, when he asks "What if everybody lied?", what he's getting at isn't that it'd suck if you couldn't even ask for the time and get the right answer, but that it'd destroy the concept of truth, and with that what does "lying" even mean? Kant answered the specific scenario of "What if the Gestapo wants to know if you're hiding any Jews?" (his actual scenario was with a murderer looking for a victim, since Nazis weren't a thing yet), and said that yup, you do not lie, because to him the morality of an action is unrelated to its likely consequences.
    - samatman 4y ago
      This is where the limits of the categorical imperative become apparent. If there were a fund (assume a spherical, frictionless, voluntary society) that was the only way to feed the hungry, everyone should donate to it. Unfortunately it's set up by an evil game master, and one in ten thousand donations is answered with a bullet to the spine. Of course the categorical imperative says we should do it anyway. I wouldn't. You wouldn't. Rational defection on bad payoff matrices is correct behavior.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Meh, the 2 seconds of warm fuzzy feeling I get from helping others is nothing in comparison to the risks from making enemies with someone. And using a fake name is not a great solution because there’s often enough circumstantial data to tie a person to a review, whether that be metadata or even just the content of the review itself.
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    Writing a review to warn others is like "i scratch your back, you'll scratch mine". There is no imminent benefit for you instantly when leaving negative review, but you benefit when others warn you later.
    - b112 4y ago
      Quite. This is how systems break down, and is realistically a bit selfish. Further, the more everyone does honestly review, the more outrage occurs if that process is interfered with. The less acceptable it becomes to maliciously go after an honest review.
  - Ma8ee 4y ago
    The reason we help other people is not because it gives us warm fuzzy feelings. It is because it make the world a better place to live in, not only for the people you help, but also for yourself. Airbnb should understand this. If no one dares to give bad reviews, there won't be any way to filter out bad hosts, which make people in general have much worse experiences (not to mention attracting more bad hosts), which make people use AirBnb less.
  - 2-718-281-828 4y ago
    you're a wuss :D I do leave bad reviews if necessary and never got any problems.
- rpigab 4y ago
  Just copy paste a positive review from a bot. It's a win-win, the platform (Airbnb here) and service provider (owner) can't hate you because it's positive, won't harass you for not leaving a review and the other customers aren't fooled if they actually read it because it's obviously fake. Reviewing someone's work is not my job, I'm the customer here. And by increasing the number of dishonest reviews, you are warning customers that you can't trust user reviews and there's no actual way of having actually verified reviews (e.g. Amazon brushing). Be a bot. Become one with the dead internet. I don't even know if this comment was written by my hand or by GPT-3. Who am I?
  - elzbardico 4y ago
    Be passive-aggressive: Get on the most glowing reviews and just copy and paste. It will look absolutely shady and make people think twice before booking.
sshine 4y ago
I rented an airbnb room where the host had forgot to update the pictures since there was now a wood workshop in the room behind a curtain. He was a nice guy, but it turned out to be a negative experience for my girlfriend. I mostly blame myself for not picking a more expensive place, but I still felt like other guests should know that they’re sharing the place with model ships and fishing equipment that aren’t in the pictures. Didn’t try to make enemies; gave five stars with a redeeming comment phrased positively. But clearly a flag for anyone who cares.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  I doubt that the host "forgot" to update the pictures...
  - sshine 4y ago
    Right. That’s the polite way of saying it. :)
septimus111 4y ago
This is why there is such “grade inflation” in reviews. The way I read reviews is now: - look at the reviews with lowest ratings. They have the most signal (the walls were paper thin and the bathroom was dirty) as opposed to positive reviews (beautiful room in a great location). You can usually tell if the reviewer is being unreasonable. - search for specific negative keywords in the other reviews - “noisy”, “loud”, etc. Often people will leave a five star review but discreetly complain about something.
- scarab92 4y ago
  Be mindful of confirmation bias when searching reviews. Finding 10 reviews mentioning noise might be because it's noisy, or it might be that they have thousands of reviews and a small percentage experienced noise
  - septimus111 4y ago
    This is an excellent point! I suppose I could normalize by the number of total reviews. It hasn’t been an issue so far as I am only filtering out cases when there are multiple reports of the same issue, and I care more about eliminating bad options than detecting all good options.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

bambax 4y ago

AirBnb seem to have a different policy now: they simply delete the bad reviews. In June I had my first bad experience. The owner was nice but the property was absolutely awful (yet it was a "superhost" with glowing reviews). I left a bad review (my first). Two days later I received a convoluted message from support, telling me that my review was incorrect and wouldn't be published, because it pointed out "things the property owner couldn't change". This is sinister, but funny at the same time. If the property is dirty it can be cleaned. But if, for example, it has walls so thin you can hear the neighbors breathing, or the slope of the bathroom is in the wrong direction and water flows into the bedroom every time one takes a shower, you can't say that in a review! Because it "can't be changed". I learned from that experience that AirBnb reviews can't be trusted, and "superhost" doesn't mean anything (except the power to kill bad reviews). I haven't been to an AirBnb since; the best properties are very often on Booking.com as well, and those which aren't, are questionable.

newaccount74 4y ago
It's such a shame how short-sighted profit motives ruin everything. User reviews are such a wonderful thing -- until companies figured out it's more profitable to hide negative reviews and just sell people crappy products. Booking.com is the worst in my experience, and it makes me sad to hear that Airbnb isjust as bad...
- yuvalr1 4y ago
  Since Airbnb couldn't verify my credit card due to technical reasons, I started using Booking a lot (with the same card - no problem whatsoever), and it was a pretty good experience. Why do you think this way about Booking?
  - hiq 4y ago
    What's your minimal rating when you book? I found out that anything lower than 8/10 is really bad on Booking, which was counterintuitive to me.
    - 4y ago

l2silver 4y ago

I wonder if their review system is just biased towards the user with more activity. When I first signed up for airbnb 2 years ago as a host, I didn't know what I was doing and accidentally allowed the default option of instant bookings, which means you just automatically accept what ever booking comes your way. So of course the next day someone booked the place at 3am in the morning, which wasn't going to work because we still had tenants there for another week. I had to cancel. And the person I cancelled on left a wonderfully concise review. "Cancelled day-of booking" I thought this was true, but disingenuous because I had also cancelled the day it was booked, but airbnb refused to intervene. I ended up creating a new account.

pb7 4y ago
“Cancelled day-of booking” is an automated review left by Airbnb, that’s why they didn’t intervene.

toss1 4y ago

Seems it is well past time for a 'Glassdoor for Online Lodging' to take it out-of-band for the online lodging apps. It'd have to be properly moderated, and vetted for having actually stayed there (automate with Google/Apple timeline?), but it could be very valuable.