5 ms·

To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem. There's no good answer to this. Anyone that allows/relies on direct consumer feedback is at risk for

To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem. There's no good answer to this. Anyone that allows/relies on direct consumer feedback is at risk for one of the hardest problems that exist. Personally, I want to know people's great and real experiences, or terrible ones, who wouldn't!? But, once you tie it to money, it's over.

grugagag 4y ago
It seems like Airbnb is doing the gamification and manipulating it as well. I’d rather all reviews stay, good and bad and let the consumer decide for themselves. As soon as some reviews get promoted and others hidden I stop paying attention to them
- irjustin 4y ago
  > I’d rather all reviews stay, good and bad and let the consumer decide for themselves That's not a realistic solution. If all the reviews were fake 5 stars but it's just the property's friends always leaving reviews then when you got there, you feel there's no way it's 5 stars. But less obvious is property manager says, hey i'll give you a 5% discount for 5 stars, when really the place was a 3-star at best. Those shifts in star ratings are material in your personal decision making process.
  - edmundsauto 4y ago
    Is there anything currently in place that prevents the 5% off situation? Seems like nobody is able to solve that one. Or wants to tackle it. Airbnb is incentivized to have higher scores because lower ratings might not push people to other properties - it might discourage them from booking all together. They need them to not be totally worthless, but score inflation is definitively in their best interest.
    - progval 4y ago
      I left a negative review on a product on Amazon whose seller was doing this (but much higher than 5%). Amazon deleted the review.
      - tw98521358 4y ago
        [flagged]
prepend 4y ago
I wish I could post the review on my own site and users could easily discover it when browsing items. That makes me develop and risk a reputation. I don’t trust sites like Airbnb and I understand how sites have problems with review fraud. If I posted with a unique signature then over time people could learn that mine aren’t fake. Also would be nice to know that the Airbnb reviewer also rated a restaurant and some headphones, etc.
- aembleton 4y ago
  You should also be able to give extra weight to reviewers that broadly line up with your own reviews. That way; the things that are important to you will show up. It also incentivises you to leave honest reviews.
  - prepend 4y ago
    In my mental lazy file there’s a company called antipode that is able to find people with opposite and like reviews and can help people identify and avoid items. So you can basically collect people who review in ways that are useful to you and layer that over the web to rank search results, apartments, blenders, etc etc.
- tw98521358 4y ago
  Someone should just scrape airb&b reviews as they post and never take them down. Internet archive of air B&B of sorts
waboremo 4y ago
It is a problem, but it's also partially self-inflicted. Compare reviews on Steam to reviews on Airbnb. You'll quickly notice something, Steam shows you far more information at a glance. You get to know whether someone bought the game themselves or if it was given free to them, how many hours they played before the review, how many hours they played in total, their rating, how other people feel about that review, how many other products the user has, if the review was edited, and of course review text. Airbnb's reviews has a scoring system that was generalized, and review text, maybe a translation badge if the review was translated. Reviews work best when you are given as much information as possible. Without it, you might as well be relying on an anonymous 5 star system.
- namlem 4y ago
  Steam Reviews really should be a model for everyone else imo. They still have problems such as review bombing, but they are way better than anything else.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  You can also only review an Airbnb once you have stayed within. Difference of opinion, I do not find the game examples would be relevant or safe to disclose in the scope of an Airbnb review.
onos 4y ago
That’s true. Another reality is that there are bad actors on the customer side too. A single person who gets off on being awful to people can leave an unwarranted bad review and materially harm an Airbnb host’s business.
acdha 4y ago
> To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem. True but also one they’ve created for profit. They choose to ignore complaints about hosts to avoid losing their fees, they choose not to audit reviews, etc. There’s an entire industry of people who get paid to do mystery shopping to review customer experiences, which is quite effective but not free since you can’t automate it at scale. This seems like it’s basically a VC playbook now: focus on growth numbers and assume you’ll be able to convey the shiny tech imagine until you reach market dominance, and avoid spending money visibly on “menial” jobs to support the image that you are about to be unbelievably profitable.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
> To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem. I wonder if "tipping" could improve things. A new platform like airbnb could have an expected tip built in to the platform. Hosts are expected to provide good service and get a tip. Customers are encouraged to tip at the end of their stay (with a lower base price than airbnb to account for that). Hosts can see the average, median, max, and min tips of potential customers (along with distribution, and percentage calculations) and use that to determine whether to accept them as a guest. Customers can see the average tip a listing received, and use that to determine if they'd want to stay there. Of course, they would sometimes leave $0 or a low number as a tip, but they'd be incentivized to also provide good tips for good service, because a low tip average would reflect poorly on them and make them less likely to be hosted. I suspect tying things to real value for the customer and host would lead to better service and a more honest indication of host/customer quality. But perhaps it would just lead to hosts literally bribing customers for good tips.
- irjustin 4y ago
  Personally I hate tipping. Long term it just makes everyone frustrated. Socially, it used to be 10% now the bare minimum is 15% if give 18% people then people start becoming happy. Now I'm forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list...
  - tekknik 4y ago
    > Now I'm forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list... If the industry moves to service included, then the prices will still be 15-20% higher, or more, than they are today. You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however. Multiples of 5% calculations is pretty simple and keeps the brain sharp. It’d also be easy to show the price with tips, but dark patterns.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however. The incentive to provide better service for individual employees should be provided by their employer. The incentive for the employer to provide better service to customers is competition with other service providers the client might choose. Which is how it works in all the jobs that aren’t within the weird and arbitrary bounds of tipping culture.

grugagag 4y ago

It seems like Airbnb is doing the gamification and manipulating it as well. I’d rather all reviews stay, good and bad and let the consumer decide for themselves. As soon as some reviews get promoted and others hidden I stop paying attention to them

irjustin 4y ago
> I’d rather all reviews stay, good and bad and let the consumer decide for themselves That's not a realistic solution. If all the reviews were fake 5 stars but it's just the property's friends always leaving reviews then when you got there, you feel there's no way it's 5 stars. But less obvious is property manager says, hey i'll give you a 5% discount for 5 stars, when really the place was a 3-star at best. Those shifts in star ratings are material in your personal decision making process.
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  Is there anything currently in place that prevents the 5% off situation? Seems like nobody is able to solve that one. Or wants to tackle it. Airbnb is incentivized to have higher scores because lower ratings might not push people to other properties - it might discourage them from booking all together. They need them to not be totally worthless, but score inflation is definitively in their best interest.
  - progval 4y ago
    I left a negative review on a product on Amazon whose seller was doing this (but much higher than 5%). Amazon deleted the review.
    - tw98521358 4y ago
      [flagged]

prepend 4y ago

I wish I could post the review on my own site and users could easily discover it when browsing items. That makes me develop and risk a reputation. I don’t trust sites like Airbnb and I understand how sites have problems with review fraud. If I posted with a unique signature then over time people could learn that mine aren’t fake. Also would be nice to know that the Airbnb reviewer also rated a restaurant and some headphones, etc.

aembleton 4y ago
You should also be able to give extra weight to reviewers that broadly line up with your own reviews. That way; the things that are important to you will show up. It also incentivises you to leave honest reviews.
- prepend 4y ago
  In my mental lazy file there’s a company called antipode that is able to find people with opposite and like reviews and can help people identify and avoid items. So you can basically collect people who review in ways that are useful to you and layer that over the web to rank search results, apartments, blenders, etc etc.
tw98521358 4y ago
Someone should just scrape airb&b reviews as they post and never take them down. Internet archive of air B&B of sorts

waboremo 4y ago

It is a problem, but it's also partially self-inflicted. Compare reviews on Steam to reviews on Airbnb. You'll quickly notice something, Steam shows you far more information at a glance. You get to know whether someone bought the game themselves or if it was given free to them, how many hours they played before the review, how many hours they played in total, their rating, how other people feel about that review, how many other products the user has, if the review was edited, and of course review text. Airbnb's reviews has a scoring system that was generalized, and review text, maybe a translation badge if the review was translated. Reviews work best when you are given as much information as possible. Without it, you might as well be relying on an anonymous 5 star system.

namlem 4y ago
Steam Reviews really should be a model for everyone else imo. They still have problems such as review bombing, but they are way better than anything else.
hackernewds 4y ago
You can also only review an Airbnb once you have stayed within. Difference of opinion, I do not find the game examples would be relevant or safe to disclose in the scope of an Airbnb review.

onos 4y ago

That’s true. Another reality is that there are bad actors on the customer side too. A single person who gets off on being awful to people can leave an unwarranted bad review and materially harm an Airbnb host’s business.

acdha 4y ago

> To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem. True but also one they’ve created for profit. They choose to ignore complaints about hosts to avoid losing their fees, they choose not to audit reviews, etc. There’s an entire industry of people who get paid to do mystery shopping to review customer experiences, which is quite effective but not free since you can’t automate it at scale. This seems like it’s basically a VC playbook now: focus on growth numbers and assume you’ll be able to convey the shiny tech imagine until you reach market dominance, and avoid spending money visibly on “menial” jobs to support the image that you are about to be unbelievably profitable.

pcthrowaway 4y ago

> To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem. I wonder if "tipping" could improve things. A new platform like airbnb could have an expected tip built in to the platform. Hosts are expected to provide good service and get a tip. Customers are encouraged to tip at the end of their stay (with a lower base price than airbnb to account for that). Hosts can see the average, median, max, and min tips of potential customers (along with distribution, and percentage calculations) and use that to determine whether to accept them as a guest. Customers can see the average tip a listing received, and use that to determine if they'd want to stay there. Of course, they would sometimes leave $0 or a low number as a tip, but they'd be incentivized to also provide good tips for good service, because a low tip average would reflect poorly on them and make them less likely to be hosted. I suspect tying things to real value for the customer and host would lead to better service and a more honest indication of host/customer quality. But perhaps it would just lead to hosts literally bribing customers for good tips.

irjustin 4y ago
Personally I hate tipping. Long term it just makes everyone frustrated. Socially, it used to be 10% now the bare minimum is 15% if give 18% people then people start becoming happy. Now I'm forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list...
- tekknik 4y ago
  > Now I'm forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list... If the industry moves to service included, then the prices will still be 15-20% higher, or more, than they are today. You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however. Multiples of 5% calculations is pretty simple and keeps the brain sharp. It’d also be easy to show the price with tips, but dark patterns.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however. The incentive to provide better service for individual employees should be provided by their employer. The incentive for the employer to provide better service to customers is competition with other service providers the client might choose. Which is how it works in all the jobs that aren’t within the weird and arbitrary bounds of tipping culture.