Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb

Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by localhost3000 on Friday July 29, 2011 @11:03AM (#2822144)

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.

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Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by SoftwareMaven on Friday July 29, 2011 @11:09AM (#2822176)

They have failed in their handling to this point though.they are going to be lucky to survive, and they may take the industry with them.

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Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by drivebyacct2 on Friday July 29, 2011 @11:17AM (#2822228)

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.

edit: Nevermind, I missed this article. Sorry for the noise. http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/29/airbnb-victim-speaks-again-...

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?

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Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by SoftwareMaven on Friday July 29, 2011 @11:43AM (#2822384)

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.

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Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by div on Friday July 29, 2011 @11:27AM (#2822278)

The victim has updated her blog with a new post in which she explains how some of the public statements made by Airbnb's ceo are not true:

http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/airbnb-nightmare...

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Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by drivebyacct2 on Friday July 29, 2011 @06:15PM (#2824045)

Wow guys, sorry 6 hours when this news was a few hours old, I hadn't seen it yet.

A totally great reason to dogpile and downvote. Do you people even take HN guidelines into account when voting these days?

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Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by SoftwareMaven on Friday July 29, 2011 @06:37PM (#2824120)

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.

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Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by drivebyacct2 on Friday July 29, 2011 @06:53PM (#2824163)

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.

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Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by jamesbritt on Friday July 29, 2011 @11:14AM (#2822208)

This is great practice for airbnb.

What about this, exactly, is practice?

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Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by localhost3000 on Friday July 29, 2011 @01:06PM (#2822763)

Practice for dealing with a public tragedy like a death or violent crime rather than a burglary. Point taken, 'experience' would be a better word.

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Re:Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb by smackfu on Friday July 29, 2011 @11:37AM (#2822351)

Yes, experience would be a better word.

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