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.
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.
Classy, Paul.
After many years of being faked out, I gradually learned to reserve judgment when my indignation buttons were (intentionally or unintentionally) being pressed, but I still had incomplete information.
Exactly. To me it seems very suspicious that the airbnb accuser won't release original communication between her and airbnb. She can do that voluntarily. However, airbnb being a corporation cannot do the same unless as a court proceeding. On the same note, airbnb also cannot publicly indulge in setting the record straight and calling out a former customer no matter how much she may be at fault. Folks at HN simply appear oblivious to these finer points.
Unfortunately brianchesky's comments here are brief and he ignores the replies:
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=brianchesky
AirBnb are giving low-key responses given the coverage it's received. Perhaps this is for privacy or legal reasons, or for PR / reputation reasons, or they don't think their response will be perceived as adequate by the so-called "angry mob" here. Maybe it's just they don't think it's any of our business how they deal with this situation.
The incomplete information you mention is frustrating. I'm sure many people here like me would like to know how a company should deal with this kind of PR - and personal - crisis, and were hopeful we'd see more of this played out in public after EJ's blog. The visibility this story has received from the upvotes on the TechCrunch, FT, and blog post stories has led to us getting more information than we otherwise would have had.
Are we really being manipulated or "faked out" into voting, or is it not a rational response given that the visibility tends to lead to more information leaking out?
Now the accuser can easily clear all this up by publishing her original communication with airbnb and their exact responses. Instead she continues to post summations which the public here seems to take as a definitive word(wrongly, in my view).
I've a hunch that when the dust settles, we'll be reading a lot of mea culpas from HN users who rushed to judgement against airbnb.
There's a very obvious solution: Airbnb need to do the right thing. Right now. Publicly and privately.
It's really not hard. Whatever they've done wrong in the past few weeks, they can make right pretty quickly, and the conversation will shift just as quickly.
Until then? All public evidence indicates they're still doing the wrong thing. Really, what do you expect? This is an issue of basic human empathy, and the apparent lack thereof. Business issues have been very much a secondary concern in all discussions about this.
The full story is pretty irrelevant. What we have is clearly sufficient to know that Airbnb doesn't have a clue how to handle this, either with regard to the particular customer, or the wider PR disaster.
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.