AirBnB bans host for knowing the wrong people, without disclosing who the wrong person was, denies appeals with cookie cutter mails (“after careful consideration”) every time.
This is some boringdistopia shit. Some bot damn near ruins a family and won’t even tell them why.
No, a family that could not afford to own a second home bought one and then couldn’t profit from it.
They couldn’t profit from it because of a bot. That issue is going to get more widespread and someone you know will be affected by it.
As someone who can’t afford to buy even one home (and barely can afford to pay rent), I don’t really sympathize with people who buy multiple homes, just to rent them out. However, sympathy or not, it’s still not okay how AirBnB handled the situation. Just because I don’t really care for the reason that they have a second home that they want to rent out, doesn’t mean that they should be treated inhumanely. Two “wrongs” don’t make a right, and frankly, even if I have little sympathy for people who choose to own multiple homes, it’s not inherently wrong. At least they planned to use it for a purpose for themselves part of the time, which is more than I can say for people or companies that just buy up homes exclusively to rent out (with no intention of ever utilizing it for a practical personal purpose). And frankly, if AirBnB treats them like this, who’s to say it couldn’t treat anyone else like this, be it a renter or host? I’m sure we’ve all dealt with being mistreated by customer “support” at various companies, and it’s not something anyone likes, and it’s certainly not okay to send canned responses that are likely flat out lies. I bet they never did an investigation at all until these people went public. And if it’s really “humans” on the other end of the emails, I’m sure it’s just people hired to copy/paste set phrases into an email and hit “send”. Not people who are meant to actually look into issues and personally respond. The issue I’m seeing is that AirBnB’s “response” to these people is part of a societal flaw that, in this case, hurt people who maybe some people might not feel sympathy for, and maybe rightly so. However, as this can happen to anyone (be it with AirBnB or any other of the many many companies that have similarly shitty customer service), it’s a terrible precedent to be setting, that can hurt all of us.
Agree with this. I think we need to treat whether we empathize with the person separately from how corporates treat people.
Looks as though silencing individuals without records is becoming a trend, with the other notable news of Amazon banning someone for something they didn’t do that I saw just a few days after I saw this news.
I think that maybe the lesson I’m learning in these last few years (through the misadventures of others), is that trusting platforms with your livelihood is not a very good idea. It’s just too fragile.
I’m OK to use them as a tool, but whatever business I build must be able to survive suddenly losing access.
That’s seems like reasonable.
I’m sure I’m not telling you anything new, but if you use them for marketing I’d always try to include your self hosted link. Before retiring for health reasons I worked in mfr and I know when we would have shortages from our existing suppliers for actual parts we’d also start just googling that part directly and occasionally would find new suppliers that way though that involved more risks and extra testing of the parts ordered so it wasn’t a regular thing.
For consumer stuff I enjoyed a lot of reddits comics and am glad I bookmarked those artists site so I can give them clicks directly. Plus I won’t miss out on limited sales of merch for some of them. There was a dragon plushie I regret missing. Good luck on your business.
I think we need more competition and anti trust enforcement on the big conglomerates that own majority’s of any said market. Sometimes feel like we are going through another robber baron stage in the US.
