Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Now for the counterargument:

Airbnb is evil, because it facilitates and profits from rule and lawbreaking, up to and including turning whole apartment buildings into pirate hotels, while spinning the tale that it's all about individuals occasionally renting out their primary place of residence for a couple of days. It's evil because while occasional random temporary sublets aren't a problem, they become a problem when they stop being random and instead become a coordinated, frequent phenomenon.

It's evil because its whole business model is making money by encouraging people to break social contract and do wrong against their neighbors.

Sure, hotels, motels, hostels, and all other legit accomodations aren't perfect. But this isn't the way to fix them.

View on HN

I agree with this, and I think there is an interesting generalisation that can be pulled out of it: something’s which are fine (harmless, neutral, or even good) at a small individual scale become problematic or terrible when done at the scale that modern software and the internet can provide.

VRBO isn’t inherently bad, hijacking VRBO into a stealth hotel business and breaking the social contract of residential neighbourhoods is.

Exactly.

And what's extra sad here is that once a company like Uber or AirBnB gains large-scale success, there are only two things that happen. Some places accept it and eat the social externalities. Others try to ban the practice, but legislation is expensive, enforcement is expensive, and it also hurts the society by making illegal what was previously just fine on a small scale.

I think societies need to learn to recognize this pattern ASAP, because the best outcome is nipping such companies in the bud, before they grow and leave only two bad options on the table.

EDIT: Related is this post I read once:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/

It calls "sharing economy" a locust economy - an economy based on making money off leading masses of people to destroy other businesses, and ultimately each other.

> and it also hurts the society by making illegal what was previously just fine on a small scale.

This is the other thing that leaves me feeling salty. Wholesale abuse of prerogatives usually results in those being taken away from everyone.

The other thing I'm saly about is when I started in tech you had two 'prongs'. One was defense companies. Which also served as tech incubators and dual use tech companies. And then mostly commercial tech companieswhich was focused on products people wanted. I feel like now a lot of tech is about enabling exploitation. Providing no benefit to ordinary people at all. And worse these companies produce zero low to minimal skill jobs.

>> “I think societies need to learn to recognize this pattern ASAP, because the best outcome is nipping such companies in the bud, before they grow and leave only two bad options on the table..”

Who are you specificities referring to when you say ‘societies’? Government? Consumers?

Both!

There is also the consequence of removing rental inventory from residents of that city because renting to tourists is more profitable if you don't have to meet any of the other conditions of running a legal hotel.

If renting out to anyone is profitable and there is suddenly more demand for housing, doesn't it encourage construction of new housing?

Unlafwul in no way implies evil. For every reason that AirBnB is "evil" for breaking the law, you could come up with a reason that the law is "evil" for existing in the first place.

> Unlafwul in no way implies evil.

Not always, but typically it does, as one usually breaks laws to benefit themselves at the expense of others, either direct or through second-order effects.

> For every reason that AirBnB is "evil" for breaking the law, you could come up with a reason that the law is "evil" for existing in the first place.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Whether or not the laws need changing doesn't justify breaking them (or encouraging people to do so), especially not when that act of disobedience has well-understood and well-documented negative consequences to society at large. It's not like AirBnB (or Uber) are doing this to make the world a better place - they figured out a business model that's essentially burning social trust and cohesion as if it was a fuel.

I don't necessarily agree or disagree with your argument.

But I think the use of the world "evil" here is really bad - it's both wrong, in my mind, and is also hurting your case, because people who can be convinced of it might be put off by insisting that "no, it's evil".

I mean, evil implies a lot of things - it implies this is done intentionally. It implies that anyone working at Airbnb is by association evil. It implies that there is no working with Airbnb.

Whereas if we thought about it more neutrally, we'd have both much clearer remedies, and a much more appealing argument. Instead of "Airbnb is evil, because is facilitates...", we could say "Airbnb causes problems, because it facilitates...". Therefore the solution could be to regulate it in some way. It sounds a lot more silly to say "X is evil, so the solution is to regulate it".

EDIT: I know that you were using the word evil because of the gp, and I disagree with their use of it just as much. I also disagree with gp's point, that it's an "either/or" on who is really evil in this situation.

It is evil the same way eBay is evil because some people lie in the description or send you bad products.

Airbnb is just a platform. Its users break laws. Just like there are bad landlords for long term rent, same is here only for the short term. The problem is landlords that break laws and turn homes into hotels etc.

That's a cop out. AirBnB as a platform introduces systemic problems that weren't there before (effect of scale matters), exploits them in full knowledge of their impact on people, and does nothing to stop them.

I agree that they should not exploit the problems and fix them, but saying that they should go broke is not a solution, as it will often do more harm than good.

Entire apartment buildings being profitable by converting to AirBnB is a symptom of corrupt real-estate though...

a counter-counter argument (or ,, just argument?)

> because it facilitates and profits from rule and lawbreaking,

Every business profits from grey areas, and even from regulations which give them advantages. Hotels are also big offenders to this (regulate against their competitors/barrier to entry even before airbnb).

> they become a problem when they stop being random

When there is demand, people find supply. People want ways to live temporarily, and airbnb accelerates this trend. People believing their neighborhoods should never change by tourism/immigration/gentrification are not necessarily less evil

> by encouraging people to break social contract

the social contract may need an update? It's not like anyone ever signs those anyway. People move a lot nowadays, and maybe the idea of an idyllic quiet downtown neighborhood cannot exist without paying premium anymore. There are trends like digital nomading and remote work which are in a steady rise for a decade, and it will only keep rising. Airbnb is perfectly positioned to serve this alternative social contract

Tragedy of the commons, all over again.

What social contract? People keep saying this but can you please enlighten me as to what this is. Where it is written?

https://www.google.com/search?q=social+contract

Basically it's the understanding that we're all in this together and we shouldn't mess things in some way for other people purely for our own benefit. Think of it as avoiding negative-sum situations. More formally:

an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, for example by sacrificing some individual freedom for state protection. Theories of a social contract became popular in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries among theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as a means of explaining the origin of government and the obligations of subjects.

It's also something no one ever signed, and is a concept loved only by those benefiting from the current order.

> It's also something no one ever signed

Which is why we don't have to reinvent civilization every generation, forever not leaving the caves.

> and is a concept loved only by those benefiting from the current order.

Which, under reflection, should be most people, as the alternatives available through abandoning civilized society are strictly worse.

I think I'm probably more pro-revolution that most, but c'mon, really? You really think that basic rules of human courtesy are the boot on the neck of humanity?

We're talking about something much more fundamental than social norms you might call patriarchal or cis-/hetero-normative or anything like that. This is the kind of behavior that keeps you from getting punched. And most people are explicitly taught these behaviors as children, whether in pre-school / kindergarten or just by being around other children at all.

Surely we can identify much more important factors propping up the current social order.

I think people are calling the current collection of laws and regulations "The Social Contract".

You seem to refer to something else.

It's both, really. A part of the social contract is that, unless there are strong extenuating circumstances, everyone is expected to obey the law of the land.

It's kind of like with sports. Both football and basketball are perfectly fine disciplines on their own, but the most fundamental rule of any game is that all players play by the same rulebook. You can't have a game if every player thinks they're playing a different sport.

I'm reminded of when Bertrand Russel said that Hegel’s idea of freedom “means the right to obey the police and it means nothing else at all”.

Of course, you're not Hegel, and I'm definitely not Russel. So I'll just leave it at that :)

You can say the exact same thing about property rights or the non-aggression principle.

The current order? I think you're overthinking things here. Were talking about social etiquette that says you should not leave your messes for other people to clean up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com