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onlyrealcuzzo

AirBNB doesn't want bots scraping their data.

They currently have a monopoly on STR listings - so they don't really need to care about user experience.

This is what you end up with.

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> AirBNB doesn't want bots scraping their data

They’re likely also trying to push users to their app.

I've never understood this concept. Reddit is the worst, though at least you can argue that they probably have all the figures to back up the idea that engagement is much higher when they push someone onto the app. For a travel app which you are only using a few times a year I can't imagine this holds.

It seems like it's product managers justifying their investment in the native applications in a lot of cases.

A company I worked for in the past explicitly made the mobile web version worse so people would use the app. They did it because with the app they could send offers through push notifications. Ugh.

It also is more likely when to users to come back after stopping using the app for a while if it's still installed and as such they can "stumble" about it.

Anyway the most well known example is probably YT which slowly reduced over time the functionality of their Web version for mobile, and also put things in to make it more annoying, too.

I don't know why so many people leave so many notifications active. I've even had people tell me that lack of notifications are the reason they don't like just using web sites on mobile.

Lots easier to collect user data without having to worry about inconvenient browser privacy protections?

There is one simple reason: it's harder to block ads in the app version.

Does the airbnb app or website even serve third party ads?

It's less useful to focus on this single example, and more on the industry. Once these types of ideas gain momentum, they just become to be accepted as truth.

"If everybody else pushes users to their app over web, there must be good reasons to do it, we should too."

Expecting companies to rationally analyzed whether that is actually the case, is, well, expecting too much of companies.

Come to think of it, does GDPR apply to apps?

Yes

It applies to all data, no matter how it was collected, including manually and for employees, with some minor exceptions for small companies.

I built a client for their mobile API a while ago. Send it through Tor. That was the plan but I decided the project itself wasn’t worth it.

They have a monopoly on STR listings? I use VRBO at least as often (probably more) than AirBnb.

It does seem like a very bizarre thing to say. As if GPT-3 decided to comment on HN.

VRBO made 2 billion in bookings, which is impressive but still less than one fourth of AirBnb.

It's a pointless war and their data is all over the place. With millions of residential IPs scraping data, its not possible to keep data in public and not get it scraped. All they are doing is making it worth someone's time to put it all together and provide a near realtime api for all the scraped data. Same goes for amazon and anyone who thinks they can protect their data.

I'm fairly certain that Airbnb used to give their data away on a different website. I used the dataset in my undergrad.

Airbnb gives their data away. http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-data.html

This looks to be an activist project focused on shutting out Airbnb, check out the about page.

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