Digital Exile: How I Got Banned for Life from AirBnB - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jacksoncunningham/digital-exile-how-i-got-banned-for-life-from-airbnb-615434c6eeba <comment><USER2> I have no particular opinion about the facts of the specific case in question. But there is something weird about the way customer service is set up these days:

1) Company: Doesn't like dealing with problem users/clients.

2) Company institutes policy saying that they can do whatever they want with no explanation. This makes it more efficient to handle the problem users.

3) Sanctioned users are now more frustrated than before because they aren't even given any explanation of what happened.

4) Users who are tech savvy take to social media or use personal networks to get special dispensations (see: every time someone posts on HN about a problem with their Google account and gets special intervention).

5) Company: Is happy because there is still an informal workaround for dealing with sufficiently motivated users or weird cases.

6) Users: Are left more powerless and potentially frustrated than when they had more sane tech support channels, but the company doesn't have to care about this.

This seems really suboptimal and the OP's comments on power imbalances seem on target. [edit: formatting, wording.]

<comment><USER3> Imagine a world in which Experian or Equifax would only fix a mistake on your credit report if you had enough followers to embarrass them on social media. This is where appropriate consumer protection laws come into play. The whole idea feels intuitively like a silly overreach to me since I watched Twitter, Airbnb, and these other services grow from nothing and so I take them less seriously, whereas banks and credit bureaus have existed as giants since I was born. On the other hand, one could imagine GDPR adding a rule that users must be provided with a detailed explanation and an appeals process before accounts can be deleted, and it wouldn't seem too burdensome when compared with the rest of the regulation.

<comment><USER4> People seem to be naturally anti-regulation, failing to see that those regulations don't exist purely upon the whims of bureaucrats, but chiefly to address previous issues brought to the regulator's attention.

Sometime in the last century, this idea was implanted by big businesses in the media and therefore the thoughts of the citizenry that regulation is more than anything, just people who couldn't succeed in business bullying people who are, and that shit is so fucking dangerous that it makes me shake. Amazon, AirBNB, Google, Facebook, Apple, none of these companies give a FUCK about you any further than they are legally required to, not one iota further, and we constantly bemoan our politicians over having a "too regulated" business environment.

<comment><USER5> But who regulates the regulators? As bad as this example is, have you never heard of the nightmares people fall into dealing with _government_ bureaucracies? If anything, they're much much _worse_ than the worst that companies inflict.

Regulatory capture is a real thing too. Regulation isn't _obviously_ positive just because there are reasons people trot out to justify it.

You're right, companies don't generally care about me. But neither does the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice, my local police department, my local school board, or any post office in which I've ever found myself.

<comment><USER4> > But who regulates the regulators?

You and people like you talk as though the various regulatory bodies simply issue an edict and every corporation is obligated to oblige that very second, and it's ridiculous.

1\. The regulations themselves are often based heavily upon opinions and trusted advice from people who actively are or who formerly were in the industry being regulated, not simply dreamed up and pulled from someone's ass

2\. There is an entire months long process of discussion, meeting, decisions, appeals, revisions, etc. engaged in between experts on both sides, lawyers on both sides, etc. By the time a regulation becomes required law, it's likely been attended to by a few hundred if not thousand people from both private enterprise and Government over months if not YEARS of work.

3\. Once a regulation becomes law, companies often have months of forewarning to get into compliance. In the event that a business is non-compliant with something, unless it's immediately life threatening, they are given warnings, written warnings, guidance, possible solutions, etc. Regulators are not some comic book villain trying to fuck over mom and pop stores. They are attempting to ensure the safety, efficiency, and long life of everyone involved in a business. They _want you to be compliant_ , not to file paperwork and shut you down.

> As bad as this example is, have you never heard of the nightmares people > fall into dealing with government bureaucracies?

Oh I have, and for years and years I took them at face value but ANECDOTE IS NOT EVIDENCE. Almost every time you hear about some person who ended up on the wrong end of a regulator's pen, if you start digging you'll find a long history of shady ass behavior from that person which is conveniently omitted from their account of the events, for I'm sure totally-not-lying reasons.

> Regulation isn't obviously positive just because there are reasons people > trot out to justify it.

The vast majority of regulations are written in the blood of the people who had to die to show us that storing some chemical in a break room gave every 3rd employee cancer, or every person who ate fish from a polluted river who didn't know that the chemicals in it would destroy their bodies. The fact that you personally don't understand whatever is behind a given regulation, does not make it unimportant or frivolous.

> But neither does the Social Security Administration, the Department of > Justice, my local police department, my local school board, or any post > office in which I've ever found myself.

Except you can affect those if you get off your dead ass and vote.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like a great system for the incumbents, and a massive cost to any new players. You give it away when you say "both sides". In fact there are many sides, and regulation all to often favours the one with the best connections to the government - usually the largest.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, by now. The idea is to reverse that, because if you just say "fuck all regulations" you have pandemonium, which is the same in that it also favors the largest, but is different in that it's _a million times worse than even what we have now_.

The very same interests that subvert regulations then use that subversion to say regulations, "in general" are bad, without explicitly saying what the alternative would be. No regulations, or less corruption? What, _exactly_ , are you arguing for?

<comment><USER8> BTW, you've been shadowbanned for 5 months or so. All of your comments start out invisible except to accounts with showdead=true. Those accounts can sometimes "vouch" one of your comments, like I just did here, making them visible to all users.

It probably happened to you because of something to do with this thread, since the dead comments start just after that: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16236350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16236350)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We recently rented a house at Niagara Falls, which looked nice in pictures, although a few people in reviews mentioned it's kind of old. When we arrived, the shower wasn't working. An hour later police showed up, as someone reported property break in. The following day, in the morning the electric company showed up and turned off electricity, at the request of the previous property manager, who was recently fired, and decided to have a revenge. Finally, when we came back after a day at the falls, there were police notices on the house stating that it's illegal for anyone to occupy the property, as it was being used as illegal vacation rental. We got our stuff and got out to a nearby hotel, which luckily had prices on last minute discount... When I though about raising a complaint with AirBnB for a refund, I've imagined exactly the same situation as happened to the author here. I've also though about all the time I would need to waste to provide the evidence to the AirBnB... In light of this, we settled for an owner's offer to refund us privately over PayPal (including AirBnB fees) in exchange for not leaving a negative feedback. Take whatever you want out of this, but the reason we settled (and didn't provide feedback which could be useful to other people) is precisely because we knew how it is to fight with the giants. Been recently fighting for a compensation from BA for 24 hour delay, and it's seriously not worth the time I had to spend on getting these 600 euro, as the number of hours spent times my salary is higher.

<comment><USER10> >in exchange for not leaving a negative feedback

This is the same reason I roll my eyes when a ride sharing app asks me to rate a driver - I assume anything less than 5 stars is going to kill their work so I just give 5 stars. The one time I had a bad experience (nice driver, liked to talk, but could not drive and talk and almost got us killed), I just skipped the review entirely.

I have this working theory that we (people privileged enough to spend lots of time per day on the Internet) are getting close to being able to spend our time in fictional spaces; one of the reasons for that is the fact we spend a lot of goddamn time lying about things in order to make systems work the way we want. Now let's you and I sit down and talk about what 4 stars in iTunes/ Spotify/ whatever means in your personal system . . .

<comment><USER11> I went to a "hot" new restaurant recently...

It was busy alright.

The owner was running around like a mad person furiously cleaning tables.

I enjoyed my meal, the service was great, but as we were leaving I was disgusted to see the owner (who was cleaning tables, mind you) cough into her hand and then use that same hand to wipe down a table.

I noticed her voice sounded a bit off as well.

Anyways sure enough, the next day, I got sick.

When I told my friends I was considering leaving a 1 star review for that restaurant as a result... they were dumfounded... how could I possibly... you pariah you!

I was flabbergasted.

This restaurant owner came into her own restaurant knowing she was sick, and was publicly cleaning tables with dirty hands that she was coughing into... and I was the one getting pushback for wanting to leave a 1 star review as a result.

I left the review, the owner apologized and essentially admitted that she had come into work sick.

But I still feel weird about the whole ordeal.

What's the point of a review system if you are pressured to always be positive? No matter the circumstances?

<comment><USER12> The incubation period for colds and flus is several days, usually about a week, so you wouldn't get sick the next day. Unless by "sick" you mean that you got food poisoning, but that wouldn't be from the owner's cough, but rather poor hygiene in the kitchen. Presumably the owner wasn't also making the food.

<comment><USER11> I misspoke. It was a few days between my visiting the restaurant and my getting sick.

This transpired a long time ago now.

<comment> dawid-s I totally agree that coughing into your hands and then touching things that other people touch, especially in a restaurant is disgusting.

However the fact that you got sick doesn't prove anything at all. It could have been one of hundreds of coincidences that we come across every day that we don't really pay attention to until it matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Airbnb prioritizes hosts - _even violent ones_ \- because that's the bottleneck.

We had a scary experience where Airbnb allowed a VERY aggressive host with a documented history of violence to continue. The listing is still active today.

I wrote them a long letter with facts which began:

> I am sending this to make clear in writing that this listing is extremely > unsafe for travelers.

> We were harassed, feared for our safety, and left early as a result of drunk > management on the property. We filed charges with the Maui Police Department > for harassment, and we have since learned that the host John [redacted] is a > convicted felon who has had the police out for harassment, disorderly > conduct, and resisting arrest before and has been ordered by the courts to > "obtain and maintain mental health treatment or services, including anger > management treatment or services, [or] domestic violence intervention".

> He has been in and out of court since at least 2004 and was most recently > arrested on [redacted] 2014, barely a week before we arrived. I believe that > the situation on this property is extremely unsafe and I cannot keep silent > in good conscience, even though the host has threatened me and my family.

I detailed the event further for a page or so, and sent Airbnb all the prior police reports. The host was even using a fake wife alias to run the listing.

Airbnb's response was to refund us our money in full, but _they never pulled the host, nor did they publish our negative review of the location_. The only action seems to be that they required him to use his own profile instead of the fake wife's profile.

So it's much more than just prioritizing hosts over guests financially, Airbnb also prioritizes keeping a profitable host more than keeping guests safe.

<comment><USER14> Name and shame! Is there a site for posting bad experiences with Airbnb hosts, complete with their name and listing address?

<comment><USER15> I think you may be missing the point -- the one being named and maybe shamed in this post is actually Airbnb.

<comment><USER16> Also this post implies if you name and shame someone outside the Air BnB platform you get permabanned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > is this all part of an ongoing trend, toward something like the Chinese > Social Credit Score system, where the consequences of not maintaining a high > rating are socially crippling?

Yes, except that at least with the Chinese social credit system you presumably know what your score is and what rules you are supposed to follow.

I expect that Airbnb, Facebook, Google et al will find it highly profitable to maintain and monetise lists of how credit-worthy / reliable / conscientious / conformist people are. Their neural nets' verdict on you will be both opaque and unchallengable.

> We're becoming increasingly dependent on a handful of major tech giants to > get through our basic daily routine. Imagine waking up one day and no longer > being able to check your Gmail, buy things on Amazon, or book an Uber.

Quite. Do anything the new corporate oligarchies don't like, and you're an unperson.

<comment><USER18> > Yes, except that at least with the Chinese social credit system you > presumably know what your score is and what rules you are supposed to > follow.

It's not like "don't talk about what really happened at Tiananmen Square" (or an equivalent message) is explicitly taught.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This sort of thing is why I don't use Airbnb, or similar services.

If I want a professional hotel experience, I stay at a hotel. If I wanted a less predictable experience from people playing at running a hotel, I'd stay at one of these amateur hotels.

To be sure, there are excellent hotel-grade Airbnb places. But just like there are excellent Uber/Lyft drivers, there are others who are simply cosplaying taxi driver.

It's the nature of the "gig economy." And why I avoid it.

<comment><USER20> Not everyone can have that luxury. I've stayed in a dozen or so Airbnbs in the past few years, from low to high end, and didn't have a single bad experience. It's always a lot less expensive than hotels in the same area, and in many cases a higher quality building and room than nearby hotels. Just no room service.

There's honestly not much that can go wrong with an Airbnb experience as a guest, unless you're doing some weird spa cycle arrangement like the person in this story did, are gambling on a first-time host, or have some bizarre fluke. If they lie about any of the amenities or anything else in the listing it's simple to bring it up with Airbnb.

I've reached the point where I can't find a single reason to actually stay in a hotel anymore, no matter where I'm traveling (internationally or in the US).

<comment> dorian-graph Luxury? I travel _a lot_ (been to 45+ countries and travel every couple of weeks for fun) and more often then not, AirBnbs cost more. A lot of my friends travel just as much, if not more, than I do, and we've all slowly moved away from AirBnbs as much as possible. ftr we don't mind AirBnb, and I've had good experiences with them. Also, we're not luxurious travellers, but we do so as cheaply as we can manage.

The main reasons (cost aside) are unresponsive hosts, late hosts, and incorrect details. I've never had any 'weird' arrangements either, just normal stays.

Hell, people's experiences like this person's are reason enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The last point in the article hits the nail on the head; power is being centralized in these large tech giants. It's not so much that they are inherently bad, but it's that there are quickly becoming no alternatives.

<comment><USER22> At some point they will be regulated like utilities. Which they might as well be in the future.

In the meantime imagine your electricity provider cutting your power because you gave a bad Yelp review to one of the people individually producing solar power and distributing it through the provider's grid. Or some other similar scenario.

<comment><USER23> I don't see any clear path for Big Tech to be regulated like utilities. Certainly not in the US.

The internet itself is still not even close to being regulated as a utility, decades after it became indispensable for our lives. So Google or Amazon? How would that even work?

This is a tough problem, and I don't think it's going to be solved so easily.

<comment><USER22> I think the path is there, we just don't really know how long it takes to get to that point. I gave electricity as an example because at some point is was also just a service provided by a private company to people who had alternatives. So it's perfectly conceivable that in 10-20-50 years such services will be considered utilities.

Electric, gas, water, sewage, trash, these all _became_ utilities. The internet itself might also become one. Or some of the services relying on the internet like mail, shopping, accommodation, etc. I expect it will take a while though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Benjamin Mako Hill has some really interesting things to say about how AirBnB displaced couchsurfing[1].

We could've had a world where people can stay anywhere in the world for free. Instead we let a bunch of VC-funded bros convince us that adding a gatekeeper to the short term rental market was a good idea.

We all need to think carefully about the consequences of our actions online, from building such applications to using them. I refuse to use AirBnB after being stuck out in the middle of nowhere and basically told to go whistle. I'm not the only person where the bad experience has been a result of AirBnB's handling of the situation, but it was us as users that enabled AirBnB to get into it's partial monopoly situation by evangelising so much for it in the early days./

[1] - [http://media.mako.cc/hill-whither_peer_production- libreplane...](http://media.mako.cc/hill-whither_peer_production- libreplanet_keynote-20180326-EDITED-v3.webm#t=199)

<comment><USER25> Couchsurfing and AirBnb are not even remotely the same.

Hosting on Couchsurfing is a way to meet other travelers and show them around your city, and most importantly, you don't get paid.

Hosting on AirBnb is a business. AirBnb is far closer to HomeAway and VRBO. These existed before too, but their usability was terrible and they were prone to scams.

<comment><USER26> The people running couchsurfing killed it themselves by changing from a non- profit to a VC funded for-profit business after accepting huge amounts of volunteer effort.

But yeah, they aren't really the same thing. There is some overlap since it could be difficult to cover every day that you wanted to visit (and there isn't always enough hostel beds available, which are closer to the same idea), but for anyone who really preferred AirBnB it was better for everyone that they not be on couchsurfing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've continually voiced my discontent with the way Airbnb treats guests vs hosts. Guests are completely disposable and I even had a personal experience I wrote about on medium as well for a long-term stay. Airbnb is the company that is going the way of too big to fail. As more and more customers complain cities will eventually be forced to regulate and potentially kill this company. It's quite ironic that Brian Chesky,the CEO, tweeted end of June about how wrong the travel ban is in America ( a ban that fails to provide clarity as to why some of the countries are on it) and yet Airbnb feels they are allowed to ban a user without providing any clarity as well.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why would you ever agree to rent a place where you need to vacate it for 4+ hours every day? The experience with AirBNB sounds all around awful, but I'm honestly baffled why you would go along with such a weird setup.

<comment><USER29> Same reason someone would be willing to rent a pod with barely enough room for a sleeping bag and shared access to a toilet across the street: _price_

That aside banning people for external reviews is nonsense. What's next, banning someone for speaking (literally talking) about their negative experience?

<comment><USER30> Isn't "banning" the user in this case simply declining to provide the service? If I were a house painter and, for whatever arbitrary reason, I decide that I don't really like you, I wouldn't paint your house even if you demanded it.

I have the right to not engage you. You don't have the right to compel me to engage.

As much as Airbnb made this worse that it had to be, I think the flip-side is much worse. Imagine if by some authority one individual was compelled to buy a good from or perform a service for another individual.

<comment><USER31> I disagree. This is not AirBnB deciding they just don't like someone. This is AirBnB deciding to ban someone because they gave a negative review. I think the world where you're banned from services for speaking honestly about them is far worse than the alternative. If we can't speak honestly about our experiences, then others simply are not capable of making informed decisions, and all of capitalism goes poof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Author learns a lesson as to why we regulated the hospitality industry.

Turns out rules are kinda necessary.

<comment><USER33> Do hotels have a regulation that says they're not allowed to ban customers?

Or are you just taking the opportunity to get on your soapbox to complain about AirBnB?

<comment><USER34> Yes, if you're interested you can look up hospitality law or innkeeper law. Airbnb and others attempt to replicate existing services while sidestepping the regulations in place, which of course makes them cheaper / faster because they don't have to deal with the regulatory burden..

<comment><USER35> I tried looking up both of these terms, and I didn't find anything about not being allowed to arbitrarily ban an individual from your hotel.

<comment><USER36> IANAL, but besides the protected classes that have been linked below, the United States regulates the hospitality industry on a federal, state, and local level. For the guest, that means a legal recourse, and not a medium blogpost.

We can quibble about the word "banning", but the fact remains that, for hotels, there is a body of laws "against [guest] injury, whether accidental or intentional". For the tech giant that pretends it's not even in the same industry, there's just a patchwork of guidelines.

<comment><USER35> I'm still haven't seen anyone claim that you'd have legal recourse if the Hilton refused to rent you a room, unless it was due to protected class status. Wouldn't a person in that analogous situation be stuck with a blog post too?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How is "we are not obligated to provide an explanation" a valid reason? Of course they need to state why you were banned? Dystopian nonsense. Stop using AirBnB.

<comment><USER38> The potential downsides are huge legal costs and the upsides are almost none, so any business is wise to keep their mouth shut unless through lawyers. Same reason why you don't comment on people you don't hire.

<comment><USER31> And we as consumers care about that why? It's not my concern that providing an actual answer might get them in trouble.

<comment><USER38> It's not, I'm just stating why I believe businesses don't always explain their actions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The Black Mirror third* season social media hellscape episode starring Bryce Howard Dallas seems a more apt reference than the Jon Hamm as sexual deviant episode.

The smallest breaches of protocol snowballed into her becoming a persona non grata all while trying to please a system that doesn't actually care.

<comment><USER40> Season 3, no? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive) [spoilers]

<comment><USER39> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I too was banned for life from AirBnB – I don't really blame them, given the information available, it was fair for them to side with the host, who was their long term customer over myself who was a new user.

The apartment I was in had a gas leak while I was gone, the door got kicked in by the fire department and the gas was shut off. The replacement cost $1300+ – and I was out of a room for two nights. I refused to pay the fee for the door – that seems like something insurance should cover. I was not in the room when the gas was on, but I guess there's an off chance I bumped the stove and flipped it on – seems like that should not be possible, but I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wrote a comment earlier this week about a Google user being locked out of Google. I expanded it into a story, peppering it with less than flattering stories about Google.

[https://theandrewbailey.com/article/203/Insanity-Locked- Out](https://theandrewbailey.com/article/203/Insanity-Locked-Out)

I haven't read any Kafka, but I'm probably a fan already.

<comment><USER43> I find myself using the word "kafkaesque" a lot more lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> AirBnB is a shitty company.

1\. Apartments are more expensive than Hotels. I've been to 20 cities and I have yet to find an apartment that is cheaper than an equivalent Booking.com.

2\. This probably works, however, because it is cheaper to book the same apartment for 3-4 people instead of being a single traveler.

3\. This makes the target customers of Airbnb problematic guests (imagine having 3-4 new guests to the apartment everyday). Probably why neighbors are complaining about Airbnb.

4\. The prices displayed are way distorted. It is _way_ worse than booking.com. The price on the search function is like half of what you'll actually pay.

5\. Pretty much every property is 5 star rated. Pretty much every guest is a nice guest. Really? This cannot possibly be the truth and probably mean that the rating system means crap.

<comment><USER12> > 1\. Apartments are more expensive than Hotels.

Why wouldn't they be? It's a different product. I like being able to prepare and eat my own food in a full kitchen. I like washing my own clothes and tidying my own bed. An apartment typically has much more space than the equivalent hotel room, with multiple rooms to stay in. I also don't need to interact with any staff, or see much of tourists (nor do I need to be in a crowded downtown area). For me, these are all benefits.

<comment><USER45> almost all of those requirements can be met by staying in hoStel

<comment><USER12> Hostels are generally dormitories where you share minimal bunk-bed rooms with strangers. I've never seen a hostel with its own kitchen, let alone its own bedroom.

<comment><USER46> About any good hostel I've seen had a decent community kitchen. Some of them habe private rooms, sometimes even with private bathrooms.

<comment><USER12> Of course. But I don't see the relevance when we are comparing between a private hotel room and a private apartment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'll just leave this here: [https://www.airbnbhell.com](https://www.airbnbhell.com)

Coming from a guest perspective where I've had things go wrong during my stays, Airbnb has been absolutely horrible to deal with. It's literally gambling with your vacation, because if anything goes wrong you can count on Airbnb to take your money and run. Why do we give so much money to what is essentially a middleman that provides almost nothing of value?

</comment><comment><USER48> The same story keeps playing out:

\- A new "marketplace" platform takes off with a idealistic free-market approach. It's different enough from previous companies in the space that it doesn't get regulated, and it denies having any social obligation or responsibility.

\- As more and more customers and - primarily - vendors come to depend on it, its hands-off approach becomes one of arbitration, and its relationship with both groups becomes exploitative.

\- We get to start over at square one, re-learning the difficult lessons about consumer and employee protection that we've spent the last century developing.

This is going to keep happening until the government gets more agile at regulating nebulous and category-breaking companies. Uber, YouTube, Facebook (with news companies as the vendors), Twitch, AirBnB, etc.

Companies that invent new business models and break with preconceptions aren't inherently bad - that's potentially a great thing - but it becomes bad when regulatory laws can't keep up.

</comment><comment><USER49> Gross behavior on the part of AirBNB. I'm half tempted to post a "ban-me" review of AirBNB's HQ to Google and friends.

</comment><comment><USER50> > Please understand that we are not obligated to provide an explanation for > the action taken against your account.

Do you really want to behave as badly as legally permitted? That's kind of a low bar.

</comment><comment><USER14> A story about Airbnb, bedbugs and a lack of accountability:

My now-wife and I used Airbnb in Berlin and the mattress in our otherwise clean apartment was badly infested with bedbugs. I took a video (see below) and posted it to YouTube so that Airbnb would have the evidence needed to make what I assumed would be a quick decision in our favor.

Instead, they were completely unhelpful. I was an American traveling in Europe so I didn't have a phone number where I could be reached, which they insisted was the only way they could communicate with me about the issue in real time. They demanded photos of the bedbugs, which I didn't take, because I assumed the video would be more helpful and my wife and I got out of the apartment as quickly as possible. (after frantically checking to make sure our clothes and luggage were bedbug-free)

Finally, they took the host's word that there were no bedbugs, besides the obvious conflict of interest on his part to not report the visible bugs and blood stains on his mattress. (below a clean topsheet!)

After much complaining on social media and repeated Skype calls from WiFi hotspots they finally agreed to cancel our remaining few nights and pay for a hotel for us instead. This might sound generous, but it came after losing a night to bedbugs and the better part of a day to dealing with their terrible customer service--one full day lost out of a 7 day trip.

Like many of the complaints people are describing ITT, the problems that arise with Airbnb can happen in any hotel, too. The difference is that a hotel can quickly make you whole by giving you a new room or, if need be, putting you up in another location across town.

With platforms like Airbnb it's simply too easy for them to ignore you and your pesky complaints or, in the case of OP, ban you from their platform forever. While I'm reluctant to call for more regulation, it's hard to see what else could make them treat you fairly, as a customer and a human being.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJHScbdp15s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJHScbdp15s)

</comment><comment><USER51> The host complaining that the guest was entitled to a room they had paid for is unbelievably ironic. I guess the irony was lost on Airbnb.

</comment><comment><USER52> Perhaps the moral to the story is to create a dummy account on Google to leave negative feedback, so Airbnb can't link it to your account?

</comment><comment><USER53> If the situation were reversed, how would you handle it? You run a service that connects two parties, something happens, and there is a dispute. Do you ban one of the parties, or both, or neither? Do you force them to go to arbitration? Does this scale? How much time, energy, and capital is appropriate to expend on this situation?

<comment><USER54> I would never ban people without telling them why they were banned. That's just moronic.

I'd offer banned user contact information that goes directly to a human being which can be used to appeal if the user believes they did not violate said terms and conditions.

I'm neutral about how a company handles matters after the appeal--whether it focuses on protecting buyers over sellers. It's totally fine for the decision to be final after said appeal, but the company response had better show that the rep actually bothered to read the appeal message.

This doesn't seem like rocket science to me. Your customer service cost scales proportional to number of customers / revenue, which is reasonable. In terms of justifying capital spend... how much are you spending on marketing? Each customer you screw over is canceling a mountain of your outreach efforts via negative NPS.

<comment><USER38> Customer service costs only scale if the customer is spending enough at your business to offset it. Many people probably don't spend enough to offset this and make more sense to drop as customers than to keep maintaining. And when there are only a handful of sellers in the market anyway, what difference does it make if they have a negative experience to share.

<comment><USER54> I assume you're talking about the general case rather than AirBnB specifically?

Tell people why they're being banned. There is no excuse not to.

I can imagine a B2C freemium product with a high rate of abuse where the non- paying users aren't given the appeal option. But if somebody is paying you, you should have a human driven appeals process.

There are certainly cases where customers aren't worth the support cost. Many years ago a SaaS I worked for cut out its entry level subscription because those customers represented most of the support load while also being a minority of the revenue.

If you are a monopoly or oligopoly... it might be worth considering what happened to the taxi industry when Uber came to the scene (even before UberX). Years of underwhelming service and zero product development translates to zero customer loyalty. Choice will arrive sooner or later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Not a lawyer here, but wouldn't the author have a case for a libel suit? Especially if he can _prove_ that the host made false statements.

<comment><USER56> But what are the damages? The calculable damages are likely the cost differences between Airbnb and hotel for the proportion of time you spend in travel.

So maybe a few hundred to a few thousand over a few years? I'd think the cost of the lawsuit would really dwarf the value of the lie.

Are Airbnb accounts tied to anything truly identifiable or can you make a new account with a new email & different credit card? (I've never signed up for Airbnb so don't know how rigorous they are)

<comment><USER57> If you win the lawsuit you could force them to pay your legal fees. Even if you don't make profit, you wound them financially.

<comment><USER58> legal fees are rarely given in court.

most of the time, it's because someone sued you and they were being assholes and the judge didn't like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> The whole no-reasons-or-explanation thing particularly looks really bad, as we are free to speculate the worst possible petty reasons for lifetime bans. I can't imagine the logic behind that - is it some kind of legal liability issue? Really sours me on the brand.

<comment><USER60> > I can't imagine the logic behind that

Lazy tech companies want to automate everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I had a disupute with AirBnB long time ago (You can find it in my history because I posted about it here). They had a "sign up a friend" promotion and I liked the service so much that I recommended it to my parents. They used it and liked it too... but I didn't get my promotional credit.

When I emailed them they were adamant the conditions were not met. They then changed the terms in the email to something new... luckily their own website was still active and represented EXACTLY what I had originally stated. I finally got a very patronizing email from support.

Won't use AirBnB again. Plenty of other services.

</comment><comment><USER62> The bulk of airbnb's value and valuation comes from enabling people to run illegal or subpar hotels. I travel frequently and occassionally use Airbnb. Only in one instance was my host actually just renting out a spare room. All other occassions it was clearly a business operation turning residential units into hotel rooms.

</comment><comment><USER63> I dislike AirBnB on many levels, second-most to Uber: Its a mechanism which marginalizes tenants and maximises profits in property rental to the detriment of neighbours and people just trying to find homes. But this story, of being excluded by the parent company, for un-reversable, un-appealable reasons "because you signed a contract and we don't have to" really is the icing on the cake.

The extent of "yea, if google want to make you rue the day" comments also rings true to me. I'm concerned about my exposure of risk:consequence here, not because I think I have done anything to warrant it, but because successfully reversing arbitrary acts in these situations is so fraught.

Basically, its a guilty-until-possibly-accepted-but-not-acknowledged-as- innocent-and-no-recompense world.

</comment><comment><USER64> > After booking the weekend, we were told that we'd need to vacate the > premises from 12–4pm because the room was located in a spa retreat.

 _After_ booking they told you that?

IMO either do the sane thing and cancel or get into whatever horrible interaction you describe in the rest of the blog.

</comment><comment><USER65> Similar experience here. After years of evangelizing airbnb I got shit on by them by some low level employee with no way to continue communication, even though their misunderstanding could be explained in a single sentence.

Apparently after years of driving customers to their platform, I'm not even worthy of being able to send a note to second line service, or even a single response to first level service after he closed the issue.

It will be an interesting calculation to sum up the net benefit my efforts have provided to airbnb vs the damage that will occur due to my now committed lifetime of the opposite.

All they needed was an appeal button, everything would have been resolved in minutes.

But hey, lets fuck the people we built the business on.

</comment><comment><USER66> I don't know exactly why, but the indignity of this story really gets to me.

Does having a desk at a big tech company really strip your humanity to the point where you're OK sending messages like these to another person?

How do you treat other human beings with so little respect?

</comment><comment><USER67> It's pretty easy to live without AirBnB. While outrageous and rude on general ground, AirBnB behavior here is not too harmful. But what if another company like Google just blacklists you? That could be a lot more trouble, especially if you have Google mail, use Google identity to log in to other sites, etc. And what if it's some cloud company that just blocks you from your data, backups, digital assets, private keys, etc.? Modern tech provides a lot of nice opportunities, but if you stop to think about it it's scary how fragile it is and how much a lone keypress of somebody (alive or even bot) inside the guts of a major company can have impact on your life...

</comment><comment><USER68> This seems pretty clear. He had a bad experience but didn't leave a review for the place, and then when the review period expired, he saw that the place had left a bad review for him. Airbnb keeps both users blind to each other's reviews until the review period has expired, because otherwise people will use the threat of leaving a bad review (as retribution) in order to ensure they get reviewed well. But he did an end-run around this and posted reviews on multiple other sites, which makes airbnb's system break down.

It sounds like Airbnb just needs a way for people to respond to reviews that are left for them. I'm surprised it doesn't have that already.

<comment><USER69> Airbnb has "public" and "private" reviews. "Public reviews" are shown everywhere, "private" is just messaged directly to the host only. You need to write a "public review" to do a "private one" to my knowledge, last time I used it.

Whenever I had a bad host relationship, I decided not to pursue it further and leave no review at all. It feels weird that there is no recourse action because you don't know if your host will recripcate posting a good review, a honest terrible review, a fake bad review, or none at all. Your host might know your experience was bad and doesn't know either if you will post what he will post. Airbnb reviews feels like the prisons dileama game theory problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Ebay did something similar to me,account banned with no reason given. I was selling some old Alix computers and I believe the ban was because I put something in the listing about using them for vpn's to hide or change your location.

</comment><comment><USER71> A few simple regulations would help a lot.

First of all, arbitration and civil court access for challenging bans and such. Second, require specific explanations. Third, require content-neutral social media / common carrier policies.

</comment><comment><USER72> Very Kafkaesque.

It's completely unacceptable to remove a service without explanation.

</comment><comment><USER73> I also had an incident where they sided with the host and refused me a refund. That was quite a surprise and the way they handled it had a strong taste of they decide by numbers and then it's a brick wall and they'll just coat it for you but the decision is incontestable. Now I'm weighing the risk and uncertainty and oftentimes it's just not worth it and I'll rather go for a hotel.

<comment><USER74> Do a cc chargeback if you think you have a real case

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Banned for life.

Sounds familiar: [https://steemit.com/twitter/@genesisre/decentralizeeverythin...](https://steemit.com/twitter/@genesisre/decentralizeeverything-9-years- on-twitter-with-no-right-to-appeal)

Not enough crypto-currency scams.

Notified Twitter about one with verified-fucking-account.

Instant, irreversible ban, no right to appeal.

WOW

</comment><comment><USER76> It is scary to try to predict what the state of things will be in 10 or 20 years. Are we going to be like the society in the sci-fy series Continuum where corporations literally control everything?

Maybe a rating of customer service for online services would be appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER77> I'm very curious how this story develops. Usually, a tech company ending on the front page of HN for messing up is shamed into fixing the mistake, often quietly and without providing any explanation to the victim.

<comment><USER78> > I'm very curious how this story develops. Usually, a tech company ending on > the front page of HN for messing up is shamed into fixing the mistake, often > quietly and without providing any explanation to the victim.

The company should better be shamed into dropping the Kafkaesque policy in their terms of service completely. Anything below means that such terms are actually acceptable.

<comment><USER77> Of course. Personally it's the first time I've heard they're using that kind of language. I'm wondering if this is even legal in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I always wanted to try Airbnb, but everytime I searched for accomodation it didn't seem to offer better deals than I could find on booking.com or elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER80> Instead of a ban why not let the rating amd comment system do the work?

Rude hosts and guests will get nicked and after a while a pattern will emerge

</comment><comment><USER81> So very Google'ish, ban a person for life with zero liability. FUCK. THIS. SHIT. Period.

</comment><comment><USER82> Since the Charlottesville incident, when AirBnB permanently banned an unspecified list of people they identified as Nazis, I've always taken a closer look at ToS and AUP for various cloud services, many of which claim they will permanently and immediately ban you for transmitting or storing things that are "offensive", with no further explanation given.

Bans like this are yet another transparent exercise of platforms' power. Where does it stop? Amazon clearly has the technological ability to ban you from Whole Foods if you returned too many items on their website or wrote some bad things about them online; I'm just waiting for the first Medium post about it. Can the phone company ban your number if they don't like who you're talking to? Hell, even my apartment lease lets them terminate it if I "engage in criminal activity", not requiring "criminal charges, arrest, or conviction", but by a "preponderance of the evidence in our judgment".

<comment><USER83> Amazon is currently banning people for making too many returns.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the- shoppers...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-shoppers-who- make-too-many-returns-1526981401)

My guess is that they have an algorithm to automatically ban people who abuse the return system. But if you are the unlucky person who gets one defective item after another and returns them, then Amazon bans your account. You are not allowed to buy anything else on Amazon's web site, ever. And it is difficult or impossible to speak to a human to resolve the situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> It is not mandatory to use such companies and laws already exist in case company has done trouble. Not sure what needs to be regulated here. Company should have freedom to choose who it does business with. If you don't like it you can start your own AirBNB.

<comment><USER31> This is a terrible attitude. Deciding that companies should have free reign to do whatever has had disastrous consequences in the past, and today would be no different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> They rebranded to Airbnb some time ago, just saying.

</comment><comment><USER86> Looks like the US is creating a social credit system - it's just a distributed one.

</comment><comment><USER87> Airbnb isn't on your side as a guest. That's the reality. I had a situation where the owner was lying in his listing and the person maintaining the house told me Airbnb had warned him, but hadn't followed up to make sure he was in compliance. Imagine driving 2,000 miles only to learn that Airbnb knew about many serious issues plaguing a listing.

<comment><USER47> Your story is not unique, sadly. I flew all the way to Hong Kong just to find my Airbnb was full of bed bugs, then had to fight them for 2 weeks to get a (partial) refund.

[https://www.airbnbhell.com](https://www.airbnbhell.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> so I took AirBNB for the first time and I was shocked how little vetting process there is. One particular place I had was awful....towels with dried blood spots, pubic hair on blanket....

</comment><comment><USER89> To me, the AirBNB product looks ripe for crypto-disruption.

</comment><comment><USER90> I got lifebanned from getaround because my ex girlfriend smoked in a car we rented. The penalty in the terms of service was a $250 cleaning fee (which I got charged) but no where did it say you'd be banned (and iirc it _still_ does not say that). I appealed it twice and both times they upheld the ban.

<comment><USER91> Good. What a shitty thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment> cool-RR _" It all feels very 1984. Or Black Mirror."_

Really? A private company deciding not to do business with you feels like your basic human rights were taken away?

 _" After emailing AirBnB support and its founders multiple times, I've finally given up."_

I've had a problem in Windows on my computer the other day and emailed Bill Gates, could you believe he had other things to do except respond to my problem?

</comment><comment><USER92> Sounds like the perfect time to stop using AirBnB. You are not required to do so and they are not required to serve you. I don't see a problem other than you being upset by their rudeness.

I only first used AirBnB 2 weeks ago. There's a single one in my town. I've never seen an uber. I think many on hackernews overestimate how many people use or depend on these kind (uber, airbnb, etc) services outside of high population density areas.

<comment><USER93> > I think many on hackernews overestimate how many people use or depend on > these kind (uber, airbnb, etc) services outside of high population density > areas.

Most people live in high population density areas. The USA is 80% urbanized.</comment></comment>


Apple Wins Reversal of $625.5 Million Mirror Worlds Patent Infringement Verdict - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-04/apple-wins-reversal-of-mirror-worlds-patent-verdict.html

<comment><USER2> For reference, here is a picture from one of the MW patents: [http://www.patentlyapple.com/.a/6a0120a5580826970c013487fbb5...](http://www.patentlyapple.com/.a/6a0120a5580826970c013487fbb50a970c-800wi)

You can see how there is some Cover Flow similarity there. However, why should this be patentable at all? Otherwise, shouldn't I just sit down and sketch as many UI configurations as I can think of, patent them all, and then sue the hell out of anyone who then implements them? Just seems silly.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you can, but you'll have to spend some money, say 10k in US each, more for international markets, as well as a battle-chest of cash for lawsuits. Depending on how far you take the ideas, you'll either be known as a patent troll or inventor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there any other country in this beautiful world that encourages lunacy like this?

I mean, patenting a specific engine design is fine by me. But that would be equivalent to patenting _the source code structure_ of Spotlight, which no one can see anyway. How did we get to the point where we now have patents not for implementations but for interfaces? I wonder how much money is wasted every year on disputes like this. How much time is wasted on it. How many lives are getting wasted on it!

Software does not have visible physical implementations like engines do. Software consists of ideas, written down so computers can execute them. Software really only exists in the mind, it has no physical reality. If you patent software, you patent cell patterns in some brain. If you sue someone for that, you are claiming ownership of some programmers brain tissue!

It will be a fine day when we programmers can legally own our own brains again. It will be a day worthy of great celebration! Until then, american minds must keep their head down lest someone wants to rip their brains out, which is a sad thing indeed.

<comment><USER5> Well I hope you called out apple when they sued HTC on patents like, sliding an image to unlock a phone...

<comment><USER4> It's not that anyone in particular partaking in this system is evil. They all have to do it. It's the system itself that is evil.

I don't care who sues who. Software patents in general are an awful mess that should be abolished.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me these patents seem less transparently silly than many of those often at issue in high-profile cases, and yet they end up providing an even harsher argument against software patents. With the silly patents a couple tweaks to the system might get them thrown out, but I don't think any patent system that accepts software patents could find a basis for rejecting these. From that starker viewpoint its as crazy an idea as ever that the person who typed these abstract descriptions and made these shoddy diagrams deserves more ownership than Apple, who actually made the concepts real.

<comment><USER7> _"From that starker viewpoint its as crazy an idea as ever that the person who typed these abstract descriptions and made these shoddy diagrams deserves more ownership than Apple, who actually made the concepts real."_

To be fair, Gelernter wrote several books about these ideas, founded a software company based on them, and tried to market several different desktop software packages using the ideas in the mid/late 90s. He's also a professor of computer science at Yale, and invented a bunch of concepts (in the same books) that were inspirations for JavaSpaces and Jini. He's not a wackadoo in some garage in Texas.

My point is, it's terrifically unfair to characterize Gelernter as a patent troll. He's been a prolific contributor to computer science, and (speaking as someone who was a fan of the books that first popularized the ideas in question), a lot of Apple's UI designs today _really are_ fantastically similar to what Gelernter was dreaming up 20+ years ago. The Time Machine UI, in particular, was so much like the lifestreams concept that I originally thought that Apple had hired him to do the design.

There are situations where ideas seem obvious in retrospect, but completely out of left-field at the time of their conception. These ideas weren't even in the ballpark when Gelernter first started publishing them.

<comment><USER6> Thanks I didn't know all that about Gelernter and his work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The old truths of the OJ trial still rings true. Justice is not black or white, the only color that matters is green!</comment>


How we got 100,000 visitors without noticing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.historio.us/how-we-got-100000-visitors-without-noticing-4 <comment><USER2> Eek, not to rain the parade, but this is not good historious team. Google's duplicate content filter is generally accurate but in this case it penalized the site that originated the content and ranked yours higher because it assumed you were the owner of the content i.e. the page about sending free SMS's.

Google will quickly correct this error and you'll find the traffic on that page drops to nothing. You may also find other duplicate pages on your site penalized in the same way. You may also find your site penalized by Google for essentially screen scraping sites and copying their content verbatim and in it's entirety.

I'd recommend you set up a robots.txt to block Google from indexing identical pages on your site. Copying content verbatim and republishing in it's entirety is not a good SEO strategy unless you have thousands of throw-away domains and wear a black hat.

Sorry about the negative message, I'm sure this was very exciting for you guys but I don't think it's sustainable.

Perhaps an alternative is to have your users highlight the paragraph or snippet on each page they found interesting and archive that instead. Then publish those snippets on your site. Generally I've found republishing paragraph size chunks of text is OK with Google and will net you decent SEO traffic. It worked for my job search engine when we republished job descriptions and limited them to the first 400 chars. You can also mash the paragraphs up into pages with multiple chunks of text that e.g. show all chunks of text a particular user found interesting or a set of users or by date or location. That will give you the best of both worlds - lots of content to SEO and no dup content penalty.

Best of luck!!

<comment><USER3> Or set the canonical address of your cached pages to the real page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean the "base" tag? We already do set that (admittedly, after this happened and because of it).

<comment><USER4> No, he meant the rel="canonical" links.

<comment><USER5> This does not work across domains, guys. (Among other reasons, it would turn injection attacks into $X million bugs for some companies.)

<comment><AUTHOR> The google blog says it does...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The short form if don't want to read the entire post is summarized with this snip:

"By some algorithmic oddity, the historious cache actually ranked higher than the site (which turned out to be the most popular free sms service in Brazil), so anyone who searched for "free sms" in Brazil ended up on the historious page!"

In short, Google ranked an archive page (historious) higher then the content. Google corrected this problem, presumably automatically, 3 days after it happened.

</comment><comment><USER7> They could sue you for copyright infringment if they wanted.

And allowing google to index your "stolen" content pages is just outrageous. You don't own that content.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then we could sue Google for copyright infringement for caching _our_ pages, I guess... Why would we not allow Google to cache it? Each cached page has a great big box on top saying that this is the historious version of the cache and linking to the original site...

Example: <http://cache.historious.net/cached/515865/>

<comment><USER8> There's a huge difference between what Google is doing and what you're doing.

1) Google is caching pages for a specific purpose and ensuring that they _aren't_ cached/scraped by others:

<http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/robots.txt>

By not excluding robots, you're opening yourself to all kinds of situations where you are responsible for draining revenue from the owner of the content, which leaves you liable to lawsuits. By contrast, the way that Google caches content and their rules surrounding it do not generally harm the copyright owner.

2) Google honors all robots.txt, no-archive meta-tags, and other indications that the author doesn't want the page to be cached. Is historious doing the same?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) We do exclude robots now, yes. 2) historious doesn't spider websites, it only saves the pages the users give us. It's the same as a user deciding to make a backup of a webpage on their computer...

<comment><USER9> "It's the same as a user deciding to make a backup of a webpage on their computer..."

... and then publishing it on the Internet.

(This is not meant to be snarky or to imply opposition to your product at all. I think there is a meaningful difference between saving to a computer and saving to a web-accessible, apparently globally readable website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't it a users responsibility to obey copyright restrictions in this case, given that we never publish content unless the user does it? It's basically the same situation as hosting a website, if you upload and publish a copyrighted page, is the host responsible?

<comment><USER8> In my opinion, those two cases are not similar. I doubt that this type of automatic caching/publishing would have any protection under the DMCA safe- harbor laws unless you're making it clear to users what they're doing (I'm not a user of the service, so maybe you already are).

If I understand correctly, the users of your site are simply bookmarking pages. You are then caching it, storing it, and publishing it with a world- readable URL. There are many ways that you could provide the same experience to the user without making the cached page publicly accessible.

If you were to give users the option to make specific bookmarks world-readable - and you provided a disclaimer explaining that they should not make copyrighted material world-readable - then it might be different. But that's probably something you should discuss with an attorney.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, no, our users cache pages, but if they want the cache world-readable, they need to explicitly click the "publish" link.

Thank you for the information, I'll talk to our lawyer about it just to be safe.

<comment><USER9> I wanted to let you know that I didn't mean to disappear without responding, but that sounddust expressed what I was thinking already so I don't have much to add. I did not know that the world-readable bit was opt-in; I think that's a good start, and I'm glad you're getting legal advice on this topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, that's the nature of online commenting! Thank you for your concern, we'll talk to a lawyer to clarify this (perhaps in the ToS).

Thanks again!

<comment><USER7> I thought you were european? The DMCA safe-harbor laws don't apply to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am, I'm in the UK. I know the DMCA safe-harbor laws don't apply, but neither does the DMCA. Copyright law is similar everywhere, however, so I just wanted to get an idea. I have a lawyer researching this right now, though. Thanks again!

<comment><USER7> That's not true.

Your copyright law is similar to the US or Israel based one, not so strict as the main european one, which is based on the napolion code and is very very strict.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see, thank you. Our lawyer advised us to add a clause to the ToS and we, of course, take action against copyright infringement.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This might be slightly off topic but if you don't mind could you share the specs of your Varnish server? Everything I have read about Varnish says that it will run extremely well on pretty much any decent hardware. But I am still unsure how much power I should be providing it.

<comment><USER11> How many hits per day are you expecting?

We serve up about 2000 requests per instance per second, 8 instances on an 8 core machine with 32 G of RAM.

<comment><USER12> Why run separate instances on the same box?

<comment><USER11> To get over a bunch of limits.

<comment><USER13> What limits?

<comment><USER11> Specifically 65K file descriptors, I can't seem to get around that one in spite of all the limits having been raised appropriately.

So I ended up running multiple instances. I've discussed this with a few other HN'ers and we agree that it shouldn't be necessary but to date I have no solution for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is exactly what should happen when your low-traffic site suddenly gets 50k visits in a day: Absolutely Nothing. Kudos to the historio.us guys for building something that can actually handle a little spike in traffic without falling over.

We see so many sites come through here that are showing 500 errors by the time they get halfway up the front page that you'd think nobody knew how to do this stuff anymore.

Great job of ticking off the basics, guys. Building on top of that foundation, you shouldn't have any trouble scaling out when this sort of traffic starts becoming a daily occurrence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! To give credit where it's due, buro9 from HN urged us to implement the Varnish caching feature for cached pages, so we had it written but disabled because we didn't think it was going to get that much traffic. We hadn't turned it on for the first 30k visitors and the server was still doing great, but when we saw it we just switched it on and load dropped to nothing.

 _Serious_ amounts of love for Varnish here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I predict a lot of sites featuring the words 'free sms' will be hammered out within hours of this articles posting.

<comment><AUTHOR> We didn't know one of our users publicised it, though, and we didn't know Google would even see it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> nice discovery. I read somewhere in Blackhat forums about Google Search Engines traffic exploits. I didn't understand what they are talking about until I read your post today.

</comment><comment><USER16> I just hit the "historify!" bookmarklet on the varnish page. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Your actions have placed all of us in great danger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This makes me want to go and try out varnish. I have heard great things, but never gotten around to setting it up.</comment>


Feds Walk into Building. Demand Everyones Fingerprints to Open Phones, Its Legal - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/10/16/doj-demands-mass-fingerprint-seizure-to-open-iphones/#33970688d9d2 <comment><AUTHOR> I imagine this could be interpreted to include other devices and data protected by biometrics, too. Very concerning.</comment>


Ryanair Plans $15 Flights to Europe - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/11/it-seems-kind-o/

<comment><USER2> Worth noting that Ryanair has a habit of announcing things like this just to get publicity. Previous examples:

In flight gambling: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4400676.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4400676.stm)

Coin operated toilets: [http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/02/27/ryanair.toilet.ch...](http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/02/27/ryanair.toilet.charges/index.html?iref=mpstoryview)

Standing room only flights: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2229734/Michael- OL...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2229734/Michael-OLeary-calls- standing-room-space-Ryanair-flights.html)</comment>


Foreign Competition, Not Automation, Is Behind US Manufacturing Decline - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/ <comment><USER2> It's stupidly obvious that this is the case, but data is always nice.</comment>