#every book publisher should be blowing up zuckerberg right now

[tribow]

Ain't no way Facebook gets away with profiting from piracy while the Internet Archive is struggling to survive after briefly doing piracy for no profit.

[timalexanderdollery]

A bait-and-switch scam ran unchecked on Airbnb. Here’s how it worked.

While Airbnb has been slow to implement strong verification policies, some customers are getting scammed in a big way.  | Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

On this episode of Reset, hear how one woman found herself in the middle of it, and how to protect yourself.

While on vacation in September 2019, reporter Allie Conti accidentally uncovered an elaborate Airbnb con when she herself became the unwitting victim of the scam.

Conti and her friends paid Airbnb $1,200 to stay at an apartment in Chicago. But just as they were about to check in, the host called to say the place was flooded. He offered another property of his instead but that alternative turned out to be pretty dingy. Even worse, the host kicked out Conti and her friends after just two days — forcing them to find a hotel at the last minute.

The host never offered them a refund. But Airbnb ended up refunding her in full after her article was published.

When Conti researched her horrible host, she found that the same people responsible for scamming her also managed Airbnb listings in eight cities across the US.

On this episode of the Reset podcast, she tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross how the scam works:

“You book a place that looks pretty nice and pretty cheap and then about five minutes before check-in you get a call about an emergency. It’s flooded, the air conditioner’s broken, something insane is happening. You don’t want to stay here. But luckily, he’s there to save the day with a nicer, bigger place. You’re going to be disoriented in a new city and just decide to do the easiest thing, which is to trust this person that you don’t know. You get it there and it’s just disgusting. But you have to request a refund before check in. So it’s too late at that point to ask for a refund through their policies as written.”

Later in the episode, New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac breaks down what about big tech companies makes them ripe for exploitation at the hands of crafty criminals. Isaac explains that Silicon Valley’s insistence on “scaling up” and having companies like Facebook, Uber, and even Airbnb grow very big, very fast leaves little room for them to focus on “doing the proper due diligence to make everyone safe and happy.”

“That’s just the nature of being a platform. You have to get big before you can police your content. And then it becomes impossible to properly police it once you get that big. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.”

If you’ve ever rented a place or Airbnb or plan to one day, listen to the entire discussion here. Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Isaac’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

You can subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

The scam that Allie discovered is actually just one of the scandals Airbnb is dealing with right now. How could these issues have been prevented? And why weren’t they?

Mike Isaac, you just came out with a book about Uber, which is perfect because Uber, like Airbnb, is an app that connects customers to people who own a thing like a car or an apartment that they can share.

So, Mike, walk us through the last couple of weeks for Airbnb?

Mike Isaac

It’s just been a series of total press PR nightmares for Airbnb the past few weeks. They had this really awful tragedy happen in this community called Arenda in Northern California, where folks had rented out an Airbnb house to basically use it as a party house for Halloween.

Some really awful shootings happened and people got killed over what should have been like a fun night. Folks essentially said that Airbnb should be more responsible in policing that.

And then Allie Conti stumbled upon this crazy widespread scam where folks are essentially getting ripped off for renting Airbnbs and then getting duped last minute when they got to the place. It was a way of scamming people out of paying a lot more than they should for these properties.

So all of that kind of blowing up at one time for the company has not been great on showing how Airbnb handles these properties.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

How has the company responded?

Mike Isaac

They’re doing these standard corporate things — “We’re looking into this. We’re taking this seriously. We guarantee we’re going to police our platform a lot better.” They said they’re going to start verifying each property and making sure what is advertised is the correct thing that you’re going to get. But I see it as kind of a little bit of lip service.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, recently said in an interview with Kara Swisher that his company had been slow to implement strong verification policies.

Mike Isaac

That’s kind of a head fake, honestly. Part of the whole philosophy of becoming a platform — and Airbnb is one of the largest platforms for home sharing and renting your place in the world — is expanding as fast as possible. That means just getting people to sign up and list their houses or apartments or whatever. By design, those verifications and checks in the process are not going to be built in from the beginning just because you have to have what’s called liquidity on the platform. You have to give people as much selection as possible.

The way that technologists view it is some subsection of our properties are always going to be false or at least not properly vetted. That’s the sort of percentage that our platform is willing to deal with in order to make this work in the long run.

So I would argue that it’s kind of built by design that way initially. And then later on, once you get to a big enough scale, then they could say, “Oh, we’re going to start doing the proper due diligence to make everyone safe and happy.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

These policies that would be designed to keep people safe, to make sure that there’s a very low percentage of scams on the platform, they cause friction. They stop people from signing up. They’re a barrier to entry. And companies like Airbnb don’t really like that.

Mike Isaac

Yeah. Hundred percent. All of these are very interchangeable. Airbnb might have said we could have had better vetting policies upfront, but that’s the same as Uber, which has gone through this process of background checks for drivers and making it harder for people to sign up for the platform if they didn’t have identity verification.

That all comes later once they get to the scale that they are on. Uber was just kind of taking as many bodies, whether as riders or drivers on the platform as possible, just as Airbnb was trying to do.

They’re like software corollaries to this, too. You can look at YouTube in its earliest days. All they wanted was just getting as much video content on the platform as possible to grow. And that included copyrighted material that was just ripped off or was free-booted material from other networks.

That’s just the nature of being a platform. You have to get big before you can police your content. And then I would also argue that at the same time, it kind of becomes impossible to properly police it once you get that big. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

What is it about that culture that these companies respond only after something bad happens and a reporter writes about it? Is this a Silicon Valley thing?

Mike Isaac

This is why I take all of these “We’re very concerned” statements with a real grain of salt because everyone who’s building these platforms knows exactly what they’re doing. And sort of by design — this is how it was meant to scale.

It’s fair to argue that you don’t know exactly how the platforms are gonna be exploited because criminals or thieves are very creative. And we’re finding new ways that Facebook is being manipulated every day. It’s hard to really predict how your platform is going to be used.

That said, there’s an acceptable amount of risk built in to building any of these things in the first place. It’s really about getting to scale and doing that as quickly as possible for it before some other competitor beats you to it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

I feel like these companies want to get as big as possible and as quickly as possible. Why, though, is it so important for these companies to reach scale?

Mike Isaac

There is the advantage of what’s called “a network effect,” which means the bigger you get, the more your platform reinforces its own entrenched incumbency.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

You’re the dominant force, basically.

Mike Isaac

Facebook greatly benefits from that. The more people that use it, the more people are going to continue using it over time. Part of that is maybe the nature of the business itself.

I can’t imagine most of the folks in Silicon Valley wanting to be fine with a small, modest, and sustainable business that isn’t growing by 100 or 200 percent every other quarter. It’s just about changing the world and world domination.

For the past 15 or 20 years, that was a lauded approach to how we look at CEOs. Now that sort of view is becoming questioned in tech, which is in for this reckoning right now.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

It’s interesting because I think that for a lot of people listening to my question, they would just go, well, money, obviously. But clearly, it’s not just money, it’s more than that?

Mike Isaac

I’m hesitant to put all this stuff on money just because a lot of the guys — and again, it’s mostly guys that are running these companies — have money right there. They’re set for life. Zuckerberg isn’t doing it for the money. He has more money than you will ever be able to spend.

It’s about conquest. It’s about history. It’s about making one’s mark on the world. Or if you want to go, Steve Jobs, the dent in the universe thing.

Really, it’s about ego.

I’m hesitant to say these businesses only care about money because I think it’s not the thing that really drives them at the end of the day. It’s about maintaining power and and beating your competitors so that you don’t have to worry about being usurped or becoming irrelevant.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

And in order to do that, you say I’m okay with 2 or 3 percent of listings being fraudulent and customers be damned. That’s just their problem.

Mike Isaac

There’s always going to be laws being broken or crimes being committed or some “acceptable” amount of problems. It always exists.

So it might be hard to hold the platforms to a 100 percent standard of keeping everything pristine. But they also know what they’re getting into when they’re building as quickly as possible without proper verification.

So you have to come in and say, look, you need to forget worrying about growth at all costs and start protecting people on your platform, especially when it’s having real world, potentially life-threatening consequences.

To find out, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/33LCsEI

[gracieyvonnehunter]

A bait-and-switch scam ran unchecked on Airbnb. Here’s how it worked.

While Airbnb has been slow to implement strong verification policies, some customers are getting scammed in a big way.  | Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

On this episode of Reset, hear how one woman found herself in the middle of it, and how to protect yourself.

While on vacation in September 2019, reporter Allie Conti accidentally uncovered an elaborate Airbnb con when she herself became the unwitting victim of the scam.

Conti and her friends paid Airbnb $1,200 to stay at an apartment in Chicago. But just as they were about to check in, the host called to say the place was flooded. He offered another property of his instead but that alternative turned out to be pretty dingy. Even worse, the host kicked out Conti and her friends after just two days — forcing them to find a hotel at the last minute.

The host never offered them a refund. But Airbnb ended up refunding her in full after her article was published.

When Conti researched her horrible host, she found that the same people responsible for scamming her also managed Airbnb listings in eight cities across the US.

On this episode of the Reset podcast, she tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross how the scam works:

“You book a place that looks pretty nice and pretty cheap and then about five minutes before check-in you get a call about an emergency. It’s flooded, the air conditioner’s broken, something insane is happening. You don’t want to stay here. But luckily, he’s there to save the day with a nicer, bigger place. You’re going to be disoriented in a new city and just decide to do the easiest thing, which is to trust this person that you don’t know. You get it there and it’s just disgusting. But you have to request a refund before check in. So it’s too late at that point to ask for a refund through their policies as written.”

Later in the episode, New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac breaks down what about big tech companies makes them ripe for exploitation at the hands of crafty criminals. Isaac explains that Silicon Valley’s insistence on “scaling up” and having companies like Facebook, Uber, and even Airbnb grow very big, very fast leaves little room for them to focus on “doing the proper due diligence to make everyone safe and happy.”

“That’s just the nature of being a platform. You have to get big before you can police your content. And then it becomes impossible to properly police it once you get that big. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.”

If you’ve ever rented a place or Airbnb or plan to one day, listen to the entire discussion here. Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Isaac’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

You can subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

The scam that Allie discovered is actually just one of the scandals Airbnb is dealing with right now. How could these issues have been prevented? And why weren’t they?

Mike Isaac, you just came out with a book about Uber, which is perfect because Uber, like Airbnb, is an app that connects customers to people who own a thing like a car or an apartment that they can share.

So, Mike, walk us through the last couple of weeks for Airbnb?

Mike Isaac

It’s just been a series of total press PR nightmares for Airbnb the past few weeks. They had this really awful tragedy happen in this community called Arenda in Northern California, where folks had rented out an Airbnb house to basically use it as a party house for Halloween.

Some really awful shootings happened and people got killed over what should have been like a fun night. Folks essentially said that Airbnb should be more responsible in policing that.

And then Allie Conti stumbled upon this crazy widespread scam where folks are essentially getting ripped off for renting Airbnbs and then getting duped last minute when they got to the place. It was a way of scamming people out of paying a lot more than they should for these properties.

So all of that kind of blowing up at one time for the company has not been great on showing how Airbnb handles these properties.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

How has the company responded?

Mike Isaac

They’re doing these standard corporate things — “We’re looking into this. We’re taking this seriously. We guarantee we’re going to police our platform a lot better.” They said they’re going to start verifying each property and making sure what is advertised is the correct thing that you’re going to get. But I see it as kind of a little bit of lip service.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, recently said in an interview with Kara Swisher that his company had been slow to implement strong verification policies.

Mike Isaac

That’s kind of a head fake, honestly. Part of the whole philosophy of becoming a platform — and Airbnb is one of the largest platforms for home sharing and renting your place in the world — is expanding as fast as possible. That means just getting people to sign up and list their houses or apartments or whatever. By design, those verifications and checks in the process are not going to be built in from the beginning just because you have to have what’s called liquidity on the platform. You have to give people as much selection as possible.

The way that technologists view it is some subsection of our properties are always going to be false or at least not properly vetted. That’s the sort of percentage that our platform is willing to deal with in order to make this work in the long run.

So I would argue that it’s kind of built by design that way initially. And then later on, once you get to a big enough scale, then they could say, “Oh, we’re going to start doing the proper due diligence to make everyone safe and happy.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

These policies that would be designed to keep people safe, to make sure that there’s a very low percentage of scams on the platform, they cause friction. They stop people from signing up. They’re a barrier to entry. And companies like Airbnb don’t really like that.

Mike Isaac

Yeah. Hundred percent. All of these are very interchangeable. Airbnb might have said we could have had better vetting policies upfront, but that’s the same as Uber, which has gone through this process of background checks for drivers and making it harder for people to sign up for the platform if they didn’t have identity verification.

That all comes later once they get to the scale that they are on. Uber was just kind of taking as many bodies, whether as riders or drivers on the platform as possible, just as Airbnb was trying to do.

They’re like software corollaries to this, too. You can look at YouTube in its earliest days. All they wanted was just getting as much video content on the platform as possible to grow. And that included copyrighted material that was just ripped off or was free-booted material from other networks.

That’s just the nature of being a platform. You have to get big before you can police your content. And then I would also argue that at the same time, it kind of becomes impossible to properly police it once you get that big. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

What is it about that culture that these companies respond only after something bad happens and a reporter writes about it? Is this a Silicon Valley thing?

Mike Isaac

This is why I take all of these “We’re very concerned” statements with a real grain of salt because everyone who’s building these platforms knows exactly what they’re doing. And sort of by design — this is how it was meant to scale.

It’s fair to argue that you don’t know exactly how the platforms are gonna be exploited because criminals or thieves are very creative. And we’re finding new ways that Facebook is being manipulated every day. It’s hard to really predict how your platform is going to be used.

That said, there’s an acceptable amount of risk built in to building any of these things in the first place. It’s really about getting to scale and doing that as quickly as possible for it before some other competitor beats you to it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

I feel like these companies want to get as big as possible and as quickly as possible. Why, though, is it so important for these companies to reach scale?

Mike Isaac

There is the advantage of what’s called “a network effect,” which means the bigger you get, the more your platform reinforces its own entrenched incumbency.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

You’re the dominant force, basically.

Mike Isaac

Facebook greatly benefits from that. The more people that use it, the more people are going to continue using it over time. Part of that is maybe the nature of the business itself.

I can’t imagine most of the folks in Silicon Valley wanting to be fine with a small, modest, and sustainable business that isn’t growing by 100 or 200 percent every other quarter. It’s just about changing the world and world domination.

For the past 15 or 20 years, that was a lauded approach to how we look at CEOs. Now that sort of view is becoming questioned in tech, which is in for this reckoning right now.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

It’s interesting because I think that for a lot of people listening to my question, they would just go, well, money, obviously. But clearly, it’s not just money, it’s more than that?

Mike Isaac

I’m hesitant to put all this stuff on money just because a lot of the guys — and again, it’s mostly guys that are running these companies — have money right there. They’re set for life. Zuckerberg isn’t doing it for the money. He has more money than you will ever be able to spend.

It’s about conquest. It’s about history. It’s about making one’s mark on the world. Or if you want to go, Steve Jobs, the dent in the universe thing.

Really, it’s about ego.

I’m hesitant to say these businesses only care about money because I think it’s not the thing that really drives them at the end of the day. It’s about maintaining power and and beating your competitors so that you don’t have to worry about being usurped or becoming irrelevant.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

And in order to do that, you say I’m okay with 2 or 3 percent of listings being fraudulent and customers be damned. That’s just their problem.

Mike Isaac

There’s always going to be laws being broken or crimes being committed or some “acceptable” amount of problems. It always exists.

So it might be hard to hold the platforms to a 100 percent standard of keeping everything pristine. But they also know what they’re getting into when they’re building as quickly as possible without proper verification.

So you have to come in and say, look, you need to forget worrying about growth at all costs and start protecting people on your platform, especially when it’s having real world, potentially life-threatening consequences.

To find out, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/33LCsEI

[corneliusreignallen]

A bait-and-switch scam ran unchecked on Airbnb. Here’s how it worked.

While Airbnb has been slow to implement strong verification policies, some customers are getting scammed in a big way.  | Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

On this episode of Reset, hear how one woman found herself in the middle of it, and how to protect yourself.

While on vacation in September 2019, reporter Allie Conti accidentally uncovered an elaborate Airbnb con when she herself became the unwitting victim of the scam.

Conti and her friends paid Airbnb $1,200 to stay at an apartment in Chicago. But just as they were about to check in, the host called to say the place was flooded. He offered another property of his instead but that alternative turned out to be pretty dingy. Even worse, the host kicked out Conti and her friends after just two days — forcing them to find a hotel at the last minute.

The host never offered them a refund. But Airbnb ended up refunding her in full after her article was published.

When Conti researched her horrible host, she found that the same people responsible for scamming her also managed Airbnb listings in eight cities across the US.

On this episode of the Reset podcast, she tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross how the scam works:

“You book a place that looks pretty nice and pretty cheap and then about five minutes before check-in you get a call about an emergency. It’s flooded, the air conditioner’s broken, something insane is happening. You don’t want to stay here. But luckily, he’s there to save the day with a nicer, bigger place. You’re going to be disoriented in a new city and just decide to do the easiest thing, which is to trust this person that you don’t know. You get it there and it’s just disgusting. But you have to request a refund before check in. So it’s too late at that point to ask for a refund through their policies as written.”

Later in the episode, New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac breaks down what about big tech companies makes them ripe for exploitation at the hands of crafty criminals. Isaac explains that Silicon Valley’s insistence on “scaling up” and having companies like Facebook, Uber, and even Airbnb grow very big, very fast leaves little room for them to focus on “doing the proper due diligence to make everyone safe and happy.”

“That’s just the nature of being a platform. You have to get big before you can police your content. And then it becomes impossible to properly police it once you get that big. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.”

If you’ve ever rented a place or Airbnb or plan to one day, listen to the entire discussion here. Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Isaac’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

You can subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

The scam that Allie discovered is actually just one of the scandals Airbnb is dealing with right now. How could these issues have been prevented? And why weren’t they?

Mike Isaac, you just came out with a book about Uber, which is perfect because Uber, like Airbnb, is an app that connects customers to people who own a thing like a car or an apartment that they can share.

So, Mike, walk us through the last couple of weeks for Airbnb?

Mike Isaac

It’s just been a series of total press PR nightmares for Airbnb the past few weeks. They had this really awful tragedy happen in this community called Arenda in Northern California, where folks had rented out an Airbnb house to basically use it as a party house for Halloween.

Some really awful shootings happened and people got killed over what should have been like a fun night. Folks essentially said that Airbnb should be more responsible in policing that.

And then Allie Conti stumbled upon this crazy widespread scam where folks are essentially getting ripped off for renting Airbnbs and then getting duped last minute when they got to the place. It was a way of scamming people out of paying a lot more than they should for these properties.

So all of that kind of blowing up at one time for the company has not been great on showing how Airbnb handles these properties.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

How has the company responded?

Mike Isaac

They’re doing these standard corporate things — “We’re looking into this. We’re taking this seriously. We guarantee we’re going to police our platform a lot better.” They said they’re going to start verifying each property and making sure what is advertised is the correct thing that you’re going to get. But I see it as kind of a little bit of lip service.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, recently said in an interview with Kara Swisher that his company had been slow to implement strong verification policies.

Mike Isaac

That’s kind of a head fake, honestly. Part of the whole philosophy of becoming a platform — and Airbnb is one of the largest platforms for home sharing and renting your place in the world — is expanding as fast as possible. That means just getting people to sign up and list their houses or apartments or whatever. By design, those verifications and checks in the process are not going to be built in from the beginning just because you have to have what’s called liquidity on the platform. You have to give people as much selection as possible.

The way that technologists view it is some subsection of our properties are always going to be false or at least not properly vetted. That’s the sort of percentage that our platform is willing to deal with in order to make this work in the long run.

So I would argue that it’s kind of built by design that way initially. And then later on, once you get to a big enough scale, then they could say, “Oh, we’re going to start doing the proper due diligence to make everyone safe and happy.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

These policies that would be designed to keep people safe, to make sure that there’s a very low percentage of scams on the platform, they cause friction. They stop people from signing up. They’re a barrier to entry. And companies like Airbnb don’t really like that.

Mike Isaac

Yeah. Hundred percent. All of these are very interchangeable. Airbnb might have said we could have had better vetting policies upfront, but that’s the same as Uber, which has gone through this process of background checks for drivers and making it harder for people to sign up for the platform if they didn’t have identity verification.

That all comes later once they get to the scale that they are on. Uber was just kind of taking as many bodies, whether as riders or drivers on the platform as possible, just as Airbnb was trying to do.

They’re like software corollaries to this, too. You can look at YouTube in its earliest days. All they wanted was just getting as much video content on the platform as possible to grow. And that included copyrighted material that was just ripped off or was free-booted material from other networks.

That’s just the nature of being a platform. You have to get big before you can police your content. And then I would also argue that at the same time, it kind of becomes impossible to properly police it once you get that big. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

What is it about that culture that these companies respond only after something bad happens and a reporter writes about it? Is this a Silicon Valley thing?

Mike Isaac

This is why I take all of these “We’re very concerned” statements with a real grain of salt because everyone who’s building these platforms knows exactly what they’re doing. And sort of by design — this is how it was meant to scale.

It’s fair to argue that you don’t know exactly how the platforms are gonna be exploited because criminals or thieves are very creative. And we’re finding new ways that Facebook is being manipulated every day. It’s hard to really predict how your platform is going to be used.

That said, there’s an acceptable amount of risk built in to building any of these things in the first place. It’s really about getting to scale and doing that as quickly as possible for it before some other competitor beats you to it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

I feel like these companies want to get as big as possible and as quickly as possible. Why, though, is it so important for these companies to reach scale?

Mike Isaac

There is the advantage of what’s called “a network effect,” which means the bigger you get, the more your platform reinforces its own entrenched incumbency.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

You’re the dominant force, basically.

Mike Isaac

Facebook greatly benefits from that. The more people that use it, the more people are going to continue using it over time. Part of that is maybe the nature of the business itself.

I can’t imagine most of the folks in Silicon Valley wanting to be fine with a small, modest, and sustainable business that isn’t growing by 100 or 200 percent every other quarter. It’s just about changing the world and world domination.

For the past 15 or 20 years, that was a lauded approach to how we look at CEOs. Now that sort of view is becoming questioned in tech, which is in for this reckoning right now.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

It’s interesting because I think that for a lot of people listening to my question, they would just go, well, money, obviously. But clearly, it’s not just money, it’s more than that?

Mike Isaac

I’m hesitant to put all this stuff on money just because a lot of the guys — and again, it’s mostly guys that are running these companies — have money right there. They’re set for life. Zuckerberg isn’t doing it for the money. He has more money than you will ever be able to spend.

It’s about conquest. It’s about history. It’s about making one’s mark on the world. Or if you want to go, Steve Jobs, the dent in the universe thing.

Really, it’s about ego.

I’m hesitant to say these businesses only care about money because I think it’s not the thing that really drives them at the end of the day. It’s about maintaining power and and beating your competitors so that you don’t have to worry about being usurped or becoming irrelevant.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

And in order to do that, you say I’m okay with 2 or 3 percent of listings being fraudulent and customers be damned. That’s just their problem.

Mike Isaac

There’s always going to be laws being broken or crimes being committed or some “acceptable” amount of problems. It always exists.

So it might be hard to hold the platforms to a 100 percent standard of keeping everything pristine. But they also know what they’re getting into when they’re building as quickly as possible without proper verification.

So you have to come in and say, look, you need to forget worrying about growth at all costs and start protecting people on your platform, especially when it’s having real world, potentially life-threatening consequences.

To find out, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/33LCsEI

[shanedakotamuir]

A bait-and-switch scam ran unchecked on Airbnb. Here’s how it worked.

While Airbnb has been slow to implement strong verification policies, some customers are getting scammed in a big way.  | Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

On this episode of Reset, hear how one woman found herself in the middle of it, and how to protect yourself.

While on vacation in September 2019, reporter Allie Conti accidentally uncovered an elaborate Airbnb con when she herself became the unwitting victim of the scam.

Conti and her friends paid Airbnb $1,200 to stay at an apartment in Chicago. But just as they were about to check in, the host called to say the place was flooded. He offered another property of his instead but that alternative turned out to be pretty dingy. Even worse, the host kicked out Conti and her friends after just two days — forcing them to find a hotel at the last minute.

The host never offered them a refund. But Airbnb ended up refunding her in full after her article was published.

When Conti researched her horrible host, she found that the same people responsible for scamming her also managed Airbnb listings in eight cities across the US.

On this episode of the Reset podcast, she tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross how the scam works:

“You book a place that looks pretty nice and pretty cheap and then about five minutes before check-in you get a call about an emergency. It’s flooded, the air conditioner’s broken, something insane is happening. You don’t want to stay here. But luckily, he’s there to save the day with a nicer, bigger place. You’re going to be disoriented in a new city and just decide to do the easiest thing, which is to trust this person that you don’t know. You get it there and it’s just disgusting. But you have to request a refund before check in. So it’s too late at that point to ask for a refund through their policies as written.”

Later in the episode, New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac breaks down what about big tech companies makes them ripe for exploitation at the hands of crafty criminals. Isaac explains that Silicon Valley’s insistence on “scaling up” and having companies like Facebook, Uber, and even Airbnb grow very big, very fast leaves little room for them to focus on “doing the proper due diligence to make everyone safe and happy.”

“That’s just the nature of being a platform. You have to get big before you can police your content. And then it becomes impossible to properly police it once you get that big. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.”

If you’ve ever rented a place or Airbnb or plan to one day, listen to the entire discussion here. Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Isaac’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

You can subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

The scam that Allie discovered is actually just one of the scandals Airbnb is dealing with right now. How could these issues have been prevented? And why weren’t they?

Mike Isaac, you just came out with a book about Uber, which is perfect because Uber, like Airbnb, is an app that connects customers to people who own a thing like a car or an apartment that they can share.

So, Mike, walk us through the last couple of weeks for Airbnb?

Mike Isaac

It’s just been a series of total press PR nightmares for Airbnb the past few weeks. They had this really awful tragedy happen in this community called Arenda in Northern California, where folks had rented out an Airbnb house to basically use it as a party house for Halloween.

Some really awful shootings happened and people got killed over what should have been like a fun night. Folks essentially said that Airbnb should be more responsible in policing that.

And then Allie Conti stumbled upon this crazy widespread scam where folks are essentially getting ripped off for renting Airbnbs and then getting duped last minute when they got to the place. It was a way of scamming people out of paying a lot more than they should for these properties.

So all of that kind of blowing up at one time for the company has not been great on showing how Airbnb handles these properties.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

How has the company responded?

Mike Isaac

They’re doing these standard corporate things — “We’re looking into this. We’re taking this seriously. We guarantee we’re going to police our platform a lot better.” They said they’re going to start verifying each property and making sure what is advertised is the correct thing that you’re going to get. But I see it as kind of a little bit of lip service.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, recently said in an interview with Kara Swisher that his company had been slow to implement strong verification policies.

Mike Isaac

That’s kind of a head fake, honestly. Part of the whole philosophy of becoming a platform — and Airbnb is one of the largest platforms for home sharing and renting your place in the world — is expanding as fast as possible. That means just getting people to sign up and list their houses or apartments or whatever. By design, those verifications and checks in the process are not going to be built in from the beginning just because you have to have what’s called liquidity on the platform. You have to give people as much selection as possible.

The way that technologists view it is some subsection of our properties are always going to be false or at least not properly vetted. That’s the sort of percentage that our platform is willing to deal with in order to make this work in the long run.

So I would argue that it’s kind of built by design that way initially. And then later on, once you get to a big enough scale, then they could say, “Oh, we’re going to start doing the proper due diligence to make everyone safe and happy.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

These policies that would be designed to keep people safe, to make sure that there’s a very low percentage of scams on the platform, they cause friction. They stop people from signing up. They’re a barrier to entry. And companies like Airbnb don’t really like that.

Mike Isaac

Yeah. Hundred percent. All of these are very interchangeable. Airbnb might have said we could have had better vetting policies upfront, but that’s the same as Uber, which has gone through this process of background checks for drivers and making it harder for people to sign up for the platform if they didn’t have identity verification.

That all comes later once they get to the scale that they are on. Uber was just kind of taking as many bodies, whether as riders or drivers on the platform as possible, just as Airbnb was trying to do.

They’re like software corollaries to this, too. You can look at YouTube in its earliest days. All they wanted was just getting as much video content on the platform as possible to grow. And that included copyrighted material that was just ripped off or was free-booted material from other networks.

That’s just the nature of being a platform. You have to get big before you can police your content. And then I would also argue that at the same time, it kind of becomes impossible to properly police it once you get that big. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

What is it about that culture that these companies respond only after something bad happens and a reporter writes about it? Is this a Silicon Valley thing?

Mike Isaac

This is why I take all of these “We’re very concerned” statements with a real grain of salt because everyone who’s building these platforms knows exactly what they’re doing. And sort of by design — this is how it was meant to scale.

It’s fair to argue that you don’t know exactly how the platforms are gonna be exploited because criminals or thieves are very creative. And we’re finding new ways that Facebook is being manipulated every day. It’s hard to really predict how your platform is going to be used.

That said, there’s an acceptable amount of risk built in to building any of these things in the first place. It’s really about getting to scale and doing that as quickly as possible for it before some other competitor beats you to it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

I feel like these companies want to get as big as possible and as quickly as possible. Why, though, is it so important for these companies to reach scale?

Mike Isaac

There is the advantage of what’s called “a network effect,” which means the bigger you get, the more your platform reinforces its own entrenched incumbency.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

You’re the dominant force, basically.

Mike Isaac

Facebook greatly benefits from that. The more people that use it, the more people are going to continue using it over time. Part of that is maybe the nature of the business itself.

I can’t imagine most of the folks in Silicon Valley wanting to be fine with a small, modest, and sustainable business that isn’t growing by 100 or 200 percent every other quarter. It’s just about changing the world and world domination.

For the past 15 or 20 years, that was a lauded approach to how we look at CEOs. Now that sort of view is becoming questioned in tech, which is in for this reckoning right now.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

It’s interesting because I think that for a lot of people listening to my question, they would just go, well, money, obviously. But clearly, it’s not just money, it’s more than that?

Mike Isaac

I’m hesitant to put all this stuff on money just because a lot of the guys — and again, it’s mostly guys that are running these companies — have money right there. They’re set for life. Zuckerberg isn’t doing it for the money. He has more money than you will ever be able to spend.

It’s about conquest. It’s about history. It’s about making one’s mark on the world. Or if you want to go, Steve Jobs, the dent in the universe thing.

Really, it’s about ego.

I’m hesitant to say these businesses only care about money because I think it’s not the thing that really drives them at the end of the day. It’s about maintaining power and and beating your competitors so that you don’t have to worry about being usurped or becoming irrelevant.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

And in order to do that, you say I’m okay with 2 or 3 percent of listings being fraudulent and customers be damned. That’s just their problem.

Mike Isaac

There’s always going to be laws being broken or crimes being committed or some “acceptable” amount of problems. It always exists.

So it might be hard to hold the platforms to a 100 percent standard of keeping everything pristine. But they also know what they’re getting into when they’re building as quickly as possible without proper verification.

So you have to come in and say, look, you need to forget worrying about growth at all costs and start protecting people on your platform, especially when it’s having real world, potentially life-threatening consequences.

To find out, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Richard Reis

"I write this not for the many, but for you; each of us is enough of an audience for the other." - Epicurus http://richardreis.me/May 16How Less Helps You Do More — Minimalism And Your Brain

Hello dear,

By the end of this letter, you’ll know something that’ll make you wealthier, but also think better.

This knowledge changed my life. I’m excited to share it with you.

Many of my friends know this, but minimalism is something I have been a big fan of for quite some time.

Now, I hate calling it “minimalism” because the word comes loaded with whatever past meaning you attached to it.

So from here on, whenever I say “minimalism” I want you to think “no clutter” or “no sh*t lying around”. Whichever you prefer.

With that big, fat, elephant out of the way, we can begin.

Why minimalism?

Two reasons:

I believe it’s an amazing “brain-enhancing” technique.

It saves a ton of money (this is, after all, a finance series).

I think #2 is self explanatory. Let’s dig deeper into #1, it’s very important.

Why is minimalism an amazing brain-enhancing technique?

“A messy room equals a messy mind”.

As it turns out, that’s true.

Psychologist (check out the insane CV) Dr. Jordan Peterson’s favorite advice is “clean your room”.

In fact, Dr. Peterson gets letters from people telling him how cleaning their room changed their life!

I’ve experienced the benefits personally, and it works.

Here’s a direct quote from Peterson:

“My sense is that if you want to change the world you start from yourself and work outward because you build your confidence that way.

I don’t know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can’t keep your room organized. […]

The world presents itself as a series of puzzles, some of which you’re capable of solving and some of which you’re not. You have many puzzles in front of you that you could solve but you choose not to. Those really are the things that weight on your consciousness, knowing ‘oh I should do this’, but you don’t.[…]

It’s like, don’t be fixing up the economy, 18 year-olds. You don’t know anything about the economy. It’s a massive complex machine beyond anyone’s understanding and you mess with it at your own peril. Can you even clean up your own room? No. Well, you should think about that.

Because if you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?” — Dr. Jordan B Peterson

I couldn’t agree more.

Sidenote: This may seem odd, but I have a hypothesis as to why minimalism/ cleaning your room is effective for better thinking.

This insight came to me from meditation. I know that when someone meditates effectively, the brain regions known as Default Mode Network’s (DMN) activity diminishes. These regions are what make you ‘daydream’ (aka not focus): “I shouldn’t have said that to Bob this morning”, “I regret not asking that girl for her number”, “that a**hole who cut me in the freeway last week could have killed me”. Meditating (basically) shuts down those voices and allows you to focus on the present (which makes you more effective).

Soooo doesn’t the same brain activity increase when your place is messy? “oh I should vacuum this floor”, “those dishes look dirty”, “damn, my closet is a mess”.

My hypothesis: A messy place increases activity in the DMN, which doesn’t allow you to focus 100% (making you less effective). This could explain why when you ‘go minimal’, you focus better (and most people say it’s life-changing).

If everyone had a clean room/ apartment/ house, the world would be a better place 🙂 (I just gave a great PhD thesis for some neuroscience student out there).

Do you understand the importance of minimalism now?

If you’re home, perfect! Look around you, is there something you’ve been meaning to clean? Does opening your closet stress you out?

This physical clutter is probably also cluttering your brain. Hence why you can’t focus.

If so, what follows is tactical advice that will help you clean in record time.

When should you “go minimal”?

Many bloggers will tell you to start slow and gain momentum.

This… may work.

Unfortunately it didn’t work for me. And I believe it won’t work for you either.

Why? Most people are lazy when it comes to tidying (come on, how long have you been thinking about organizing your mess?)

Therefore, the best solution I found came from the ginormously popular book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing” by Marie Kondō.

In case you don’t know Marie, here’s a nice summary from Tim Ferriss’ awesome (recent) interview with her:

“Her books have sold more than seven million copies and have been published in more than forty countries.

Kondo’s methods have become so famous that her last name has become a verb, ‘Kondo-ing,’ and people who share her specific values are referred to as ‘Konverts.’ She has been named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people.”

Yeah, wow.

Marie’s philosophy is much closer to mine. If you want to declutter your life, pick one day and do it all at once.

“When you tidy your space completely, you transform the scenery. The change is so profound that you feel as if you are living in a totally different world. This deeply affects your mind and inspires a strong aversion to reverting to your previously cluttered state. The key is to make the change so sudden that you experience a complete change of heart. The same impact can never be achieved if the process is gradual.” — Marie Kondō

How to declutter1. Pick a day

Pick a day, any day. And start early in the morning (this will energize you).

“But I’m too busy.”

I think that most people who are “too busy” miraculously have enough time for other things like cable TV or Netflix.

Unless you have 5 kids, work 3 jobs, and are a single parent, you’re not “too busy”.

“Too busy” is also a polite way of saying “this isn’t a priority for me”. But if you weren’t convinced from the intro that cleaning IS a priority, chances are you’re just being lazy.

2. Put it all on the floor

If this sounds like a song title, it’s because it’s the fun part.

“Where do I start?”

Marie Kondō recommends going by categories, not rooms.

“Don’t start selecting and discarding by location. Don’t think “I’ll tidy the bedroom first and then move on to the living room” or “I’ll go through my drawers one by one starting from the top down.” This approach is fatal. Why? Because most people don’t bother to store similar items in the same place.” — Marie Kondō

The correct sequence she recommends is this: clothes, books, papers, miscellaneous items, and mementos.

Go around your house looking for everything that fits in each category (and put it all together at once on the floor).

Don’t touch items in a category unless you’re done with the previous category. There are many reasons for this (though too long to include here), if you really want the details get Marie’s book. If not, just trust me.

Easy.

3. Discard

“Now I have every item in a category on the floor, what do I do?”

This is what makes Marie so special. She talks about the concept of “sparking joy”.

Grab each item one by one, and ask yourself “does this spark joy?” If it doesn’t, it goes in a trash bag.

“Why does this work?”

Because (this might blow your mind), people own things they don’t really like! *gasp*

I know right? People actually have clothes, shoes, books and/or other items in their homes that they don’t really like all that much.

This is why I like minimalism; everything you own is something you love.

I love my “uniform” (I wear the same clothes every day), I love my whiteboard, I love my yoga mat, heck I even love my blender!

I don’t understand why people keep their closets full of clothes they “kinda” like, their kitchen full of ugly utensils they dislike, and their bookshelves full of books they’ll never read.

This is why you have to look at each item and ask yourself, “do I love this?” (or, even cuter, Marie Kondō’s “does this spark joy?”) and if the answer is “kinda” or “no”, in the trash bag it goes.

By the end of this, some people end up with 10+ full trash bags (I’ve been there).

Getting rid of them is an AMAZING feeling. You’ll see.

4. Store

I don’t mean in a storage unit (how dare you).

I mean now that you only kept things you love, find a place for them and organize them well.

Here’s an example with clothes.

That’s it. That’s my entire wardrobe (year-long baby).

I just picked what I like best, and stuck with it.

Going to a high-school where we all wore uniforms taught me it’s soooo much more convenient than having to worry about what to wear every day. This is why I wear a “uniform” to this day. Besides, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Obama made it cool (so I’m not “weird” anymore I’m “avant-garde”).

Sidenote: Wondering where I got those sweet folding skills? Learn how Marie Kondō does it here (t-shirts and tank tops), here (pants), here (sweaters and hoodies), and here (socks and stockings). Hell has a special place for people who occupy space hanging clothes than can be neatly folded.

Common But’sBut what if I want to buy something new?

The idea should be for you to only own things you love (what a concept).

Stop accumulating, surround yourself only with your favorite stuff.

I’m sure most people wear 20% of their wardrobe 80% of the time.

Therefore, why not keep the 20% you love and get rid of the rest?? You’re not really using it anyways and it’s cluttering your space and mind.

The end result is for you to only be surrounded by the things you love (or… spark joy).

This also means most of your items will be high quality.

Now I’m not saying own as little as possible (we can’t all be enlightened like the Buddha, or Jesus).

What I am saying is a lot of your purchases were impulsive, kinda like stress eating. Except instead of accumulating fat, you accumulated clutter.

The clutter is stressing you out. Get rid of it, and see what I mean.

But I’m a girl

Sidenote: This is a common “but” I’ve heard very often from different friends who all happen to be female. So, I have to include it.

Until further DNA evidence, being a girl doesn’t mean you have to have lots of clothes. To prove it, here’s the awesome YouTuber, LightByCoco, showing the concept of a capsule wardrobe.

You might “enjoy” shopping. But re-read the intro and see why it’s never a good idea to surround yourself with clutter.

I’ve found that guys and girls tend to wear their same favorite clothes over, and over, and over again.

So, get rid of all that other stuff you never really wear! Your mind (and closet) will thank you.

But I don’t have enough space for all my stuff, I live in a small apartment

So do I. Living in a small apartment doesn’t mean anything.

It just means you have way more crap than you need. And that’s a bad, bad habit.

It simply means that even if your house looked like this (look at that space! And no clutter! Wow):

You’d still find a way to make it look like this:

Messy people are messy independently of where they live.

Most people see empty rooms and feel the need to fill, “oh some flowers would look nice here”, “oh maybe I need a lamp”, “I wonder if I need paintings on the wall”.

Stop!

That’s how you end up with a ton of items you don’t like that much. Stop the madness.

But I have kids

The “I have a partner and kids” is a bad excuse.

Joshua Becker is a minimalism blogger who’s married and has two kids. He’ll prove anyone who uses the “I don’t live alone” excuse is wrong.

But my roommates are messy

I’m a big fan of leading by example.

Begin with yourself. Clean your mess. Others will follow.

I shared a 3 bedroom house with 18 people. I found that when I tried to keep things clean, others would follow.

It wasn’t always perfect, but it’s better than blaming others.

But can’t I store most of it in a storage unit?

You’re just trolling me.

Kidding, but what about rebound?

I’ll let Marie Kondō answer this one.

“Rebound occurs because people mistakenly believe they have tidied thoroughly, when in fact they have only sorted and stored things halfway. If you put your house in order properly, you’ll be able to keep your room tidy, even if you are lazy or sloppy by nature.” — Marie Kondō

Sometimes (I mean once or twice a year), I may end up with a little more stuff than I need. Recently, after losing 35lbs I kept large clothes that are too big now, for no good reason!

No one’s perfect.

The key is to simply grab your trash bags and get to work 🙂

But, trash-bags?? Does that mean I should throw everything away?

Of course not, here’s what I do:

Try to sell it on eBay. If no one wants it after 30 days I:

Give it to Goodwill if it’s clothes.

Give it to the local thrift store if it’s other items (books, gadgets, CD’s…)

Throw it in the trash if it’s too much trouble.

But never, never, ever just leave stuff lying around.

And that’s it for today!

Today, we learned:

The amazing psychological benefits of a clean space.

How to declutter.

How to organize.

How not to make excuses for owning a bunch of things you don’t even like.

See you next week, be well.

R

P.S.: It turns out decluttering doesn’t only help the individual, it can benefit entire cities! A friend of mine recently shared with me the Broken Windows theory.

Before 1985 New York City was as violent and dangerous as Gotham. By 2001, crime had dropped significantly (and kept dropping for the following ten years!). What led to this huge crime drop? They cleaned the city (no graffitis, no people demanding payment after car window cleaning, and no public urination… among other things).

A clean, clutter-free environment does indeed make the world a better place🙂

Your mother was right, clean your room!

Is this helpful? Please ❤️ it below, comment or Tweet me 😊 Hearing from your fellow readers and you is what makes writing these letters such a joy.