Comment by bigger_inside
3 years ago
What can be done is prevent them from becoming near-monopolies with a captured audience. Cory Doctorow calls this "enshittification" - his term.
The basic idea is that in the beginning, new companies are all about their users, luring them away from competitors, providing the best experience for cheap, with great service. That captures them. Think amazon, underpricing everyone, shipping for free, taking all returns, making a loss for years until everyone just uses amazon to search for products.
Once you have their market, you shift gears, from serving users to serving your financiers, selling the user data/user attention/user experience to them: Amazon selling ranked listings in the search that all the captured customers now use as a default search engine. This makes every seller use amazon to sell. You have to, to reach the captured audience. And you have to pay amazon to be seen.
And finally, using this machine you built, with captured customers and captured sellers to squeeze the most of it. Amazon copying the best-selling items and top-ranking their own products, without of course charging itself fees for either the listing or a cut of the sale, as the do with third parties.
AirBNB don't have a monopoly. Aside from obvious alternatives like hotels, VRBO is quite good and I used it successfully in the past.
I suspect the real reason this happens is a mix of recruiting ex-tech firm employees (they seem to treat abuse as if they were running a social network), and some internal data that shows just one or two bad experiences can cause a host to drop out permanently. There are way fewer hosts than customers, so if one customer repeatedly creates bad experiences then they need an ultra-tough policy as otherwise they'd burn out their supply of hosts too quickly. Hotels don't have this problem because they're much more committed to being hosts, such that a few bad customers occasionally won't cause them to simply shut up shop.