Just copy paste a positive review from a bot. It's a win-win, the platform (Airbnb here) and service provider (owner) can't hate you because it's positive, won't harass you for not leaving a review and the other customers aren't fooled if they actually read it because it's obviously fake. Reviewing someone's work is not my job, I'm the customer here.
And by increasing the number of dishonest reviews, you are warning customers that you can't trust user reviews and there's no actual way of having actually verified reviews (e.g. Amazon brushing).
Be a bot. Become one with the dead internet. I don't even know if this comment was written by my hand or by GPT-3. Who am I?
Be passive-aggressive: Get on the most glowing reviews and just copy and paste. It will look absolutely shady and make people think twice before booking.
Meh, the 2 seconds of warm fuzzy feeling I get from helping others is nothing in comparison to the risks from making enemies with someone.
And using a fake name is not a great solution because there’s often enough circumstantial data to tie a person to a review, whether that be metadata or even just the content of the review itself.
Writing a review to warn others is like "i scratch your back, you'll scratch mine". There is no imminent benefit for you instantly when leaving negative review, but you benefit when others warn you later.
Quite. This is how systems break down, and is realistically a bit selfish.
Further, the more everyone does honestly review, the more outrage occurs if that process is interfered with. The less acceptable it becomes to maliciously go after an honest review.
The reason we help other people is not because it gives us warm fuzzy feelings. It is because it make the world a better place to live in, not only for the people you help, but also for yourself.
Airbnb should understand this. If no one dares to give bad reviews, there won't be any way to filter out bad hosts, which make people in general have much worse experiences (not to mention attracting more bad hosts), which make people use AirBnb less.
You can always try do do the Kant thing for questions like these: Would it be good for you if everybody followed your advice? Compared to the chances of getting fucked for writing a bad review, aren't the chances bigger to get fucked by a bad actor in a world where nobody left bad reviews?
It is simple. If the answer to the question: "How would it be if everybody acted like me?" is "It would be worse", this means you are acting in a way that makes society worse for your own advantage.
A bit pedantic, but that's not really the Kant thing. Kant is a proponent of deontology, which is utterly unconcerned with consequences. His thing was more checking if it would still make logical sense.
That is, when he asks "What if everybody lied?", what he's getting at isn't that it'd suck if you couldn't even ask for the time and get the right answer, but that it'd destroy the concept of truth, and with that what does "lying" even mean?
Kant answered the specific scenario of "What if the Gestapo wants to know if you're hiding any Jews?" (his actual scenario was with a murderer looking for a victim, since Nazis weren't a thing yet), and said that yup, you do not lie, because to him the morality of an action is unrelated to its likely consequences.
This is where the limits of the categorical imperative become apparent.
If there were a fund (assume a spherical, frictionless, voluntary society) that was the only way to feed the hungry, everyone should donate to it. Unfortunately it's set up by an evil game master, and one in ten thousand donations is answered with a bullet to the spine.
Of course the categorical imperative says we should do it anyway. I wouldn't. You wouldn't. Rational defection on bad payoff matrices is correct behavior.
It's really unfortunate that this simple principle can't work in real life, just because people's idea of "what is worse" are so different. One has only to look at the very different outlooks people have politically to know the answers to the question "Will this make the world worse?" are going to be wildly different, and some of them downright nonsensical to most people.
It actually takes a fairly high bar for me to leave a negative review of a product or service. But some sellers/providers are just so awful to their customers, you're dang right I enjoy helping other people avoid suffering from a business deal that is certain to be terrible.
I get a positive feeling when others have honestly reviewed a product/service, whether that be positive or negative feedback.
I most certainly do not get a positive feeling when watching someone recommend just keeping your mouth shut because "there's no point leaving a review"
Have Airbnb become the corporate mafia or something?
This is why there is such “grade inflation” in reviews.
The way I read reviews is now:
- look at the reviews with lowest ratings. They have the most signal (the walls were paper thin and the bathroom was dirty) as opposed to positive reviews (beautiful room in a great location). You can usually tell if the reviewer is being unreasonable.
- search for specific negative keywords in the other reviews - “noisy”, “loud”, etc. Often people will leave a five star review but discreetly complain about something.
Be mindful of confirmation bias when searching reviews. Finding 10 reviews mentioning noise might be because it's noisy, or it might be that they have thousands of reviews and a small percentage experienced noise
This is an excellent point!
I suppose I could normalize by the number of total reviews.
It hasn’t been an issue so far as I am only filtering out cases when there are multiple reports of the same issue, and I care more about eliminating bad options than detecting all good options.
I rented an airbnb room where the host had forgot to update the pictures since there was now a wood workshop in the room behind a curtain. He was a nice guy, but it turned out to be a negative experience for my girlfriend. I mostly blame myself for not picking a more expensive place, but I still felt like other guests should know that they’re sharing the place with model ships and fishing equipment that aren’t in the pictures. Didn’t try to make enemies; gave five stars with a redeeming comment phrased positively. But clearly a flag for anyone who cares.
