Airbnb "cracking down on fake listings"

[beschizza]

Originally published at: Airbnb "cracking down on fake listings" | Boing Boing

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[abutilon]

@beschizza

got damp, got rotten, released toxic spores everywhere, is now a shimmering moldy gloop of fraud, fascism, human despair and marketing, and everyone is looking at it and grimacing and saying “we can fix this with AI.”

Nice!

[bolamig]

@beschizza

“Free accounts, post without oversight” was a fundamental mistake of the modern web.

Elon Musk is a madman, but he isn’t wrong about how small user fees can totally ruin the economics of shit bots.

[sqlrob]

He kind of is though. It’ll stop LEGITIMATE bots. Fraudsters, not so much.

[FGD135]

@beschizza

It […] got damp […]

I’d go as far as saying it got m‍oist, even.

[fuzzyfungus]

You can definitely price out lower value botting activity; but I’d imagine that fraudulent airbnb listings are not especially low value botting. Unless I’m completely misunderstanding how the con works anyone in that business already has(or at least thinks they have) a mechanism to take payment for services not rendered without getting caught.

Unless the margins are astonishingly tight in scam listings those are exactly the sort of people who should find paying for their bots reasonably trivial.