Trump appoints Airbnb co-founder to revamp public (government) websites

[u/Choobeen]

https://www.dw.com/en/trump-appoints-airbnb-co-founder-to-revamp-public-websites-after-musk-doge-exit/a-73744139

[u/hikeonpast]

Fuck Joe Gebbia and his AirBnB billions.

I’m just one person, but I’m done with AirBnB until this doofus is off their board.

[u/nycdiveshack → u/hikeonpast]

We had the USDS to help revamp government websites and have them work seamlessly with other agencies and organizations. You know who took over that? Fucking DOGE… it’s why doge has so much access to all the federal agencies and is slated to give all the IRS/SSA data over to Palantir in September

[u/hikeonpast → u/nycdiveshack]

Gebbia worked for DOGE before this assignment.

Fuck Joe Gebbia.

[u/Oriin690 → u/nycdiveshack]

That’s not why Doge has access to all that agencies. They just took a small department they didn’t care about and sort of had to do with efficiency, fired everyone and replaced them with Elon Musk and a bunch of his lackeys and heritage foundation interns. Trump gave executive orders firing and replacing everyone who protested at their illegal data access with sycophants. And when judges went “uh that’s illegal” the Supreme Court swatted them down with a mixture of totally unexplained decisions and a few batshit kangaroo court logic ones, usually backing the idea of unitary executive which to save you some time means that they think the President is King over the executive branch (and since the executive branch does basically everything is King over us all).

The original departments access is meaningless. It’s just totalitarianism and lawlessness with a gold star approval from the Supreme Court and the Republicans in control of Congress.

[u/Regular-Engineer-686 → u/hikeonpast]

As if I needed another reason to boycott AirBnb, but everyone should. They are a TERRIBLE company.

[u/I_am_BrokenCog → u/Regular-Engineer-686]

in what way are they terrible?

[u/green_gold_purple → u/I_am_BrokenCog]

They fuck over their customers and the housing market.

[u/Regular-Engineer-686 → u/I_am_BrokenCog]

Here’s a list:

• They significantly contribute to rising housing cost in metropolitan areas • They change the “character” of whatever neighborhood they are in by focusing on short term tourists rather than actual residents. • Their model benefits property owners and wealthy hosts, but lower-income residents and workers are forced to live further and further away from where they work as the areas become gentrified, with people don’t even live there. • For the people that actually live in the community, they are disrupted as all types of people rent AirBnb places including porn directors, sex traffickers, drug manufacturers, etc… not to mention just the people that come in every week to have a parties disrupting the neighborhood. • It also sucks for their users. There’s no safety protocols. Hidden cameras in bathrooms and bedrooms have been found, including ones in the bedrooms meant for children.

You should do a little googling. They are terrible. I’ve used them in the past when I didn’t know any better. If you’re using them, please stop.

[u/DeadMoneyDrew → u/I_am_BrokenCog]

Don't know why you're getting downvoted for asking a legitimate question. Not everybody is immersed in all of the evil stuff that companies do.

Airbnb charges outrageous fees to consumers to the point where they are no longer an economical alternative to a hotel. They also suck up housing supply which contributes to high costs of rent.

[u/fury420 → u/DeadMoneyDrew]

It's actually individual hosts that choose to add a cleaning fee and pet fees, not AirBnB itself.

[u/TechieWasteLan → u/DeadMoneyDrew]

Is it airbnb themselves that sucked up housing ? Or is it that it created an incentive for people and later companies to buy up housing to put up on Airbnb?

[u/Unlucky-Meaning-4956 → u/I_am_BrokenCog]

In all of them

[u/sinh1921 → u/hikeonpast]

It’s not just off the board. He will still continue to make money forever off AirBnB. AirBnB has been a net negative on communities, the housing industry, and hotel industry. Maids make less money and chances for employment as hotels have been hurt. It’s time we stop supporting these companies like they do ANY fucking good. They find ways to make really good ideas the absolute worst for everyone so they can make billions. I guess it’s not their fault because there’s basically 0 regulation but it’s not like they care. They’ll do anything to make their billions

[u/CinnamonMoney → u/hikeonpast]

He stepped down already

[u/hikeonpast → u/CinnamonMoney]

He’s still on the Board of Directors

Edit: Proof: https://investors.airbnb.com/governance/default.aspx

[u/CinnamonMoney → u/hikeonpast]

Dammit mane, i got hoodwinked by not knowing the difference between their charitable arm and their business website

Thanks

[u/zaskar]

Wait until they learn about section 508. They will call it DEI.

The government had an amazing digital services agency, 18F and doge burned it to the ground because they were in palitir’s way all the time.

[u/dbbk → u/zaskar]

I was gonna say, isn’t this just… the US Digital Service? Which DOGE replaced?

[u/gizamo → u/dbbk]

They didn't really replace it. They just gutted it, shit all over it, and moved on to the next thing they could screw up.

[u/raymonst → u/dbbk]

it absolutely is. just nonsensical tbh.

[u/EuphoricCrashOut]

Just another way to transfer public (tax) wealth to a Billionaire. They're never going to stop. Yeah, we're all looking at you, you Republicans. *smh* Idiots. Morons. It's socialism for the Rich. Snap out of it. Get a brain and use it.

[u/Jenks0503 → u/EuphoricCrashOut]

Yeah, it’s the same play every time. Socialism when it helps the rich, lectures about hard work when it’s the rest of us.

[u/kehb]

Yeah. Well, fuck this guy.

[u/Encomiast]

The HTML of https://americabydesign.gov does not exactly inspire confidence that anyone over there actually knows what they are doing:

<span data-word-id="1-word-0" class="text-main-dark" style="transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;-webkit-transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;will-change:color">
    What's
</span></span>
<span><span data-word-id="1-word-1" class="text-main-dark" style="transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;-webkit-transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;will-change:color">
    the
</span></span>
<span><span data-word-id="1-word-2" class="text-main-dark" style="transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;-webkit-transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;will-change:color">
    biggest
</span></span>

[u/ekun → u/Encomiast]

Holy fuck that is the real landing page for this initiative. LMAO

[u/gizamo → u/Encomiast]

Jeezus. That's, well, something. Lol.

[u/Expensive-Job-9419 → u/Encomiast]

eli5?

[u/Encomiast → u/Expensive-Job-9419]

It's…uhm, unusual to wrap every word in markup. It's super inefficient since all this duplicate text needs to be sent to the browser, it's hard to maintain, and it play havoc with screen readers, so it's not super efficient. And it's just ugly.

[u/Kershiser22 → u/Encomiast]

I think the old HTML WYSIWYG software was called Frontpage? When I messed with it ~20 years ago, my memory is that it would do stuff like this. If you made any change to your page, it would apply all the formatting to the new section.

[u/Regular-Engineer-686 → u/Encomiast]

This is like Frontpage all over again

[u/nicuramar → u/Encomiast]

Honestly, though, it’s a bit far fetched to criticize tiny details like that. There is plenty of stuff to criticize. 

This was clearly not written by hand but by some tool. 

[u/joeyb908 → u/nicuramar]

It is a valid criticism to judge basic html/css for a group that will supposedly modernize the governments websites.

This is quite literally week 2 of an html/CSS course in college. Someone with 0 experience should get this right.

[u/bkirbyNL → u/nicuramar]

…written by some tool. Indeed it was.

[u/erics0n → u/Expensive-Job-9419]

Not a webdev, but probably the double span for each word. The parent for each doesn't really serve a purpose or at least not required in this case (just based off this, idk the actual css file, too lazy to check). Also, inline styling.

[u/Encomiast → u/Expensive-Job-9419]

Also don't even get me started on using foot marks instead of real apostrophes. You go through the trouble of making your users download half a MB of font files, and proceed to treat it like this.

[u/epicfail1994 → u/Expensive-Job-9419]

Wrapped each individual piece of text in multiple redundant spam elements is….not good practice

[u/TinyFists-of-Fury → u/Expensive-Job-9419]

Imagine a word processor: This is you styling every word in a sentence, one at a time and in the same way, instead of highlighting the entire sentence to style them altogether in one go.

[u/Sloppy_Wafflestomp → u/Encomiast]

Totally overdone or AI?

[u/Agile_Tomorrow2038 → u/Sloppy_Wafflestomp]

That's how AI does 10k lines of code

[u/IM_KYLE_AMA → u/Encomiast]

This is a hacky, probably AI generated way to get the text to highlight on scroll. This is something that GSAP is used for but here they just cobbled it together themselves. This would have never been accepted by the US Digital Service.

[u/SerialBitBanger]

Based on his level of competence, I'm guessing stocks in WordPress are going to skyrocket.

[u/limbodog]

Requirements? "Loyalty to the mad king"

[u/CinnamonMoney]

When DOGE did that big Fox News interview, he said this

Excited to share I’m bringing my designer brain and start-up spirit into the government. My first project at DOGE is improving the slow and paper-based retirement process.

This was 5-6 months ago. I remember him saying it’d be finished by now. As far as i can tell, that’s not true. Anyone see anything to the contrary?

[u/unknownpoltroon]

"revamp" is a funny way of spelling destroy

[u/electrobento]

As if I needed another reason to boycott AirBnB.

[u/jeffandeff]

So now every site comes with some crazy cleaning fee. Can’t wait.

[u/SamuraiMike81]

Jesus, its like he just has a list of rich people that he just randomly picks for shit

[u/Comfortable-Pause279 → u/SamuraiMike81]

They're all turning up and talking Trump into appointing them to try stupid shit. Musk decided taking over the US Digital Service was his way to try and be America's CEO. RFK jr. talked Trump into letting him fuck around with Health and Human Services.

This prick thinks the Federal government needs someone do to work creative Executive-level work on Federal website design (instead of a budget to actually do website design). None of these people are the most competent people to head-up civil service projects and none of this shit is budgeted for.

[u/inssein2]

Everyday I feel like we are on a failed timeline.

[u/Wonderful-Group3639]

Seems like a waste of money. Most sites haven't been revamped because of budget cuts throughout the years. They don't need to hire someone to revamp them, they just need to budget money for it.

[u/giantshortfacedbear]

The Florida Fascist giving corrupt kickbacks ... is there anything more American?

[u/WorldInWonder]

Just get the guys who did gov.uk.

That is the gold standard.

[u/Sportgen44]

Well neoliberal privatization is the illusion of more “choices”, but at a greater cost- just like Air bnb😂

[u/tmdblya]

The Hugo Boss of the 21st century. Never live it down.

[u/heavy-minium]

It's obvious for a few people what the intention is but nobody will speak about it before it's too late. It's not always easy as dictator to connect those federal systems full of data with a private company like Palantir while escaping the awareness of the opposition. But going directly at the source where all the data is being entered, whether for public services or intranet government websites, that would not appear on any politicians radar.

This is why the "designer in chief" and it's new agency is perceived as a replacement for DOGE. It wasn't about efficiency, it was about citizen data access.

[u/irich]

“This is Trump going bigger than Nixon” is one helluva line to use on a government website.

[u/IM_KYLE_AMA]

Ah, so they’re creating the official government marketing department that will set standards for their propaganda. Check out the website, the only thing it really talks about is Trump. Then look at the “company” responsible for it, the National Design Studio. This has nothing to do with making anything better for Americans. The entire point is to standardize and control government websites in service to maga.

[u/amiwitty]

I guess I will never use Airbnb again.