This is very non-scientific and anecdotal, but perhaps worth mentioning:

The reaction of "regularfolk" to AirBNB feels very negative. I'm a very active host of a single unit in NYC (and have had a remarkably positive experience - met some wonderful people, received dozens of thank-you notes and gifts, etc.)

But my non-tech friends and folks I tell about this can't get it.

"You let strangers stay in your apartment? Are you nuts?"

"You're running a gypsy hotel in your living room."

"AirBNB should be illegal. Why don't people just stay in a regular hotel?"

"Why would someone want to stay in your place when they can just get a hotel room?"

It hasn't improved over the past few years either. So although AirBNB feels like a darling of the tech community, a LOT of regular people see it in a negative light. I give the pitch every time I talk about it, but it doesn't get me very far. 'Enjoy this while it lasts'

As a user of Airbnb it was great, the hosts seemed to like it too.

But then someone in my building (NYC) starting hosting. It really did have a serious impact on my quality of life and on the maintenance cost of the building. Lots of stuff in the public spaces were destroyed, loud roof parties on weeknights etc. It fully converted me to absolutely hating Airbnb.

Isn't a bit amoral of Airbnb that they are throwing their most active hosts under the bus? The ones with the most listings are those people that have spent the most time, energy and money building out the Airbnb platform and they are having their business/livelihood wiped out with no warning.

To preempt what I imagine will be a response to this question, which is that these users are violating the TOS with Airbnb, I have two points: the first is that Airbnb itself is violating many "TOSs" - laws - so it doesn't give them very good moral standing here.

The second point is stronger (I think), which is that Airbnb's position here is logically inconsistent. They either believe strongly that you should be able to do what you want with the properties you own, or you don't. I simply don't see why it matters if N=1 or N=10 (put differently, N=1 is not a special case that deserves being considered differently).

I've been enjoying Airbnb for a while now, both as a host and guest. I travel frequently to NYC and have had great experiences staying with people renting out a part of their place. Right now though I'm 1.5 hours away from checking into my current Airbnb and I just got a call from a property management person about my check-in time. I noticed the email for the profile who owns the listing is bklynvacationrentals@gmail.com. I'm starting to doubt if the person in the profile is connected to the apartment and it kind of makes me nervous. I liked Airbnb when it was being used as intended but I might stop using it for my NY trips.

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when civilization tries to evolve to be more efficient, inflexible politics ans business practices often slows down the process.

Oh hey, they shut down John Smith's account with twelve listings.

[SpongebobCueCard]One Day Later[/SpongebobCueCard]

Man, that Smith family sure has a lot of listings!

Posting via a throwaway account for obvious reasons.

When the lease on my NYC apt expired 2.5 years ago, I've kept the apartment and been subletting on AirBNB 100% of the time. A couple of months into it, I've automated this to a point where I was making ~ $1-1.5K/month after all expenses, and spending ~ 2 hours a month on it, so I considered getting some more apartments and scaling the operation.

I'm very glad that I didn't. My lease expires in a couple of weeks and I'm not renewing it. I'm deleting the listing, and my highly-ranked (consistently top 3 in searches for my neighborhood) account from the site forever.

I'm thankful to AirBNB for the opportunity to let me do this, but it's become very clear early on that AirBNB doesn't care about its hosts, only about their own company. Those people invested a ton of time, money and efforts into building a viable business model on AirBNB - and now they're royally fucked. I'm glad I'm not one of them, but this is a really shitty move by AirBNB.