Airbnb removed my negative review

I've read they're taken very seriously in some places like Germany and Japan, but in my experience, a lot of people in the USA won't bother reporting noise violations because they know the chances of them being enforced and/or investigated in a timely manner is low.

I'm part of the problem not part of the solution and I know it. I spend almost all of my time in AirBnBs and other short term accommodation and I will rarely if ever leave a negative review.

This is for several reasons. Firstly I stay in the places much longer than the average guest, so notice flaws more than someone that is there for a whirlwind visit. Some things are taste based as well.

But also because I understand that often it's a small business and by leaving negative reviews I'm fucking with someones livelihood (this varies from place to place and I'm far more likely to leave a review if it's company owned).

In the few times I have left negative reviews they have to be horrendously bad. Bad to the point that I can't stay (as the OP was).

Given how much I stay in AirBnBs I've also learned to read between the lines. Often you can tell more about the place by what is consistently not mentioned. If people consistently rave about everything it's a good sign. If people give half hearted positive reviews (one nice thing only maybe), that's probably a sign that you're going to want to give a negative review and bite your tongue.

A lot of the macrolevel complaints about Airbnb are trotted out because customers had shitty experiences. I still bring up their douchey bus ads in sf bragging about finally paying their taxes after years of dodging then not because that campaign directly effected me but because I have been personally burned by the company a few times and this anecdote helps communicate the global nature of the problem with the company culture that a few bad stays doesn’t always convey.

That kind of service (AirBnB or otherwise) has a few things going for it:

1) "whole place" rentals are really nice if you're traveling with kids. Like, really nice.

2) It used to often be cheaper to get an apartment or entire house through AirBnB to get any but a bottom-tier hotel (granted, much less true now)

3) It gives you a lot more location flexibility. Ordinary neighborhoods or apartment buildings like a local, maybe walkable to a bunch of cool stuff that's not walkable from where the hotels are in the city, or rural housing sometimes in places where there's not a hotel for many miles.

4) For any kind of getaway where you expect to mostly hang out at/around your accommodations, hotels are so awful I wouldn't consider them an option, short of maybe resorts. Meanwhile you can get a nice AirBnB house on a lake go kayaking right out your backdoor and hang out reading by a wood-burning fireplace and all that. That kind of "the accommodations are the attraction" thing isn't really what hotels are for (again, except, maybe, resorts—but even that's not really the same thing). Granted AirBnB didn't invent this and isn't the only way to get it, but it's one sort of thing for which AirBnB is an option and hotels really aren't.

5) AirBnBs may no longer consistently beat basic hotel rooms on price, but they're still often much cheaper and available in more areas than equivalent apartment-style hotel rooms with kitchenettes and multiple connected rooms and such—these are often limited to long-term hotels, largely near airports and aimed at business travelers, and big expensive suites in fancy hotels in the city center.

The house next door to you was de facto rezoned from residential to hotel.

In the US, and California specifically, any kind of zoning change is met with pitchforks. If your neighbor tried to build an apartment and you didn't like it you could have easily held up the project for years.

Airbnb figured a way to rezone property without invoking the wrath of local busybodies. Kudos to them. But at the same time, if you live in a place that takes zoning seriously then Airbnb shouldn't be allowed.