[subpixel]

“ Airbnb must have learned to deal with trust/safety/reputation issues better than basically any other consumer app based company”

Not at all. Basically all reviews on Airbnb are positive bc of the threat of retaliation. Your reviews are like your social credit score, not worth threatening to post a negative but honest review.

[mr3martinis]

How? The reviews aren’t visible until after the window of time to review is closed or the review has already been submitted. AFAIK there’s no way to retaliate.

[fallingknife]

There is no threat of retaliation for reviews because hosts and guests can't see each other's reviews until the review period is expired or they have already left their own review.

[dayjah]

The Airbnb review process is so weird I can only assume it’s actually broken.

Give someone three stars; which is “okay” (airbnbs own language) and you’re forced into specifying why a review (or part of a review) got three stars. The canned reasons are pretty negative (“felt unsafe”, etc). The “write in your own reason” option is limited to 50 characters.

So you’re incentivized to select 4 or 5 stars which allows you to click through the review without any other entry requirements.

I only give truthful reviews and I’ve only had three cases (out of ~70 stays) where the host was an asshat in response.