The Insaneness Continues...

[Tim-and-Holly0]

Airbnb is now apparently testing sorting guest reviews showing on the listing page by length of review. The longest review is first, second longest is second, etc. It used to be that the last guest to stay who wrote a review was first. 

Here's the problem with that. Guests who write bad reviews tend to be more wordy, thus their review will remain at the top for an indefinite period of time.  A bad review cannot be "buried" over time and when a host recieves a false review that Airbnb refuses to remove, guess what, that review may continue to kill your business for a long time.

Again, something that never needed to be changed is changed and ultimately hurts hosts.

[Tim-and-Holly0]

@Branka-and-Silvia0 

I could not believe that number myself when I read it. Amazing. I guess if you need a development team for each language group I could see the number becoming larger, but when I developed websites we programmed the site and then created a language pack that changed the text, but did not need to change the core program.

[Ange2]

How many Airbnb coders does it take to ...

Did  someone code to sort by character count instead of something that may be useful for the guest and fair to the host like date of review. Too boring?

[Tim-and-Holly0]

@Ange2:
One of the tests Airbnb conducted did include a character count so that the first review on the first page was the longest recent review and then going down to the shortest. It appears that that test did not get final approval as what is now showing across most listings is just random reviews pulled from at least the last two years.  On one of my homes the first page shows two reviews from 2017, two from 2018 and three from 2019.

[Carmen-and-Ben0]

The question here is -

WHERE IS AIRBNB'S RESPONSE TO THIS REVIEW NIGHTMARE? Not a word from Airbnb. It figures.

[Tim-and-Holly0]

@Carmen-and-Ben0, @Ange2 , @Branka-and-Silvia0 , @Gloria474 , @Beth80 :
As of tonight the reviews in my area have returned to chronological order. Let's hope they stay that way!

[Mike-And-Helen0]

Really interesting. After reading this I see my reviews are showing in a completely random order.

[Dimitar27]

Sorting of my reviews is based on keywords. Why, how...no idea!