As with most other posters here, my review rate has also fallen off a cliff over the last several months. I'm past caring though - as a 16 time Superhost with hundreds of reviews and a 5.0 rating, I still can't get a booking for love nor money, as I'm in a saturated market with search ranking priority being given to wave after wave of newbies and an ever-increasing army of "professional" management companies and commercial entities, all of which are pushing (have pushed) small, traditional, long-standing hosts like myself out of the market altogether. (But hey, Airbnb still want us little guys out there fighting their corner in regulatory battles with governments and local authorities, so they can maintain the illusion and perpetuate the myth that Airbnb is still all about the little guys using their hosting income to feed their families and stay in their homes, as opposed to the huge, cash-grabbing, power-hungry, manipulative, dishonest behemoth it's long since morphed into)
The review/rating system was already an abusive, incompetent farce but the implementation of this sneaky, time-wasting spy charter is not only potentially catastrophic for hosts' earnings and reputations, but it hammers home several more nails in the coffin of the already perishing host-guest relationship on the Airbnb platform.
There was a time when we all genuinely looked forward to meeting new guests and welcoming them to our neighbourhoods and to our homes. Over the past couple of years however, with the gradual and insidious introduction of guest-centic policy after guest-centric policy, and the inequitable (and frequently shameful) elevation by Airbnb of guest over host, often at great personal and financial cost to the host, and with hosts apparently being demoted from "valued partners" to worthless servants who must cater to guests' every outrageous whim and petulant demand - or suffer the consequences - Airbnb has somehow managed to turn their own platform into an adversarial battleground, pitting host against guest, and annihilating the culture of fun, chilled, organic host-guest interactions that was once the hallmark (and USP) of the brand.
Now though, with every new guest that comes through the door, we're full of doubt and suspicion, wondering what rules they might wilfully ignore, how disrespectfully they might treat us, what damage they might to to our homes, what stunts they might pull to screw us out of our money, and how badly they might destroy our reputations and our earnings potential when they finally leave and shaft us with a crappy review afterwards.
Well done, Airbnb, well done. You've taken a wonderful concept and ran it into the ground with your greed, your hubris, your Messianic delusions, your relentless (yet incompetent) scaling, your insatiable need for power and control, your penchant for squandering oodles of cash on ill-advised vanity projects (and expecting your "community" to foot the bill for it), your lies and obfuscations, and your utter contempt and disregard for the very hosts on whose backs your fortunes were built.
Airbnb has democratized the hospitality industry?? Nope. They've bastardized it instead.