@Ann72 Oh I think it is objectively worse unless you have a unique property. Too many hosts who have 'cabins' or 'lakefront' properties that have disappeared from the search results for it not to be a disaster. You are lucky as I'm sure you realize, in that your listings are exactly the kind of place Chesky would stay. High end, unique-ish, designer listings in rural areas are what the new algo is looking for and promoting.
It's an old adage that if you give the customer too many choices they're going to walk away. That's how Airbnb feels to me. Unless I am actually intending to stay at an expensive tree house or glamping farm, I don't find anything useful....which will ultimately lead me back to Expedia and Booking and VRBO, where some Airbnbs are also listed.
But, it is typical Airbnb and if you had asked me to predict what a category redesign would look like, I would have said, it would be confusing, random, disenfranchise a lot of hosts, be poorly implemented, badly designed, glitchy, surrounded by opaque language of how to use it and generally make things worse. And, voila, here we are.
ETA I think we will leave, both because Airbnb has become too stressful, I don't need to feel like any day the hammer can drop on me because someone couldn't use the key or wants a free stay or saw a bee in the house, plus, rents in JC have jumped an astronomical amount, and if we're going to give up access to the first floor, we might as well make the most profit we can. The real drawback is that if we rent to a long term tenant then we can no longer host friends and family, and we would not really have room to comfortably have people stay in our apartment, so unless we did a serious basement reno, anyone coming to visit would have to stay elsewhere, and that is a big loss. We'll see.