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Comment by yggydrasily | Hacker News Reader

Yes, things have dramatically improved, but there are still taboo subjects on HN. For example, try saying any of the same things about YC's own AirBnB and see how that goes over.

In fact, this very article had an early comment[1] comparing Uber's logo re-design to AirBnB's paperclip thingy[2]. That comment is now deleted. No way to tell if it was self-deleted or mod deleted, but either way it seems someone wasn't comfortable having that on here, for whatever reason.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11038131

[2] http://blog.airbnb.com/belong-anywhere

View on HN

The most upvoted and commented story about AirBnB is "Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight"[1]. Also in the top 10 are "The Moment Of Truth For Airbnb As Users Home Is Utterly Trashed"[2], "Airbnb Victim Speaks Again: Homeless, Scared And Angry"[3] and "Dear AirBNB, No thank you for the XXX Freak Fest"[4]. There are more in the top 20.

A single comment sounds like poor evidence to me.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820615

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813956

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820605

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7407796

I draw the opposite conclusion, as all of your examples are from several years ago. Three of your four links are more than 1600 days old!

Ever since AirBnB became the most valuable company in YC's portfolio, there has been a remarkable groupthink on HN where everything they do is good and criticism basically vanishes. Yet criticism of a non-YC company like Uber gets upvoted and creates a big dogpile, even when it could be equally applied to both companies.

The "past few years" is a bigger sample than just "the past year", so assuming the posts are equally distributed through time, you're still going to get more of them in the first bucket.

Still, from the top 10 of past year:

"Why Airbnb is dead to me" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10291070)

"The two faces of Airbnb" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10487447)

"AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10090119)

"Living and Dying on Airbnb" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531229)

And many of the others in the top are not really about AirBNB itself, just of related topics. I don't see much praise.

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