In late 2012, Airbnb headhunted Douglas Atkin as Global Head of Community. Atkin is the author of a book called "The Culting of Brands - How To Turn your Customers into True Believers", and was the creator of "The Glue Project", a venture "dedicated to helping people make communities, and the loyalty that results"
He spend years studying how cults work, the techniques they use to suck people in and brainwash them into being blindly devoted, subservient and loyal to the cult leaders, and the psychology of how cults manipulate and control their members into doing their bidding. Atkin's area of expertise was how to use those same techniques in the business and corporate world, in order to make the minions similarly devoted/subservient to the global corporations they "serve"
Airbnb has been using every trick in the culting book on its hosts since around the end of 2013/early 2014, including restructuring the entire ratings, review and Superhost programme as a supposed "reward" system, when in actual fact, it's a punitive, abusive system specifically designed to penalise, manipulate and control hosts and their behaviour.
It works on the basis of something called the "Commitment Curve", which is structured to reel people in initially with a very low barrier to entry, then ply them with very quick "rewards", in order to get them hooked as quickly as possible. (such as, the newbie search boost, designed to ensure new hosts get lots of bookings straight away so they're locked in and beholden to the platform from Day 1. It's also why hosts can "achieve" superhost status after just 10 single night bookings and a handful of reviews. And even why you can reach "Level 10" contributor in the Community Centre in about 5 minutes flat). It's all about massaging people's egos and making them feel "special", so that they'll feel so enamoured by you that they'll happily and gratefully do whatever you demand of them.
Then, once you have the targets hooked, the strategy is to ramp up the pressure on them exponentially, with bigger and bigger "asks", and rapidly increase the level of demands on them as time goes on. (For example, gradually stripping people of their rights over their own homes and businesses, while making them jump through near-impossible hoops to please you and reach almost unattainable targets (the "f*ck-off metric", as it's known internally) - such as making Superhost status achievable now only at 4.8 overall rating, instead of the previous 80% 5 star reviews, while sending relentless "you need to do better" emails to hosts when they "only" get 4 star ratings)
The theory behind all of this - and the fundamental principle on which Airbnb has been operating for several years now - is that the more you demand of your subjects, the more loyalty, devotion and dependency you'll squeeze out of them, and the more you can manipulate them into doing your dirty work for you. The ultimate goal, of course, is to mobilise the troops to get out there fighting your corner for you (such as, using gullible hosts as "frontmen" and mouthpieces with city councils, politicians, media, local authorities etc). Unfortunately for Airbnb though, the vast majority of independent hosts and homesharers are now waking up to the fact that they're being used and abused by the company, and are finally realising that small hosts fighting Airbnb's battles, is like turkeys voting for Christmas.
Douglas Atkin quietly parted ways with the company in 2017, citing "other interests". Perhaps he felt that they'd taken his ideas just a little too far
