It seems like for any tech company to be successful and sustainable it has to destroy the openness and community it was born from. I discovered couch surfing right as my wandering days came to a close and I feel I sorely missed out.
I think the destruction of openness is a reflection of the user they serve. When Airbnb serves only NYC they can be idiosyncratic to the population there, and their smaller user base is a more similar type of person.
Once at scale, they have to appeal to everyone in the addressable market, which is a very diverse set of people, which makes shared community and closeness harder (what do 100m people all have in common except superficially?).
They don’t kill the openness intentionally, it’s just a consequence of that fact that mass appeal is the opposite of tightknit
