I don't want to tick anyone off here, I enjoy HN, and have for a long time (over 6 years). Perhaps I don't understand the ranking, but more than once active discussions just went away, with low-vote/low-interaction topics replacing them.
I only see articles in my comment history from over a year ago. Search here isn't great, e.g. I can't find the article where PG himself commented on something I said.
I appreciate that you don't want to "tick anyone off here", and you haven't, but you have said some things that aren't true. I think I've answered most of them at [1], but there's at least one other. It isn't true that we single anti-Airbnb stories out. We don't treat them any other way than comparable stories about something else.
I think there's a general phenomenon affecting this. Once startups become hyper-successful, there's a noticeable HN backlash against them. Perhaps this is because they're no longer the underdog. Airbnb and Uber (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9933165) are clearly in this category, and we've noticed others.
The trouble with such backlashes is that the discussions they lead to are super repetitive. Even more than the indignation, it's the repetitiveness that makes them unsuitable for HN.
I wasn't ticked off, just interested in searching for those threads on http://hnrankings.info/ . While you're right that the first thread had a fairly hard drop off from the front page, the other two just linearly dropped down.
I only see articles in my comment history from over a year ago. Search here isn't great, e.g. I can't find the article where PG himself commented on something I said.
Here's a few where I participated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7923849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7939414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8222687
In this one I reacted to someone else with the same impression https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332889 I asked for clarification on the policy, instead I got a downvote.
Since that time, I'm keeping quiet.