I think based on context it's clear they mean "regulated like hotels".

How exactly do you regulate it like hotels without changing the legal structure? Hotels either directly run their various locations (aka run by their employees) or franchise it. That's a totally different business model.

So just saying "regulate it like hotels" doesn't mean much. Unless you mean every host is regulated like a hotel?

You would do it by changing the legal structure, but not by requiring any employees of Airbnb to manage the properties themselves, any more so than TripAdvisor employees manage hotels today.

Require Airbnb hosts to pay for a license, have regular inspections, etc.

Right, so you're not regulating AirBnB directly really, you're regulating the local AirBnB hosts.

And how does this help with reviews on airbnb.com?

That’s what Airbnb plus was - vetted properties, annual inspection. They utterly failed to market it properly.

I don’t think this does much to solve the problem - “we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong”.

the idea of a secret shopper is common. i suspect abnb already does this. obviously they get extremely limited coverage if they do so

No reason AirBnB can't invest in improving their average host quality if they invested in it. Consumers just need to push back publicly.

These sorts of HN posts is often how change happens.