Well, one data point: Airbnb cheap rooms allowed me to travel widely while in my twenties. I definitely couldn’t have done so if I needed to pay for hotels. This very much changed the trajectory of my life.

That said, I was an active member of couchsurfing.org prior to Airbnb eating its lunch, so maybe you could make the argument that we’d be off better as a whole with a free community-oriented platform.