It's on HN right now because it's an amazingly good and open discussion about how someone who was involved in a PR nightmare feels after it moves from being a story to being something in the past. If you read carefully, there are important lessons in PR and how to do good customer service embedded all around this story. There are lessons on crisis management, and yes, there are lessons on irrational human behavior and responses, especially in terms of how media attention, time and the reactions of others changes people's perspectives.
I've found HN's comment section to be equally full of lessons on irrationality. From the person who is angry that EJ can't be satisfied to the person whose heart was still captured by her original story and unsatisfied by the outcome.
These are how your customers respond when you do something wrong and are disappointed in you. For a site that focuses on startups, these lessons are worth seeing.
Even though I do agree that the _whole_ story has some valuable PR lessons, I don't think that this particular blog post adds any value to this field. The story was worth keeping an eye on for entrepreneurs to take lessons from. But we had more than a dozen articles about it on HN, which is, for me, too much noise.
You said that Airbnb was wrong and disappointing, I would argue that this wasn't mainly their fault, but that's out of our discussion point right now.
I've found HN's comment section to be equally full of lessons on irrationality. From the person who is angry that EJ can't be satisfied to the person whose heart was still captured by her original story and unsatisfied by the outcome.
These are how your customers respond when you do something wrong and are disappointed in you. For a site that focuses on startups, these lessons are worth seeing.