In the wake of New Year's weekend, the news seemed inevitable. Some high school kids faked their identities on Airbnb, rented a nice couple's house in Oakland, California, and absolutely trashed the place during a giant party. It was yet another dark tale about the company, which seems poised to overtake Uber in the contest to become the most successful service that generates reams of bad publicity.

Objectively speaking, Airbnb's business is booming. Valued at $25.5 billion, it raised $1.5 billion in investments over the summer, followed by another $100 million in November. In March of last year, the company's future prospects brightened considerably when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that online travel companies like Airbnb are not responsible for paying hotel occupancy taxes. In May, the company reported that it had almost a million guests per night. And yet its public image keeps taking a beating.

Some of Airbnb's troubles began when the company decided to intervene in San Francisco municipal politics. In October, Airbnb spent $8 million to post what many observers called "passive aggressive" ads in bus shelters all over San Francisco. "Dear Public Library System," one read. "We hope you use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep the library open later. Love, Airbnb." Read another: "Dear Public Works, Please use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to install more electric vehicle charging stations. Love, Airbnb." The references were to Airbnb caving to pressure from San Francisco to charge a 14 percent hotel tax to its guests (the same tax that people pay at San Francisco hotels). But the goal of the campaign was to defeat Proposition F, which would have made it unlawful for people to rent out their properties for more than 75 days consecutively per year. Dubbed "the Airbnb law," F was eventually defeated . But even people who thought F was a bad idea were still revolted by the tone-deaf propaganda campaign , which portrayed Airbnb as some kind of do-gooder pal of local city government when in fact they'd fought to avoid paying municipal taxes.

A few days after Proposition F's defeat, Zak Stone published a harrowing story on Matter about how his father had been killed at an Airbnb rental. Stone's whole family had rented a home for the Thanksgiving weekend in Texas. It looked perfect, and even had a big, inviting backyard with a tree swing. But when Stone's father sat down in the swing, the tree cracked in half, hitting his father on the head and killing him almost instantly. Stone's recollection of the tragic and horrifying details gave way to questions about how this could have happened. The tree had been dead for a long time, making the swing an obvious hazard. Why wasn't Airbnb making sure that its rentals were safe? Shouldn't it be regulated or liable in some way?

The story went viral, and soon more people were coming forward with horror stories about Airbnb rentals. The problem is that there are few reliable statistics on Airbnb customer complaints. Indeed, the company hardly makes any statistics at all available about its user base and their experiences. After posting some carefully curated stats about its New York users late last year, Airbnb promised to show its anonymized user statistics to anyone who was willing to venture to the company's New York offices. Except Airbnb wouldn't allow any of these visitors to download the information. Or take pictures of it. So BuzzFeed's Jeremy Singer-Vine and his colleagues used pen and paper to copy spreadsheets full of data and crunch some numbers.

What they found was telling. Airbnb trumpets that 90 percent of its hosts rent all or part of their own homes. These hosts are using Airbnb as the company suggests, which is to "welcome travelers into their homes to earn money and meet people from all over the world." But as Singer-Vine noted, after analyzing all the data available (emphasis mine):

Between November 2014 and November 2015, hosts with more than one entire-home listing in NYC accounted for more than 30% of all NYC revenue. (And that includes share-home and shared-room listings.) And hosts with at least three entire-home listings accounted for more than 18% of all NYC revenue.

What this reveals is that Airbnb is making a huge part of its revenue from a tiny percentage of its hosts, all of whom appear to be renting out more than their personal residences. So they aren't exactly sharing their homes. Given that at least 127 hosts in New York City alone made over $100,000 from rentals last year, it seems like Airbnb is helping people run businesses that actually do compete with local hotels.

Though San Francisco's Proposition F may not have been the right legislation to regulate Airbnb, its advocates were clearly onto something. A big part of the company's revenue, at least in New York, appears to come from people who are making a living by renting multiple units on Airbnb to visitors rather than locals.

Further Reading Airbnb host gets fined $2,400 for breaking hotel laws

Add this thorny business issue to the public's growing unease about the dangers of unregulated rentals, and you can begin to understand why so many stories about this extremely successful company are negative. Especially on social media , the bitterness over Airbnb is overwhelming

This brings us back to Uber. Like Uber, Airbnb is disrupting an old, corrupt system with a new, questionable one. Airbnb creates a lot of problems, but it also works. It's actually a very pleasant and cost-effective way to find lodging while traveling. As a result, many people who use Airbnb feel torn. We want something like Airbnb to exist, but we hate the reality of all the sticky political, ethical, and even personal questions it raises. And because it's an online consumer service, aimed at attracting people through social media, debates about its business practices are bubbling up everywhere—not just in the pages of The Economist or The Financial Times.

Airbnb is developing a fractured public image as a company that's winning... but still kind of sucks. What's unclear is whether this marks the beginning of a genuine consumer revolt and user flight from the platform. After all, Airbnb is only as valuable as its user base. If the backlash creates enough bad feeling about Airbnb's brand online, even a billion dollar investment won't make people use it.