China's 'sharing economy' booms, but can it last? | Hacker News Reader

China's 'sharing economy' booms, but can it last?

reuters.com

32 pointsstephenboyd19 comments

I don't know about renting basketballs but I do believe in bicycle sharing schemes. The article mentions the fairly recent entries in Singapore of "stationless" rental bikes, and I have seen first hand how this is going.

Sharing is appealing. And thanks to VC money, it's cheap. But as soon as it goes from a small local thing with passionate users to a big business with a big cross section of the overall population, dynamics change.

In Singapore the sharing companies are the present beneficiaries of a government "wait and see" period. The more popular they become, the more incidents occur that will do them no favours. Bikes dumped in rivers. Bikes parked in car traffic lanes on busy roads. Bikes parked in residential racks. Bikes hidden from view to prevent sharing.

This is ugly. This is what it looks like when your shared goods are widely adopted with no expensive enforcement. This is happening in Singapore, one of the most rule-abiding, nice cities in the world.

You want a million customers? The woodwork is buzzing.

It's not so bad. There are many cases as you mention but not so many as to be seriously problematic. My guess is eventually the novelty will wear off and people will mostly stop doing the negative things you mentioned. The dockless bikes are a dream come true for me and many others. The positives far outweigh the few bad eggs that you mention. A small section of Singaporeans are uniquely non-civic minded in my experience, possibly due to the nanny state they have grown up in. What you are seeing is a consequence of this. The dockless bike sharing companies have come from China and if it works for them in China it can work anywhere in the world.

Purely conjecture here as I'm not sure on the specifics of the rental system but surely there is some measure of accountability in operation?

I was under the impression that by scanning a qr code it registered the rental to your account, hence discouraging bad actor behaviour with the potential punishments for discarding or hoarding a bicycle that those actions would incur in fines etc.

If not, how difficult could this type of measure be to implement?

Regarding the bikes being kept for personal use, its a quirk of the way one of the bike-sharing systems worked. Ofo, one of the biggest players, didn't have any sort of GPS system on the bikes. Rather, each bike has a license plate with a numerical code, which, when put into an app, gives you a number for a padlock which will unlock the bike. Now, the number in the padlock doesn't change, so people quickly figured out that they could write down the code for the padlock, rip the license plate off the bike (or scratch off the number), and then no one else can use their bike.

I believe this company has added GPS tracking to the bikes now, but this was a pad enough product design flaw that it should have rendered this company incapable of making money. I haven't seen any numbers from them, but I would be extremely surprised to see them bringing in any significant revenue, nonetheless profits.

I haven't downloaded their app, but I've used their bikes a number of times, as they're currently littering the sidewalks of Shanghai, many with their locking mechanisms ripped off or permanently opened.

Nonetheless, this company was valued north of $1 Billion as of their last fundraising round.

Feels pretty bubble-ish to me.

Can you detect the difference between no one else renting the bike vs one person hoarding it in some way? If you can't, then it only takes a couple stories in the news of some innocent being charged fines to generate ill will.

Yes, you need to submit a photo of yourself along with your ID when you register an account. And bikes can be traced so there is accountability.

This is on a renting economy.

Sharing economy I feel usually refers to a person-to-person marketplace where asset ownership is decentralized (i.e. airbnb you rent out your room or uber you rent you a ride in your car).

That said, I agree with most comments that bike renting sounds quite useful, but things like umbrella renting sound a bit more dicey.

Sine you mention it, I feel obliged to point out that the only project that seems to be working on a real alternative to the sharing economy giants right now is Swarm City, a distributed application built on Ethereum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1794644.0 for information post). Despite the current ICO craze, most of the funded projects don't seem to be working on problems that affect everyday people with the exception of a few select projects.

Disclaimer: I'm a backer of the Swarm City project, but outside of that I truly believe that dApps that are able to solve the problem of sharing economy businesses built on privately controlled infra maintained by corporations completely financed with massive amounts of VC funding do not have correct incentive alignment with the providers of services or the users of the services, which makes exploration of alternatives a moral and social obligation.

I think it would be also be better described as a company that provides a service. Wait a minute we call those things companies ! But when most people say sharing economies you are giving the definition that the news tells you. Typically sharing economies are ways where people can provide possible illegal services and may or may not qualify as employees but are kept as contractors .

Looks like another submarine post about this Chinese startup. To be honest I haven't heard that many bad things about it. Bike sharing companies seem to do OK around the world too.

umbrellas in Japan are for free at many shopping malls and restaurants, just lying around in holders until someone needs one. pick it up at one place, put it down in another when the rain stopped. such a nice system.

For bicycle sharing schemes, yes, for many other projects/companies, NO.

There are lots meaningless 'sharing economy' projects out there are for the solo purpose of getting cheap VC money. The whole 'sharing economy' term is just an convenient slogan used to sell their meaningless & never profitable project. The most stupid one I've ever seen is the the shared power bank rubbish. You can buy a brand name highly reliable power bank from jd.com for $7, if that is too expensive, jd.com has $3 power bank available as well. Yet, people still started numerous shared power bank companies asking for $15 deposit to rent their dirty & ugly power bank for a fee.

That being said, it does offer some good entertainments for the public - Wang Sicong, the only child of the richest Chinese promised to eat poo should such power bank sharing schemes can end up being successful.

Does JD deliver the power bank, charged and ready to use, to the cafe within two minutes of your order? If not, your comparison is totally irrelevant and misses the point of the service.

Here is an interesting video from a Westerner living in China about bike sharing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi9G1jLUeUk

nothing lasts in china, even communism

To be fair, communism doesn't last anywhere.

To be fair, it's never been tried. At the time the only country that could do it was Germany. Now, most of the Western world would probably work. China couldn't meet the requirements so they hacked the ideas to fit an agrarian system and nearly killed them selves in the process. Perhaps they should try now.

Russia by the 1980s was a industrialized nation, and no, it continued to not work.

They already had the old hacked institutions from the bolshevik. Russia never tried reform. China has a history of changing policy.

I'm not saying this will work. In fact I don't think it will. I'm just saying if anyone want to try it and have the will to do it, it could be China.

Communism wouldn't work in Germany, either, unless by "work" you mean turn the country into Venezuela without the oil.

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