Hacker News Reader

Comment by Judgmentality | Hacker News Reader

I thought the #deleteuber campaign was somewhat successful? My understanding is a series of unfortunate events, largely kicked off by that campaign, ultimately led to Kalanick's downfall.

http://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-uber-takedown...

View on HN

Kalanick is still a very successful founder - not that I necessarily think he should be emulated.

Regardless of what you think of Uber, Travis Kalanick started a very large company, and Uber is as entrenched as ever.

So perhaps this actually is evidence in favor of the parent comment. Did Uber really suffer much at all? Or did they just reshuffle management, pay Kalanick billions to (kind of) leave, and continued business as usual?

> continued business as usual?

Citations? I haven't really heard about them pulling any shenanigans under the new CEO's watch.

In all fairness, Uber's many shenanigans

1. Happened a lot over the early do or die periods of entering new markets. 2. Continued over a much longer period of time than Travis has been gone. 3. Happened while the company was being considered a darling and was not being critically scrutinized over every move it made.

Shenanigans are truly shenanigans only once the outside world gets to know about it. Paradox of sorts really.

Continuing business as usual in the context of the parent's comment though is less about shenanigans and more about the operating model probably. Drivers are still being duped. Earth scorching ride subsidization tactics are still very much in play. Although the CEO is gone and there may be some activity happening within the company to undo toxic cultures, the overall business has not truly changed. And the overall business really ought to change.

In technical terms, I think there is the economical vacuum present with the entrenched taxi business, which nature abhored hard enough that someone came along and "shot the moon" so to speak, by exploring business models on a large enough scale that the validation could occur before regulation could even understand the disruption, let alone protect innocent bystanders from the inevitable downsides.

Take for instance the case in michigan, where the Uber driver had a psychotic episode, and killed the people that were hiring him, over multiple rides over multiple hours, simply because he was the nearest driver. Uber had no infrastructure to locate a driver, or assist law enforcement in any meaningful, real time manner. Imagine if that happened in 2018, and the lack of critical infrastructure was laid that bare by a multi billion dollar tech company testing out it's latest business tweak.

In some ways, it's not much different from an organized crime structure. The main reason organized crime is able to get away with all of their crime for long enough to even establish itself is good legal representation, to help stay ahead of their regulators.

Didn't the traffic accident with the obviously not-watching safety driver happen under the new CEO's watch ?

Not every tragedy is a shenanigan? I seem to recall reading that the self-driving program started before his time, and that that the poor implementation was a result of the folks in that division hastily trying to impress the higher-ups -- not a result of something the CEO condoned. IIRC they stopped their testing after the incident. Not sure how you can claim he was having Uber pull shenanigans here.

#deleteuber had pretty much gone away until Susan Fowler post pointed out real problems which led to all the changes at Uber.

From the article you pointed at:

By mid-February, #deleteuber had slowed to a trickle and Uber's top executives were exhausted. Kalanick and Michael booked their trip to Malibu for what was supposed to be a weekend of rest and recovery. Instead, Kalanick was reading Fowler's post.. [which] had already gone viral.

There were a lot of problems at Uber beyond #deletuber. He probably would have gone anyway.

At least with Uber there are real & mainstream alternatives.

Not using Facebook, or really any social media, has always been a viable alternative.

That’s not really how the word “alternative” is typically used. “Mangoes” are not a good “ground beef alternative.”

You wouldn't say that if you'd tried my delicious mango lasagne

That actually sounds like it could be really good, especially with unripe mangoes.

Depends on where you live. In Denmark every social event, both public and private gatherings is organized through Facebook.

You’re not forced to be on Facebook but if you’re not then you’re the one person people will always need to do extra work to invite. And that’s for friends, without Facebook you won’t even hear about public events until after they have happened.

Don’t get me wrong, we always invite the two guys without Facebook, but I know both of them feel a little shitty about having to be extra trouble.

Eventually people will leave, and someone have to take the first step, but that’s a really shitty step. The reason I say eventually, is because nobody uses Facebook for anything but events, I haven’t used messenger since they forced you to use the app and I’m not the only one and when I look at my news feed none of my close friends (or myself) have posted anything since New Years.

So Facebook have become a satellite network we check for events, and that’s one step from being obsolete.

This is anecdotal of course, but it is true for both my and my wife’s friend circles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com