Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me
locusmag.com
locusmag.com
I think if you wanted to build more services like this, you'd have to go this approach: instead of building an above-board app that uses the Uber API and has developer info on file with Apple and Google, anonymously develop a tool for jailbroken phones that injects itself into the Uber app and monitors requests. Instead of building a website that scrapes Amazon centrally, build a browser extension with permissions on amazon.com. And so forth.
The arms-length approach of meta apps helps here, because then individual ride-sharing coops and bookstores get plausible deniability. They're not telling you to use the app, it's a shadowy foreign group who decided to link to them.
Users jailbreaking their device and getting a specific app from a non-official/non-preinstalled app store is not convenient.
I don't understand what you mean. Is there a more moral alternative to Netflix and Spotify?
It seems to me that Netflix and Spotify combine convenience and morality (or at least, legality), showing that the combination trumps free (pirated)?
Yes. If I had to rank the options in order of morality, they would go like this: Buy DRM free content > Abstain from consuming content > Pirate the content >>> Pay for DRMed content.
Supporting DRM means supporting a world where you have to pay rent and seek permission from corporate overlords to use your own devices in the way you wish.
"Supporting DRM means supporting a world where you have to pay rent and seek permission from corporate overlords to use your own devices in the way you wish"
No. It means paying content creators for access to their content on my device. I'm using my device however I like, I just don't get access to the hard work of others on exactly my terms all of the time.
And that's ok.
And what if those sales were DRMed content?
I meant more that Netflix and Spotify took a big chunk out of the pirate market. Piracy is cheaper so that can't be it, buying was more moral but people still pirated so morality can't be it.
I (and many others) believe that convenience is the important factor here. Piracy was much more convenient than the legal options 10-20 years ago. Netflix, iTunes, Spotify etc are much more convenient than piracy so users migrated to it.
The exceptions, including successful projects like GNU and Linux, tend to be led by rather unique individuals, like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvals, who are almost religiously zealous about their mission, and they maintain their commitment year after year, and decade after decade, without any personal profit motive.
Barring these exceptions, Capitalism seems to be the "least-worst solution" to this problem that human civilization has evolved over millennia, so far.
Email, the Web, and Usenet were all created before the modal HN user was born. Of those three, Usenet is basically not a going concern (beyond paid binary newsgroups for piracy, honestly). The Web is increasingly siloed off. What federation there is exists largely thanks to commercial CDNs and peering, not user-facing federation that benefits user freedom.
I'm not sure IRC was ever motivated as a federated model. It's true users can run an IRC server, but the main advantage of IRS compared to previous attempts at multi-user chatting (whether asynchronous like BBSes or synchronous like early chat platforms) was that it allowed confederation of servers into server networks. But also my impression is certainly that IRC is moribund with many long-time users having pivoted to Slack or Discord, both centralized.
Rather, where federation is growing, it's largely recent, fringe experiments. That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, let a thousand flowers bloom. Mastodon might end up working out for some definition of working out. I doubt PeerTube will.
But in any case, it's more accurate to say that some of the early internet was built on decentralized platforms, some of which were federated, and that recently some tech enthusiasts have recently written some interesting, maybe promising federated platforms. There is definitely not a trend toward federation.
>[...] away from Usenet towards unfederated forums like this one.
We're actually one step beyond that already, the era of forums is behind us, now people open a Facebook page or Subreddit when they want to create a community around a given topic instead of powering up a new PHPBB instance like they might have 15 years ago. Forums like HN are getting increasingly niche.
I don't like this trend but I think it makes complete sense. Centralized solutions offer generally better user experience (you don't have to monitor 10 different websites or watch your emails for notifications, you don't have to create dozen of accounts etc...), they're easier to develop, easier to maintain and, perhaps critically, easier to monetize.
These days I only see the cryptocurrency communities betting on a decentralized future (instead of merely wishing for it without much hope like I do).
Except this is not just a problem with the owners (and to some extent you are wrong, there are CEOs motivated by that, they still by and large fail).
Because ...
There are no workers motivated like that either. People do not want this.
In the vast majority of businesses, the CEO is the only one that cares about anything more than next month's pay check. Even if there are a few exceptions among the employees they remain big exceptions.
This sort of business can't work unless CEO and everybody else cares about the mission of the company. And there are no such people.
I left Google when I became disillusioned (when my own depression became too overwhelming - I left rather than be put on a PIP). Facebook seemed like a place where I could regain my purpose, but instead the illusion was shattered. I've let myself be taken in by that illusion since, but the reality is that the people who offer that illusion are predators, and should be treated with the suspicion that that entails.
There's a real lack of thinking about what the free market should actually mean. It's almost always couched in industrial era terms when it does come up, esp in relation to Uber and the gig economy. "Labour" has a very different meaning now to what it meant back in the 1800s.
Good episode of South Park talks about this, "The Human CentiPad". Basically the boys fall foul of an Apple agreement and something bad happens. Really bad.
"Free and open source alternative to Uber/Lyft connecting passengers and drivers. LibreTaxi makes ridesharing affordable by getting rid of the third party between passengers and drivers. Negotiate the price before the ride is confirmed, pay cash upon arrival. 1-minute hiring for all drivers." https://libretaxi.org/
I have to say, though, that not having to negotiate a price is a key benefit of Uber. The price is the price, no quibbling, no bait and switch.
Similarly, paying by cash feels like a step back.
Without some form of strong niche, it's going to be tough to break through the market. Perhaps an app like LibreTaxi can go directly to governments and get funding there.
You guys are so funny! Afraid of negotiating a price? Really?
Perhaps it's time we became grown ups?
To me uber is just an extension of the habit of calling your parents to pick you up after soccer practise.
Also soon there won't be any cash at all, and so no anonymity in any financial transaction, thanks for promoting that!
I'm not afraid of it - I'm just at a disadvantage in terms of information. When I fly into some random city where I don't know anything about what a normal taxi fare is I can't negotiate can I?
It's also just something I don't want to do - I don't want to have a stand-up argument with someone about money, thanks. I also don't want to unblock a toilet but that doesn't mean I'm somehow afraid of it.
But some people are afraid of a negotiation, yes. A vulnerable person, stuck somewhere alone in the dark getting into a belligerent argument with a taxi driver could be an extremely frightening experience.
Taxis also requires you to carry physical cash, which again makes you vulnerable - to robbery. And again that probably is much more of a concern to people more vulnerable than you.
> To me uber is just an extension of the habit of calling your parents to pick you up after soccer practise.
Good? That was a great system when I was a child. It was safe, friendly and didn't involve any cash. If we can replicate the same great system for independent adults that's fantastic.
That's a bit stone age. Here in Scandinavia I never take cash when I go to one of the other countries, all the taxis take plastic.
In the US, though, the problem isn't a shortage of readers. It's partly that instead of drivers swiping cards, there are often car-installed readers in the passenger area, which are a pain to fix when drunk or angry riders break them. But it's largely a tax/overhead scheme, where drivers say their reader is broken so that they can get cash and underreport fares.
In many places they're required to inform passengers in advance when they can't take plastic, but that doesn't mean they actually do so - and the problem was even worse before ubiquitous cell phones enabled "I'll stay here and we'll call the cops". Even with most taxi companies launching their own ride-hail apps, a significant selling point of Uber is avoiding common issues like drivers demanding cash or inflating costs with longer routes.
Why not? It's not so bad. I prefer to negotiate my own contracts. To rely on some third party to do so is infantilizing.
If I got into the habit of avoiding stuff like that, I wouldn't be able to travel and live like a local. You know when I travel it's sans apps. I use paper maps road signs and no GPS, I take local cabs, even collective cabs. It's never been a problem, and asking people for help has led to much better travel experiences.
I guess you could say I prefer full contact travel.
> Good? That was a great system when I was a child. It was safe, friendly and didn't involve any cash. If we can replicate the same great system for independent adults that's fantastic.
Except that now the 'parent' isn't a benevolent person with your best interests at heart, it's uber. Why hand all that power over to an unelected, unethical company?
And like i said above, such a system is inherently paternalistic, and infantilizes everyone.
(I'm not attacking you personally of course, it's just that your post perfectly exemplifies an attitude that I have a passionate counterargument for.)
I just want to get from A to B with as little hassle as possible so I can concentrate on things I think actually matter.
I'm just advocating for the full contact approach to living which I think is being subtly eroded by disney, cruises, resorts, cashless restaurants and uber and so on.
I don't know if you read travel writing, but imagine trying to read a good travel writer like Paul Theroux, except by first transposing everything into the mediated realm.
Instead of taking a cab and then staying at a small local hotel and eating at a market stall what if the writer took an uber then stayed in a resort and ate at the buffet?
I cherish those possibilities, like I cherish freedom.
I may not exercise my full freedom every day, but I do cherish it.
Fine, Uber isn't for you but other people's preference for that style of transaction has nothing to do with infantilisation.
This may be a significant part of why other people are disagreeing with you.
Pre-Uber, I had bad experiences with cabs perhaps 20% of the time. Mostly it was just unreasonable fare demands made after promising something else, but it did escalate to some light stalking and threats of physical violence. (And for whatever it matters, I'm a largish guy and still had that experience.) The vast majority of those experiences were with licensed taxis (or in the worst case, a fake licensed taxi) in America.
I'm not at all upset by bartering, asking for help, or struggling with language gaps. I actually agree with you that we've lost something due to Yelp reviews, online bookings, and the larger move to impersonal and intermediated travel. I've had friends be genuinely surprised when I suggested that we skip Yelp while traveling and just wander until someplace looks interesting.
But taxis? At best, the mechanical experience is arriving where I'm going. At worst it's a conflict far worse than I can even imagine having in a restaurant or shop. The only personal touch is talking to the driver (or a fellow passenger), and ironically I've actually had more engaging conversations with Uber drivers than with drivers in traditional taxis.
Personal transactions, based on reputation and persuasion and goods-on-hand, predate agriculture and settled habitation. In fact, they predate humanity by quite a bit. Definitions of civilization vary, but all of them that I know involve sedentary agriculture, written communication, and social stratification or organized government. Pretty much all of that represents a move away from face-to-face dealing by equals.
I can certainly believe that civilization effectively sacrifices positive human interactions and free association in the name of reliability and (sometimes) efficiency. And I'm very open to the idea that a society full of Homeowner's Associations and impossible-to-override checklists is abandoning normal human interaction for no real benefit.
But I think that's hard to address without conceding that this is part of the same process as calling the cops instead of starting a fistfight; civilization is in large part the process of adding more intermediaries to our interactions.
* An argument that a cashless society will remove all anonymity in financial transactions.
1) "My time is more important to me than haggling over a price with a shopkeeper." Or, "I don't find the process of bargaining interesting, and I'd rather save that time and energy for other creative or human-connection type activities."
2) "Avoiding the time/inconvenience overhead of dealing with cash and change holds more utility to me than the promise of anonymity, and the credit card rewards are a plus."
I actually don't use taxis/Uber/Lyft all that much when I travel. If there are good transit options, I usually do that. Or I just walk around a city. However, when I do need to, making the ride higher friction, requiring me to have local currency, potentially being overcharged, etc. are not really a source of exciting travel experiences for me.
I'm somewhat with you on disneyfication and I don't do cruises, rarely go to a resort, and haven't been to a Disney theme park in many decades. But taxi rides seem an odd hill to die on with respect to this question.
You could say that insisting that you have the source code to all the software you use also seems like and 'odd hill to die on' but I think now the general public is just starting to realise that RMS may have been on to something.
All of the risk is not in taxi fare negotiation, nor is that the source of all face-to-face interactions with other people. Seems like you're trying to argue a mountain out of a mole hill.
But avoiding an argument about price and then having to hand over cash is a large part of why I use Uber...
Do they have a process for dealing with abusive users/drivers? E.g. if someone gets enough complaints can they get banned from the platform, or is that not possible by design?
Uber solves this by automating the payments. If you pay cash then there is no guarantee you'll get paid.
For example, he says "Uber...allows them to illegally discriminate against people with disabilities" Does he really not know the long history of cab drivers not stopping for black passengers? This has been frontpage news on multiple occasions, most famously with Danny Glover. Multiple friends have told me how much Uber/Lyft have improved this situation.
Meanwhile, Doctorow's meta platform idea literally steals revenue from people who have added tremendous value not only at time of transaction but after via the reputational system and other customer service functions. Nevermind that it would be trivial for Uber to squash this via cancellation fees and driver derankings.
If you want to form a co-op app, go for it. But find a better thought leader than Doctorow.
> Uber (and its Peter-Thiel-backed rival Lyft) are not good companies. They’re not forces for good. But the system they killed? Also not good.
I felt Doctorow's piece addressed the nuance of Uber bringing both improvements and regressions.
Geolocation to match you with the local collective and an API to send the booking request to them (unlike Uber they want to work with metasearch companies). Done. Let the collectives handle the certification, pricing and local routing. (I know someone who founded a business effectively doing meta-search for a ride with local minicab companies via nationwide telephone enquiries, so it's not like the basic idea wasn't possible even with yesterday's technology).
Trouble is, for the most part these cooperatives don't exist. Which makes the meta-app less useful than Uber in most parts of the world. Uber has every incentive to discourage people from using a meta-app as their first port of call for ridesearch, and so even if their TOC were completely unenforceable they'd just find ways of blocking a meta-app from accessing Uber data. Blocking people and drivers who are obviously hacking Uber's service to co-locate each other, not paying for the ride via Uber but both ending up in the destination anyway is even easier. A non-profit meta-app isn't going to win an arms race with a multibillion dollar enterprise whose business depends on being a more reliable way of booking rides. Legal restrictions on reverse engineering their software isn't their moat.
The problem is that Austin is an edge case. Drivers got together and formed it and raised money to build the app and set up a vetting process the city govt approved because they'd lose their livelihood if it didn't exist. RideAustin doesn't exist in most other cities because drivers and passengers aren't really set up for collective action, particularly not against the company sending them rides, the costs of getting the service working aren't trivial and any nascent startup would have the problem that Uber was more recognised (and would likely try to kill their app stone dead by subsidising Uber rides with VC money). If you want more local cooperatives, you need to bring down the software development and vetting costs to run a service like RideAustin, not reverse engineer Uber's iPhone app. Or lobby more local governments to find reasons to bar Uber and Lyft from more city centres. And the market will see more cooperatives happen organically if/when Uber tries to squeeze more profit out of rides...
He has it exactly backwards. Taxicabs would routinely racially profile passengers.
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/04/nyregion/danny-glover-say...
All this overhead needs to be put in place without any direct income from riders. Either it come's in the form of a service that co-ops subscribe to and pay for or it comes in the form of a collective formed of individuals already in the co-op. Whatever the formation, it's activity that needs funding from the drivers.
This "meta" layer is then ready for abuse. Once the drivers are connected to this top-level coordinating layer the individual co-op layers become mere middle-men and are ripe for cutting out. Then we just get back to Uber.
It would be interesting to learn ideas how such a meta system could be created while limiting the overhead costs levied on the co-ops and retaining a decentralized cooperative system that allows drivers (and the higher layer workers) to retain their power.
If you distribute the authority in the system you decentralize the power structures that produce hostile actors like the brass of Uber and Lyft. Nothing says each city can't have its own app and own driver cooper so long as my app from my city can speak your cities language when I'm there.
I understand that this example is just an illustration of the spirit of the article and doesn't represent Cory's argument, but I feel that the "felony contempt-of-business-model" is only one pillar in the structure, rather than the whole thing.
After investors decide it's a sure way to lose money, it may happen.
It might be a nitpick, but if a $10 ride already feels cheap and the driver only gets $7, then to some extent the driver is part of the chain of people subsidising the ride.
That's almost certainly true in many cases. I don't know if it's some drivers or most drivers, but it's almost certainly fair to say that many drivers underestimate the cost they're incurring by driving for Uber/Lyft. (Or they understand the costs but don't feel they have a choice because they need the cash in hand today and they'll deal with getting new tires next year.)
Wow, that seems especially evil.
It shouldn't be surprising that companies will do this if they can. There was an episode of Doctor Who not too long ago where employees on a space station had to buy oxygen from the company store.
Silicon Valley's technical skills and ethos are good at discovering disruptive business models. It is incredibly hard to pivot operations at scale until you get the market properly sorted out. Investors would love to believe that this also imploes a moat for replicating and administrating the system... but there is no reason one flows from the other.
Of course, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair
market reasoning, market reasoning, market reasoning, pitch an idea and then forget about market reasoning.
How much rent would one of those apps be allowed to seek? Or would they just be run out of benevolence?
But what would happen if such a technique were to become legal and ubiquitous?
Suddenly, no one wants to invest in a company that requires significant capital, because they know that as soon as the company becomes successful enough to become a target, there will be other companies that will swoop in and attempt to exploit its technology so they themselves don't need to invest significant capital.
The damage to the market would be severe.
That said, as a fan of distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism I am also a huge fan of cooperatives, and I think worker-owned co-ops can be successful in the ride-sharing space without needing to resort to such tactics.
But this is the point: the reason Uber is successful isn't particularly because of their technical excellence or innovation, it's because they've used massive amounts of capital to very knowingly buy the market.
This is an example of one of the nefarious sides of capitalism -- a flaw -- not a celebration of how great it is at solving problems (which is genuinely is in a lot of circumstances).
If Uber didn't have as much capital, smaller distributed co-ops may well have prospered.
Much of that requires capital, and the asset you end up with after investing that capital is a large user/subscriber base, which can lead to other competitive advantages. It is true that having a large user/subscriber base does not imply technical excellence or innovation, but it is a business asset nonetheless.
But if that asset can be easily siphoned off, then there is less of an incentive to build it out to begin with.
Then why didn't they until Uber came around?
1. Uber/Lyft went to the state to get the regulations overturned in a bit of venue shopping. They don't have to do fingerprinting. Happens a lot around here.
2. He failed to mention Austin Taxi Co-op. Some old hippies got together and helped form a normal Taxi company but made it owned by the drivers. It has an adequate but clunky app that is slowly getting better. They grabbed about 2/3s of the regular taxi drivers.
We won't really know how the ride-share market plays out until the subsidy goes away. It reminds me of when Standard Oil would go into town, undercut the local gas station until it fold, and then recoup the cost by raising prices. It is one of the things that the Antitrust laws were specifically designed to stop.
Meeting the needs of Austinites is a more sustainable business because you don't need to handle the burst capacity.
Somehow the market of people who are flying around all the time seems to get a disproportionate amount of attention from marketers who make catalogs full of stuff like:
https://www.coolthings.com/motorized-monocycle-looks-fun/
Fortunately the "yellow cab" model works just fine at the airport where people show up at predictable times. I did not grow up with the habit of taking cabs, and I've never taken one in NYC, but I learned at some point that if I didn't have a better plan to get away from the airport such as
http://web.mta.info/mta/airtrain.htm
I could walk up to the taxi stand and be on my way and yeah it is kindof expensive... But often about the same or less then I'd spend on parking alone for a rental car in a congested city.
On the way back I learned I could go to the front desk of the hotel and have a cab ready for me when I want to go at 4am or whenever I need to catch an early flight.
In general though I don't use Uber/Lyft or cabs all that much when I travel (which is frequently). But, anecdotally, a lot of people seem to have gotten into the habit of pulling their phone out of their pocket whenever they need to go more than a couple of blocks.
What Uber provides, and what Cory's proposal piggybacks on, is trust: just like when you ask for a Big Mac, you know more or less what you're getting when you're matched an Uber driver with 4.8 starts, yet the same is not true for some other ridesharing app you've never heard of.
But that also backfires on his argument about Uber's rates and goal of replacing it; they can charge an higher rate because they provide a service that others don't - a reasonably consistent experience worldwide - and one can't get rid of it without harming the meta-app itself.
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/7245278?co=GENIE.Plat...
They also do meta search against other modes too, like walking, bicycling, and public transit.
Co-opt
I mean, I think Doctorow's idea is that users search on Google Play for 'uber' and not only does 'uber' appear in the results, but so does 'meta-uber'
That doubt aside, I mostly agree with this.
Drivers probably signed up again with Lyft/Uber simply because these apps had again a significant volume of business to offer.
Also, I saw on reddit that RideAustin had closed its onboarding office, which seems like the best way to send drivers to their competitors.
http://austin.culturemap.com/news/innovation/07-27-17-ride-s...
how could the apps on both the driver's and passenger's phones both reliably generate the same globally unique code?
So, meta-uber would need to embed within itself a hacked copy of the actual uber app, or just very carefully mimic calls to Uber's backend somehow.
Or meta-uber would need to somehow have the permission to run and inject data into an authentically installed instance of the Uber app (not quite sure if or how, say, the Android platform's security model would allow this.)
Hmmm.