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Comment by lr | Hacker News Reader

Can we please stop referring to these services as "sharing"? Lyft actually started as a company that coordinated the sharing of rides, i.e., no money was involved. But the "sharing" pretense has long since past for all of these companies.

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Right? It's nonsense. A grocery store isn't "food sharing", and a barber isn't "hair cut sharing". It's one party paying another for a product/service. Uber/Lyft's killer feature is the app pairing those two parties. But no one is "sharing".

google.com/search?q=buy+a+share+of+a+cow

We need a new word for "taxi companies with cute apps, unsustainable pricing/wages and lots of Silicon Valley venture capital propping them up" to distinguish them from old-school taxi companies if we're gonna quit saying "rideshare".

Any suggestions?

The dot-cab bubble?

I prefer unlicensed taxis.

While this is accurate, I think the subtext of it conflicts with the common anecdotal claims (including mine) far preferring Uber over actual licensed taxis.

"hired car" // been in use for decades

"ride for hire"

"car for hire"

"fee for service"

Macro-cab firms.

gig cabs

You know what it's caled when a bunch of people put up capital or labor in exchange for a portion of the retrun from coordinated activity. It's called buying a share -- from adventurers to publicly traded corporations.

Lyft isn't ride sharing because people aren't dividing up cars to rides, not because money is involved. Car2Go/Flexcar are car sharing. Carpooling is ride-sharing.

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