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Comment by formalsystem | Hacker News Reader

I went out to grab a burger last night and there was a huge line of Uber Eats drivers and they were waiting for what seemed like a long time especially considering how little they're paid.

Is there any reason why an OSS Uber competitor wouldn't be tractable? Drivers and passengers can pay a small booking fee which would go towards maintaining server costs. Client app can be really bare bones and I believe people would be willing to use it if it's way cheaper. So many scammy people talking about decentralized computing but this seems like a low hanging fruit which gives gig workers their autonomy back.

Same question for all gig worker apps.

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I have seen this question come up a lot recently when food ordering apps are on hacker news (disclaimer: I work for one of "those companies").

My answer is this: Respectfully, if you think creating & running a platform like DoorDash is not that complicated, I say knock yourself out. Show us the low-fee, "non-exploitative", reliable, "OSS" solution. There's even white-label delivery platforms[1] (you bring your own fleet) that could get you started dispatching orders right away. To be honest I'm not sure what you mean by "OSS" here as the issue is not proprietary software but the digital and physical infrastructure, payment processing, fraud prevention, merchant recruitment etc. as well as the very large support staff.

I would love to see better and better solutions to the "convenient, cheap, fair-to-couriers, fair-to-restaurants food delivery challenge." I think you'll find it's a more difficult problem than it seems at first blush.

1: https://onfleet.com for example

Perhaps there hasn't been interest in building such an app for food delivery yet, but there's definitely been for ridesharing, see the various replacements that arose in Austin after Uber and Lyft were banned there. The most difficult problem would seem to be a lack of will and incentive, at the moment.

i thought about this recently too. the technological complexities are not trivial, but they're dwarfed by the operational, marketing, and regulatory ones. for instance, who handles crimes like assault or theft between the various parties? who sets up payments and issues refunds?

i'd love to organize/contribute to something like this, but it has some serious hurdles to think through.

Even the technical challenges are significant. It's one thing to make an app, it's another thing to have a 24/7, global, distributed application with lots of money running through it. You'll need site-reliability teams to handle maintenance issues and a significant number of developers on staff. If there's some new law, regulation, or bug which requires changes to your system it needs to be done NOW, not whenever someone gets around to it.

>who handles crimes like assault or theft between the various parties? who sets up payments and issues refunds?

Lawyers. You're going to need a lot of lawyers.

yes, i didn't mean to imply that the technical challenges weren't substantial. real-time matching and routing are also not trivial.

Would be cool to have an open protocol where anyone can make an app to hook people up P2P.

> who handles crimes like assault or theft between the various parties?

If it's P2P, then the same as any other P2P transaction. If I pay a random dude to deliver my lunch, and he assaults me, this is handled by the local police. It's a risk I'm willing to take if I choose to trust him. A distributed trust system w/ reviews will help make things safer.

I feel like sometimes we seek 100% safety in a world where that's not possible, and when it DOES happen we point fingers. With a middleman like Uber we can point fingers more easily, but ultimately we're responsible for ourselves.

> who sets up payments and issues refunds?

There are public escrow services such as escrow.com that could be integrated. And there's always cryptocurrency.

i like p2p as the default, but i'm not as confident that the liabilities go away so easily with that configuration.

totally agree that the world is full of risks and sometimes we just have to accept them.

escrow in some form would likely be necessary, but the fees of escrow.com are prohibitive for this use case.

instead of pricing being controlled by the marketplace, it'd be cool if it were more like a trading platform where riders bid for rides and drivers offer rides (with considerations for starting point, distance, and trip time).

Call me a cynic, but I'll just let Doordash take the overhead fees if it means I can avoid a call to the police and an escrow service for a $15 burrito.

Best of luck on your OSS endevor.

The operations are non-trivial. UberEats, DoorDash, GrubHub et al all have full-time operations personnel in nearly every market they operate. Operationalizing this requires things like fraud/risk protection, order defect minimization, courier safety, refunds/chargeback adjudication etc.

Not to say that this CANNOT be done in a decentralized, OSS way — but it's not just a CRUD app.

How do you prevent your platform turning into a tool for money laundering/extracting cash from stolen credit cards?

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