It's fascinating how the subsistence wage is simultaneously too low for workers and too high corporations.
Wrong. Turns out, people aren't willing to pay that much for people to clean up their streets - only $1-5 on average per job. Yet it takes an hour to clean the street sometimes. That is an abysmal hourly wage, how can you expect desperate impoverished single mothers trying to work 3 jobs to live off of this?? Clean Streets ought to give a living wage and full health benefits to anyone who signs up. Oh, except... just one problem... the 1% transaction fee isn't enough to fund that, and jacking up pricing just means people stop using the app altogether.
So yes, in theory this app is great - if you can restrict its use to only non-desperate people. But desperate people would nevertheless try to make a living on it, and you would get lambasted by human rights activists for exploiting the poor. Sigh, I wish there were a way for things like this to exist.
We (society) have traditionally massively underpaid people who are time rich and cash poor, but who have basic life necessities provided outside of their income - teenagers, most obviously, but historically the same applied to middle-class married women (look up "working for pin money").
But that involved discrimination - either only offering these jobs to people who were not relying on them for basic life necessities, or paying people who were actually trying to make a living much more (at least minimum wage, and in some cases far more). That discrimination has usually been illegal, but paying a local teenager a few dollars to mow your lawn (when you would pay a much more substantial fee to a proper lawn-care firm) is the sort of informal small-scale law-breaking that no enforcement body would ever bother with.
But you can't, intrinsically, aggregate this sort of thing. That takes the human being out of the loop, which means there is no one to discriminate. It makes the law-breaking large-scale and formal, rather than small-scale and informal. This happens to all sorts of things - there are plenty of informal payments made to people in exchange for small amounts of their time (lots of us have paid a bit more than the fuel costs for a friend to give us a lift to the airport), but when this starts to scale up (ie Uber), you have to turn it into formal business and employment arrangements, and that changes the nature of the relationship. You can't scale it up without changing it in kind.
I know that a lot of people on HN don't like the idea that there are some things that can only be done one-to-one, personally, and informally, and therefore cannot be automated, done many-to-many, impersonally, and formally. But there are.
For the specific case, surely the solution is to assess how long the job will take, check the minimum wage or living wage, and then aggregate multiple bounties until there's enough to pay for the job to be done.
As for health benefits, the likely approach is something like how SAG health benefits work - you pay a percentage of your income into the plan; if you earn more than $X per year, then you get health benefits. Someone should organise this across all "gig" jobs and employers can then require people working gig jobs to sign up for this (and deduct the percentage at source). That someone would be a labor union, of course.
Right, but were they the original target demographic? Just because a platform gets commandeered by desperate people doesn't mean the platform was originally designed to support them.
Uber even has financing options to help drivers buy cars specifically for this job. What type of person buys an entire car to accomplish side hustle or to dally around? The fact that Uber accomodates such a large investment into being a driver speaks towards what their "target demographic" is.
edit: please don't ever ask me the related dystopian business model generator.
In a difference landscape the Uber model might be sustainable, but the middle class is being completely gutted. California especially is headed toward a Hawaii-esque bifurcated economy, comprised of a wealthy minority and a massive underclass of service-industry people catering toward their every want and need.