Hacker News Reader

> The challenge from the company's perspective is that historically, people game the system and tragedy of commons scenarios can quickly become prevalent.

It drives me crazy that when we talk about gig workers acting in their best interest, it's "gaming the system" but when companies like Uber operate (read: manipulates) a market in their best interests, it's just SOP.

> I'm sure when Uber rolls out these new programs designed to make driver life better, people will find some way to criticize them

This is essentially a captive market and Uber's best interests are often not aligned with that of the drivers, as you perfectly detail above. As long as that remains true, there is always going to be valid criticism against this kind of model.

Isn't that always the case? You are just treated worse when you have less money.

How's one perceived if high earner hires professional help to take advantage of every loop hole in the system and how's one perceived if they take advantage of a loop hole in the system with say food stamps. Neither is breaking the law.

It’s not about having less money. If I’m going into town from the burbs, I have the money to pay Uber and I’m willing to pay more for one. But there are not that many people in the burbs that need to use ridesharing.

I might be poorer in the inner city. But my rides are going to be a shorter distance and there are more people.

I think you're misinterpreting the parent comment. By "gaming the system" and "tragedy of the commons" they mean that features they release to help can hurt the drivers and the passengers. Tragedy of the commons is when people individually following their self interests make themselves worse off.

Eg, if you aren't careful with heat maps, drivers flock to the busy area and then can't get enough fares and passengers elsewhere can't get drivers.

But the “solution” to that potential problem arising cannot be limiting the information that drivers get. At least not as long as Uber also wants to treat their drivers as independent contractors.

The parent comment you are replying to is acknowledges this, validates what you are saying, and even goes as far as to say that "Insiders legitimately want drivers to have flexibility without fear of penalties, and there are some major projects in the works to try to make things better for drivers"

Maybe you disagree that they are actually trying but, at least according to this comment chain, everyone at uber agrees with you.

Totally disagree with you. The parent you are referring to is framing the debate desingenously. Uber, and Uber insiders, are free to ponder all the intricacies and challenges of running Uber in its current form. As long as they recognize that drivers are not in practice independent contractors, with all ensuing legal consequences.

If they still insist on saying drivers are independant contractors, none of their whining about "tragedy of the commons" is anybody's business. Just provide information to market participants.

> If they still insist on saying drivers are independant contractors, none of their whining about "tragedy of the commons" is anybody's business

You're confusing things a bit. Uber itself doesn't "whine" about tragedy of the commons, the other stakeholders (drivers and riders) are the ones who do.

Also, for everyone going on about how Uber doesn't provide info upfront, and parroting the old drivers-should-be-employees clueless hot take, perhaps they missed this other recent article[0]:

> The company says the new feature provides drivers with more transparency. They [drivers] see more details of a prospective ride before accepting it, such as the fare and pick-up and drop-off locations, which is something drivers say they’ve been asking for. In the past, most drivers wouldn’t receive this information until after they accepted a ride.

So yes, Uber knows what drivers want and it wants to provide it to them, and it obviously has a vested interest in avoiding scenarios where drivers cannibalize themselves to death. What's not obvious to y'all outsiders is that Uber has to figure out all of the unspoken complexity and cleverness required to enable changes like this to be rolled out in a way that basically looks like what all the armchair analysts were saying it should have been done, without running into the previously known risks of rolling out such a thing. And even then, there's always some cherrypicky over-simplified scenario to bitch about (as the very article I linked to does).

Everyone who keeps making statements that "Uber wants drivers to be employees it can rip off" fundamentally do not understand what they are talking about. As an insider, I don't owe it to anyone to "argue" with them. I can just inform them that I've heard from many other insiders that they think independent contractor status is a good thing (i.e. McDonalds FTE already exists and more options on top of that are always a good thing), that the implementation still has room for improvement, and that they want to make it better.

[0] https://themarkup.org/working-for-an-algorithm/2022/03/01/se...

Wait, they are hiding the route for the benefit of all? Uber doesn't want the driver to know how far they have to travel but forced them to take a route after they accept.

This runs counter to the principle that more/better information makes for better markets.

Much to the chagrin of economists we do still operate in the physical world and if everyone flocks to the same space and clogs up the intersection idealized scenarios about markets don't tend to do well

A driver wants unmet demand. A heatmap of demand that ignores supply is more but not better information.

A tragedy of the commons requires a commons, a commonly owned resource. Uber is certainly not one.

If Uber gives a driver a ride at a price that's a guaranteed loss for the driver (like in the example) but never shares in that loss then none of Uber's actions are motivated by care for riders or drivers but exclusively for the bottom line.

The solution for the $5, 45min ride that comes out of the driver's pocket is to guarantee the trip price covers a profit for the driver and let the rider choose if it's worth it. But that would mean fewer trips and lower guaranteed profit for Uber.

Anything else is abuse and a lot of rationalizations to put your mind at ease.

And if you think I'm wrong, tell me you'd be OK being treated like this as a customer: never knowing what the price will be and not being able to cancel without being taxed or punished. Wait, that's more or less the taxi industry that Uber is ostensibly fixing by turning the tables and putting the drivers and the wrong end of the shit stick. So what was wrong in the past is ok now because you work for the company who affords your salary because of these practices?

> The solution for the $5, 45min ride that comes out of the driver's pocket is to guarantee the trip price covers a profit for the driver and let the rider choose if it's worth it. But that would mean fewer trips and lower guaranteed profit for Uber.

IMHO, a $5, 45 min trip should just never happen. Algos should price that properly and drivers should get more transparency so they can choose to not accept bad terms before it ever becomes about cancelations.

The absolute bottom cost of a trip should be 58.5 cents per mile, which is what the IRS allows you to deduct for driving for business purposes.

And that should be after Uber's cut, not before.

We don't need to subsidize car travel any more than it already is, especially by tricking vulnerable workers to slowly trade their asset value for cash.

That'd be having the driver earn nominally $0 per hour, which seems a bit low to me.

> The solution for the $5, 45min ride that comes out of the driver's pocket is to guarantee the trip price covers a profit for the driver and let the rider choose if it's worth it. But that would mean fewer trips and lower guaranteed profit for Uber.

I'm glad you wrote this comment, but I have a slightly different solution: Uber should just subsidize the ride. Uber brings in billions of dollars in revenue – not every trip needs to be profitable for them. (Of course, not without limits; if a driver is regularly unprofitable, Uber should stop offering them trips or fire them.)

Aren't Ubers algorithmically priced per mile / per minute, whichever is higher? Not sure how you could possible have a $5 45min ride.

I've certainly never got such a fantastic deal as a rider.

The general idea is that any business will try to optimize for revenue within the law and certain moral hang-ups (or at least the fear of moral hang-ups being captured by the press). The idea, just like with any business, is that if drivers are unhappy then they can choose another job. If enough of them do, Uber will make a change once the number of resignations start affecting the bottom line. I don't know of many companies that would change a policy just to make the driver's happy in a move that might stymie business.

> The challenge from the company's perspective is that historically, people game the system and tragedy of commons scenarios can quickly become prevalent. For example, if you show high profit heat maps, you risk drivers flocking there and the balance of service reliability dropping elsewhere.

The challenge from the company's perspective is that they operate under and sell the delusion that app magic dust makes considerations about which neighborhoods you work in and which neighborhoods you don't disappear into smoke. This isn't a tragedy of the commons, it's a bunch of people who are working hard trying to maximize their efficiency. Uber tries to thwart them through deception and punishment.

Taxis didn't work unprofitable neighborhoods, and avoided dangerous ones. It wasn't personal.

If you really want to solve the problem, you make all the drivers employees, and guarantee their hourly income when they work. Then you send them out as inefficiently as you want, but you pay for that inefficiency.

> Driver payment is mind bogglingly complicated due to regulation differences in different places.

Are you expecting us to pat Uber on the back for managing to solve the impossibly difficult problem of actually paying their workers, as if that's a unique problem no other company has ever had to solve? Come on...

If you didn't want to handle the regulatory hassle of paying people in 50 countries, you didn't have to expand to 50 countries. You chose to expand to more locations, and that means you get to deal with the consequences of being in those locations.

Yes, it's complicated to build infrastructure to dispatch and pay your workers. But, come on, as middlemen, that is literally your only job. You don't even have to do the driving part!

I might be very wrong, but in my humble opinion Uber drivers are their workers as much as iOS app developers could be considered Apple employees or Youtubers could be considered Google employees. Just because you provide a service through someone's platform doesn't mean you're automatically their worker.

I agree. They should be considered employees, and be given the same benefits as employees. However, Uber doesn't agree, it says all of its drivers are contractors. So I'll continue saying that Uber's employees aren't the ones doing the driving, at Uber's own admission.

I think you misread the comment you replied to. They were saying they’re not employees, same as content creators for YouTube or independent iOS devs.

Parent agreed with your equivalence, but not your conclusion. Your conclusion was that they were both not employees, while the parent's conclusion was that they were both employees.

The legacy taxi industry blazed the trail (at least in the US) with their own arrangements with drivers. Drivers would lease the cab by the day and receive non-binding (but useful!) dispatch instructions. And taxi companies argued they were independent contractors too.

> non-binding (but useful!) dispatch instructions

This gave the entire industry a bad reputation for not showing up. I know when I drove airport shuttles we often rescued people who had tried to get a taxi.

Precommitting to an SLA can earn more customers’ trust, but it only works when every driver is confident about coming out ahead on average. $5 was too low for that job.

Uber drivers are meant to be interchangeable cogs. I know this because I used to be an Uber driver myself.

We couldn't set our own rates. We couldn't make our own decisions about the rides we were willing to take. We didn't have our own brand. And there was no way for customers to request us specifically, even if they preferred to be driven by us. This was all by design. Uber drivers are treated as an interchangeable commodity, not as brands.

I couldn't even wait for pings within the warmth of my own home without getting a letter graded report for not having my phone in my cradle. And it's not just the cradle that was a factor. If you drove too "aggressively", or if you drove too fast, their idiotic AI would scold you (and before someone says it, yes, that functionality is turned off now, but know that it was only turned off around the time that Uber was trying to make the argument in court that Uber drivers were not employees. Also note that even thought that particular functionality is turned off, Uber still tries to micromanage drivers in many other ways, even to this day).

This isn't to say that app creators and youtubers don't have their own set of problems with the app store and youtube, they certainly do. But compared to Uber drivers, they still have a thousand times more freedom than Uber drivers.

There’s a huge difference. App developers given no ”jobs” by Apple and have to source and grow their own customer base as well as set their own rates.

Employees of a company or even contractors, generally don’t get to do this.

I'm not personally on any mission to "convert" anyone. If you don't care about an insider's perspective as a data point for informing your opinions, that's totally up to you.

I'm merely pointing out the irony of people on a forum full of programmers talking about Uber as if changes to complex systems with live SLOs can magically be done with a snap of fingers.

It doesn't seem that hard to show drivers the expected payout for a ride. They hide that information for a reason, but of course they don't say the reason is "fuck you, pay me" - they'll find a way to justify it as good for the stakeholders.

GC literally gave you a reason for that which isn't "fuck you, pay me" – if you just want to ignore that then fair but... ok?

You know, I suppose I was a bit overly reductive. Would it be more accurate to say no one wants to pay the market rate for this ride, not the rider, and not us, so we'll just lie to you through omission? If your employer didn't tell you how much they paid out for your work, would you think of them as an honest company?

How was the statement not "fuck you, pay me"?

He did give us a reason, and I'm sure he's correct to a degree, but as a former Uber driver, I don't want you to completely discount the "fuck you, pay me" attitude of Uber's management either.

For instance, collecting a "$1 safe ride fee" per passenger was a very big fuck you to the drivers. We didn't see a penny of that fee. And it wasn't even counted in the calculation of our commission structure, which they bragged about constantly.

The same goes with many of the other payments it collected from passengers. Eventually, after Uber lost a court case, Uber made every driver sign an agreement that the commission structure had nothing to do with the payments given by passengers.

I can't comment on the safe ride fee as it predates my tenure at Uber (i.e. we're talking about stuff from 5+ years ago), but from what I'm gathering, it does appear to have been a BS fee.

I'll acknowledge that there was a wide perception of leadership not giving two fucks under Travis. I heard many people internally were unhappy about many things, hence him being ousted.

Anyways, just to give some context: When I talk about efforts to improve things for drivers, I'm talking about things I've heard about very recently (like within the last six months). Many aren't live yet.

Prior to it, I'd say other aspects received a lot more attention, for example the safety center on the rider app was a big big focus at one point.

The shift of focus to drivers only really became visible to me within the last year or so. My two cents is this focus is happening as part of the effort to attract drivers back after their exodus due to the pandemic.

Regardless of the motivation, I'm glad the company is at least trying to listen to drivers. Cynicism aside, I personally think drivers should be treated well, period.

>The challenge from the company's perspective is that historically, people game the system and tragedy of commons scenarios can quickly become prevalent

Well yes, that's what every business does. Ultimately that's the fundamental problem. Uber wants employees that act in the business' best interest but does not want the regulatory burden that comes with it.

No, Uber wants gig drivers that do not create a Tragedy of the Commons situation by all acting in their own short-sighted self-interest.

Then their drivers shouldn't be all independent contractors.

I think you're both right.

Wouldn't the simple solution be to guarantee a minimum hourly rate from the time a driver accepts the ride to the drop-off? Uber would have an incentive to be efficient (find closer drivers, get more drivers on the road) and drivers wouldn't worry about the 45min-$5-ride problem. If the ride is profitable on its own, there's no change. If there are no close drivers for a short ride, the ride would (and should) cost more.

Wouldn't this encourage slow driving to increase ride prices?

Hey Driver X,

You’ve a ride request from “Person Y”

Pickup is “M km” from your current location.

Estimated ride distance is “N km”

Projected/min/approx cost for ride is “$ D” for total “N+M km”.

Do you accept or reject? You’ll not be penalised for any choice!

How the hell is this difficult and relates to all the jargon gymnastics you’ve done in your comment, other than just to keep the driver in the dark and without any kind of choice or freedom!

It makes for a bad user experience for the rider. The customer wants to know that they can certainly get a ride, not get rejected because their destination isn't profitable.

> if you show high profit heat maps, you risk drivers flocking

What's the point if increasing fares if those aren't being used to incentivize drivers to take those routes?

It's not a real question. It's obviously to gouge the customer.

Portraying Uber, with its enormous resources and wealth - not to mention an incredible lobbying and a PR machine, as deployed in news op-eds, and through astroturfing all over social media (though not so much now) - as a struggling victim of circumstance and bad press, and implicitly comparing the company to drivers struggling to make ends meet, is a bit much.

It's up to Uber to solve its problems and deliver, and be responsible in the community. You have all the power and resources.

Thanks for making this comment. Comments like yours are why I like HN so much. Where else on the internet could you possibly go to get this level of insight?

> Not really sure what Uber can do about this, tbh.

I don't see why Uber can't show the pick up location and drop off location before choosing to accept the job.

That is the fundamental of being an independent contractor. You have to know what the job is.

From your comment, now I know why Uber will never solve this problem. Uber employees don't want to solve it, basically.

This reads like some bad and sloppy PR blurb. You can talk about "playing the system" if you pay the drivers a basic salary, otherwise why the hell would they go to places where there is no money to be made if that's their only way to get money?

Awful company and people working for it that could work elsewhere are awful people.

> For example, if you show high profit heat maps, you risk drivers flocking there and the balance of service reliability dropping elsewhere.

Isn’t that the entire purpose of the market based, algorithmically generated pricing?

If a certain area gets congested, the prices will go down and the rates should equalize based on prices.

> I work at Uber. Opinions are my own. Etc. Here's my two cents: people in the company are acutely aware of this problem. Insiders legitimately want drivers to have flexibility without fear of penalties, and there are some major projects in the works to try to make things better for drivers.

This is laughable. The reality is that no one at Uber gives a two cents about "making it better for drivers" because of the sweet sweet paychecks that they are getting by screwing those drivers ( and since most of drivers look like the taxi drivers of NYC no one really gives two cents that they are being screwed).

Fish rots from the head. Uber has a rotten CEO. If he could sell his mother into slavery for a buck he would. Rotten CEOs attract other rotten people. Costco demonstrated that it is possible to even compete with the bottom feeder like Walmart without screwing people who work there.

At least Travis did not pretend like Dara does. Watching SV view Dara as a Jesus walking on water is wild.

The problem appears to be that a $5, 5 mile, 45 minute ride does not break up even for the driver.

Gaming the system, cancellations, poor distribution of drivers, etc seem like attempts to resolve the impacts of the problem, not the problem itself.

Send me resume@fure.cab founders equity..