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Comment by itake | Hacker News Reader

> ideal one for a workers' cooperative

I am sorry, but there is not way a workers' cooperative can build a safe product for passenger and drivers. All of the leading rideshare companies have invested 10s if not 100s of millions into safety platforms that leverage the latest face recognition, fraud algorithms, and more to ensure that everyone can have a safe ride.

Both passengers and drivers robbed and murdered each before these investments were made to keep the bad guys off and the good guys safe.

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...you know why they need to do that? Because they have an incentive to let basically anyone join and have an adversarial relationship. A workers cooperative can be a faceless organisation, but unlike a company it is also an actual community, so things like vetting who let in I'd much more feasible to do you'd do in a community than in a "startup family" trying to squeeze their drivers. It could be as simple as requiring somebody to vouch for you and being responsible for whatever fuckups you do.

How are cooperatives not incentivized to "let basically anyone join"?

The more drivers a co-op has means shorter wait times and higher geographic coverage for the passengers. If passengers have to wait too long, they will lose faith in the reliability of the co-op and be forced to use other forms of transit.

The more passengers a co-op has means drivers have to idle less or shorter (unpaid) distances to travel to pickup a passenger.

It is always better for the co-op to have more active drivers and more active passengers. The growth comes in the form of "let basically anyone join".

Why do you think a cooperative will be conscious about reputational awareness of reliability, but not about safety?

I never said a co-op would not care about safety. I am saying that they lack the resources to implement low-cost safety solutions.

None of the co-ops listed have industry standard safety systems for telematics (unplanned stops, detour detection, or unsafe driving), face recognition, or audio recording.

Feel free to address the original point of how co-ops have the same incentives as Big Tech for letting anyone on the platform.

I don’t think you’re wrong but it’s certainly extremely pessimistic to believe this is impossible.

This seems very optimistic about the likelihood of a "community" to vet itself properly vs. covering things up "for the good of the community". Obviously it can work out, but there's bountiful examples of communities ranging from schools to churches to workers unions that have a pretty well established history of systematic abuse and coverups.

The thing is, as a co-op in a small and competitive market, it's not like you have much leeway for reputational damage. Unlike Uber, you can't really survive a scandal by filling in with profits from other cities or drivers.

And what you said is true, but it's also a vapid statement without looking at percentages and incentives. Individual bad examples exist everywhere, but a workers coop of drivers in a City has social incentives (if a driver from your coop robs someone who goes to the same church as you, you'll hear from it) and constraints (if your cooperative gets boycotted in your town, what will you do, move everyone next postcode?) which uber lacks (if there's a boycott in one town, bad for the drivers, but you just put out a press blurb, do a promotion and donate to a charity and wait until things die down)

But now it sounds like you're advocating for Taxis.

We'll, in my native country, Taxis are actually working fine, they are regulated but with no cap on the licenses - uber eventually needed to apply for those as well. And we also have public transport and walkable cities. So it's not like gig-economy driving is the only possible way to have a working system

It'd be interesting to see actual statistics on rideshare crimes before and after the introduction of these intended mitigations. Anecdotally, the number of gruesome news stories seems to have remained roughly constant.

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