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Comment by current_thing | Hacker News Reader

> we, the users, are compliant with such abuse of monopoly.

But Bolt is not a monopoly. There are many taxi services in Riga.

> I invite you to boycott any company that forces (or coerces) you to install an app...

I do not think I will boycott Bolt just because you hacked their product and somehow become outraged. Bolt rides are cheaper than the alternative and .. the app works. The alternative mainstream taxi app needs an ios upgrade, and the ios upgrade fails on my shitty old phone.

Edit: There is no uber in riga looks like. Nice work, but running a company that generates cash at scale is hard. So i am sympathetic to the app developer.

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> But Bolt is not a monopoly. There are many taxi services in Riga.

My experience is that if you don't speak Latvian, Bolt is basically the only choice to order a ride in Riga. Oh trust me, how I've tried. I never use those ride hailing services unless there's no other option left.

> No thanks I will not boycott Bolt because you chose to violate some ToS and hack their product and somehow become outraged.

Well, I'm not inviting people to boycott Bolt because I "hacked their product". I'm inviting to boycott Bolt because they are using dark patterns to take control away from users.

At the end you talk about having laws passed. What sort of law do you want passed exactly (and do you mean EU, specific EU countries, US, elsewhere)?

I guess one thing could be to force businesses of certain scale (or ideally, of any scale) to not offer services exclusive to a particular digital ecosystem, unless that's the only way to provide that service.

My local restaurant uses an app to do loyalty stamps... I really wish tey would come back to the traditional paper-based ones

this will never happen.

outside of the imperial centers, "big tech" have already reached into governments.

for example, latin america governments make it very difficult to schedule a dmv visit without a cellphone number AND a meta/facebook's whatsApp account. While all public universities accepted a free google meet account for covid time remote classes, and now got a surprise multimillion bill to access material uploaded to the system after the original offer period.

things are already way past the point of no return.

while rich engineers are busy fiddling with websites to solver their own problems (could your immediate family have hailed that ride when in a similar situation?) companies have already encroached themselves in the very foundation of the institutions that could solve this via public policy.

Why should the government mandate something like that? Why don't you just give feedback to the businesses that they should make these changes and if you and enough other people feel the same way, they probably will. I understand government intervention in cases of dark patterns that harm consumers (e.g. the recent Intuit settlement in the U.S.) and to protect certain groups that are likely to be harmed or neglected (e.g. the handicapped, blind, etc.) but I'm not sure I understand the need for government to intervene in a case like this where it is a business choice and the consumer while annoyed is not really harmed and there is no monopoly (as far as I remember in Estonia when I lived there a few years ago it was quite easy to hail a normal cab anywhere and was the same when I travelled the Baltics), and personally I get very nervous when the government starts regulating very specific things.

Agree with this part.

Which control are they taking away from you? You choose to use their service and yet you complaint because they don't allow you to use it as you see fit. As far as you know, the web client is not as well developed and maintained. I can't fathom where this sense of entitlement comes from.

Not really, it is sort of a monopoly. The only competitor app we had was Yandex Taxi, but ever since the war we don't have it here anymore.

Did Uber exit the market in the region completely?

It never was a thing in Latvia, and neither was Lyft. I don't recall Bolt (ex Taxify) ever having another app competitor except Yandex Taxi

For what it's worth Uber is still in the neighboring Estonia, which is also the headquarters of Bolt.

Uber entered Estonia quite early and did its classic market share grab where it completely dominated. However they quickly lost that market share to Bolt (in a period of a few years, and even before it was called Bolt - it was Taxify back then) because of local market understanding and more concentrated marketing/advertising. Nowadays Uber still "works", but you have to wait 20 minutes for a car, compared to 2 minutes with Bolt. I get a sense that a good chunk of Uber drivers are banned from Bolt, but this is just a hunch based on the Uber drivers accepting low fee rides during surge pricing on Bolt.

Okay, yeah I'd used Uber once or twice when I moved to Estonia but Bolt just so completely dominated that I switched over to using that whenever I was in Estonia and then if you wanted to go really low priced you could use Yandex Taxi (although I mainly used that in Armenia because that was the best local option at the time).

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