Tech's broken promises: Streaming = confusing Ubers as much as taxis Cloud costs | Hacker News Reader

Tech's broken promises: Streaming = confusing Ubers as much as taxis Cloud costs

businessinsider.com

43 pointshbcondo71422 comments

On the "glass half full" side, even if the price hasn't gone down, tech's managed to offer better products for the same price, which in itself is a positive.

- Streaming is a much better experience than cable. I can watch anything I want whenever I want on whichever device I want. I don't need to rent a cable box. I don't need to schedule a technician to come to my house to start my service.

- Uber / Lyft are a way better experience than taxis. I can call the device from my phone wherever I am. I get price certainty up front instead of the miserable experience of sitting anxiously watching the number on the meter go up. The app handles payment and I don't have to mess with the driver telling me the card reader is broken and he wants cash. The driver's GPS is integrated with my ride and I both don't have to tell the driver where to go and worry about them taking the scenic route to drive the fare up.

Anyone who wants to go back to the world of cable / taxis is looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Tech has absolutely made both of those products better.

>Uber / Lyft are a way better experience than taxis.

Not anymore always. Here in Eastern Europe they're really screwing over the drivers, which are reassorting to creative measures to pad their missing revenues by screaming over customers, like driving in circles in one spot and getting you to cancel so they're an pocket the cancellation fee, and other such schemes.

Uber was great when they were still flush with VC cash from all the negative interest rates. Not anymore.

> Uber / Lyft are a way better experience than taxis.

I know this is very dependent on where you are, but in my part of the US, this is not true.

And to the extent it’s true it’s because they’ve been allowed to circumvent laws that were deliberately setup to limit the number of cabs on the street, and by flooding those streets with Ubers and Lyfts there’s a lot of research that shows that congestion and traffic has gotten much worse.

So even if a specific Uber/Lyft ride might be better, the residents of a city have a much worse overall experience.

And that’s without getting into how many of these drivers barely make ends meet, whereas driving a cab was a path to the middle class for millions of cab drivers for decades.

On the other hand they don't always capture all of the good things each. I agree with all of your points. Except now my drivers don't want to go off track, even when I request it. The app doesn't provide a way to let me select the route I want. So I am at the mercy of the app which picked the "best" route. Which happens to he the same one everyone else is taking during rush hour and takes twice as long as the route I would rather take.

Taxi roulette was not a fun game to play: a) will it show up? b) will someone else take my cab? c) will the driver get angry if I attempt to use a card? d) does the driver know where they are going?

Sure?

>Uber CEO stunned by $52 fare for 3-mile ride

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37000811

I couldn't care less if Uber costs as much as taxis or even a bit more. Uber was selling a better UX and that has always been its main selling point. Not the price.

Exactly.

Anyone familiar with pre-Uber taxicabs knows this.

Uber broke all sorts of laws but the existing system was so broken society collectively didn't even care.

> was selling a better UX

Isn't that the whole point? Was.

Isn't this the natural order of how things go in tech? You burn millions or billions of dollars acquiring market share, then start pumping your customers for cash until they leave, or if you've done it right they can't leave.

I'm still waiting for CloudFlare to become a $5/month subscription for my personal sites.

I think part of the reason Cloudflare is free for personal stuff is to harvest information. Information they otherwise wouldn't get.

Alternatively, the more sites use Cloudflare the less peering ISPs will have to non-Cloudflare destinations. Eventually it could be that you need to be behind Cloudflare if you want any chance for your website to be reachable with reasonable bandwidth.

Come on now. Project Honey Pot would never stoop to such a level.

Idk if pinging like this works but @dang the title seems mangled on this one

dang has said before that pinging does not work.

There's an email address on the bottom of the page:

hn@ycombinator.com

'@dang' and 'by dang' only work as search items

I think it’s a mod edited title? In any case I agree it’s absolutely terrible.

"Normal" cycle: change the business model to take out competition, then increase pricing.

This headline makes me want to shout out one of Samuel L Jackson’s lines from Pulp Fiction.

https://archive.is/qZKDw

Paying the same amount as cable to not have ads seems as though it's still better than cable...

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