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Comment by andy99 | Hacker News Reader

The real "economy of scale" in these platforms is not actually providing any support , moderation, fraud prevention. It's not that they scale it better, it's just that they don't do it and get away with it through market power.

If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business. If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just getting the monopoly power to treat your customers badly and get away with it.

Which, of course combined with the larger attack surface, is why bigger platforms do so much worse on spam/fraud/support.

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> If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just getting the monopoly power to treat your customers badly and get away with it.

People don’t use Uber because they’re a monopoly. They use it because it’s convenient, it’s a known quantity, it’s mostly predictable, and they can use it almost anywhere they go.

People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services was far worse. The hypothetical case of Andy’s small town taxi service that provides exemplary service either didn’t exist or was such an outlier that you couldn’t reliably find it while traveling.

> People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services was far worse

Did you live in a small city back then?

I’ve used plenty of small-town taxi services, yes.

If you’re only remembering the gold standard small-town service that did everything perfectly, you’re looking back with rose colored glasses. The typical experience back then was not good.

Well I'm pretty confident in my memories because it wasn't too long ago. The thing fell apart only around 2016 with the rise of apps and the inflection point was a complete misery hard to forget: drivers taking your order and not moving, drivers calling you to ask about the destination point and then refusing to go there, drivers telling you that you should've put the destination point into comments, driver asking you to cancel the order and pay them in cash etc.

However the apps were able to price-dump for around three years until all small players died, then hiked the prices back again.

I'm not saying anything about the "typical experience back then" however I do know that in right circumstances (high demand, cheap supply, no lock-in) competition between independent small companies can have remarkable results.

Did you report these drivers to the app owner? Did they do anything?

Not OP, but I've reported many drivers to the app owner with zero [0] results.

[0] Not quite zero. I always got an immediate computer-generated email telling me I'm important and that my complaint is of utmost importance. Drivers never had repercussions from the companies though; every once in awhile if I had concrete evidence of running over a pedestrian's foot or something I could get law enforcement to care, but the companies DGAF.

They apologized and gave promocodes, subsidizing the service even further. They were well aware of the problem.

Things normalized a few years later. I think the biggest lesson was that clients were willing to endure a lot of hardship for a 50% discount.

I think this varied greatly between different places. In my own country&city, Uber came in as a premium-ish option initially (regular taxis were already dirt cheap), with nicer cars and excellent service. Of course over time things normalized back down to the same sorts of cars and the same drivers, but the first few years it was beautiful, not a race to the bottom.

Still, even today (and with Uber mostly having lost the market to Bolt), the average ride is much, much better than the average taxi ride ever was (and I was a regular user of both). The cars are still cleaner, and it's virtually unheard of to have drivers try to overcharge or otherwise scam you - which were both regular occurrences with taxis.

What about living in a small town now? Uber does not operate in most small towns. Small town (and big town) traditional taxi services still suck massively. I would pay a premium to use uber/lyft over traditional taxis.

Fwiw I used to live in small towns until I graduated college and the taxis in Pennsylvania sucked no matter where I was

Now Uber/Lyft aren't great, but it's still way better seeing the driver on the map when they're running late than having literally no idea and having to call dispatch who themselves will begrudgingly call the driver who will just give a bs status anyway

I live in SF and my pre Uber experience was about as nonexistent as the cabs and the people at the cab company who were supposed to answer the phone.

Taxis prior to Uber SUCKED.

Uber was needed to give cab companies in a lot of places a proper kick in the pants, but it is now usually worse in my experience.

> but it is now usually worse

so why not go back to taxis?

I largely have. The local cab company is far from perfect but they now actually show up most of the time, unlike Uber drivers.

Taxis sucked outside of parts of major cities and airports. Even in NYC, the taxi system only worked well in Manhattan.

You miss the parent's point. Uber might care about their customers, but they don't give a toss about other aspects such as fraud, the local labor rules or local laws etc. They try to dodge it as much as possible. And that is a problem if they are a near monopoly and market leader because they are the market.

> If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business.

We know this isn’t true, though; taxi services sucked before Uber. In small towns, there wasn’t competition at all, so know reason to fix issues. In larger cities, most taxis were hailed on the street or sent from a central dispatcher, so no individual taxi driver cared about their reputation… people weren’t choosing a specific taxi, and there was little repeat business, so customer service wasn’t important.

If I'm Andy's small town taxi company, I actually bet that nobody will spend thousands of dollars using me over a 20-50 dollar ride. I don't need to care, and no lawyer will go for a class action suit because the class is too small

>If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business.

In a very small town, you won't go out of business because you'll be the only taxi service in town. Everyone can establish their 'monopoly power' in a small enough area.

Not really, because the entry barrier to create a small town taxi service is incomparably lower than creating a new Uber.

20 years ago my small town had around five fiercely-competing taxi services with cars arriving within 4-5 minutes of a phone call. In many respects that was better than the new times. Especially when it came to customer service.

How small a town are we talking about? I grew up in a 100,000 person city and we only had two taxi services that would take ages to arrive, depending on where you were.

Around 100k. It was in Russia though and owning a car wasn't as common as say in US. Public transport wasn't very pleasant to use either.

It was an interesting case, a sort of a breakthrough in transportation habits achieved by loads of 15-years old right-hand-drive Toyotas converted into taxis. The cheapest ride was around $1 and people literally started riding taxis to the next building on the same street.

A population of 100k is large enough to appear on the wikipedia list of "largest cities in Russia". A small town it is not.

It must depend on the demographics also, right? Which would apply some skew to our personal impressions, making it hard to say much.

I’ve lived in a couple college towns and they tended to have smaller populations, but pretty good taxi services—which makes sense when you have a bunch of young people who want to go out to drink, might not have cars, and probably are willing to spend money on that sort of thing, and tend to all go to and from the same destinations.

I bet the hackernews demographic skews toward college educated, so I wonder if people are commenting with truthful experiences, but from that particular (IMO, at least questionably representative) niche.

When I say a very small town I mean way less than 100k people. There is a very high barrier to entry in being the second taxi service for outsiders because when it's that small everyone knows everyone else or their family by name so they don't trust outsiders easily.

Regardless of how permissive the regulations and bylaws are on the books.

And even when it's a second group of locals that want to establish a second taxi service, you can still establish your 'monopoly power' on one side of town, or specific areas. There's no practical bottom limit.

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