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Comment by chillfox | Hacker News Reader

A lot of tech recently has just made things worse.

Uber made the taxi experience way worse and less predictable.

Now, I can’t just walk out of a bar, get into a clean taxi and go home, I have to fiddle with an app, wait, wave trying to identify “my” ride, then hope it’s clean and safe. It’s a nightmare compared to what we had before.

Uber eats made food delivery significantly worse and more expensive.

It used to be that I could get food delivered for a known fixed price, it would arrive while still hot and it would be delivered to the door. Now, the price is obfuscated, there’s an extra fee for getting the food warm, sometimes the drinks are spilled into the bag, delivery is to the curb so I have to go outside to get it.

There’s a lot more that has been made worse by tech companies.

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I agree wholeheartedly with your first sentence here. But I find it difficult to think of a worse example you could have picked than taxis. For all Uber's many faults, the taxi companies were worse. Hell they're still worse.

Are you old enough to remember the bad old days?

Whilst you can argue that services may have improved in some respects, the action towards resolution to problems is carefully monitored to help as least as possible and insulate accountability within a blanket of 'help' agents.

Infuriating as it is, this is still better than with the bad old days of taxis, which usually had even worse resolution and accountability. It sounds like people don't quite grasp just how bad the taxi experience was.

The taxi experience was pretty great where I live and where I traveled. I guess we were experiencing different parts of the world.

To be clear the happy path for taxis for me was fine. When things worked things were quite smooth. But this thread is primarily about when things went off the happy path. If a taxi didn't show up, I'd usually have a disinterested dispatcher to talk with who might be able to send another in a half hour. If a taxi intentionally went the long way around to charge more, I'd have to have an argument with the cabbie about this and maybe things would go well maybe they wouldn't. While I didn't personally experience harassment from cabbies I definitely know people who have. So on and so forth. In all of these cases off the happy path the usual recourse back then was worse than the recourse today with e.g. Uber.

Again the overwhelming majority of my taxi rides were fine. The overwhelming majority of my Uber rides are also fine. But when things go wrong they definitely went wrong worse with taxis than Uber rides for me.

I can share an example of a trip we just did to South America to two countries. Four out of four taxi rides were scams. Things are better to the extent there were controls in place, like taxi meters and an app. There the scam was less but still involved scams. Too long to detail in a comment here.

I should also mention we tried to use their version of Uber (DiDi), but I suspect there was some kind of price-fixing attempt there because no taxis would come for the price that they suggested. We had the option of upping our price until someone came and then I gave up on the service.

My other experiences were some years back in upstate New York, where there were also questionable practices, and you really had to look over the driver’s shoulder. They tried to control scams with payments based on zones, and the drivers would bend the rules when possible.

I assume this is a case of I live in a part of the world where it was different to how it was where you live... Or we value different things.

> Are you old enough to remember the bad old days?

I'm old enough to remember them. I very much preferred the "bad old days" over bad new days of ride-sharing services.

TV has unskippable and targeted commercials now. The list goes on and on.

We might be living in different worlds, but for me Uber is infinitely better than taxis. I can get it anywhere, within minutes and it's clean and nice. I see where they are and I know exactly how much I'm going to pay to get to my destination. I don't even know how or where to hail a taxi these days, but all the taxis I got into at the train stations and in some airports were a huge downgrade from Uber — dirtier, older/shittier cars, inaccessible front seat.

Also, Uber Eats delivers food that used to be pretty much non-deliverable. There's no comparison, it's a pure net-additive capability. You just couldn't get a lot of foods without physically going there and now you can.

My experience with Uber is the opposite, FWIW.

You and I must live in parallel universes or something.

You can still hail cabs off the street, it’s just that it’s an inefficient way of getting a ride.

Using uber I will immediately see the price up front and I can tailor the cab to my needs and price.

What? The reason Uber was so successful is because it was better. You don't have to waive your hand and pray they see you and stop. You use an app which is easy and you know when they are coming. And you can know the price ahead of time and the route. I've never gotten into a dirty Uber but definitely have gotten into dirty taxis. Whatever Ubers faults, they are better than taxis.

And at best you could get pizza delivered. Now everything can be delivered. Just because sometimes the drivers mess up doesn't mean overall it's worse.

Neither of your examples are good ones for your point.

Complaining with the angle of "cold pizzas and spilled cola" fills a bit of touch when considering the human exploitation on the other side.

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