Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

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I have used CL rideshare perhaps 40 times for travel between northern & southern California in the past few years, and I personally am glad to see Ridejoy and other attempts at commercializing it fail. The service works fine as it is: free, informal, fast. The last thing it needs is a bunch of annoying startups invading, all crowing about "untapped markets" and how "passionate" they are to enable social this-or-that--an act which invariably strikes me as mercenary and disingenuous. In short, I can see why CL would issue the C&D.

The "anonymous and sometimes sketchy rides posted every year" line is particularly irksome as it so perfectly conveys the annoying disdain techies have for things that don't sport a slick iPhone app and/or (attempt to) make money. The truth is (confirmed over many hours of conversation with fellow riders and drivers) sketchy rides are both obvious and exceedingly rare. A few simple rules (like physically talking to the rider/driver ahead of time, meeting in a public place, etc.) are sufficient to ensure a smooth experience.

One of the Ridejoy cofounders here. Thanks for sharing your positive experiences with ridesharing. It is because of people like you that we believed so strongly in Ridejoy.

If you were willing to put up with all these hurdles of lack of any real search mechanism (some posts say "driving 9/17" and others "next Thursday"), a totally unstructured multi-step posting experience and no form of reputation or review or payment, in order share rides, then if we eliminated those hurdles for others (you might not seem them as hurdles, but other people definitely do) that we could expand the market for rideshare many fold.

We've spoken to many people who've shared rides and sketchy experiences do come up from time to time. An app cannot eliminate that completely but it can help alleviate it and kick out offenders. I believe that the system has lots of opportunity to improve and I'm sorry you don't think we were helping.

[Ridejoy] I've also used CL rideshare, and many of our users did too. CL rideshare works great for the people who keep using it (by definition). It doesn't work so well for most people-- if you feel especially vulnerable (are you male?), or if you want to share a ride without having to spend tons of time on coordination, ahead of time and day of (CL: ~50 back-and-forth SMS, Ridejoy: a few screens).

I love Couchsurfing-- and it "works fine"-- but I was also glad to see Airbnb succeed.

> I love Couchsurfing-- and it "works fine"-- but I was also glad to see Airbnb succeed.

Funny you should mention Couchsurfing. I would say that it used to work fine... several years ago... before they went for-profit and rewrote it completely. Sure the old app wasn't sexy but, like Craigslist, it solved the problem with minimal friction. The new Couchsurfing attempts to be more sophisticated but reduces global transparency and tries to take more control over the process, in the vein of Zimride or Airbnb. I can no longer be bothered with Couchsurfing, and it seems I'm not the only one: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=couchsurfing.org

The trend for 'couchsurfing' is a lot less scary looking: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=couchsurfing%2C%20cou...

"I can no longer be bothered with Couchsurfing"

Maybe you changed, not couchsurfing.

Airbnb added a reputation system which is really what was needed.

What changed exactly? I've been couchsurfing since 2008, and hosting since 2012.

I've been hearing a lot about the changes that came with for profit management. But I haven't noticed any difference. Granted I never went to many local meetups.

I'm genuinely curious: could you be more specific about what negatives you've noticed?

As a long time CS user, I see two changes:

1. This one I haven't experienced so much being male, but I've heard from it enough to believe it. When it was more niche, there were pretty much just travellers on the site. Now that it's quite more mainstream, there are a lot of guys just trying to pick up chicks on it. I personally don't care if two CSrs hook up, but I've heard enough stories of male hosts either being too aggressive with their female guests or just plain old kicking them out when they realize they won't sleep with them, to make me cringe. I think the landscape for single women using CS has changed.

2. The new website is absolutely horrible, less usable, lacking lots more info (they deleted the old wikis with tons of user-generated content), the groups are less useful, etc. All this is kind of funny because I used to dislike the old one. Now all I wish is they rolled back to it. I just don't know what the hell they were thinking with all these changes after they raised investment.

http://www.businessinsider.com/couchsurfing-the-best-hook-up...

I actually had the opposite experience. Every time I needed a rideshare on CL, I couldn't find one. Or, when I offered a rideshare, I got no responses. And when I did get a response, it was from someone who didn't read my post and realized it was WAY past due. Perhaps it's because I live in a smaller metro area. I don't know. But, I did often commute up to the Bay Area, and I did often commute to L.A.

I think rideshares are just generally a bad idea anyways. After some thought, I think the idea of sitting with a stranger for several hours, trying to make conversation, would get tiresome in the end.

Yes, I did not like the way they were doing things. No, I don't think leaving it up to CL is the solution. I had a guy once screaming very badly at me for being 10 min late, this kind of people cannot be spotted easily, you need some kind of review system.

Also, regular travelers can't organize well on CL. What's, say, 10-15 dollars a year to get a decent platform? Yet, I know, nobody wants to pay for that, chicken and egg, etc., but the market is there, of course it's there, people are moving all the time...

CL Rideshare is funny because like you say, it works for 18-50 year old males that are willing to research the "few simple rules" perfectly fine, so about half a million people. There's no way that half a million people, out of 330 million Americans, is the full market of people that would be willing to do a rideshare. I think there's a case to be made that Craigslist is keeping that number from growing by not improving the level of trust they add, and have made it difficult for others to innovate in the space by (justifiably or not) keeping it a walled garden.

Did you give the screaming guy a ride anyway?

In France this sector is working very well (covoiturage.fr), has been for several years, to the point that friends consider checking out rideshare site like that and price-checking with trains and planes.

I have a suspicion that the fact that a lot of rides are either Paris-X or X-Paris probably helps (a lot of parisian students end up getting schools outside and go home during vacation/weekends). And students here don't always have cars.

Let me just do a wild stab in the dark here: none of these French sites are VC backed start-ups looking to get rich quick or conquer the world, but just ordinary companies happy to be making a profit.

Well this would be my comment too. Many VC backed companies kill lifestyle businesses which could be profitable. this would give joy to the owners of the business and their users.

But these VC backed companies kill these small businesses AND they later when it's not profitable enough let down their uses my closing down the shop.

Let's build a community also expects input from a community which is left in the cold. Wouldn't this make it harder and harder to form communities in the long run?

blablacar discuss their model here (I think (via whois) these guys are also the covoiturage and comuto brands):

http://allthingsd.com/20131202/europes-blablacar-has-created...

"The company last raised funding in 2011 — $10 million led by Accel Partners"

As far as I can tell, Blablacar was a successful company that after half a decade raised funding to expand, not to exist.

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