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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

If you set aside the hyperbolic title, this actually is an exoneration of the worst things that Uber has been accused of: namely they were NOT pranking or trying to deliberately mess up Lyft.

The hangup calls were the side-effect of their extremely aggressive recruitment efforts for Lyft drivers - where it seems they'd hang up and call back later to try and get a different driver that they hadn't already pitched.

While not great, it also doesn't strike me as particularly underhanded or evil (this is a scenario where the "best" outcome for Uber is paying Lyft for a ride where they try and give the Lyft driver a phone and presumably a better paying job).

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Lyft has stated they've had over 5,000 CANCELLED rides, meaning Uber is deliberately trying to mess up Lyft. If you don't think the cancelled rides count, how can you say that aggressively recruiting its drivers, and as a by product, reducing the earnings of the drivers/Lyft, is Uber not trying to mess up Lyft? I'm not saying its illegal, but its clearly Uber trying to win the market by shutting out Lyft.

I love lyft (and also drive for uber)... I have no doubt in my mind that uber did this (and if I get deactivated by uber for posting this I don't really care, they've lost so much money on trying to recruit me it will take 10 more months for them to recover their investment).

I think it would be hilarious if lyft didn't ban the uber guys but hellbanned the uber guys (hellbanned in the hn sense). Which would make the number of cancelled rides make much, much more sense.

Why were they trying to recruit you if you were already driving for Uber?

They tried to recruit me before I drove for Uber? I do now, but I "gave" the recruiting bonus to my friend who was a dual driver and not the smarmy recruiter.

5000 cancelled rides over a year does not mess up a system that reportedly has a millions of trips per year.

I don't think the argument here is over the scale or the percent of rides that were fake. The argument here was "Is Uber trying to shut down Lyft, through a variety of tactics?". I'd have to say yes, they are trying their best to block Lyft out of the business by limiting the key resource, drivers.

> Is Uber trying to shut down Lyft, through a variety of tactics?

But not through cancelled rides, right? I don't understand how Uber trying to recruit drivers is any different from any tech company trying to recruit me.

Straight up, this is a key point. Lyft is in 64 cities. 5500 canceled rides over a year is peanuts. That's 1 cancel per city per 3 or 4 days. I can't believe this is even a story.

It's a story because it's an abusive tactic. It harms individual drivers to try to benefit a very wealthy company.

It's a story because Uber thinks they need to do it. Does that then mean that Uber thinks they can't compete on quality of product and price of product?

Those are the rides that are cross-correlated with known recruiters. The actual figures could be more. I know for a time in February I would get tons of suspicious pings, and my friend who was a dual driver said, "oh, that's Uber fucking with you"

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