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Comment by cmsmith | Hacker News Reader

Please be sure to read this article before commenting.

It is NOT about Uber ordering fake Lyft rides to keep Lyft drivers off the street, as was alleged by Lyft last month.

It is about:

1. Uber using the Lyft service to get in touch with Lyft drivers, then trying to recruit them to be Uber drivers by presumably paying them more

2. Lyft trying to block Uber contractors from using Lyft, so that they cannot do (1)

3. Uber using burner phones and fake Lyft accounts to enable them to keep doing (1)

Also keep in mind the uproar here over the past year caused by Apple/Google/etc trying to increase profits by subverting the free market for tech worker salaries. Is the only difference that then it was collusion as opposed to an adversarial arms race? Or does the collective opinion depend on whether HN readers stand to benefit financially?

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Yeah but they did cancel a bunch of rides and that's the upsetting part. Their reasons might have been different than originally assumed but that doesn't change the egregious nature of their tactics.

What it sounds like from the article is that the independent contractors Uber hires are canceling rides whenever they realize that the Lyft driver has already been approached. If they had a policy of never canceling rides I don't think people would be as upset.

Lyft says that Uber employees have canceled 5000 rides since last October. That's like $100k in lost revenue -- it's nothing. Definitely not some big plan by Uber to undermine Lyft.

It's also lost revenue for the drivers who were on their way to pick up the recruiters. I think that's the part most people are upset about.

And while the canceling of rides isn't a big plan by Uber to undermine Lyft, the recruiting of their drivers most certainly is. That I have no problem with, but canceling rides is (borderline) fraud.

That's a potential software developer's salary, whose contributions are certainly worth more than that - I'd call it substantial.

That's not all. Let's say that software developer would have produced $200k in value for Lyft. But that 200k could hire two more software developers! By induction, Uber has cost Lyft an infinite amount of money.

Much less than that. They only lose the time it took to drive to the person, not the time they would have spent driving that person to their destination. The "drop" is way less than $20, so we can assume the cost of a canceled ride is too.

This is like $10k in revenue.

If someone defrauded me of $100k, I wouldn't call it 'nothing'. Fraud is a felony. People need to go to jail for this.

Point #2 is technically correct, but I think it's perfectly legitimate to block people from recruiting your employees at your place of business, while they are working.

Lyft isn't trying to block Uber from contacting Lyft drivers at home, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, etc. They are trying to block them from abusing the Lyft service to recruit. It would be like Apple trying to block Google from waltzing into their HQ and walking from desk to desk trying to recruit their employees.

Except they're not Lyft employees. They're independent contractors. They set their own schedule, choose where they wish to work, ect...

I still agree that it's perfectly legitimate for them to put forth effort to block recruiters but I think the fact that the drivers aren't employees does make it not quite as bad as your analogy.

And 4. Uber contractors cancelling rides for drivers that have already been recruited

5. Uber drivers organizing in chat groups to keep track of Lyft drivers in the area that have already been tapped, to prevent canceled rides.

Just making sure it's all in there. I'm not a big fan of Uber either but the large-scale stuff (top post here) seems way more important than Uber trying to reach out to each Lyft driver one time and see if they're interested.

From the article, the organization was to ensure that they didn't hit up the same driver multiple times, giving away the scale of the game they were playing. Clearly they don't care about canceling rides, since they were literally just in the news for intentionally canceling rides for no reason other than to make Lyft and their drivers lose money.

Where did you see anything about Uber canceling rides specifically as a tactic to make Lyft lose money? Everything I've seen has indicated that the rides were canceled because the Uber recruiters realized they were calling a Lyft driver that had already been spoken to.

No, that's not it. They're keeping track of Lyft drivers in the area so that they know who to cancel, not so that they can avoid canceling rides.

And, look, if they could hail specific drivers that they'd never talked to before, I'm sure they would. But they can't. They don't control who Lyft matches them with. It sounds like they make some attempts to avoid just hailing the same driver over and over again, but sometimes they do hail the same guy over and over again, and in that case, they cancel.

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