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Comment by justinv | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I've stopped using Uber because of the lack of the company/management's lack of ethics. Lyft comes off as a much friendly, consumer-focused company & frankly, my experiences have been better in a Lyft than an UberX.

Also - I'm not one to usually browse Buzzfeed, but this was their story to break, so props to them for getting it out there.

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The thing that’s crazy is that Uber’s service is terrific. They can succeed quite handily in the market without resorting to this sort of bullshit (like that crazy caper where they asked drivers to make phony ride reservations on competing services).

I think Yglesias has the right take — the very qualities necessary to make an legally-grey service successful are going to become antithetical to them succeeding as a normal, law-abiding, “legally white” service. http://www.vox.com/2014/11/18/7240295/uber-privacy

Success is a matter of expectations and degree. Uber is clearly capable of providing success in the form of "make a popular service that people use and which has value," and I'd say like 95% certain, "that is capable of turning a sustained profit."

But they've raised money at a $17 billion+ valuation, from people who invested on the theory that they at least have a shot at a x5 profit -- so they need to target a valuation of $100 billion or so.

Which means that "make a popular service that people use and which has value and that is capable of turning a sustained profit" is now abject failure for them.

Success for Uber looks like "become part of the fundamental infrastructure of large parts of the world." It is NOT clear that they are on track to do that, and failure to do that is a real possibility, in a way that "failure to have a popular service that can make money" is not really a possibility.

I don't want to sit in the front seat and I hate those stupid mustaches.

Same here, it's idiotic.

There's also Sidecar, it's pretty great. It is usually cheaper and let's you select from available drivers. You see their price upfront.

Sidecar is a joke in Chicago. They have only 2-3 drivers available at any time, wait times of 15-30 min, and 98% of the time they refuse your request anyway.

I fully expect Sidecar to just give up in Chicago any day now.

Uber is quite ok and i have not felt any of the problems which any of the news articles are reporting.

I think we all know what a lack of ethics gets you in the business world: more money and power.

Lyft only exists because Uber cleared the way. They also continue to benefit from Uber doing the hard work of fighting the taxi industry and regulators. If you don't want to be a hypocrite you will have to walk.

Stating this once is enough, please.

Duplicate, please just start one thread.

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