This comparison strikes me as bizarre. The medallion racket is lobbying politicians to use the force of the law to prevent competitors from doing business. What discordorama describes is paying people money to install and sign into your app. This is... either a poorly designed incentive system that was then fixed, or a clever campaign that gets a lot of future drivers through the earliest hoops and puts them in a position where it's easy to incentivize them to start driving. (Clever to the extent that that works.)

I can't see why you think there's a similarity, other than that you think they're both underhanded, and that they're both done by companies providing taxi-like services.