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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm going through something similar with Lyft. I got a new pixel phone, had to re-setup my account in an airport added my cards, and was unable to hail a ride due to some "oops, there was a problem, try again" error with both the cards I entered. That was 9 months ago. To this day, I've been unable to use Lyft, and I can't get anybody to really look at the issue.

I'm not sure why they don't want to take my money, but for now, I just use Uber. Hopefully they won't decide they hate met too.

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I had something similar happen with Uber early on, but it was as simple as the card I had in the account expiring. I'm pretty sure I'd never even actually used the service but had signed up as a "just in case" when I was going to be in an area where it made sense.

For whatever reason when I tried to use it rather than saying that the card had expired they locked my account. By then some of the "fish rots from the head" aspects of the company and its culture had started to get press, so I basically said "Hm, good riddance" and never pursued it.

I recently moved abroad and tried to change my phone number in my Uber account. Uber wouldn't let me because it said there was a driver account associated (there wasn't). Their support told me to delete the driver account, but since there wasn't one I was greeted with the driver sign-up that I couldn't complete.

After talking to their support again they deleted my account so I could recreate it.

And then my email, new phone number and old phone number were all marked as in use, yet I could not log in. Over the course of a month it took FIVE emails from my end explaining the situation, with screenshots, each of which was responded to with an "it should be ok now, try again". Only the very last time when I stressed in the email that they really had to escalate it because I had to ask the same question repeatedly without it ever being fixed, they took their time and actually fixed it after a bit over a week.

I know support is hard, especially at scale, but damn Uber that was just baaaaaad.

Please tell me more if you can.

gmail account matching this one or https://rachelbythebay.com/contact/ - thanks.

Email sent with details. Thank you so much for looking into it.

Do you work for Lyft or something?

No, but she used to work for Google and Facebook.

It’s complicated.

I read your blog, so I am at least somewhat aware of this ;)

Please look up information about Uber's business practices and don't use them. A few minor technical problems are nothing compared to how bad Uber is. Disclaimer: Austin resident who is still mad at both of them for all the massive lies they published all over the city and the huge amount of our money and time they wasted with their stupid campaign to not have to fingerprint drivers.

> "A few minor technical problems"

If they're literally unable to use a service because of a glitch, it's not a "minor technical problem".

So? There are plenty of other alternatives anywhere.

As a consumer, I don't really care.

I long ago realized that most big companies I do business with have probably done something sketchy in terms of lobbying / dodging regulation, whether they've gotten caught yet or not, and decided to stop losing sleep over it and just use the services that work best for me.

This isn't a single mistake, it's a pattern of bad behavior that's been going on for as long as they've been in business.

I remember that. It was my last year in Austin and I vowed to never use them either for that same reason and also this one:

https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2017-03-14/lege-f...

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