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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

So now people not in a city center will never get rides. Wonderful outcome, very progressive.

Can you please not post in the snarky or flamewar style to HN? It's against the rules, and evokes worse from others, as demonstrated below.

We're trying for thoughtful conversation here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking that spirit to heart, we'd be grateful.

I'm aware of the guidelines. I've been here for years and such tiny dabs of sarcasm have never been an issue before. If we're not all grown up enough here to handle a basic "oh, great" then that's a sad state of affairs. Guess I'll write every comment like a college thesis statement from now on.

It always seems like "tiny dabs" when we're the one producing it, but I guarantee you that it doesn't feel that way to everyone else. Perhaps the majority don't care, but at least in the long tail, a bunch will, and some of those will get activated enough to lash back. The reason we ask people not to post like that isn't because we think it's somehow wrong in itself. It's simply because the quality of the lash-backs is so low, and they lead to even worse. That's why we got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22021528 and so on.

In that way, each user here is partly responsible for the quality of the replies they get. If we want to have a good community in the long run, we have to learn to edit out gratuitous provocation.

I drive in smallish city. I never drive more than ten minutes for a ride. This means that at night (when I'm the only one on the road) some people don't get rides. I know it would be nice if we had people who could drive around on their own dime and give everybody rides, unfortunately that does not exist. I will happily go anywhere in a city where a ride will be worth my time and effort. We could increase the cost of short rides and pay the drivers (and charge the drivers) for the time spent driving to the rides. Then the drivers will come.

However, you are asking that drivers be willing to take 40 minutes out of their day to make 3 dollars. These drivers often barely make it by as it is. That is neither profitable or sustainable.

Subsidizing a small portion of the user base in the name of fairness is certainly sustainable, as it already was before. I get you don't like making a few less dollars in the day but society works better when we help each other out a bit and I don't think people should suddenly start having to pay an extra transportation tax for the zip code they live in.

Why? One does pay more for a metro ticket in area 9 compared to area 3. And metros are usually as subsidised as it gets. Also the cost/rent of an apartment in area 9 is less than one in area 3.

What a great attitude. What, are you entitled to subsidized taxi rides even if you live 50 miles away? Geez.

Why, because they're too short? Why not walk?

If you aren't in a city center, why would the ride be short?

This is like when people yell at the customer service rep about a company policy. They're a driver, take the sass to Uber.

The guy that your parent post is responding to us the guy responsible for refusing rides, in this instance, not Uber.

The point is with this change it is no longer like “complaining to the customer service rep” it is now a whole lot more like “complaining to the independent contractor that his policy is exclusionary”, despite the fact that his contracting agency clearly wishes it weren’t, which is why they hid that information from the ‘contractor’ in the first place.

Ah yes, you're right. The minimum wage worker should continue subsidizing your travel. This injustice to the tech elite will not stand.

Maybe my analogy was bad, maybe you should take it up with California rather than this random driver expressing their opinion.

Or how about instead of eroding the user experience to allow Uber to continue to take advantage of the fiction of the drivers being "independent contractors", the state does what it should and enforce minimum conditions, including a minimum wage?

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