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Comment by subsaharancoder | Hacker News Reader

> except uber/lyft will remove you from the platform if you decline too many rides, thereby only giving the illusion of choice.

Factually incorrect for Uber drivers in CA, the platform no longer penalizes drivers for declining trips and now allows them to pick and choose trips without any impact on driver rating. (I worked in Uber Eng up until the 5/18 layoffs)

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This is the bigger problem. None of the people even here on HN actually now how Uber works and how different the experience for rider and drivers can be varying on city, state, country etc. Just a bunch of people repeating what they hear from anti-tech journalsits writing about startups.

Uber app is very hyperlocal because each location has different requirements/challenges especially around fare calculation, taxes and levies, how the app works in CA is very different from London and different from New York. The Driver app in CA was reworked on extensively during Q4 2019 in response to AB5 in order to strengthen the Uber case that it is essentially a platform that matches riders to drivers. Internally those changes can be rolled out to all cities in the U.S. if the AB5 tide goes beyond CA, but to be honest no one knows if those changes will make the case for Uber or not, they are the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Yep. Though is it still true that the prices for riders and the earnings for drivers are seperated? To me that is the key greediness here.

At least in Europe all competitors still work with the % of fare calculations.

Thank you for the clarification—I'd edit my comment if I could.

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