Just because the taxi industry wasn’t perfect in your eyes - who are you by the way? What skin in the game do you have? - doesn’t mean that Uber and Lyft aren’t orders of magnitude more exploitative.
My father drove a taxi before Uber/Lyft and that shit was way more exploitative. He was paid shit ($600/week was considered good), didn't get any flexibility (once you're on the clock, you're on the clock), he didn't get to choose his hours (they would assign times and fares by seniority, he mostly worked from the evening well into the night), he had to drive the company's disgusting cars that were constantly falling apart (which were also assigned by seniority and then he had to clean them, before and after his driving, usually because the previous driver left the car trashed), he had no recourse for shit customers that either wouldn't pay or would trash the car, and the taxi company gave zero shits about any of this because they had their medallions and that's all that mattered.
It was the worst job he ever had to subject himself to and this is a man that grew up in the Soviet Union (where he actually drove taxis part time to make extra money).
I'm sure it was nice if you were a taxi driver that happened to acquire your own medallion, got to work for yourself, providing dog shit service, and for rates of your choosing since the competition was artificially constrained. But that is a minority of the taxi drivers out there.
Uber has left numerous drivers in its wake with criminal records as a result of their illegal and sometimes criminal operations. As bad as it was for your father it doesn’t sound like the taxi driver paid him to commit criminal acts he was otherwise unaware he was committing.
> I'm sure it was nice if you were a taxi driver that happened to acquire your own medallion, got to work for yourself, providing dog shit service, and for rates of your choosing since the competition was artificially constrained. But that is a minority of the taxi drivers out there.
Yes and I’m sure being an investor in Uber pre-IPO without ever having to actually work much less drive and dump that dog shit on the public to cash out was very nice. But that is a minority of people under US capitalism.
Just like 99.999% of Uber drivers haven't experienced that situation either. Do you really think that taxi companies of the past aren't guilty of even worse crimes? At least Uber is a big enough target that you can seek some sort of justice, good luck getting any sort of justice from the scumbag taxi companies.
I think you're assuming a zero-sum rule of the world where the only way Uber or Lyft can benefit is by taking away from their riders and drivers. That's not how any of this works.
The average HN user - usually in the upper middle class - are certainly on the beneficial side of this. They've received a cheap private chauffeur service, albeit decentralized, that they use to a greater extent than they would ever use taxi because of its affordability (ofc made possible by VC money and offloading costs to the drivers). The self-interested confirmation bias in HN threads about the gig/ride taxi industry must be seen in that light.