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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

> I can't recall any recent high impact "new thing" except maybe crypto.

Uber is literally life-changing. Remember needing to call people and ask them for a ride when something unexpected happened?

> I cannot begin to understand what it's like for a 20 year old to have been born in a world where Google is already established, Social networks are mainstream, and Amazon is our all encompassing commerce overlords.

20-year-olds have had life-changing technology adopted around them multiple times. It's just not on your radar because you weren't 10 years old in 2011.

Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are examples. As people are saying: the metaverse already exists to some extent, and young people have been living in it daily since they were small children.

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> Uber is literally life-changing

I might be only 26 years old, but even I have memories of my parents easily flagging down taxis in Manhattan. More convenient? Absolutely. "Literally life changing" seems a bit much, though.

Outside of Manhattan, certain streets in San Francisco, and some parts of Chicago it is life changing.

Maybe not in Manhattan, one of the central points of one of the biggest cities of the world.

Where I live, the only form of non-personal (your own car or bike) transport was the bus, which comes by 5 times a day, only once on saturdays, and never on sundays. Uber and its local equivalents have allowed me to participate in social events that the long and restrictive bus rides would not allow, and which taxis would be too much of a luxury.

I think that for me it is fair to say it was life-changing. Maybe not as life-changing as other things, but if it wasn't for this kind of service, I wouldn't have some of my best friends.

Manhattan is the worst example to compare to. You can now, in literally any suburb, get a ride on demand in 10 minutes or less. I used to have to book a taxi or figure out how to chain multiple buses to get to where I wanted if I was going across town in a suburb.

alright, then in the suburb of new york i lived in (which was, mind you, in the middle of a forest), i could call up the local taxi company and get a cab to me in like... 30 minutes or so. really the only convenience is that it saves me a phone call and from carrying cash.

It also depends on the suburb you were in in New York. If you were in "some" neighborhoods, the taxies would never come.

In New Orleans, when you wanted to get a ride home from a bar, you'd need to try calling taxi services for 30+ minutes, because most of them didn't answer, or their lines were busy. If you got in contact with one, you'd need to wait 30+ minutes for them to show up, if they ever did.

In San Francisco, when the bars would let out, none of the services answered their phones. You'd have to stand outside and try to flag one down, and most of the time they'd roll their window down and ask where you're going, and decide whether or not they want to take you. You could easily spend an hour outside waiting for a taxi.

It's really not that different from Uber. Good luck getting Uber in a remote-ish suburb. Taxis will not go somewhere where it's inconvenient for them.

I do this frequently. When I go back to New Orleans to visit family, I use Uber/Lyft in the suburbs to get around, even including the remote suburbs. They don't come within minutes, like if you were in a city, but I'm able to reliably use it.

Most cities in the US did not have either a functional taxi or public transit system.

As someone from Manhattan, you live(d) one of the most unusual existences in human history.

To me Uber is not my dad picking me up. It's a taxi i called up. I used to call a cab by phone, and now I call it with an app. Not a huge difference. I don't care who drives it as lon g as it gets me there. Having a situation where anyone is a "TV" star, and anyone is a "celebrity" with "followers" and everything is "documented" and "filmed" is a major shift.

> I used to call a cab by phone, and now I call it with an app. Not a huge difference.

And maybe you have lived places where this wouldn't mean anything to you, but you couldn't do this in most of the US before Uber.

Even in some well-known cities, your chances of getting a cab in < 30 min (if you could get one at all) were close to zero. There wasn't a single number to call -- you had to call many numbers and hope someone actually showed up. You couldn't track progress.

Where I grew up, my parents couldn't even get to the airport without asking a relative (and this is the biggest city in our home state).

A functioning, 24/7, predictable taxi system was absolutely not available in most of the US before Uber.

> A functioning, 24/7, predictable taxi system was absolutely not available in most of the US before Uber.

I find this quite surprising. I've lived in 3 countries (including the US but limited to San Francisco) and calling a cab was always a reliable thing. I know my scope of experience is still limited, but Uber being the silver bullet of taxies seems to me like an overstatement. They are great, I like them, but to me they are just a better version of something else, most times. At least that statement explains more their level of success.

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