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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

It feels like in the last few years all the beloved, life changing formerly-unicorn-startup offerings came crashing down. They are a mashup of dark patterns, unattractive price hikes, user hostile behavior, lies and trash content. Additionally, the early "mutual trust"/"assume good faith"/"organic"/"non professional"/"human" sentiments disappeared, everything is hyperoptimized by greedy capitalists and uncaring AI. This fits the current era of tech layoffs, Russian war madness and high inflation.

Uber, AirBnB, Netflix, Facebook come to mind.

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There's something uniquely American about taking a brutal cold blooded business, putting a fake friendly facade on it, and holding that facade up for so long

Perfectly put

Uber and AirBnB were always shady, both services were heavily subsidized by VC money in order to acquire customers. Now that these corporations went public, they stopped with the charade and are aiming at making as much profit as the business they claimed they "disrupted".

Airbnb lets me rent a whole apartment for a couple weeks. Couldn't do that before. And Uber is so much better than the cabs it replaced that there can't really be any comparison. It's not just about price relative to competition.

VRBO and subletting agreements existed long before AirBnB.

My experience trying to use VRBO and HomeAway 10-12 years ago was just awful. There was basically no search or filtering functionality whatsoever, the only option was to scroll through page after page of "L@@K AT THIS OBNOXIOUS, INFO-FREE DESCRIPTION" manually until I found something that met some of my requirements.

I eventually gave up and resorted to going through an agency. For an actual vacation involving a group of people, that wasn't so bad. As a solo traveler wanting economical, shared accomodations, Airbnb was a game changer when it first came onto the scene. Nowadays, not so much, although I do still get lucky sometimes -- I'm writing this from a perfectly acceptable room in a very nice host's home that is costing me $113/night all-in.

While Netflix has their own issues, I don't think I'd put them in the same grouping as [0]Uber, [1]Airbnb, and [2]FB/Meta.

Content that some people dislike is way different than [0]driving taxis out of business, [1]contributing to housing crunch, and [3]driving civil wars/genocide.

Netflix also had a lot of the content that drew people to their service pulled from the platform by content owners wanting to spin up their own streaming services (with mixed results). It's not like they intentionally dropped that content to save money, the licensing agreement ended and wasn't renewed by the IP owner.

Is it wrong of me to think that at the root of all of this is the VC funding model?

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