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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

The last wave of "unicorns" has been hardly "disruptive" in the positive sense of the word. If most of them were to disappear, my life would just be a little more cumbersome, but it won't change in any material way.

DoorDash is nice, but restaurants delivered food before that too. Uber is nice, but it's barely better than the taxis it replaced - at least in my city. Airbnb is a good option, but if it were to disappear, I'll just do what I always did - get a hotel room.

Considering that it tooks tens of billions of dollars to create businesses that were at best "nice to have", I have to wonder what's "disruptive" about any of this stuff.

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In my city Uber was worlds better than the taxis it replaced. Before Uber, you would call taxi dispatch and give them your address. If you were lucky, the driver would show up at that address, within the wait time the dispatcher gave you. He (always a he) would rarely take credit cards too...better plan an ATM stop into the ride.

Now that's in my home city. I cannot be the only one who got scammed by a taxi driver in an unfamiliar city when they took a deliberately circuitous route to the destination. Lesson learned: never tell the driver its your first time in <city>. If asked "is it your first time in <city>" tell them, "no, I come to <city> monthly for business".

I am not justifying Uber's sleazy behavior, both internally and with their poor vetting of drivers early on. But the taxi industry in the mid 2000's was just asking for disruption.

In the long run all these apps did was take you away from your traditional means and then put those price increases into the product over 5-10 years. In some cases getting you hooked to a new cost stream (i.e. doordash/uber). Those margins are just getting repackaged to the corp and the dev costs amortized over a longer time period.

Uber, at least in my city (São Paulo), has been truly disruptive and made my life significantly better (since I don’t own a car or even know how to drive)

In my city, they lured in drivers with fat incentives, then encouraged them to buy new cars - even partnering up with lenders to offer loans with low/zero down payment. Of course, the incentives dried up and drivers were left with expensive cars they couldn't pay for unless they worked 12-14 hour shifts.

I have zero sympathy for this godawful exploitative company. If the world didn't see them with the rose-tinted tech shades, they would have the same reputation something like Nestle has - a greedy, reckless, and exploitative corporation.

I agree they are a greedy, reckless, exploitative corporation. I do think though their product is a net positive to society, even a net positive to the drivers class in general (taxi is basically mafia around here and Uber driving was used as a sort of safety job fallback for people that would be otherwise unemployed).

where i live, downtown, uber is nearly equivalent to taxis. pros for taxis: you have to wait less time, you can tell ahead of time if they have air conditioning, and pricing is predictable. cons for taxis: uber is always available, you know what you're paying before you get in, and taxi drivers rob you every chance they get, while uber drivers never do

where my girlfriend lives, in the suburbs, taxis don't exist, so uber/didi/cabify is the only option other than taking the bus (which doesn't run at night) or walking (which is dangerous, especially at night)

'disruptive' innovations are worse in important ways than the incumbents they challenge, but much cheaper; from the perspective of the consumer, this isn't true of rides from uber or lodging with airbnb, but from the perspective of the provider, this is extremely true of uber and airbnb, which are 'competing' with the taxi medallion mafia and the regulatory regime established to protect established hotel chains

getting a taxi medallion or getting licensed to open a hotel are enormously more expensive than signing up with uber or airbnb

You could do vrbo even before airbnb existed. Airbnb innovation was the room in someone else house and almost no one does that at this point.

In San Francisco, Uber was a mobility revolution!

Lyft was! At the cost of public infrastructure, job security for drivers and increased emissions! But is it ever convenient.

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