Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft | Hacker News Reader

Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft

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1,224 pointscoloneltcb391 comments

I've been mystified how Uber's kept up their "Underdog" mantle for as long as they have. They've raised over $1.5B in investment from some of the biggest companies, private equity firms, and VCs on earth. I think you stop being an underdog as soon as Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, TPG, KPCB, Google, and Jeff Bezos are invested in your success.

They likely have more cash-on-hand than the cumulative Taxi base they are 'disrupting', they've been caught multiple times sabotaging competitors, they've been outed for dishonest advertising, and have been repeatedly accused of hostile actions toward their drivers. They ignore sensible regulations like maximum hourly workweeks and insurance minimums (do you want your driver working 90hrs/week without liability insurance?) under the guise of fighting the taxi cartel.

It often takes a 'push' to get bad laws changed, and Uber's provided much of that push, but not all laws that restrain business are bad and not all companies that break bad laws are good.

The whole "taxi cartel" thing is stupid. It arises out of this really distressing attitude that every dispute must involve "good guys" and "bad guys." Yes, the taxi companies are trying to shut down Uber and Lyft using regulation, but they are just trying to enforce a legal monopoly granted to them by the cities in which they operate. It's a legal right they got in return to agreeing to measures like rate regulation and "common carrier"-esque regulations concerning routes.

I personally think most of the taxi regulations are stupid, especially the price controls. But they're not irrational, nor did these legal regimes arise out of nefarious lobbying on the part of taxi companies. Rate regulations, forbidding surge pricing, requiring cabs to serve the whole city, etc, arise from cities treating cabs as a part of the overall municipal transit infrastructure. The "last half mile" of transit, as it were. I don't think regulated monopolies are a good idea, but they're certainly a common solution when it comes to industries that resemble public infrastructure.

Given that the taxi companies were granted monopolies as part of a larger regulatory regime, why are they "evil" for trying to enforce that privilege in the face of companies like Uber taking the high value routes out from under them, using techniques like surge pricing they aren't allowed to use?

As you point out, most people are critiquing the state intervention for being woefully outdated and not inline with market economics (as they always seem to end up being overtime thanks to technology). No-one really thinks the Taxi companies are the "evil" ones because they were handed monopolies on a platter then got comfortable and fat with their position.

If the local administrators have the power to hand out monopolies, they should also have the responsibility to retract it when it no longer makes sense. A repeated and long-delayed failure to do so is harmful to society, whether or not it was had good intentions at the beginning doesn't absolve it of criticism now.

  ... for being woefully outdated and not inline with market economics

Why do regulations have to be in line with market economics in the first place?

Most, if not all regulations should serve and protect the citizenship and not private interest.

That Uber so vehemently lobbies against sensible regulation, like an obligation for commercial insurance, speaks volumes.

I do think the local municipalities have a responsibility to revisit the regulations in light of a changing market, and frankly I believe a lot of the "universal coverage" motivations of the original regulations are misguided and never should have been in place to begin with.

That said, the narrative painted by the tech press has focused mostly on the efforts of cab companies to "stifle innovation" without acknowledging that they are defending legitimate rights. They paint Uber as a scrappy startup trying to compete with "fat" cab companies that have regulators in their pockets. The tech press narrative is simultaneously baseless and self-aggrandizing. The real narrative is less sexy: technology is enabling companies like Uber to eat up markets previous served, rather inefficiently, by modestly profitable small businesses. It's no different than what Wal-Mart did to mom and pop shops, or what Amazon did to small retailers, or what Starbucks did to local coffee shops. A national corporation can offer better service and lower prices, and can exercise quality control that obviates much of the need for regulation. This is both good and bad, but mostly, it's just the way the world works.

There's no reason, on top of all that, to demonize cab companies for trying to force municipalities to hold up their end of the bargain.

> critiquing the state intervention for being woefully outdated and not inline with market economics

Regulation is often not about being inline with market economics - it is often used to enforce things that companies would not do (because of cost) that have significant impact on employee, customer, and public safety.

The regulations in place vary from city to city, but Uber and co are not just arguing against the out-of-date bits (knowing "the knowledge" which some argue is irrelevant with technological help, and so forth) but the whole lot including drivers having adequate insurance and relevant background checks.

I'm very much in support of new business models thriving, even if it eventually kills the old ones (progress is a good thing) so I'll back Uber wanting a piece of the pie, but I don't agree with the complete circumvention of the existing regulations so I wouldn't currently feel safe using them.

The problem is that local politicians have little incentive to retract an inefficient monopoly enforcement (even one that we assume was previously efficient), because the taxi companies' special interests tend to win out over the dispersed interests of all taxi customers. This isn't some specific flaw with taxi regulations. It's a basic economic reality of government regulation.

It's a bad law, but as people point out downthread, breaking a bad law is not in itself a good deed, it is simply a neutral one.

For me, the appeal that Uber had (when it was active in Vancouver) was that most people didn't use it, and that I didn't have to pay at the point of delivery (nor tip). On a Friday night, leaving a venue at midnight with my wife and a friend, we knew from experience that waiting for a cab was going to be an hour at least, and probably more, as taxis were surging into the city with their fares and then rushing back out to get more fares. We were just out of the way enough that no cab was going to want to carry us from A to B, heading from a poorly-travelled area of town to another. On top of that, it was going to be hugely expensive, and splitting the fare is a hassle.

Instead, I summoned an Uber. It got there in fifteen minutes (and would have been sooner except for traffic), took us home, then continued on to drop off our friend. Minimal hassle, a comfortable ride, and impressed the fuck out of our friend. I was sold.

Then in Seattle earlier this year, we used Uber again. Our first trip was perfect (as we'd expected). Our second trip, the driver didn't even show up. We watched him on the app for 20 minutes; mostly not moving, and then driving around, never getting closer than ten blocks. My friend called him (another handy feature!) and he said that he'd already picked us up? Or someone up? He'd already done a fare, anyway, and apparently we weren't part of his plans. My friend got billed though, and had to contest the charge with Uber (which they quickly reversed).

Had we been excessively drunk (as I'm sure a lot of people were that weekend) we might not have even noticed. We would have flagged down a cab (which we eventually did) but forgotten about our uber ride entirely. The driver would have gotten paid, we'd have been out fifteen bucks, and no one would be the wiser.

Uber has gotten shady, for sure, but with their explosive growth it's hard to believe that the drivers aren't getting shady as well. Uber needs to be held to the regulations (which may need updating to support newer models of transportation), but they also need to start behaving like a real company and not an insecure frat boy trying to bully everyone into doing things his way. It's time for their investors to step up and start protecting their investment, and force Uber to stop exposing the company to lawsuits and horrible public image.

And it's time for people to stop using Uber until they straighten out their deal.

You know, I don't even think anything is wrong with Uber's public image. Its in their shareholders' best interest to be free from insurance requirements, etc, although I think ultimately they'll have to capitulate to those. And some of the "poaching" of Lyft drivers--well that's great. The drivers should go to whoever pays the most, and agreeing to not poach drivers would be anticompetitive.

I think Uber is great. I just see no reason to aggrandize them or to demonize the cab industry.

I think there is some legitimacy to the shake-up of the "taxi cartel".

Where I live in the midwest traditional taxi cabs are unreliable with their pickup times, they often advertise they accept credit cards when they do not, and they have a history of intentionally diverting through long routes.

Uber brings accountability and transparency to every step in the process of getting a taxi cab.

I'm not rooting for the good guy, I'm rooting for the more convenient and efficient customer experience.

I agree with you here -- I'm not necessarily pumped about ride-sharing because it's the best way for everybody to get around, but it is an outstanding way to wake up the taxi companies and force them to actually consider customers. Until recently, they've had enough of a corner on the market that they can have broken credit readers, unsafe drivers and suspect billing without much consequence. In my city, they seem to be regarded as the Comcast of the transportation world.

> they often advertise they accept credit cards when they do not,

This is not allowed in the UK and you have a variety of ways to tackle it.

> and they have a history of intentionally diverting through long routes.

This sounds straight up criminal. Carrying a GPS enabled phone and mapping the route driven should gather enough evidence to persuade regulators to take action.

On the other hand Uber doesn't take cash, which I prefer.

If taxi drivers actually adhered to those "common carrier-esque" restrictions, they would have a valid point in expecting Uber to follow the same. As it stands, you're speaking like someone who hasn't actually endured the experience of needing a cab driver to adhere to them.

Unfortunately, it's not enough to have a written law that says "oh yeah, taxis will totally take you anwhere, pick up anyone hailing them, and accommodate the disabled"; it needs to have actual observable implications.

When your entire defense is that "but we have to provide this public service", you might want to check that you're actually providing it.

Agree about the dangers of needing to make everyone a pure good or a pure bad guy though.

> Yes, the taxi companies are trying to shut down Uber and Lyft using regulation, but they are just trying to enforce a legal monopoly granted to them by the cities in which they operate.

If I buy legislation that allows me to extort consumers then when I extort them afterwards it is legal, but it's also as evil as always. There is a reason why illegal and evil are two different words.

You've obviously never been a black person trying to hail a cab. I can't tell you how many times I've had taxis refuse to take me across a bridge (which is part of their responsibility that comes with the monopoly). The taxi industry brought this on themselves and I'll be glad to see them go.

How is Uber addressing this? If anything it seems like it would be harder for them to enforce this that a regular taxi company.

> not all companies that break bad laws are good.

This to me, is the key of the problem. Yes, the taxi medallion system was broken in many cities and Uber is forcing to at least acknowledge that regulation in it's current form it's not longer useful. But I think that as a company Uber it's not a positive force on the public transportation market. Quite the opposite. I love tu use it when I'm in San Francisco but cannot shake the feeling that we are screwing ourselves long term by supporting it.

>This to me, is the key of the problem. Yes, the taxi medallion system was broken in many cities and Uber is forcing to at least acknowledge that regulation in it's current form it's not longer useful.

The medallion system was never "useful". It was simply a feudalistic setup designed with the help of regulatory capture to allow private investors to impose a private tax on riders and drivers.

Uber is simply modifying the feudal system, placing themselves at the top instead of the medallion owners.

Given the range of big investors and political support for the company (that stretches all the way up to Obama), I would guess that it's not even a change in who owns the taxi system - Goldman sachs are probably simply buying up uber stock and dumping medallions on easily duped investors - pension funds and the like, while lobbying their ass off to give Uber a free pass on all this lyft sabotage bullshit.

> Goldman sachs are probably simply buying up uber stock and dumping medallions on easily duped investors

Owning a taxi medallion is like owning a McDonald's franchise. Doesn't exactly make you a Master of the Universe. A $1 million investment in an NYC medallion nets you a maximum of about $75,000 a year: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/10/21/why-taxi-me.... The average McDonald's franchise nets $200-250k/year, and costs about $750k-1.5 million to buy.

> I love tu use it when I'm in San Francisco but cannot shake the feeling that we are screwing ourselves long term by supporting it.

Have you considered not using it?

What it boils down to, though, is it doesn't matter how much investment money you have if you're declared to be operating an illegal business and ordered to shut down. At this point, Uber and other ride-share companies are still in that danger zone. They're operating against the law in many cities (mine included, not that I'm complaining), and could be fined or forced to close at any moment.

Think it won't happen? It happened to Aereo. Sure, they didn't have as much money and weren't in as many locations, but its a similar vibe: if they closed their doors tomorrow, nothing would change. They might be in the process of disrupting the market, but they haven't won yet. They could lose everything overnight.

> They're operating against the law in many cities (mine included, not that I'm complaining), and could be fined or forced to close at any moment.

This plays into their "Uber vs. The Taxi Cartel" trope perfectly. In reality, Taxi regulations vary by city, state, and country. Uber is now operating in over 90 cities in the US and in 44 other countries. They couldn't possibly be "forced to close at any moment" since their business is legal or at least 'not illegal' in the vast majority of those territories.

The "Taxi Cartel" is really several hundred independent locally granted monopolies that exist to attempt to ensure requirements that Uber is going to ignore. The highly profitable airport routes exist to subsidize the requirement that taxis are handicap-accessible and can't discriminate against customers. Medallions were created to ensure that cars were properly maintained, drivers could earn decent wages, and that there wouldn't be reoccurrences of the crime waves against taxis and customers that led to medallions in the first place.

Obviously the number of medallions has been restricted to an unreasonably small number in most places causing the terrible service that many are used to. Also fairly obviously, the advent of the smartphone with personal profiles has reduced the crime potential facing the typical cabbie as well as the issues hailing cabs in outer boroughs or less populated neighborhoods. All of that said, it's not like cab companies or taxi drivers are widely profitable. The only public Medallion company (NASDAQ: TAXI) only makes $35M in revenue/year and about 1/3 of that in net income. If the claims surrounding Uber are true, they're projecting close to $2 Billion in net revenue in the very near future.

If Uber does indeed take all of the profitable routes, Taxi companies will close their doors. Some might consider that a net win, but consider the Uber app and the demographics of Smartphone owners (http://i.imgur.com/T5JpmQE.png) and then try and estimate how many Ubers are handicap-accessible. This would only be a net win for the wealthy, young, and non-handicapped, which was the entire point of taxi regulation in the first place.

I don't mean to argue that Uber = Bad and Taxis = Good, and there are other options to solve these problems rather than local monopolies and route protection, but the simplistic "Uber vs. Taxis" analysis usually ignores all of the externalities that would accompany a taxi-less world.

It's interesting to me that the main defenders of the status quo with respect to taxi regulation tend to invoke themes of social justice and egalitarianism (and criticize, either overtly or covertly, their opponents' privileged perspective).

This is interesting to me because none of the studies I have come across concerning taxi regulation emphasize these arguments; they mention them only in passing, if at all.

Take this paper from the November 2007 issue of Transport Policy, "Entry Controls in Taxi Regulation: Implications of US and Canadian experience for taxi regulation and deregulation": http://schallerconsult.com/taxi/entrycontrol.pdf

In its discussion of the rationale for taxi regulation (section 3), these reasons are given:

  - economies of scale may disproportionately favor larger companies
  - regulations guarantee availability of off-peak and low-density service
  - many aspects of taxi service cannot be examined prior to consumption
  - insufficient barrier to entry may lead to oversupply

Or take this OECD Policy Roundtable debating taxi regulation from 2007: http://www.oecd.org/regreform/sectors/41472612.pdf

The reasons given there (p.22) are:

  - lack of regulation leads to "excess entry" into the market
  - high taxi supply could take people away from more "economical" transport options
  - arguments about pollution and congestion
  - cyclical demand could lead to wage downturn when demand subsides
  - cyclical demand could harm service quality, since long-term players can't become established.

So out of all of those arguments, maybe one has anything to do with these egalitarian concerns that Uber/Lyft critics invoke. And many of these arguments are very directly obsoleted by Uber/Lyft-like business models (particularly the ones concerning incomplete information prior to the hail).

So why suddenly are taxis the champions of the underprivileged, and their competitors the tools of young rich person oppression? If protecting the underprivileged is "the entire point of taxi regulation in the first place," why are these social arguments missing from pre-2009 (when Uber was formed) literature?

> Medallions were created to ensure that cars were properly maintained, drivers could earn decent wages, and that there wouldn't be reoccurrences of the crime waves against taxis and customers that led to medallions in the first place.

Ha ha. In Sydney, at least, this is a joke.

In my opinion, all it would take for Uber to be shut down is a sufficiently big enough fine for violating the law in one or a couple cities. If they got hit with a $5000 per passenger fine in a major metropolitan area with thousands of passengers, how long with the major investors keep pumping in money? There's little hope of a return on that kind of loss.

In my city I thought Uber would be massively successful. I was so excited when they launched. But there are hardly any drivers around, because the police calls up Uber rides and then tickets the driver for operating an illegal cab. No one wants to drive with that persecution going on.

That's probably why they're employing such shady tactics. They need the fastest growth they can achieve, in order to become huge enough and making it difficult for the regulator to shut them down by means of law.

> the regulator

Which regulator?

That's probably why they're employing such shady tactics. They need the fastest growth they can achieve, because those new 911 turbos aren't going to buy themselves.

There ya go, fixed it.

nothing would change

Well, in my market (San Diego), anyways, I am certain the number of drunk drivers would go up, and the bar industry would see a hit in their clientele. I rarely even drink myself, but I don't think twice about calling a Lyft to go out or come back after drinking.

>number of drunk drivers would go up

>bar industry would see a hit in their clientele

Back to pre-Uber levels, presumably.

Aereo is fighting a much larger battle. It's the difference between fighting a house cat and a sabretooth tiger. The problem with Aereo is not that it is so good for consumers that some people aren't getting "their cut"...it all boils down to advertising. With Aereo, it's no longer truly possible to tell someone how many homes they are reaching with advertising dollars. How are network executives supposed to quantify how much they can charge to advertisers, now that they have even less of an idea of the effect of those advertisements? Also, since Aereo was being considered as on-par with the rest of the CATV providers, why weren't they required to pay retransmission fees? Although I really did believe in Aereo's promise of a better future, and I absolutely think that the future of television is streaming linear broadcasting, I always knew that it was going to be killed off by legislation because the cable industry is SO corrupt that there is literally no room for disruption.

On the other hand, Uber is not illegal. It never really was. Taxi cartels are attempting to twist the law to make it sound illegal. But really, Uber is just a dispatching service for limo companies that already exist. If you're talking about UberX, that may be a different story. UberX is not available in all 90 cities that regular Uber operates in, but there are enough cities with just regular Uber service that it won't be a problem if they have to shutter UberX for some reason down the line.

There are bastions of sanity in the world. My city government and Uber worked together to put Uber/Lyft under legal regulation while at the same time doing a small amount of deregulation of taxis to help competition. There was a _healthy_ amount of dissent which made reasonable points and the measure eventually passed.

It may be cold half the year in Minneapolis, but I think it makes people a little more reasonable.

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2014/07/mpls_city_council...

I disagree, I think business size matters a lot. Uber may not be there yet, but the nature of legal violations changes for big companies. It's like they say: if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem. Similarly, a sufficiently large business breaking the law is more a problem for the government than the business. Just look at how much trouble e.g. Bank of America got in for all their illegal shenanigans surrounding the mortgage crisis.

Uber also has the advantage that they're generally not dealing with national governments, but local ones, who are much more easily swayed by big businesses. One locality might declare them illegal, but they can just drop that market and move on. Or more likely, as happened here in Virginia a few weeks ago, they'll come to some sort of arrangement with the local government and be back in business in a few days.

>I've been mystified how Uber's kept up their "Underdog" mantle for as long as they have.

Companies intentionally market themselves to mislead in ways that are beneficial to them, in terms of image. One example is Hyundai, which walks the fine line of modeling its logo and style after Honda to draw off Honda's goodwill with customers (I think that this is quite smart).

I wonder how much Uber has invested in its PR status to keep this underdog image.

I agree with the idea of what you're saying, but Hyundai vs Honda seems odd to me. I've owned and liked 2 Hyundai but really don't understand why people buy Honda's.

If Uber is already this evil now, what things can we expect once they go into ground transport in general with self-driving cars? I don't want to trust a nefarious company to drive me and my kids around!

How can their investors, of which some are excellent startup investors, be fine with this. Is there no guidance at all??

> I've been mystified how Uber's kept up their "Underdog" mantle for as long as they have.

I see them as the "underground." Granted they have gotten a lot of funding, their primary opposition -- taxis -- are firmly entrenched & cities all over the country have considered various legislation to ban/stop them.

In fact, I think it's somewhat silly they're fighting with Lyft. They should be working together to knock back the entrenched players.

I see Uber as wanting their own future monopoly. They aren't some egalitarian democratic plumb bob making the world better for everyone. They are a national and trans-national transportation monopoly that has deep brand recognition while forcing drivers to play or pray, same schtick as the taxi companies. Why else would Goldman Sachs and Blackrock be involved?

Someone needs to make the craigslist of Uber or a Meta-Uber. The fact that many uber drivers are also taxi operators is very telling.

Or have cities provide Uber-esq services in lockstep with their other transportation services (bus, light rail, etc).

Don't we argue always for the last-mile to be a public utility? Same scenario. Whitelabel services can contract with locales, an API is provided that anyone can integrate with, and the city can manage capacity and utilization.

Good catch.

The way I see it, Uber is trying to establish a global rent-seeking scheme. Or, to put it in slightly another way: they're trying to capture a large number of the existing, mostly local rent-seeking schemes.

Once that happens, they will no doubt fall into the same slouch that infests any lucrative monopoly.

For the time being the customers can at least enjoy the ride.

I bet Lyft doesn't think it's silly.

Don't let the fist bumps and mustaches fool you, Lyft has raised over $300,000,000 in VC and has tried to poach many an Uber driver. There's no one to feel bad for in this race.

Every company is, to some extent, an underdog against governments.

They may have more money than taxis, but taxis often have entire local agencies dedicated to their industry. It's extremely difficult to break that sort of captured regulatory structure. The ICC for example was chartered in 1887 to regulate railroads, and was not dissolved until 1995!

... are you casting Gilded Age robber barons as underdogs?

I don't understand how anyone could get that from my comment. Could you elaborate? I'm honestly confused.

>I've been mystified how Uber's kept up their "Underdog" mantle for as long as they have.

They now have a guy from the Obama campaign (David Plouffe) working on their PR.

He must be really good considering he hasn't even started yet.

"David Plouffe, the former campaign manager and White House adviser to President Barack Obama, is taking his political secret sauce to Uber late next month as senior vice president of policy and strategy"

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/david-plouffe-uber-cam...

I know this may sound hyperbolic, but I hope that others join me in finally getting around to installing the Lyft app today.

Before now I'd considered them too small to be worth bothering with, but hey, if Uber is worried then maybe I should give it a try. After this, and Uber's attempts at doing the same with GoTaxi a few months ago, I'll be very happy to take my business elsewhere.

I'd also be interested to know if the VCs that invested in Uber were aware of these tactics. It's especially sad to think of good startup investment money being used to defraud a competing company rather than invest in good customer service.

I was in San Francisco for a few days in mid June.

Having never used a ride-sharing service before, I hesistantly installed Lyft and handed over my payment information.

After the first ride, I didn't look back. I used their services maybe 10 times in 3 days in order to get around the city. Waits were never very long (we got rides at many different times of day, morning, mid-day, late night) and all of the drivers I had were friendly.

My experiences were all pleasant and the fares were reasonable. I can't speak to the quality of the Uber experience, but it seems many of the Lyft drivers were not too keen on the company.

Having used both, the one thing that keeps me from exclusively using lyft is coverage. Around Atlanta suburbs they don't seem to have much coverage, not something that can be fixed easily I guess.

On at least two occasions in San Francisco I've seen someone with the Uber U on their windshield and a pink mustache on the dashboard, ready to swap out. Don't know how widespread it is, but it seems pretty easy for drivers to work both networks.

I'd love to take my business elsewhere. Particularly to Lyft however when I tried to sign up the other day to try it out I got a message that my account was banned and I had to contact support. I believe it said I had a duplicate account. I've never used Lyft.

I wonder if action they took against my account was a result of them trying to mitigate these attacks from Uber. If so the damage is much worse than just the canceled rides.

Same, pretty sure I've been shadow-banned by Lyft for the past year or two since it never shows any available cars in the middle of the day despite living in downtown SF (and plenty when my roommate opens the app next to me). I'm very cordial in any rideshare service I take, and have a very high Uber rating over hundreds of trips (though that large quantity is a direct result of not being able to use Lyft). I've always joked I was caught up in the counter-Uber net, because I see no other reason why I wouldn't be able to use the service.

Or uber "borrowed" your account info and used it for one of their Lyft smurfs...

Is there any evidence of this? That is going beyond anything I've read, in my opinion.

ewww... I guess I should take the time to contact support.

I keep hoping they release a Windows Phone App, or a mobile website with service functionality.

My sympathies - it was exactly issues like that which drove me away from Windows Phone (7) back to Android. I hear it's a lot better these days, but all it takes is one missing app...

I switched back from WP8 to android a couple of months ago, and I must say the better app selection has been huge.

Where I felt the app shortage hurt the most wasn't at the top - there are a few glaring omissions, and some of the apps took a long time to show up, but WP8 for the most part has apps for top services (facebook, twitter, instagram, spotify, uber, etc).

But then there's this second tier of apps where WP8's coverage is absolutely terrible.

I was talking with a coworker today about how his bank (small, local bank) just released an app allowing mobile check deposit - on android and iOS.

Your favorite pizza chain or sub shop has an app for ordering delivery or takeout? Android and iOS only.

Target has an app that allows you to search an item, and then see what aisle it's in in the store - android and iOS only.

There's this huge class of convenient but not necessary apps that you don't get on windows phone right now, and having spent a couple of months with them, I don't think I could go back. It's too bad really, I feel like Microsoft got a lot of things right with WP8. I definitely preferred the UI compared to android.

No doubt. I've found that Lyft is the one major missing piece for me, but because Uber has an app (and has previously had a full-functioned mobile site) that it wasn't a deal breaker. I'm probably simpler than most around here in my wants from my smartphone though.

Does anyone know if this is still the same situation on Blackberry?

It really does seem a two-horse race between iOS and Android.

I have a Windows Phone and I can't even cash checks. Sigh.

That doesn't make any sense. How can a phone cash checks? No phones have a cash dispenser.

You don't say it directly, but I'm inferring that you're suggesting Lyft because you disapprove of Uber's tactics as described in the story.

I'd be interested to know what, specifically, you disapprove of. The article sounds to me like one company trying very hard to recruit another's drivers.

What is the alternative? One or both companies refrain from recruiting each others' drivers? Google and Apple (and others) recently got in trouble for doing that sort of thing.

Not being the GP I don't know, but I'd wager it has something to do with the whole planning to disrupt their usual business part of it. It's not just recruiting, it's running interference.

Conspiracy to commit fraud and disrupt business strikes me as eligible for a RICO prosecution.

I have used Lyft in Seattle and am very satisfied. I've found Lyft a much more fun and relaxed ride than Uber.

Uber does have an explicit SUV option (I don't recall Lyft having this), which has proven to be a boon upon occasion.

http://get.lyft.com/plus/ ?

Just downloaded Lyft app for use in Kansas City AND signed up on hn after lurking for years! Feeling super motivated today apparently.

Does Lyft still require a Facebook account?

no.

If you the type of person who closes a bar, though, I would strongly suggest additionally adding a photograph, since it will make you easy to identify in the crowds of the bar rush.

Oh, great news. that's what kept me from signing up in the first place. They replied to my comment saying they were "inherently social" as if you can't be social without Facebook.

Huh, that's interesting. I assumed it was far more common for people to have both. Whenever a price drop is announced, I switch, and it's been a pretty good heuristic so far. Also lyft predated uberX, so I would've thought that many people would have it from back when it was essentially a different service.

I absolutely love using Lyft in Seattle.

I also use Lyft and Uber in Seattle, and I much prefer Lyft.

It's interesting, there are two totally different cultures when it comes to Lyft and Uber drivers. Lyft drivers are always happy to talk and love it when you sit in the front seat. Uber drivers are always pretty friendly but often encourage sitting in the back like a taxi. There are drivers that are both on Uber and Lyft and they are always great and seem to be more like a typical Lyft driver than an Uber driver.

Maybe I'm different (hey, it's possible), but I like UberX for the inverse reason. When I do one of the "ridesharing" things, I'm usually half awake, coming off of a shift at work, and I just want to go home or wherever else I'm going. I wish there was a socially acceptable way to say "I'm grumpy and don't want to talk, please just hush." Since Lyft has a reputation for being more open and friendly, I stick with Uber/UberX because they're usually quiet drivers.

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Pretty simple. Cancel within 5 minutes for free.

> Pretty simple. Cancel within 5 minutes for free.

Don't do that -- it screws over the driver who has to burn gas.

Please be sure to read this article before commenting.

It is NOT about Uber ordering fake Lyft rides to keep Lyft drivers off the street, as was alleged by Lyft last month.

It is about:

1. Uber using the Lyft service to get in touch with Lyft drivers, then trying to recruit them to be Uber drivers by presumably paying them more

2. Lyft trying to block Uber contractors from using Lyft, so that they cannot do (1)

3. Uber using burner phones and fake Lyft accounts to enable them to keep doing (1)

Also keep in mind the uproar here over the past year caused by Apple/Google/etc trying to increase profits by subverting the free market for tech worker salaries. Is the only difference that then it was collusion as opposed to an adversarial arms race? Or does the collective opinion depend on whether HN readers stand to benefit financially?

Yeah but they did cancel a bunch of rides and that's the upsetting part. Their reasons might have been different than originally assumed but that doesn't change the egregious nature of their tactics.

What it sounds like from the article is that the independent contractors Uber hires are canceling rides whenever they realize that the Lyft driver has already been approached. If they had a policy of never canceling rides I don't think people would be as upset.

Lyft says that Uber employees have canceled 5000 rides since last October. That's like $100k in lost revenue -- it's nothing. Definitely not some big plan by Uber to undermine Lyft.

It's also lost revenue for the drivers who were on their way to pick up the recruiters. I think that's the part most people are upset about.

And while the canceling of rides isn't a big plan by Uber to undermine Lyft, the recruiting of their drivers most certainly is. That I have no problem with, but canceling rides is (borderline) fraud.

Much less than that. They only lose the time it took to drive to the person, not the time they would have spent driving that person to their destination. The "drop" is way less than $20, so we can assume the cost of a canceled ride is too.

This is like $10k in revenue.

If someone defrauded me of $100k, I wouldn't call it 'nothing'. Fraud is a felony. People need to go to jail for this.

That's a potential software developer's salary, whose contributions are certainly worth more than that - I'd call it substantial.

Point #2 is technically correct, but I think it's perfectly legitimate to block people from recruiting your employees at your place of business, while they are working.

Lyft isn't trying to block Uber from contacting Lyft drivers at home, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, etc. They are trying to block them from abusing the Lyft service to recruit. It would be like Apple trying to block Google from waltzing into their HQ and walking from desk to desk trying to recruit their employees.

Except they're not Lyft employees. They're independent contractors. They set their own schedule, choose where they wish to work, ect...

I still agree that it's perfectly legitimate for them to put forth effort to block recruiters but I think the fact that the drivers aren't employees does make it not quite as bad as your analogy.

And 4. Uber contractors cancelling rides for drivers that have already been recruited

5. Uber drivers organizing in chat groups to keep track of Lyft drivers in the area that have already been tapped, to prevent canceled rides.

Just making sure it's all in there. I'm not a big fan of Uber either but the large-scale stuff (top post here) seems way more important than Uber trying to reach out to each Lyft driver one time and see if they're interested.

From the article, the organization was to ensure that they didn't hit up the same driver multiple times, giving away the scale of the game they were playing. Clearly they don't care about canceling rides, since they were literally just in the news for intentionally canceling rides for no reason other than to make Lyft and their drivers lose money.

No, that's not it. They're keeping track of Lyft drivers in the area so that they know who to cancel, not so that they can avoid canceling rides.

And, look, if they could hail specific drivers that they'd never talked to before, I'm sure they would. But they can't. They don't control who Lyft matches them with. It sounds like they make some attempts to avoid just hailing the same driver over and over again, but sometimes they do hail the same guy over and over again, and in that case, they cancel.

Can't stomach unethical, morally bankrupt anti-competitive tactics. Sabotaging a competitor's services distorts the free-market, ultimately harming consumers. If Uber aren't suitably punished by the courts, I hope at least their reputation is tarnished in the court of public opinion. Although that's not clear since "there's no such thing as bad publicity" and Uber's been getting a lot of that recently.

Either way, I'm at least glad I've never used Uber yet, and now never will.

Sabotaging a competitor is precisely how the free-market operates that's why we have regulations, because a free market isn't actually free or desirable.

I'm so tired of people who don't know what "free market" means making up their own definition and then saying it's a bad thing.

A "free market" is an economics term meaning a marketplace free from anti-competitive forces such as government subsidies, government price floors or ceilings, monopolies, cartels, oligopolies, non-compete agreements, etc.

If Google and Apple make an agreement about smartphone pricing, then we might not have a free market for cell phones. The government could then use regulations against such anti-competitive agreements to end the price fixing and restore a free market. In that scenario it was private enterprise causing a non-free market and regulation that made it a free market.

Regulations can help a free market (breaking up monopolies, preventing cartels and anti-competitive practices) or regulations can harm a free market (subsidizing production, preventing new entrants from entering the market). This notion of "free market vs regulations" is completely misunderstanding what a free market is and how the systems involved work.

>I'm so tired of people who don't know what "free market" means making up their own definition and then saying it's a bad thing.

"Free market" has multiple, ill defined and often conflicting meanings, which is partly what makes it so useful for propaganda purposes.

Yours is just one of those meanings, and a particularly pernicious one at that, because a marketplace free from anti-competitive forces has NEVER existed and never will exist.

The neoclassical school economics actually uses the term 'perfect competition' to describe your particular meaning, and while it's a very common assumption, it's one that always breaks their models (making them a poor fit to reality).

I disagree with your defintion in the google-Apple example and so does Wikipedia. It's pretty clear that if the government regulates it it's not a free market anymore.

--- A free market is a market system in which the prices for goods and services are set freely by consent between sellers and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market ---

> If Google and Apple make an agreement about smartphone pricing, then we might not have a free market for cell phones.

If people buy the phones voluntarily, knowing that the prices are set by agreement between Google and Apple, then that's a free market. The fact that you disapprove of sellers colluding to set prices does not mean collusion automatically stops the market from being free.

> The government could then use regulations against such anti-competitive agreements to end the price fixing and restore a free market.

Using regulations to force companies (or anyone) to do things they have not chosen to do voluntarily is not a free market. The fact that regulations might lead to an outcome you approve of does not make regulatory coercion a free market operation. The way a free market would "fix" price collusion between two sellers is by buyers voluntarily choosing not to buy from those sellers, causing those sellers to lose money and either go out of business or change their practices.

Exactly this. I have to explain this to people all the time. A free market is not the same as anarchy. Regulations are involved in making a market free by preventing non-governmental anti-competitive forces from distorting the market.

So in the end, what you're saying is that he's right? I took his comment as a broad generalization, not some flippant slogan via "free market is a fantasy economics concept pretty much exclusive to all who read Ayn Rand and vote Ron Paul". But you already knew that.

That depends on whether you define free market as anarchy or free of regulation or whether you define it in the original economical theory sense: a lot of competitors with essentially same product and everyone instantly know all available into (so everyone buys cheapest of the same).

Monopoly is not free market in the original sense, even if it came out from unregulated competition.

" a lot of competitors with essentially same product and everyone instantly know all available into (so everyone buys cheapest of the same)."

But we already know these free markets are either not efficient or likely not efficient. Strong form efficiency is provably false.

Weak form efficiency is only possibly true if P = NP (http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284).

Depends on what you mean by "free market". There's the free market that Adam Smith talked about, and there's the free market that Ayn Rand talked about.

> Sabotaging a competitor is precisely how the free-market operates

No, it isn't. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary: nothing happens unless both parties agree to make it happen. So unless your competitor agrees to let you sabotage them, sabotaging a competitor is not a free market operation.

Either way, I'm at least glad I've never used Uber yet, and now never will.

Which, of course, is you exercising your market decision to not use Uber.

Interesting to hear Travis Kalanick's response to the Lyft accusations last week where he mentioned that "competition is better for the consumer, better for the driver"

@ about 4:40 in this video:

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/uber-s-kalanick-hires-former-...

Agree. Goober's whole business model was about leveraging our good will from smashing the taxi cartels.

Now this? Nice "pivot" guys.

Uber has a culture of breaking the rules. As beneficial as that was and is in their growth, it's not surprising it mutates in less pleasant ways as they grow. The same actions that seemed benevolent before, will seem more and more malevolent as they look less and less like an underdog.

A cheesy line from Batman comes to mind, they will live long enough to see themselves become the villain. The customers will end up asking for more regulation in a few years. Maybe Uber will start issuing a limited amount of medallions in every city. But a lot of money to be made along the way.

It will be interesting to see how long a company with that culture can survive. Uber may even be able to flout federal law because of their extensive passenger & travel data. (Suspect Larry Page got off easy on the illicit drug advertising because of this, others would expect to do hard time.)

For service startups we benefit from the early adapter "eliteness." Early drivers as well as users of Uber were of a high social status and fairly sophisticated. Much like the early days of usenet, rules can be lax or non-existent. However when the mass market begins to arrive startups which previously flourished with an tight early adapter user base start to show their cracks.

No one wants to kill their own momentum but a way to see if your startup will start to stink as it grows is to recruit both service providers and users from online ad campaigns very early on. Track them as their own segment and see what sort of unique problems they bring.

"will seem more and more malevolent". Are you saying its not actually malevolent but is just being perceived as so because it is aggressive ?

I only meant that how we look at them changes with their size, and if they want to remain the "good guys" their tactics should change too.

If Lyft had 5 times the funding, Uber recruiting their drivers would look like a bold move. It would mean Uber believes drivers will stick with them long-term because life for drivers with them is clearly better, and the initial investment pays off in the long run, despite them having a smaller war chest to begin with.

Now that Uber has 5 times the funding, the same move looks like Uber is afraid of Lyft beating them in the market, and is trying to kill them early by buying off their drivers and crippling them. They can afford this even if driving for Uber is a shittier experience long-term than driving for Lyft, since they have so much more money it doesn't really matter. Lyft will be dead or badly injured before drivers figure it out, so Uber doesn't need to worry about being the best in the market.

What their actual motives are is anyone's guess, but it doesn't look good for them to do this.

The way people perceive actions tends to change based on the status of the person(s) performing the action at the time the action was performed.

Everyone knows reddit admins used to game the system by faking submissions to solve the chicken and egg problem and nobody really cares, but there would be an uproar if they were found to be manipulating story placements behind the scenes today because the scale of the site is so different.

People are pretty willing to overlook borderline underhanded things if you are really an underdog trying to get a leg up, but far less so when you're the industry leader trying to crush upstarts.

This is a really dumb strategy though, breaking the rules means not being constrained by the social norms and trying something new, however, it doesn't mean being an a-hole and doing purely malicious stuff at all. That's very unentrepreneurial.

>The customers will end up asking for more regulation in a few years

Consumers hardly ever ask for regulation.

I was thinking of taxi legislation as the example (EU city example, can't speak for the US). Taxis in my city need to be registered and the drivers need to have a taxi license, the cars need to have prices clearly listed on their window, as well as the driver's ID visible in the car. All of this is due to consumers getting repeatedly ripped off, complaining about it to the city's politicians, which then wrote up the regulations. The consumers are much better protected now, and have a clear channel for complaints.

To me that is clearly a consequence of consumers wanting more regulation. Same as with perishable products having to be clearly marked with its due date in stores, and practically every consumer protection law/regulation out there.

Not saying that these laws can't be abused, but that doesn't mean the consumers aren't the main reason behind their existence.

Really? My view is the other way around. Customers ask for more regulation and businesses are against it. Some of the consumer requested laws include national laws like the Pure Food and Drug Act and Clean Water Act, state laws like various lemon laws, and local laws like rent control.

> businesses are against it

I think some businesses are against it (they tend to be the smaller ones), but other businesses (these tend to be the larger ones) like it because, while it imposes a burden on them, it imposes more burden on their competitors. Also, businesses can often get into a position where they basically write the regulations that they will have to abide by (i.e., regulatory capture). In that situation, regulation can be an asset for a business.

I speak of course in broad generalities, and not to each and every company or consumer. To start, all members of a business are also consumers, so there is no clear cut distinction between the two, and some consumers are philosophically against all regulations even without being in control of a business.

You're right, the government just steps in and regulates because, uh, it hates business?

{rolls eyes}

IMO Uber's greatest threat is someone coming along and making a similar service and licensing it to cities so that the cities could control who becomes a driver, total number of drivers, as well as integrate with traditional taxi services and take a cut of the revenue. Then all the sudden Uber et al. are competing with a entity that has the ability to legislate them out of business.

Underhanded tactics like this is just more ammunition for anyone who wants to make the argument that the industry needs to be regulated. Uber might be shooting Lyft in the foot but they're also putting holes in the floor they're standing on themselves.

http://gocurb.com/ has been doing exactly that for many years.

Curb (TaxiMagic) is just a (bad) dispatch-management service; it's not really built into any taxi system, and doesn't provide any sort of feedback or quality control on the ride experience.

There is a feedback mechanism in Curb (I'm a former employee). For some taxi companies, LA for example, Curb has very deep links into the dispatch system and can choose not to offer rides to certain drivers directly - so enough bad feedback and the taxi driver will no longer get Curb ride offers. For other taxi companies reviews get reported back to the taxi management and they can act on the report as they choose (some companies act quickly and promptly and some others don't do anything).

And Hailo (?)

But why aren't they succeeding?

They are succeeding, but not to the extent of Uber/Lyft. Regulated taxi industry pricing is much higher than lyft or UberX pricing. If taxis get de-regulated and/or UberX/Lyft get regulated then Curb/Hailo/etc will be well positioned.

Uber controls its fate, though its success may be stymied by municipalities. Taking the business directly to cities puts the onus on them- a much harder proposition than providing a good service. I know which business I'd rather run.

http://www.taxi.eu/en/

I don't think it will get much further than that in many European cities. Most of the regulations are in place for a reason.

Price comparison SF:

Uber X: $3 base fare, $0.30 per minute, $1.50 per mile

Lyft: $2.25 base fare, $0.27 per minute, $1.35 per mile

Both have a $1 trust and safety fee, and Lyft has a lower minimum.

I’ve personally had better experiences with Lyft overall, and I’ve taken at least 100 rides with each service.

Anecdotally, I've had better experiences with Lyft as well. Uber's customer support has been terrible in comparison.

Agreed. I can't even sign up for their app on Android using Google account and Google Wallet. I emailed their support email a week ago and haven't heard anything back. The Wallet dialog pops up but I can't click anything. Looks like I won't be signing up with Uber anytime soon.

I just got back from the U.S.

Where I was, Uber was constantly jacking up the price with surge pricing, between 1.25x to 1.75x the normal price. Meanwhile, Lyft not only wasn't jacking up the price during those same hours but was running a 25% special. On top of that, the Lyft drivers were typically friendlier. No brainer which one I recommend to others.

Am I the /only/ person commenting that has had a better experience with Uber? I am having a hard time thinking about using Lyft over Uber in the future (West LA area).

Same here... west LA too. UberX usually has more cars available and the Lyft ones are usually older models.

Is the comparison usefull? I think many drivers use both Uber and Lyft.

And at the end the good care belongs to the driver not to the services behind them.

Is it just me or does "growth hacking" and having good "hustle" actually means doing sleazy things and being a dick.

I don't understand why Silicon Valley and Startups think acting like this is not only acceptable, but should be applauded.

I also don't understand why VCs pick companies that are clearly courting a huge lawsuit by providing a platform for people to ignore local laws.

Probably because they see how well AirBnB is doing in the same vein of "ignoring local laws".

Greed.

I think that they found a sweet spot where they can make a lot of money and still get away with it, because companies will get acquihired and VCs recoup their investment before people get fed up and start complaining. And "growth hacking" and "hustle" and the like are just ways of making those practices not trigger pangs of conscience, the way saying "you're being an antisocial, malicious jerk" might.

Every Dark Pattern is the brutal end of blindly following A/B testing.

It is the brutal end of blindly following A/B testing with the bottom line as the controlling variable.

If you were to A/B test for user satisfaction instead (much harder to measure) you'd get a totally different result.

A/B testing is a tool, you can use it for good or bad.

> If you were to A/B test for user satisfaction instead (much harder to measure) you'd get a totally different result.

I think you would pretty much get Amazon.

Strictly from a customer point of view they are the company that would get the highest user satisfaction I would give any company.

They do worry me though, that much power in some verticals is far too open to abuse.

It doesn't have to mean those things, but yes, it often does unfortunately. I still think there are some white hat techniques that can get results, but I'm no expert.

If you set aside the hyperbolic title, this actually is an exoneration of the worst things that Uber has been accused of: namely they were NOT pranking or trying to deliberately mess up Lyft.

The hangup calls were the side-effect of their extremely aggressive recruitment efforts for Lyft drivers - where it seems they'd hang up and call back later to try and get a different driver that they hadn't already pitched.

While not great, it also doesn't strike me as particularly underhanded or evil (this is a scenario where the "best" outcome for Uber is paying Lyft for a ride where they try and give the Lyft driver a phone and presumably a better paying job).

Lyft has stated they've had over 5,000 CANCELLED rides, meaning Uber is deliberately trying to mess up Lyft. If you don't think the cancelled rides count, how can you say that aggressively recruiting its drivers, and as a by product, reducing the earnings of the drivers/Lyft, is Uber not trying to mess up Lyft? I'm not saying its illegal, but its clearly Uber trying to win the market by shutting out Lyft.

5000 cancelled rides over a year does not mess up a system that reportedly has a millions of trips per year.

Those are the rides that are cross-correlated with known recruiters. The actual figures could be more. I know for a time in February I would get tons of suspicious pings, and my friend who was a dual driver said, "oh, that's Uber fucking with you"

I don't think the argument here is over the scale or the percent of rides that were fake. The argument here was "Is Uber trying to shut down Lyft, through a variety of tactics?". I'd have to say yes, they are trying their best to block Lyft out of the business by limiting the key resource, drivers.

I love lyft (and also drive for uber)... I have no doubt in my mind that uber did this (and if I get deactivated by uber for posting this I don't really care, they've lost so much money on trying to recruit me it will take 10 more months for them to recover their investment).

I think it would be hilarious if lyft didn't ban the uber guys but hellbanned the uber guys (hellbanned in the hn sense). Which would make the number of cancelled rides make much, much more sense.

Why were they trying to recruit you if you were already driving for Uber?

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It sounds like you don't understand how Lyft and Uber work. You have no control over which driver you get; the driver app lets all the drivers in your area (and an increasing area over time) know that you want a ride. Whoever clicks "accept" first gets it.

The fact that there are so many cancellations is a direct result of the Uber recruiters using a CRM to avoid pitching to the same driver more than once.

They don't know which driver they'll get assigned to them until they get the driver assigned to them - there's no way for them to check drivers against the spreadsheet until the ride has been requested.

Its unfortunate but I am surprised here, aren't there any laws to punish this kind of systematic sabotage.

Would the VCs like Google Ventures and other VCs self-police and influence Uber from this tactics. Uber already has first entrant advantage, this is not childish, this is sinister. Some driver somewhere burned lot of gas and rubber only to be disappointed that there is no fare there.

I will not use Uber until they make mends, I know I am a small hummingbird but anything with in my means to discourage this practice.

> this is not childish, this is sinister. Some driver somewhere burned lot of gas and rubber only to be disappointed that there is no fare there.

It could be even worse.

Imagine a Lyft driver going to a Uber initiated non-existent fare. Now imagine him or her getting into an accident and dying on the way there.

That seems like a needless exaggeration. Traveling to a non-existent fare does not result in the driver doing anything they wouldn't have been doing otherwise.

Uber's behaviour is already bad, we don't need to add hyperbole.

Actually, if it weren't for Uber's call they would not have been at the incident's location at the wrong time. Of course, it's a worse case scenario / exaggeration, but when they make thousands of calls, it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

To those who have used Lyft: do you get any choice in which drivers come to pick you up?

If not, I can see how the combination of Uber's policies can lead to a lot of cancelled rides even without Uber explicitly telling their recruiters to do so. To wit:

- You're an Uber recruiter, and you call up a Lyft driver to pick you up from somewhere.

- At some point, I assume you get to see the driver's profile through Lyft, at which point you flip through your messaging app and realize that he's already been pitched.

- Since Uber discourages you from pitching to the same driver more than once, you cancel the ride.

This leads to a lot of cancelled rides coming from Uber's recruiters, while letting them keep their company line of, "We don't ask our employees to deliberately cancel rides". Because, technically, they haven't.

So which is it - is poaching another company's drivers bad, or is making secret anti-poaching agreements bad?

Recruiting drivers from competitors isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's the tactics used here to attempt to kill Lyft by making it bleed cash that are unethical.

This article only describes a concerted effort to recruit drivers by hailing rides. Lyft still gets paid.

I believe that the hail / cancel tactic is unethical, but this article only describes direct recruitment.

The article references the hail/cancel.

"Earlier this month, CNN reported that Uber employees around the country ordered and then canceled 5,560 Lyft rides, according to an analysis by Lyft. (Lyft arrived at this figure by cross-referencing the phone numbers of users who tried to recruit Lyft drivers to Uber with users who had previously canceled rides.) "

The amount of money involved in the cancelled rides is inconsequential to Lyft's success. 5,000 cancelled rides is what, about $100,000? Techcrunch reported a $100 million annual gross revenue rate at Lyft last December, with 6% weekly growth.

CEO Travis Kalanick is attempting to defending Uber's practices in a Twitter conversation with DHH.

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/504374243790831616

They have so many brand ambassadors there's no way they can control what they do when you wave a stack of hundreds in front of them an incentivize them to try and steal Lyft drivers. Perhaps they didn't tell the recruiters to cancel those Lyft rides but they should have laid out some ground rules if they wanted to keep their hands clean.

And walmart has a lot of cashiers they can't control either. Turns out they're both liable for the actions of these agents acting on their behalf. Why make excuses?

"When you outsource your marketing, you outsource your ethics and your reputation."

DHH had a really great comment on this worth sharing with HN:

"Take the higher ground, man. Let the runner-ups do the runner-up shit. You're sitting on a throne but acting the peasant."

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/504374011711594496

So Google, Facebook, and Apple are bad because they come to secret agreements to not poach each other's employees and now Uber and Lyft are bad because they'll do everything in their power to poach each other's employees?

Make up your minds.

This sort of poaching is good for the drivers, and this sort of ruthless competition is a good indication of a market that is good for riders.

Imagine if google and facebook were calling up random numbers at each others' headquarters in order to recruit. If the recruiter ended up guessing a number of an engineer that they've already reached, they would hang up. If they hadn't spoken to them they would give them a pitch on switching companies.

This would be an accurate analogy, and I think if either google or facebook were doing this we (the tech community) would complain about it.

Except there are other, easier ways to contact google or facebook employees. Why would anyone do what you suggest instead of using linkedin or github? There's no such alternative for contacting lyft drivers in this case, so you're analogy is not very accurate. Also, lyft drivers aren't employees of lyft, which strains to your analogy more.

It's by no means a perfect analogy, but it's the closest thing I could come up with to compare to the anti-competitive practices of google/facebook/microsoft, which is what the OP was trying to do.

Yes, because there's only those two options. Only. Those. Two.

I think we need regulation in order to eliminate cutthroat behavior in the transportation industry. Oh wait...

it's not really that necessary... Lyft could figure out a way to immunize itself against these sorts of real-world attacks, and by and large they have using a comibination of analytics and creating a more reasonable cancellation policy.

I think the unregulated market is ripe for some disruption in the form of regulations.

As an aside, I'm starting to think that some types of non-disclosure agreements should be as unenforceable as non-competes in California.

"After Uber became aware that The Verge was asking questions, Target CW sent out multiple emails warning contractors that talking to the press violated a non-disclosure agreement they signed when they joined."

My problem isn't using these agreements to protect trade secrets, or when they are simply a contract between a company and an employee or contractor (you agree to treat certain types of things as "our property" rather than going off and selling them to a competitor).

My problem with non-disclosure is when they are used to hush up embarrassing details or otherwise keep the public in the dark about shady business practices.

Just dropped Uber. Guess now I have to sign up for Lyft. These tactics seem very similar to the Hoffa era, really had high hopes for a sharing economy but things are escalating quickly to become similar to Hoffa era tactics. Minus the whole fighting for the middle class spirit.

Evil company. Once they destroy the competition, they will use these tactics to squeeze out customers.

As an end-user, we must avoid Uber. We can't let them win.

Exactly my thoughts. Once they squeeze out all the competition, then its time for the drivers and riders to get squeezed.

Wow, burner phones and CC numbers?

Start off as a darling outdoing the establishment and taking all their business. After you've made it, the very next day, start acting just like the establishment you disrupted.

I decided to try Lyft Line yesterday and it matched me with somebody else in the neighborhood. Just as the driver pulled up to the second (shared) fare, the ride was cancelled and my driver was stuck driving me alone and accepting the half fare.

While I can't confirm whether the cancelled fare was Uber initiated, it did occur to me that both Lyft and the driver were getting screwed by the cancellation. If it happens enough times, I can definitely understand why my driver would jump ship and drive for Uber instead.

Lyft pays the driver the full amount that the driver would have received in a normal ride even when there is only one person who uses a Lyft Line.

It's a dog-eat-dog out there and if they weren't the market leader we would somehow all come around to agreeing this is the ultimate "growth hack" or appreciating Uber's "hustle". But by being top dog and having sterling investors like Google Ventures backing them, we hold them to a higher standard (much like their "polished clientele").

Since most of the risk to these services comes from the regulation side, I wouldn't be surprised that someone's greasing the wheels in Sacramento or Washington. There's enough money at stake here for those involved to do whatever is necessary. When I heard a few days ago that a lawmaker who voted in favor of rideshare restrictions was caught drunk driving the night after the vote, my first thought was that maybe it was a set up. Hire some people to buy this guy a few drinks, encourage him to get on the road, call the police to report a driver driving dangerously. Would you be surprised? I wouldn't.

Anyways, regarding the product - I use Lyft a lot more than Uber since I know a few folks there but most of my friends use both and Sidecar interchangeably. Every time I catch a Lyft, I tend to talk to the driver to figure out how much they're making, what are the pain points, and what can these services do better and there seems to be an opportunity to differentiate. Here were some ideas I had:

- Drivers tell me they can't find a place to relieve themselves since parking is hard to come by around SF. I think they would appreciate some designated "refuel" stations where they can pull up, park, pee, get coffee/red bull, and maybe vacuum or clean their cars up.

- I would love to be able to pick a fuel efficient car and see Lyft do a green mustache to indicate I'm making a choice for a hybrid. Maybe hybrids can get bonus payments since they can stay on the road longer per tank.

- Several friends have complained recently about how random the route-finding applications were that these drivers used. Some used Apple Maps, the built-in nav on the apps, or Google Maps but it wasn't always consistent and some of the routes were TERRIBLE. Seems like an opportunity for either Lyft or Uber to build better path-finding in their largest markets via maybe highly localized traffic information or by paying off the city for access to bus/taxi lanes.

> if they weren't the market leader we would somehow all come around to agreeing this is the ultimate "growth hack" or appreciating Uber's "hustle".

Personally I’d call them out for being unethical scumbags regardless of market position.

> if they weren't the market leader we would somehow all come around to agreeing this is the ultimate "growth hack" or appreciating Uber's "hustle"

I'm not so sure about that. This is playing dirty no matter who is doing it.

And yet if you post about AirBnB's history of spamming Craigslist users, you'll get downvoted into oblivion. Playing dirty is considered okay on HN so long as you're a YC company.

Actively requesting your competitor's service and then cancelling it is in a whole other league of scamminess than simply sending out a bunch of unsolicited e-mails to potential users, IMHO. Not a fan of AirBNB's tactics either, but Uber's are way more predatory.

I would also consider that playing dirty, although not as much as answering ads, accepting the room, then canceling last minute.

With regards to your third point, I just took an uber yesterday and the driver was using an uber-supplied navigation tool. maybe part of the existing app used for drivers? on my end, the app asked for a destination address and it was synced with the driver. the route was what i would expect.

the driver did complain however that they were forced to pay $10 for this ability and had no way to opt out.

this was in sf

Yes, it uses the driver's app. At least the rider's app was updated a little over a week ago (August 18) to allow this. Presumably the driver's app was updated around the same time to integrate with it.

This was what prompted my friend to get annoyed because the path seemed a bit out of the way. I would also appreciate the ability to choose optimize by time or distance.

It's amazingly sad that instead of competing through innovation, marketing, or price adjustments...that capital would get devoted to competitor sabotage of QOS (almost like a real life DDOS attack). What a terrible usage of capital and resources!

An article well worth reading: it contains an actual smoking gun, not just speculation and he says/she says.

Hint to all entrepreneurs and managers out there: if your job includes building an online form so that your team can generate any number of fake credit cards numbers as well as throw-away cell phone numbers, maybe you should take that ethics 101 class again.

This seems like cutthroat tactics, but not illegal as far as I can tell. Anyone know if this is by the book?

Which book, the lawbook or the ethics book?

The article documents recruiting Lyft drivers by riding with them, which is neither unethical nor illegal. It doesn't document cancelling rides, which would definitely be unethical, and should be illegal.

I thought on HN we call working around outdated or laws we don't agree with "disruption"?

Unnecessary generalization. Disruption may or may not have negative externalities. In fact, many externalities of disruptions are positive.

In fact, disrupt and sabotage are synonyms.

Whose ethics book says hiring employees from competitors is wrong? Pixar's?

Uber ought to be liable to a lawsuit, at least in general for violating Lyft's terms of service with fake accounts on a mass scale.

Along the same lines as the AirBnB spamming controversy, when it was reveled they violated Craigslist's ToS on a large scale to grow their business in the early days.

It's a federal crime to use a web service against its TOS.

This is bad taste. Makes me think twice about using Uber

I would hope that uber has bigger fish to fry by subverting the taxi industry, but strategically I can see why they are as scared of Lyft as they seem to be. Still seems distasteful to sabotage a fellow startup.

> Still seems distasteful to sabotage a fellow startup.

I don't see why Lyft being "a fellow startup" should affect any of Uber's business tactics.

Startups don't have any intrinsic motivation to play nice with each other.

I think it's just the idea of "punching up" vs. "punching down". When a scrappy startup takes on a larger competitor they need to pull out all the stops to combat the advantages of their competitor being an established company.

At this point Uber essentially is the #1 established company of car services, so them resorting to dirty tactics to fight Lyft leaves a very sour taste in the mouth.

Any established player that doesn't defend its position will be quickly unseated. I'm not saying this is an appropriate way to defend itself, but it's certainly one way.

Playing nice with other companies by agreeing not to poach each other's employees? Where have I heard that one before?

Interesting thread. One thing I think is missing from this discussion is how significantly even the nature of transportation has changed in the era of mobile phone tech. Some context: I live in Seattle, grew up in Minneapolis, went to school in New York, and my aunt and uncle lived/live in Manhattan and have for the last 25 years. I recently got them to experiment with Uber in New York. They rarely take taxis, so it was just sort of a novelty. They hated the experience but only because they believe there has been a significant loss of "institutional knowledge" about cities (for lack of a better term, I guess). What I mean by that is this driver had no clue where to go. I think this is sort of a danger with rideshare (not that I'm arguing against it...I'm not) wherein the drivers rely overtly on the technology to guide them. Someone visiting the city can't get in a cab (uber) and say "Hey, I'm looking for x, y, and z tonight...where can I find that?" My Uncle was telling me that, as bad and dangerous as it was years ago, cab drivers were basically the resident experts of a city. They were so plugged-in to everything that they had almost a 6th sense about them. That's been my experience with Uber in Seattle. I cannot rely on the driver to get around the city at all. My experience with Lyft has been so much better that in some cases I'd rather walk the mile back to my place than catch an uber. All of this might just be the learning curve uber has built for themselves as a direct result of the rate at which they've been expanding. But it's something both companies should address. If uber/lyft really are going to dominate urban transportation (and even inter-urban transpo....uber vegas anyone?) then they need to do more than just take me from point A to point B. They actually have to know where they're going.

Now imagine if Uber had a monopoly? I'll be taking Lyft from now on. Thanks!

Traditional taxi drivers need to be less grubby -- Uber was able to take advantage of that. How important a factor that is would depend on the country or city. But in some countries, it may be a way of filtering for drivers that speak English. For example, for Tokyo, Uber lists a flat rate of 40,000 yen, roughly 400 USD (!), for a ride from Narita Airport to any of the 23 wards of Tokyo. Pretty steep, given that a very nice bus, hotel shuttle, or express train is less than a tenth of that cost. Of course, the "last mile" is a consideration. For taxis, though, there are already established taxi services; http://www.narita-airport.jp/en/access/bus/#taxi shows that fixed fares range from 16,000 - 26,500 yen.

Does Uber guarantee English-speaking drivers in Japan? I mean, that hardly seems important when the usual taxi companies carry around lists of common phrases you can point at, and you only have to say a destination landmark.

Riding Narita into Tokyo in a taxi just seems so inefficient anyway (for <4 people). One Google Maps printout saves you tens of thousands of yens.

I never understood the disdain for Uber's pricing. Who cares if they charge considerably higher than other services? No one is forcing you to take their service.

Do you get upset when people buy an M-Class Mercedes? Would I ever buy one? No. Do I think it's extravagant? Yes. Do I care how other people spend their money? No

I actually wouldn't mind if certain conspicuous, extravagant (and conspicuously wealthy) celebrities opted for an Uber taxi. Nope, wouldn't mind it one bit.

The indignation over this makes no sense. Sure it's aggressive, but Uber has to be in order to maintain their market position and keep growing.

As developers, we get recruited all the time, even while employed. The horror! This is a good problem for drivers to have. No one is forcing them to switch (or even stopping them from driving for multiple services concurrently). They will drive for a company as long as the offer is good.

These are competitors offering an essentially identical service, and apparently fighting over an important resource -- drivers -- so the moral outrage is absurd. This is the free market in action.

I'll say it: from everything I've seen over the years of Uber, I like their playbook. Call it whatever you want -- underhanded, blatant, political, amoral, spotlight-stealing, $linkbait_adjective. Most importantly, it is damn effective.

It rises to the level of fraud. Its immoral. Maybe they will get away with it; but there are level-playing-field laws in business. Calling it 'recruiting' is disingenuous.

Did you miss the part where they cancel the rides?

And? Any service is susceptible to being gamed/abused. As developers we should understand this intuitively. Lyft is clearly working on technical ways to mitigate this if they don't want Uber hailing their drivers. As to the ethical quandary of wasting the driver's time and gas, the solution is simple: charge a cancellation fee.

all right, let's legalize DDoS !

You know man, some things are more important than winning. It's a shame you don't see that.

Will you like their playbook when they turn it back on you once they have a monopoly?

Irrelevant speculation. Moreover, there is anti-trust protection.

Yeah and a good thing too, otherwise we'd have Comcast/NBC/TimeWarner, oh, wait...

I've been exclusively an Uber customer. Reading this, I'm installing Lyft and giving them a shot.

The problem I see with the, "we're just recruiting drivers! fair game!" is that it's not.

When an Uber Rep goes into Lyft Driver's car, the Rep is technically a "customer" and the Driver can't exactly hang up on the Rep, ignore the Rep, nor drive away from the Rep. They are essentially forced to listen to a spiel about Uber that they may or may not want to hear. Yes the Driver is getting "paid" for the time spent but the Driver no longer has control over being recruited.

Recruiters sending me emails? Kinda annoying and takes a bit to click "delete" if I don't care for it. But at least I can choose not to read the email. When one of these Uber Reps gets into the car, the Lyft Driver has no choice.

Even if you ignore the ethical side of this issue, the risk that these practices create for Uber should have prevented them from developing SLOG. They had to know that this story would come out.

SLOG is now Uber's reputation. And Lyft becomes an even more lovable underdog.

From the comments here, it seems a lot of you missed the bit at the end about Lyft aggressively recruiting Uber drivers. My impression is that Uber is less subtle about it, and perhaps less ethical / more aggressive, but still, competition is competition. If Lyft were such an underdog, then Uber wouldn't be so afraid of them. From a consumer perspective, I hope that competition cools off a bit -- the price drops are great, but if they keep escalating, neither company will be particularly friendly. It would also be terrible if one company were edged out completely, ending the price wars.

That said, I always take Lyft -- simply because Uber doesn't work for my phone.

I find this somewhat funny in a way because I've ran into several drivers that were "double agents" driving both for Uber and Lyft. It makes a lot of sense actually driving for both to make up for dead times.

What would they do about the Lyft mustache? Would they just not use it, or would they have to take it on and off based on which service was used?

They had both the mustache and the uber logo. He said he never had anyone complain or refuse to ride because of that.

I had never thought of that before then.

I wouldn't expect a passenger to care, but it seems like something the ride sharing services themselves could use to prevent "double agents." I wonder if Lyft/Uber could take legal action against drivers who are displaying their trademark while driving for a competitor's service?

Two different tactics are being conflated here: Canceling rides on purpose and scheduling rides in order to recruit drivers. The former shouldn't be done, but the latter sounds fine since everyone is getting paid.

Is it fair for George Clooney to hit on your girlfriend? Yeah, let the best man win! But it's still kind of a dick move.

Regardless of whether you agree w/ tactics, the attitude and behavior leaves a bad taste.

Why is there a 300 comment discussion on a taxi company on Hacker News? How is this different from a fast-growing yoghurt company or an IT consultancy? Why do we care so much?

Because they have an app? Seriously?

It's because they are ostentatiously making a lot of money while blatantly flaunting the law. This attracts attention, as much as Al Capone once did.

It's because Uber is the fastest growing tech-startup on earth right now.

I know people at both Uber and Lyft and will say that Lyft has just as many assholes as Uber. Given both companies have great people, this article is about Uber being the unlikable of both of them and there are reasons to not like either company...if you take some things personally. That aside, cab fares that used to cost $120 now cost $35, so the customer is winning here. If anyone has a right to complain then it's the drivers that are getting the cancelled rides.

This is ridiculous. The competition is great for us as consumers. To be honest, when I first moved to the city I used Uber exclusively. The sort of "executive" brand really appealed to me. As of late, with the news of Uber's shady tactics, I've been using Lyft more and more. Lyft Line, which was released prior to Uber's attempt at the same feature, has been a lot of fun and a really great way to meet random people in SF.

I wonder sometimes if certain markets -- like taxi services, used car dealerships, domain registrars, etc. -- have inherent and non-obvious structural characteristics that bias the market toward "slimy" behavior.

To some extent Uber and Lyft are being driven by customer dissatisfaction with the expensive price-fixed "cab mafia," but in reading about these companies it seems like the sliminess has just shifted to other domains.

As someone above spoke to it seems like these claims are now facing public outcry because Uber is beginning to lose it's underdog moniker...I imagine myself saying "now would I be concerned this was an ethically egregious action if that had been trying to 'sabotage' cab companies?" The answer to which being...eh I'd probably say "GO new/little guy!...f* those guys."

It's very sad that Uber engages in these completely sleazy practices. I've never used either Lyft or Uber but Uber strikes me as a company that would be best to avoid.

Any company that engages in underhanded attacks at their competition rather than in the marketplace by offering a better service and possibly lower prices is not going to be nice to their customers in the longer run either.

I am not surprised by this. I am sure Lyft is just among a list of threats to Uber and we are only seeing a small part of that strategy.

Its ethically not good but I think it would be wrong to say that we penalized many other companies that make similar plays or resort to tactics that are just as ruthless. It doesn't seem illegal just mean and aggressive.

Honestly, it kinda seems like something they would do.

BS Clickbait headline.

Here's the gist: Uber and Lyft each try to recruit from each other. Canceling rides does not seem to be about disrupting their service. Disruption may happen as a side effect to their recruiting efforts, but that's not the point. And if you ask Uber, they tell you Lyft is doing this all right back to them.

Sure, it's an unsavory practice. But sabotage? C'mon....

I thought I was going to coin a new word -- uberize. But then I thought to look it up. Lo and behold, there is an entry from 2007: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=uberize. The meaning of the word? To destroy or defeat in a quick and effortless manner.

Uber just started here in Poland (currently only in Warsaw, our capital city). I was quite surprised that event Polish startup oriented blogs and news outlets were rather sceptical about Uber and were preffering already available local services (iTaxi, Taxi5, German MyTaxi). Usually it is quite opposite when some global startup is staring on Polish market.

Interview with Travis kalanick last week, check out 4:40 where he is asked about the Lyft accusations: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/uber-s-kalanick-hires-former-...

This is a denial of service attack. It is "cheating" and playing dirty.

As a matter of principle, I will never use Uber.

I am fine with this, the only thing I don't understand is why they cancel the rides. They should just give them a full fare to a destination where the driver is likely to get a new passenger.

From the driver's perspective, it seems like this is a fare, and a job offer. What is so wrong about this?

So now it's just like Venmo, except Venmo uses your checking account vs. your debit card which is really just a difference of security IMO.

Also, losing as much as a quarter per transaction doesn't scale. At this point, Square seems like they really need an exit and it needs to be big.

Heard plenty of stories about Travis Kalanick well before Uber took off the way it has. To that end I'm not surprised by any of these shady (and most likely illegal) tactics. Not sure if Google Ventures really knew what they were getting themselves into.

This is some nasty innuendo and I find it distasteful. If you want to throw a punch at someone, square up.

Oh come on.... the on-line rags are awash with stories of Travis Kalanick's abrasive character and less than honourable approach to doing business. It's hardly a secret.

Can you share?

Thanks Uber for proving you're as sleazy as the taxi drivers you're trying to replace.

Naw, Silicon Valley doesn't have a sexism problem, a greed problem, a fake do-gooder problem, a black-hat, dirty marketing problem (Uber is just the latest in the ongoing, playbook pattern), a drug problem, or a hooker problem. Not at all, Bra.

Is anyone really surprised that people in the taxi industry are acting in a shady fashion? I kind of wonder how many deals Uber and Lyft have made with local crime syndicates just to operate in certain cities. It would be par for the course.

I love Uber but someone high up needs to instigate a culture shift - this is just not ok.

Except their CEO is a sleazeball - all this behavior comes straight from the top.

I'll just leave this here: http://mashable.com/2014/08/12/uber-lyft-dirty-tactics/

Uber might be slimy, but Lyft is no better.

According to Uber, that is.

> Uber and Lyft are competing to become the first app you think of when you need a taxi, and the service with the most drivers likely stands the best chance of winning.

Aren't there other differentiating factors? Quality of service, etc.?

Assuming true, this is exactly what made everyone hate Microsoft back in the day. Google "knifing the baby" or "cut off the air supply," the top hits of both are ways Microsoft tried to deal with Netscape.

Uber, as any market-driven that respects itself, tries to create a monopoly. Given the companies that backed the 1.5B investment, I see where the pressure to quickly eliminate competitors from the market comes from.

Those tactics sounds like something cab companies will do to competitors in the 20's. Call me old fashion but this piece of the "sharing economy" sounds like a little for many, a lot for a few.

Quoth Uber:

"Operation SLOG (Supplying Long-term Operations Growth)"

Backronym if ever there was one..

I'm need to make a trip from San Diego Airport late at night in about a month and was hoping to use Lyft. Sadly their app is unsupported as I have an iPhone 3GS running iOS 6.

I'm always amazed at how low our businesses will stoop in a specious claim of free market and competition. Our business are monopolistic, corrupt and corrupting, and like Über is revealing itself....grotesquely, rapaciously, and insatiably greedy. Our companies cannot simply compete, they have to corrupt and sabotage and cheat and steal. It's pathetic, but unfortunately our society rewards it because at some point Über will morph from it's current state of cheating and stealing to corrupt our government and legislature and implement regulatory capture that locks into place their ill gotten, undeserved gains and advantages.

It's disgusting.

Uh... which of Uber's actions here are unethical?

Aggressively poaching drivers from Lyft seems all right to me. That's just healthy competition.

And this stuff about wasting Lyft's money by booking and canceling rides -- it's a bunch of nonsense. By Lyft's own estimate, Uber employees booked and canceled 5000 rides since last October. That's like $100k/yr in lost revenue. It's nothing. Certainly not a systematic attempt to undermine Lyft.

Am I missing something here?

Disclaimer: of the two services I only use Lyft. I've had bad experiences with Uber's customer service.

When they hit the same driver twice, they're supposed to cancel the trip aren't they?

But when a trip is canceled it hurts the driver who uses gas to drive in their direction and causes them to miss out on other available rides, reduces the amount of available cars on the street for legitimate users, and more negative effects im sure you can imagine.

This still sounds ethical to you?

No, booking a ride with the intention to cancel is definitely wrong. My point is that Uber employees aren't doing that frequently enough to affect Lyft at all, so this can't be a plan on Uber's part.

It sounds like some Uber employees are just being assholes for no reason. That's unfortunate, but it's no reason to malign Uber itself. Every company has some assholes.

I also agree that unethical is strong. It's really a grey area; it's borderline fraudulent ("not really intending to get a ride") but by that standard so is "butt-requesting".

It is a very jerk thing to do, and I think consumers should express their displeasure with those tactics through the power of the market.

This is in poor taste, but it's not illegal or unethical. If Uber was trying to hire Lyft drivers via LinkedIn, it'd be totally cool right?

Agreed that the end goal isn't unethical or illegal, but the way they're doing it has some unethical effects, i.e. every time they find out that they've been assigned a guy they already sent a recruitment pitch to, they cancel a ride, meaning somebody wasted gas and time to go to a non-existent fare.

I don't see anything wrong with trying to lure your competitor's employees away, but fucking up their business as a knock-on effect isn't okay.

Yeah, I see your point - that's definitely not cool.

I don't know the details of American law but in Denmark if uber is doing what is described here it would be illegal (breaks several parts of "markedsføringsloven" - law of marketing).

Uber paying a 3-figure for getting new drivers? Not a sabotage for me, but a big bet on user acquisition with a referral system.

What's to stop all the taxi companies in all of Uber's markets from engaging in the same behavior?

Seems like this could get fun, fast.

Uber must feel really vulnerable if they think there's a need to be this aggressive about undermining the competition.

I can see Uber, Lyft, and traditional taxi drivers reading Sun Tze's The Art of War. Well, maybe Uber and Lyft.

And this is why I exclusively use Lyft these days. Uber can bite my shiny metal ass.

Sadly my city has Uber but not Lyft, or I'd switch.

for me this is a reason not to ride on Uber

No honor among thieves.

What a great PR move for Uber!

If you use Uber, you're an asshole.

By this point, it's an excellent job interview question. "What do you think of Uber?" Anyone says they love Uber is a no-hire.

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