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Comment by cjoh | Hacker News Reader

This wasn't an "automatic price increase" unless software got really good at explaining why they were increasing prices.

http://cl.ly/image/2U3l242l350p/Image%202014-12-15%20at%2012...

"We are all concerned with events in CBD. Fares have increased to encourage more drivers to come online & pick up passengers in the area."

Somebody wrote that sentence, and it's a gross one. The same doesn't belong on the Post, it belongs on the person who wrote that and upon the culture that allows for sentences like that to be written.

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That doesn't discount the fact that the surge pricing algorithm is still automatic. They don't have people sitting at their evil corporate HQ clicking buttons trying to maximize screwing people over.

No, but they knew what they were doing and can't claim they didn't choose to continue.

Although it's possible (no idea whether it's the case) they didn't have a mechanism to shut it down, on the time frame they would have needed to.

We can't philosophically disprove it. But Occam's razor applied to the behavioural evidence suggests Uber thinks surge pricing is fantastic, and keeping it in place during crises is corporate policy unless and until there's a media backlash large enough for it to actually get through their thick skulls that people are pissed off.

Presuming Uber thinks surge pricing is fantastic, wouldn't it be all the more likely they wouldn't build in a mechanism to disable it at the drop of a hat?

Possibly. But it's a red herring considering the issue is moral culpability and whether their behaviour is socially acceptable.

Their behavior, at this point, was "pay drivers out of their own pocket to help get people away from the emergency". It's hard to call that "socially unacceptable". It arguably took longer than it should have, but it takes time to make decisions in any large company. Hopefully they will learn from the experience, get better plans in place, and clarify policies for the future.

No, but that very algorithm was designed and implemented by humans from their big evil corporate HQ.

I wouldn't be surprised if surge over a certain % requires human intervention.

How do you know ? Do you work there ?

No offence, but you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Surge pricing is indeed an automatic thing. It triangulates demand in a particular area and if there are not enough Uber drivers to meet the demand, the price increases based on the demand and supply, thus bringing more drivers into the city and then eventually bringing the price down. There isn't someone in an office somewhere going, "Ooh, a hostage crisis, lets bump surge pricing by a factor of 4 for some sweet profits"

The person who wrote that sentence explained what happened, of course a real person wrote it, it's a blog post. Automatic surge pricing kicked in, like it does anywhere in the world because there was high demand and not enough Uber drivers. While the app is smart, it can't automatically detect when there is a hostage crisis happening in the area and turn off surge pricing...

Such an uninformed response from the likes of a Hacker News user is actually worrying. I thought everyone here mostly understood how Uber works, obviously not.

I think the point is that, while surge pricing kicked in automatically, they could have disabled it when they realized why it did so, instead of writing a blog post explaining it.

Is this not what happened? Surge pricing kicked in, shortly thereafter, Uber made all trips out of the CBD free and then offered to refund anyone who made a trip during the surge pricing and was charged. I believe the blog post came afterwards, wouldn't make much sense to write a blog post before they made it right. People are complaining about how long it took Uber without having any kind of understanding how its system works. For all we know, disabling surge pricing isn't as easy as clicking a box in some kind of admin panel.

No that's not what happened. They first tweeted to acknowledge the increase of price during the hostage crisis. It's only once the backslash started that they made the trips free.

If they would have cancelled surge pricing after immediately discovering the surge was related to the hostage crisis, then there would be posts on here condemning them for putting peoples lives at risk or some other nonsense. Either way the groupthink at least on HN is that anything Uber does is Automatically Evil.

I understand that prices went up as a result of demand going up. And in the event of it being new years, rainy, a parade is in town or whatever, that's reasonable.

I don't understand how a human being can write a tweet like that explaining the price increase, for that price increase to stay in place for an hour, and only after significant blowback, for them to say "oh, we'll not charge riders."

That to me is the part that's actually worrying.

Why would that be worrying? A lot of people wanted to leave the area all at once. There were not enough drivers in the area. To attract more drivers, they need to offer the drivers an incentive to get out there and drive. So they raised the price. It makes perfect sense and I see no ethical issues in what Uber did.

All of this Uber hate is getting ridiculous.

Your post reads like you are being purposefully obtuse.

Here are the facts:

0. There is a demand to leave the CBD due to a hostage taking.

1. 4x surge pricing kicks in

2. The person who tweeted about about being concerned with the CBD events was obviously aware of the CBD situation since they tweeted about it

It may have been an algorithm that increased pricing to 4x. But it's clear that Uber can (and will) reduce pricing or cover fares in certain emergency situations.

We know this because that's exactly what they did an hour after tweeting about 4x surge pricing. There's no reason they shouldn't have been able to do this when they tweeted about surge pricing in the first place.

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