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I've personally had enough problems with taxi drivers (and I live in a developed country) that I will only take a taxi as a last resort. They overcharge, they d

I've personally had enough problems with taxi drivers (and I live in a developed country) that I will only take a taxi as a last resort. They overcharge, they demand cash because apparently their EFTPOS machine is broken, they drive you on the scenic route to increase the fare, or they'll try to set a fixed price when you know it's cheaper to run the meter, half the time the driver doesn't even know how to get there and I have to navigate them. Just last week I got woken up at 3 AM by a distraught housemate being dropped home by the police because a cabbie sexually assaulted her. It's fucking disgusting what cabbies manage to get away with and then claim "Uber is bad because it's unregulated". Uber's self regulation has proven to be vastly superior to the taxi industry. Meanwhile with Uber, my experience has been 90% positive. It's incredibly rare to have a driver try to rip me off and it's a lot safer in general. I'm absolutely sure that the cabbie who assaulted my friend has done it before to other people, and will do it again to some other poor drunk girl. I live in a Australia, this shouldn't be an issue we're facing, but it is. I don't know what Didi is like compared to Uber, but I'm absolutely sure that it's better than cabs, especially in developing countries.

puranjay 8y ago
Not to mention malfunctioning meters, especially around tourist spots when you don't speak the language. With Uber, I at least know what I'm going to be charged
lhorie 8y ago
As I understand, people are outraged because Didi built the ability to "rate" passengers in terms of their looks, i.e. whereas riders would rate drivers in terms of "fast, professional, etc", drivers could share ratings of riders in terms of "young, sexy, cute, etc". This last murder also apparently happened a mere day after Didi's decision to re-enable drivers' abilities to see riders pictures (a feature which had been disabled as a response to the previous murder). The straw that broke the camel's back was the surfacing of another girl's report that she was harassed the day before by that same person and only got out safely because she dashed away when she got the chance (and her complaints were largely ignored by Didi). Coupled with lackluster driver screening, and the non-responsiveness to complaints, this essentially created a platform for sexual predators to thrive. As my wife put it, the driver app was basically Tinder for perverts. I think the argument that at a scale of billion of rides, assaults can fall between the cracks is downplaying the magnitude of the negligence. The police force can handle much higher rates of all kinds of emergency calls. Uber has literally tens of thousands of customer service reps and entires teams dedicated to harassment reports stationed across the globe. If there were 50 harrassment reports as the article claims, surely Didi could afford to have 3 people on rotation looking at a queue of reports, preemptively disabling accounts. There's absolutely no way Didi can make a believable excuse for keeping a criminal in the system after having received complaints about him being involved in a sexual assault.
- polanerAllFruit 8y ago
  That’s an extremely freaky and unsettling design choice, to include such a feature in a system involving customer relations and client service. It seems like the kind of idea you’d throw in, if you absolutely did not care about any amount of success. Something like that is bound to blow up sooner or later, and destroy confidence in professionalism. It goes against an almost universal idea, cutting across all cultures, that customers shouldn’t be judged if you expect to do business with them.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. I thought there might be more to the story than what I initially read. That's pretty fucked up for Didi. Do you know if these "features" for the drivers were on versions of the app outside of China (i.e. in Australia)?

puranjay 8y ago

Not to mention malfunctioning meters, especially around tourist spots when you don't speak the language. With Uber, I at least know what I'm going to be charged

lhorie 8y ago

As I understand, people are outraged because Didi built the ability to "rate" passengers in terms of their looks, i.e. whereas riders would rate drivers in terms of "fast, professional, etc", drivers could share ratings of riders in terms of "young, sexy, cute, etc". This last murder also apparently happened a mere day after Didi's decision to re-enable drivers' abilities to see riders pictures (a feature which had been disabled as a response to the previous murder). The straw that broke the camel's back was the surfacing of another girl's report that she was harassed the day before by that same person and only got out safely because she dashed away when she got the chance (and her complaints were largely ignored by Didi). Coupled with lackluster driver screening, and the non-responsiveness to complaints, this essentially created a platform for sexual predators to thrive. As my wife put it, the driver app was basically Tinder for perverts. I think the argument that at a scale of billion of rides, assaults can fall between the cracks is downplaying the magnitude of the negligence. The police force can handle much higher rates of all kinds of emergency calls. Uber has literally tens of thousands of customer service reps and entires teams dedicated to harassment reports stationed across the globe. If there were 50 harrassment reports as the article claims, surely Didi could afford to have 3 people on rotation looking at a queue of reports, preemptively disabling accounts. There's absolutely no way Didi can make a believable excuse for keeping a criminal in the system after having received complaints about him being involved in a sexual assault.

polanerAllFruit 8y ago
That’s an extremely freaky and unsettling design choice, to include such a feature in a system involving customer relations and client service. It seems like the kind of idea you’d throw in, if you absolutely did not care about any amount of success. Something like that is bound to blow up sooner or later, and destroy confidence in professionalism. It goes against an almost universal idea, cutting across all cultures, that customers shouldn’t be judged if you expect to do business with them.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
Thanks for the clarification. I thought there might be more to the story than what I initially read. That's pretty fucked up for Didi. Do you know if these "features" for the drivers were on versions of the app outside of China (i.e. in Australia)?