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> Edit: Platforms don't kill dogs; people do. Stop trusting people. I disagree with that notion. Trust has always been a big problem. But when a two way market

> Edit: Platforms don't kill dogs; people do. Stop trusting people. I disagree with that notion. Trust has always been a big problem. But when a two way market is built on a platform you trust the platform to carry out it's due diligence on your behalf. Situations like: The walker that was with Winnie when she was killed had a different name in her bio paragraph than was shown on her profile—which makes me wonder if Wag is monitoring whether or not the people walking your dog are who they say they are. Sara asked the walker what her name was, but the walker did not provide an answer. shouldn't happen at all. But it's seems that most of the time platforms forgo the need for verification and think trust should solve itself because "people". It takes a harassment case (in case of Uber) etc for companies to open their eyes and realize "people" are not so simple. It takes a good and concentrated effort to run a clean platform.

james_s_tayler 8y ago
I also disagree with my own notion. And I don't. > It takes a good and concentrated effort to run a clean platform Precisely. It's hard. Because people. So I can imagine that without the platform and hence no way to actually have a concentrated effort to do the work required to up the quality you still get the garbage that people bring but without the observability or feedback loop to the entity because they're all just localised cases. But this is my point. It's people that run the platforms and it's people that partake in them. It's people that choose to trust them and it's people that can't be trusted. It's all ultimately a people problem. The platform is just a mechanism to coordinate the actions of people. It's not like this stuff never happens outside of platforms and now that you have platforms platforms are causing this stuff to happen. Caveat: it may be the case platforms cause this stuff to happen due to the type of actors they attract because the economics of certain things actually scale poorly along one axis and brilliantly along another. I address this elsewhere and am happy to concede it. I agree with you. I actually do. I also hope on some level you agree with me too. We want things to be convenient and safe and it takes time and collateral damage for things to mold themselves into the right shape. Coordination of good behavior is a hard, hard, problem to solve. It's not like the default state is "uncoordinated good behavior". Rather it seems to progress through states of "uncoordinated bad behavior", "coordinated bad behavior", "coordinated good behavior". From what I can see of the sharing economy experiment, once you coordinate things you get to coordinated bad behavior and then from there it takes a few incidents to honestly compute the real risks and appropriate responses and appropriate changes are made and you wind up with coordinated good behavior. That's a loose model and I'm sure someone out there can present a much better one than me, but I'm willing to at least say the analysis is in the right direction.
logifail 8y ago
>> you trust the platform to carry out it's due diligence on your behalf Isn't one of the central points of gig economy service provision that services are cheaper since the "red tape"/regulations aspect gets significantly less focus than before? If I wanted to drive a taxi in London, UK, there are some fairly onerous requirements[0], which come with a cost. So why did Uber and friends decide not to use the same list of requirements? Isn't it about saving money (and time) so you can keep prices low and margins high? [0] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing/apply-for-a-taxi-driver-licence https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
- magduf 8y ago
  Those onerous requirements were actually pretty ridiculous, and included having to basically memorize an entire street map of the city. That may have made some sense 40 years ago, but today we have GPS navigation, so we don't need cabbies to know how to get to any address off the top of their head. Uber/Lyft work well because instead of having your cabbie take you on some overly-long route just to jack up your fare, they have to follow the route prescribed by Lyft/Uber's GPS app, which takes the most optimal route.
ddingus 8y ago
Secondly, not actually dealing with the trust problem very seriously limits the actual value the platform provides. Margins should be ultra thin. Lack of progress on that front has been a big turn off for me. I generally do not make use of gig services.

james_s_tayler 8y ago

I also disagree with my own notion. And I don't. > It takes a good and concentrated effort to run a clean platform Precisely. It's hard. Because people. So I can imagine that without the platform and hence no way to actually have a concentrated effort to do the work required to up the quality you still get the garbage that people bring but without the observability or feedback loop to the entity because they're all just localised cases. But this is my point. It's people that run the platforms and it's people that partake in them. It's people that choose to trust them and it's people that can't be trusted. It's all ultimately a people problem. The platform is just a mechanism to coordinate the actions of people. It's not like this stuff never happens outside of platforms and now that you have platforms platforms are causing this stuff to happen. Caveat: it may be the case platforms cause this stuff to happen due to the type of actors they attract because the economics of certain things actually scale poorly along one axis and brilliantly along another. I address this elsewhere and am happy to concede it. I agree with you. I actually do. I also hope on some level you agree with me too. We want things to be convenient and safe and it takes time and collateral damage for things to mold themselves into the right shape. Coordination of good behavior is a hard, hard, problem to solve. It's not like the default state is "uncoordinated good behavior". Rather it seems to progress through states of "uncoordinated bad behavior", "coordinated bad behavior", "coordinated good behavior". From what I can see of the sharing economy experiment, once you coordinate things you get to coordinated bad behavior and then from there it takes a few incidents to honestly compute the real risks and appropriate responses and appropriate changes are made and you wind up with coordinated good behavior. That's a loose model and I'm sure someone out there can present a much better one than me, but I'm willing to at least say the analysis is in the right direction.

logifail 8y ago

>> you trust the platform to carry out it's due diligence on your behalf Isn't one of the central points of gig economy service provision that services are cheaper since the "red tape"/regulations aspect gets significantly less focus than before? If I wanted to drive a taxi in London, UK, there are some fairly onerous requirements[0], which come with a cost. So why did Uber and friends decide not to use the same list of requirements? Isn't it about saving money (and time) so you can keep prices low and margins high? [0] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing/apply-for-a-taxi-driver-licence https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...

magduf 8y ago
Those onerous requirements were actually pretty ridiculous, and included having to basically memorize an entire street map of the city. That may have made some sense 40 years ago, but today we have GPS navigation, so we don't need cabbies to know how to get to any address off the top of their head. Uber/Lyft work well because instead of having your cabbie take you on some overly-long route just to jack up your fare, they have to follow the route prescribed by Lyft/Uber's GPS app, which takes the most optimal route.

ddingus 8y ago

Secondly, not actually dealing with the trust problem very seriously limits the actual value the platform provides. Margins should be ultra thin. Lack of progress on that front has been a big turn off for me. I generally do not make use of gig services.