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I'm pretty sure that at no point did anyone sit down and say "let's charge drivers for trips". It's clearly the unintended consequence of real product decisions
by strken 5y ago
I'm pretty sure that at no point did anyone sit down and say "let's charge drivers for trips". It's clearly the unintended consequence of real product decisions, but it's equally clearly not a new strategic direction to bill the supply side of the market.
It's terrifying because it illustrates the lack of trust that the general public has in tech. Instead of "looks like someone's having a bad day at the Uber office, guess they'll fix it soon," it's a plot trialling a new form of exploitation. Two replies in, someone wants to nationalise the company. That's a lot of lost trust.
- zanellato19 5y agoYeah, but the ramifications of the unending automation is indeed exactly the impossible-to-deal-with bugs. The fact of the matter is that Uber (the company, not any specific PMs/Engineers inside it) decided that this was unnaceptable loss of money and they instead shift that to the customers. That decision, to not "invest" in support, is completely conscious by the founders/investors to make the business more viable, because at their scale, support can be quite expensive. In other words, technology is bringing scale and leaving the cost of the rounding errors to the most vulnerable.
- 3np 5y agoThey had many years of time to address this class of issues, and sometimes it has consistently gotten worse, not better. Why would the trust not go down?
- strken 5y agoI don't know, why would the trust not go down? Is this a riddle? Of course trust has gone down. I'm not saying it's unexpected, I'm remarking on adverse market conditions that will affect most of HN.
- SilasX 5y agoNo, but they did say, "let's take a fixed fraction of total charges" rather then "let's take a fixed fraction of the amount after paying third parties", not realizing the former could be more than the driver's share.