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They do some organizing of information via their apps, which has a tangible user experience (plus the apps themselves are definitely a thing they built). Buildi
by vsareto 4y ago
They do some organizing of information via their apps, which has a tangible user experience (plus the apps themselves are definitely a thing they built). Building a good marketplace is also no small feat.
In concept, they are all useful abstractions over the worst case scenario: individuals only finding and talking with other individuals to get goods or services. In practice, there are definitely abuses which come down to ineffective regulation.
- pydry 4y ago>Building a good marketplace is also no small feat. Nope, but it's lavishly overcompensated and starved of competition for the markets who manage to get the network effect going. There is no really effective regulation to ameliorate this effect either. Wouldnt need much though. If, say, e.g. airbnb simply werent able to enforce parts of their ToS around scraping/contacting users then it would make the market vastly less dysfunctional.
- Centigonal 4y agoNot saying what they're doing isn't challenging or valuable. Like pydry said, it's a business model with a cost/benefit asymmetry - if it succeeds, you get a nice little monopoly that's difficult to disrupt. That makes it attractive to investors and very sticky, which means we'll see more and more of them pop up unless something changes.