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Peer-to-peer rental: The rise of the sharing economy
- geebee 14y agoI'm a little surprised that people refer to these sites as "sharing" sites. It's pretty clearly another form of commerce to me. Last time I checked my hotel bill, the hotel wasn't sharing anything with me. It was charging me a fee for a service. If I rent my house out, I'm not sharing it with my tenant, even if I continue to live there. I'm engaging in commerce. Why does this change if I do it short term? I'm curious - does anyone know how this term (sharing economy) was started? It is no small rhetorical victory to get your commerce site referred to as a sharing site. I recall a sarcastic comment on an earlier HN thread about airbnb: "Unregulated sharing pisses me off. Let's put an end to this madness.". While people generally (especially on HN) don't like onerous government regulations on commerce, I still don't think the statement would have had the same impact if you substituted "commerce" for "sharing". Most people accept that the govt would place reasonable regulations on commerce (there is a commerce clause in the US constitution, but not so much on "sharing". I understand that sharing has a broader vernacular use that may incorporate an exchange of money, but the associations people have with the words "commerce" and "sharing" are very different, and this doesn't seem like one of those ambiguous cases.