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Much is made in this article of the trust which users have in the Uber system. That is probably valid today, but is unlikely to scale. Anyone who used Craigsl
by jzwinck 12y ago
Much is made in this article of the trust which users have in the Uber system. That is probably valid today, but is unlikely to scale. Anyone who used Craigslist or eBay over the past 10-15 years can tell you that as such systems grow from tens or hundreds of thousands of users to tens or hundreds of millions, the experience becomes very different.
Today we can rely on Uber's mutual rating system. We used to do the same on eBay, but eventually a "business decision" was made and eBay switched to quasi-unilateral ratings (sellers cannot negatively rate buyers anymore).
Today when an Uber driver picks us up, it is likely that they are reasonably in touch with modern society, probably at least a little bit educated, etc. Craigslist used to be like that too. Now it's a spam bazaar full of non-owners selling by owner, hookers pretending to be girlfriends, and so on.
These sorts of changes are inevitable if Uber grows to the sort of revenues being discussed here. Trust hasn't scaled before, and Uber probably can't innovate that away.
- TheBiv 12y agoI think the core difference between Uber and the examples you provided is that in Uber, people have to meet each other in real life. Real life still has trust that scales, called the credit system.
- potatolicious 12y agoIndeed. Anecdotally I've felt like Uber has gotten worse in NYC - probably because they originally started by recruiting experienced drivers, promising greater income (and delivering it). At this point it feels like that pool is tapped out, and they're starting to recruit a lot of drivers who just don't really know the city as well. The last 3 Uber rides I've had from my office in Brooklyn the driver didn't know how to get on the Manhattan Bridge. With yellow cabs or early-Uber drivers you never see them futzing with a GPS unit, but this is now a regular experience. Uber recently lowered UberX prices in NYC to be lower than yellow cabs. Funnily enough, given the lack of experience of their drivers and the amount of time I waste circling, or having them type things into a GPS unit, it seems more like a price correction to me than a real price drop. Scalability. It's hard.
- incision 12y ago>'Trust hasn't scaled before, and Uber probably can't innovate that away.' I don't use Ebay, Craiglist or Uber so perhaps I just don't understand how these things work, but my first thought is simply to create tiers and let customers self-select? Isn't that what UberX / Taxi / Black / SUV / Lux already are? Just shift the balance of expectation/price for each tier or perhaps create a new one to handle growth without creating the mismatched bazaar of Craigslist.
- xorcist 12y agoIndeed, online societies tend to implode over time. If they ever get to that point. However there are more immediate issues. In a world where $10 buys you 10k followers on Twitter (and it does), using a rating system to build trust does create a lot of questions.