8 ms·

Somebody please create a p2p ridesharing network and let's be done with the regulatory theater and jockeying of overvalued companies

by patcon 12y ago

superuser2 12y ago
These have existed since the early days of the internet, and before that in bulletin board form. In fact, many were (are?) even run by state transportation departments.
- baddox 12y ago
  Like jitneys? They had their own share of legal troubles as well.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  I think he probably means something that is a little more comprehensive and with higher visibility than the forum style ones like Craigslist or whatever.
jmckib 12y ago
Wouldn't any such network need to collect a percentage of each transaction? Otherwise, what's the incentive to run the network competently?
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Advertisements. See: Craigslist
  - staunch 12y ago
    Craigslist is centralized.
  - nerfhammer 12y ago
    craigslist doesn't have reputation network for buyers/sellers
steveplace 12y ago
* ridester.com * zimride.com * erideshare.com
- ngokevin 12y ago
  and ridejoy.com (YC-backed and failed). And my friend made https://github.com/thedjpetersen/ridezap_os https://github.com/thedjpetersen/ridezap_os And I've seen countless school projects trying to address ride-sharing. I don't think it will ever catch on.
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    > I don't think it will ever catch on. What do you see as the main problems?
    - scottlocklin 12y ago
      One obvious one for me, being an east coaster transplanted to the Bay Area: most people don't want to share a ride with a stranger. Bay Area (and perhaps the rest of the Northwest) upper middle class people are somewhat different. A more extroverted culture.
      - silencio 12y ago
        Zimride (where afaik Lyft got started) was all about longer distance p2p rideshares, and I was a driver and passenger on rides between SF and LA a bunch of times through that site before Megabus started up again. As a driver, I got as many as 10 viable requests per seat regardless of my ride schedule. I saw a lot of empty seats in other SF-LA rides so I was confused at the disparity...until one ride, a college-aged woman that bought a seat showed up with her mother. Both of them expressed visible relief at the fact that I, a woman, was driving, and with two adults that were obviously my parents in the back seat just like my blurb said. They really were just going to walk away if anything was different, and they didn't even consider male drivers. It clicked in my head that most messages were from women that must have felt safer riding with another woman. I naïvely assumed all the happy riders were just happy about a fast 5-6 hour ride with fresh fruit and snacks from my parents. tl;dr I think it's about intimacy. Even for an extroverted culture, plenty of people didn't use Zimride and similar even if they knew about it. Sharing 1-6 seats (most private cars) is way more intimate than 6-10 (airport shuttle-types) or a bus/train and is typically not backed by a company with a professional driver. Not sure that there will ever be a solution that provides enough trust and support to get over that problem before we get better mass transit and self-driving cars.
gasull 12y ago
Take a look at OpenBazaar: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar
narrator 12y ago
Napkin design for a p2p ridesharing network: Create a cryptocurrency. Send a message with a bid for a ride to a new address that you control with the start and end point locations with how much you want to pay. Insert it in the blockchain. Driver sees bid in block chain and answers with a similar self message and arrives. When the driver arrives, transfer half to him and the other half when you get out.
- panarky 12y ago
  Anonymity is tough with physical stuff like cars and passengers. All the CPUC needs to do is have one of their people pretend to be a passenger and you're busted.
  - hueving 12y ago
    Who is busted? There is no service. Just someone paying someone else for a ride.
    - DINKDINK 12y ago
      Are you saying that the CPUC wouldn't view the algorithm used to summon the ride as a "service"?
- balloot 12y ago
  Napkin ways to completely blow this up: 1) Write a script to answer requests without ever intending to pick up. 2) Get out of the car, don't transfer the other half. 3) Sign up as a driver, and wait until you find an attractive/rich fare. Lock doors and do what you will. Deregulation is not the answer for everything. Uber/Lyft works precisely because they are very well regulated to stop the cases I outline above, and more.
  - narrator 12y ago
    If you answer and don't show up then the first half of the fare is not transferred from the client and this leads to a bad reputation. Same for #2. #3 can be avoided based on reputation previously gained. Maybe some sort of signup payment with a trusted vetting authority.
adamjs 12y ago
As much as I love the idea of true peer-to-peer decentralized marketplace, it's a pipe-dream and I'll explain why. - Every node is potentially untrustworthy therefore additional verification must be performed on the results of any query. To verify a piece of information, a "paper trail" must be transmitted as well (who created what when). - This overhead causes information to move much more slowly in a system (if at all, if the threshold is set too high it's possible for all queries to fail). - To counter this cost, each node can build its own map of trusted nodes based on the validity of previous information. This "network of trust" can be used to throttle the amount of verification performed. - To illustrate, let's take what happens if you're totally new to a fully decentralized ridesharing platform. You start off not knowing any of the other users (nodes) and so you select a few at random (trusting all mutually), perform a query on all nodes and select the driver with the best rating (according to popular rating from those few users). You take a ride from that driver, have an awful experience, and therefore don't trust the ratings shared by those users anymore. You're back to square one. Building trust takes a lot of time and first-hand validation. - There's potential for trusted nodes to turn "bad" (untrustworthy) therefore each node must continuously "police" neighboring nodes and relay any changes in behavior to mutually-trusted nodes. - What's more, there is a certain "cost of competition" that comes with truly decentralized systems. You cannot roll out "system-wide" changes as easily as a centralized one since a majority of the system must first agree (and many times that majority is too small to even consider it a consensus, which ends in grid-lock). - These five costs (paper-trail, verification, building network of trust, policing network of trust, cost of competition) makes the overall performance of a distributed platform very inferior to that of a centralized platform like Uber. - Of course there are downsides to centralized platforms like Uber. The quality of ratings is less trustworthy since all users use separate criteria (and could be untrustworthy Lyft proponents). Also, Uber (as a system) does not make decisions in the best interest of its users and is only kept in check by its competition (which is diminishing each day). - You can look to human civilization as a way to illustrate some of the challenges and solutions of purely decentralized systems. It would be pretty hard to survive if everyone didn't trust anyone outside of himself. We built our own networks of trust via our family and friends (our tribe). As human populations grew, so too did competition between tribes. Centralized governments and services were then built to offset some of our individual responsibilities and promote unimpeded, fair flow of certain resources while still preserving those aspects that benefit the most from decentralization. - These hybrid systems (platforms with both decentralized AND centralized aspects) work the best in the real world as long as those centralized parts keep working for the majority of nodes and a healthy balance of decentralized/centralized is maintained. (You'll notice we struggle with both of those caveats today in modern civilization). Whoo! Sorry for the long-winded post, I have a lot more to say on the subject but I'll save the rest for a blog post :). (I'm working on decentralized authority and identification in my spare time so this is a hot area of research for me!).
guelo 12y ago
Seriously, why do we need the parasite middlemen like Uber?
- prawn 12y ago
  Because no one else had set up an as well-known and well-regarded service before they did it. It takes someone to offer deals and build the app and train drivers to get things rolling.
bane 12y ago
There's already a few competing free versions of this depending on the strength of the supply or demand signal. - bumming a ride - hitchhiking - car jacking - kidnapping
juretriglav 12y ago
Don't know if this is exactly what you mean, but in Slovenia, there is this website called http://prevoz.org http://prevoz.org (which translates to "ride.org"), where users/drivers can post when and where they're going, and others can contact and ride with them. It's worked remarkably well for the past 5+ years and right now, there are almost 500 rides available for today.

Somebody please create a p2p ridesharing network and let's be done with the regulatory theater and jockeying of overvalued companies

by patcon 12y ago

Somebody please create a p2p ridesharing network and let's be done with the regulatory theater and jockeying of overvalued companies

superuser2 12y ago

These have existed since the early days of the internet, and before that in bulletin board form. In fact, many were (are?) even run by state transportation departments.

baddox 12y ago
Like jitneys? They had their own share of legal troubles as well.
WorldWideWayne 12y ago
I think he probably means something that is a little more comprehensive and with higher visibility than the forum style ones like Craigslist or whatever.

jmckib 12y ago

Wouldn't any such network need to collect a percentage of each transaction? Otherwise, what's the incentive to run the network competently?

sliverstorm 12y ago
Advertisements. See: Craigslist
- staunch 12y ago
  Craigslist is centralized.
- nerfhammer 12y ago
  craigslist doesn't have reputation network for buyers/sellers

steveplace 12y ago

* ridester.com * zimride.com * erideshare.com

ngokevin 12y ago
and ridejoy.com (YC-backed and failed). And my friend made https://github.com/thedjpetersen/ridezap_os https://github.com/thedjpetersen/ridezap_os And I've seen countless school projects trying to address ride-sharing. I don't think it will ever catch on.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  > I don't think it will ever catch on. What do you see as the main problems?
  - scottlocklin 12y ago
    One obvious one for me, being an east coaster transplanted to the Bay Area: most people don't want to share a ride with a stranger. Bay Area (and perhaps the rest of the Northwest) upper middle class people are somewhat different. A more extroverted culture.
    - silencio 12y ago
      Zimride (where afaik Lyft got started) was all about longer distance p2p rideshares, and I was a driver and passenger on rides between SF and LA a bunch of times through that site before Megabus started up again. As a driver, I got as many as 10 viable requests per seat regardless of my ride schedule. I saw a lot of empty seats in other SF-LA rides so I was confused at the disparity...until one ride, a college-aged woman that bought a seat showed up with her mother. Both of them expressed visible relief at the fact that I, a woman, was driving, and with two adults that were obviously my parents in the back seat just like my blurb said. They really were just going to walk away if anything was different, and they didn't even consider male drivers. It clicked in my head that most messages were from women that must have felt safer riding with another woman. I naïvely assumed all the happy riders were just happy about a fast 5-6 hour ride with fresh fruit and snacks from my parents. tl;dr I think it's about intimacy. Even for an extroverted culture, plenty of people didn't use Zimride and similar even if they knew about it. Sharing 1-6 seats (most private cars) is way more intimate than 6-10 (airport shuttle-types) or a bus/train and is typically not backed by a company with a professional driver. Not sure that there will ever be a solution that provides enough trust and support to get over that problem before we get better mass transit and self-driving cars.

gasull 12y ago

Take a look at OpenBazaar: https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar

narrator 12y ago

Napkin design for a p2p ridesharing network: Create a cryptocurrency. Send a message with a bid for a ride to a new address that you control with the start and end point locations with how much you want to pay. Insert it in the blockchain. Driver sees bid in block chain and answers with a similar self message and arrives. When the driver arrives, transfer half to him and the other half when you get out.

panarky 12y ago
Anonymity is tough with physical stuff like cars and passengers. All the CPUC needs to do is have one of their people pretend to be a passenger and you're busted.
- hueving 12y ago
  Who is busted? There is no service. Just someone paying someone else for a ride.
  - DINKDINK 12y ago
    Are you saying that the CPUC wouldn't view the algorithm used to summon the ride as a "service"?
balloot 12y ago
Napkin ways to completely blow this up: 1) Write a script to answer requests without ever intending to pick up. 2) Get out of the car, don't transfer the other half. 3) Sign up as a driver, and wait until you find an attractive/rich fare. Lock doors and do what you will. Deregulation is not the answer for everything. Uber/Lyft works precisely because they are very well regulated to stop the cases I outline above, and more.
- narrator 12y ago
  If you answer and don't show up then the first half of the fare is not transferred from the client and this leads to a bad reputation. Same for #2. #3 can be avoided based on reputation previously gained. Maybe some sort of signup payment with a trusted vetting authority.

adamjs 12y ago

As much as I love the idea of true peer-to-peer decentralized marketplace, it's a pipe-dream and I'll explain why. - Every node is potentially untrustworthy therefore additional verification must be performed on the results of any query. To verify a piece of information, a "paper trail" must be transmitted as well (who created what when). - This overhead causes information to move much more slowly in a system (if at all, if the threshold is set too high it's possible for all queries to fail). - To counter this cost, each node can build its own map of trusted nodes based on the validity of previous information. This "network of trust" can be used to throttle the amount of verification performed. - To illustrate, let's take what happens if you're totally new to a fully decentralized ridesharing platform. You start off not knowing any of the other users (nodes) and so you select a few at random (trusting all mutually), perform a query on all nodes and select the driver with the best rating (according to popular rating from those few users). You take a ride from that driver, have an awful experience, and therefore don't trust the ratings shared by those users anymore. You're back to square one. Building trust takes a lot of time and first-hand validation. - There's potential for trusted nodes to turn "bad" (untrustworthy) therefore each node must continuously "police" neighboring nodes and relay any changes in behavior to mutually-trusted nodes. - What's more, there is a certain "cost of competition" that comes with truly decentralized systems. You cannot roll out "system-wide" changes as easily as a centralized one since a majority of the system must first agree (and many times that majority is too small to even consider it a consensus, which ends in grid-lock). - These five costs (paper-trail, verification, building network of trust, policing network of trust, cost of competition) makes the overall performance of a distributed platform very inferior to that of a centralized platform like Uber. - Of course there are downsides to centralized platforms like Uber. The quality of ratings is less trustworthy since all users use separate criteria (and could be untrustworthy Lyft proponents). Also, Uber (as a system) does not make decisions in the best interest of its users and is only kept in check by its competition (which is diminishing each day). - You can look to human civilization as a way to illustrate some of the challenges and solutions of purely decentralized systems. It would be pretty hard to survive if everyone didn't trust anyone outside of himself. We built our own networks of trust via our family and friends (our tribe). As human populations grew, so too did competition between tribes. Centralized governments and services were then built to offset some of our individual responsibilities and promote unimpeded, fair flow of certain resources while still preserving those aspects that benefit the most from decentralization. - These hybrid systems (platforms with both decentralized AND centralized aspects) work the best in the real world as long as those centralized parts keep working for the majority of nodes and a healthy balance of decentralized/centralized is maintained. (You'll notice we struggle with both of those caveats today in modern civilization). Whoo! Sorry for the long-winded post, I have a lot more to say on the subject but I'll save the rest for a blog post :). (I'm working on decentralized authority and identification in my spare time so this is a hot area of research for me!).

guelo 12y ago

Seriously, why do we need the parasite middlemen like Uber?

prawn 12y ago
Because no one else had set up an as well-known and well-regarded service before they did it. It takes someone to offer deals and build the app and train drivers to get things rolling.

bane 12y ago

There's already a few competing free versions of this depending on the strength of the supply or demand signal. - bumming a ride - hitchhiking - car jacking - kidnapping

juretriglav 12y ago

Don't know if this is exactly what you mean, but in Slovenia, there is this website called http://prevoz.org http://prevoz.org (which translates to "ride.org"), where users/drivers can post when and where they're going, and others can contact and ride with them. It's worked remarkably well for the past 5+ years and right now, there are almost 500 rides available for today.