6 ms·

Airbnb and Uber’s sharing economy is one route to dotcommunism

41 points by mjohn 11y ago

sdenton4 11y ago
"The cost of building an ethernet network, he said, grew in a straight line; the value of the network would grow by the number of users squared: it produced an exponential curve." AAAAAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGGHGHGHGHGH. Much fail, Paul Mason. Much fail.
- dang 11y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
return0 11y ago
I dont think he is backing the argument he makes in the title well. People using these platforms are in the process of repurposing their assets (rooms and cars) to make them look more like hotels and cabs, rather than the other way around. Airbnb and uber are becoming like any other capitalist monopoly. Their effect is to de-regularize the market, which is pretty much the opposite of what you would expect from "dotcommunism". It's not a free market utopia either. It's business as usual.
javaispoo 11y ago
Sigh - the continued slide into awful "journalism" at the graniud continues. I know someone has to give all the "new media" graduates a job, but, at least supervise the output!
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Here's the thing - there's no money to be gained in "supervising the output". Decency is not profitable. General population apparently doesn't give a damn about quality or reliability of the news (or even if they do, it doesn't seem to affect the profit metrics in any way).
  - JonnieCache 11y ago
    To be fair to the gruan, they are not fussed about profits. They are financed by a trust arrangement, subsidized by other publications they own. They make a huge loss every year. Hasn't stopped them becoming a kind of glossy magazine for narcissists though. I guess the data showed that buzzfeed was stealing their clicks.
  - prawn 11y ago
    Not even general population. The article made it to the front page of HN.
- walshemj 11y ago
  That is in CIF not the main paper I would agree that some of the Guardians hacks output is "variable" to be generous
- justincormack 11y ago
  "Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News."
smil 11y ago
Airbnb and Uber have nothing, 0.000%, to do with sharing. They have simply built a digital infrastructure for renting out rooms and selling taxi fares. Their success lies in the fact that digital communication systems are significantly lower cost and more flexible than pre-internet ones. They now own that infrastructure 100% and aim to become monopolies. (Edit: Another good example of a digital infrastructure company is Amazon. That's what they are, not a retailer or anything else.)
- jahnu 11y ago
  Whatever your views on it, the fact is another big part of their success is providing a novel method of regulation avoidance.
  - return0 11y ago
    What will they become when regulation catches up with reality?
    - sobkas 11y ago
      By that time, owners of this companies will have enough money to retire them and drivers/home owners enough debt to ruin their lives.So everyone that matters wins and are ready to disturb other parts of economy.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Also some common social interactions will probably become collateral damage of those regulations. So in the end, not only "everyone that matters" wins, but they do so at the cost of society. Which is tragic, because society has limited endurance and given that "damaging social trust to earn quick buck" seems to be a very popular business model today, it may turn out bad for all of us quite soon.
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  Yeah, but "sharing economy" makes for much-better sounding TED talks.
Animats 11y ago
The article suggests that such services don't really need a central company to make it all work. It could be much more distributed, or federated. This should be even more true for social networks - what value does Facebook really add? Yet no one has a successful distributed social network. We used to have Usenet, but few use that any more. (It still works fine.) There's software for federated social networks, but nobody uses it. The two main problems are lack of promotion, and asshole amplification. Without heavy promotion, a new networked service has trouble overcoming the noise level and getting enough users to be useful. Can one jerk ruin it for a large number of people? If so, the system is vulnerable to asshole amplification. 80% of email spam is generated by only 100 spam operations, according to Spamhaus. Many approaches have been tried to fix this kind of problem, from crowdsourced reputation to proof of work. There's still nothing that works really well. Solve those two problems, and we might have a non-exploitive sharing economy. What we have now is exploitation of the masses by the ruling class.
mwfunk 11y ago
It's not sharing if one person is still paying another person for a good or service. It's just cutting out a middleman (or two or three). This has the potential to be a great thing, but it's still not sharing.
- collyw 11y ago
  Is it really cutting out a middleman? My girlfriend showed me an internet cleaner service I wasn't interested, as I view that as a middleman taking their cut, and cleaners are already pretty poorly paid. I would rather go on word of mouth recommendation / or an add in the local shop noticeboard, as I did before this sort of service sprung up. I view Uber or Airbnb as a monopolized version of the middleman.
  - smil 11y ago
    indeed, they are the super-middleman because digital platforms can grow much larger than analog ones.
    - walshemj 11y ago
      a middleman that becomes the gatekeeper in ubers case
beatpanda 11y ago
This is asinine. There is already a free, federated gift economy for rides and places to stay -- hitchhiking and hospitality exchange, both of which existed, and made it to the internet[1][2][3], well before Airbnb or Uber. [1]http://hitchwiki.org http://hitchwiki.org [2]http://couchsurfing.org http://couchsurfing.org [3]http://trustroots.org http://trustroots.org
- beatpanda 11y ago
  See also: articles about how programmers in San Francisco invented the practice of a bunch of twenty-somethings sharing a rented house.
  - dschiptsov 11y ago
    Oh, come on! Wage workers share rooms since times of Egiptian Pyramids or Great Wall.
    - collyw 11y ago
      I upvoted that comment, on the assumption that it was sarcasm.
- fallat 11y ago
  You know I was thinking "why aren't there free services like this?", now I see this, and I'm REALLY wondering "why the hell did AirBnB catch on and this didn't?!". I had to rent a place for a month via AirBnB, for myself and my partner. My AirBnB fees came out to like $200, and when I told the owner they were like "wow, I didn't know that! I would have rather just paid via cash and save you guys from paying the extra!". Seriously fuck AirBnB. We need to push these free alternatives. We need services that truly just connect people, instead of ripping them off. I understand a system like AirBnB has to pay for maintenance and developers, but holy shit the fees are insane because there are investors too.
  - glomph 11y ago
    Couchsurfing did catch on.
fnordsensei 11y ago
I'm not sure I really follow the line of reasoning in this article. It starts with the word "communism" in the title, probably because it's a tried and true way of getting people riled up with minor effort. Then it seems to make the argument that these business models don't create new markets, but optimize existing ones. But then the argument that would justify the title, as I understand it, is "if communists took over things, we would be living in a communist society". Indeed! And if martians took over, we would live in a martian society.
- usrusr 11y ago
  The complete absence of anything warranting the letters "communism" in the title was a huge letdown. And it would be so easy to make a relevant point: in a traditional market economy, it is very much possible to incrementally grow from a single taxi into a larger operation, or from a small b&b into a hotel, into a chain. Both communist and centralizes "market as a service" economies don't want that to happen, hence "dotcommunism".
  - fnordsensei 11y ago
    Do you mean that if you're driving for Uber, you're pretty much prohibited from creating your own fleet of taxis? If that is what you mean, isn't that the case when driving for traditional taxi companies as well?
    - usrusr 11y ago
      Sure, but in the traditional taxi system, it did happen, over and over again, therefore it must be possible. I really don't see how the same would happen under Uber without them weighing in to either claim the share of that additional middleman or to protect their "drivers are not really doing business, so regulations for professionals do not apply to them/us" illusion.
      - fnordsensei 11y ago
        Agreed, that's a problem, and it sounds primarily like a problem of labor law. If part of the strategy for Uber has been to effectively keep taxi drivers in some kind of employment grey zone, then I assume that the goal is to have the drivers sign away as many rights as possible, while at the same time burdening Uber with as little responsibility as possible. The point of entrepreneurship is that you are able to trade security for freedom and potential material success. If Uber drivers (or anyone else for that matter) are left with no security, no freedom and no prospects for material success, then something's not right. I write all this without actually knowing what Uber's strategy or philosophy with regards to this is, hence all the "if-then"'s.
crystaln 11y ago
"Once the platforms to rent out things, services or time are stable, textbook economics states that the cost of using them should fall." I'm not sure what textbooks say about economics these days, but the pure supply and demand economics assuming rational actors taught in economics 101 has never been a good model of real world behavior. Marketplaces are valuable because they provide monopoly profits. They are real estate, and participating in them requires rent.
amelius 11y ago
> But I can be a producer in this business as well as a consumer. I can rent my own flat or register my own car to provide cab rides. Yes, and Airbnb and Uber, being the gatekeepers of the network, can extort you.
vegancap 11y ago
*Powered by consumer Capitalism
jokoon 11y ago
I imagine it would be so much better if one day the government could regulate such things. I know many people would scream, but honestly there is a gray area when it comes to rights and damage insurances. I don't think all consumer trust those business models.
sgnelson 11y ago
dotFeudalism would probably be a better descriptor.

41 points by mjohn 11y ago

"The cost of building an ethernet network, he said, grew in a straight line; the value of the network would grow by the number of users squared: it produced an exponential curve." AAAAAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGGHGHGHGHGH. Much fail, Paul Mason. Much fail.

dang 11y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

return0 11y ago

I dont think he is backing the argument he makes in the title well. People using these platforms are in the process of repurposing their assets (rooms and cars) to make them look more like hotels and cabs, rather than the other way around. Airbnb and uber are becoming like any other capitalist monopoly. Their effect is to de-regularize the market, which is pretty much the opposite of what you would expect from "dotcommunism". It's not a free market utopia either. It's business as usual.

javaispoo 11y ago

Sigh - the continued slide into awful "journalism" at the graniud continues. I know someone has to give all the "new media" graduates a job, but, at least supervise the output!

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Here's the thing - there's no money to be gained in "supervising the output". Decency is not profitable. General population apparently doesn't give a damn about quality or reliability of the news (or even if they do, it doesn't seem to affect the profit metrics in any way).
- JonnieCache 11y ago
  To be fair to the gruan, they are not fussed about profits. They are financed by a trust arrangement, subsidized by other publications they own. They make a huge loss every year. Hasn't stopped them becoming a kind of glossy magazine for narcissists though. I guess the data showed that buzzfeed was stealing their clicks.
- prawn 11y ago
  Not even general population. The article made it to the front page of HN.
walshemj 11y ago
That is in CIF not the main paper I would agree that some of the Guardians hacks output is "variable" to be generous
justincormack 11y ago
"Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News."

smil 11y ago

Airbnb and Uber have nothing, 0.000%, to do with sharing. They have simply built a digital infrastructure for renting out rooms and selling taxi fares. Their success lies in the fact that digital communication systems are significantly lower cost and more flexible than pre-internet ones. They now own that infrastructure 100% and aim to become monopolies. (Edit: Another good example of a digital infrastructure company is Amazon. That's what they are, not a retailer or anything else.)

jahnu 11y ago
Whatever your views on it, the fact is another big part of their success is providing a novel method of regulation avoidance.
- return0 11y ago
  What will they become when regulation catches up with reality?
  - sobkas 11y ago
    By that time, owners of this companies will have enough money to retire them and drivers/home owners enough debt to ruin their lives.So everyone that matters wins and are ready to disturb other parts of economy.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Also some common social interactions will probably become collateral damage of those regulations. So in the end, not only "everyone that matters" wins, but they do so at the cost of society. Which is tragic, because society has limited endurance and given that "damaging social trust to earn quick buck" seems to be a very popular business model today, it may turn out bad for all of us quite soon.
aaronbrethorst 11y ago
Yeah, but "sharing economy" makes for much-better sounding TED talks.

Animats 11y ago

The article suggests that such services don't really need a central company to make it all work. It could be much more distributed, or federated. This should be even more true for social networks - what value does Facebook really add? Yet no one has a successful distributed social network. We used to have Usenet, but few use that any more. (It still works fine.) There's software for federated social networks, but nobody uses it. The two main problems are lack of promotion, and asshole amplification. Without heavy promotion, a new networked service has trouble overcoming the noise level and getting enough users to be useful. Can one jerk ruin it for a large number of people? If so, the system is vulnerable to asshole amplification. 80% of email spam is generated by only 100 spam operations, according to Spamhaus. Many approaches have been tried to fix this kind of problem, from crowdsourced reputation to proof of work. There's still nothing that works really well. Solve those two problems, and we might have a non-exploitive sharing economy. What we have now is exploitation of the masses by the ruling class.

mwfunk 11y ago

It's not sharing if one person is still paying another person for a good or service. It's just cutting out a middleman (or two or three). This has the potential to be a great thing, but it's still not sharing.

collyw 11y ago
Is it really cutting out a middleman? My girlfriend showed me an internet cleaner service I wasn't interested, as I view that as a middleman taking their cut, and cleaners are already pretty poorly paid. I would rather go on word of mouth recommendation / or an add in the local shop noticeboard, as I did before this sort of service sprung up. I view Uber or Airbnb as a monopolized version of the middleman.
- smil 11y ago
  indeed, they are the super-middleman because digital platforms can grow much larger than analog ones.
  - walshemj 11y ago
    a middleman that becomes the gatekeeper in ubers case

beatpanda 11y ago

This is asinine. There is already a free, federated gift economy for rides and places to stay -- hitchhiking and hospitality exchange, both of which existed, and made it to the internet[1][2][3], well before Airbnb or Uber. [1]http://hitchwiki.org http://hitchwiki.org [2]http://couchsurfing.org http://couchsurfing.org [3]http://trustroots.org http://trustroots.org

beatpanda 11y ago
See also: articles about how programmers in San Francisco invented the practice of a bunch of twenty-somethings sharing a rented house.
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  Oh, come on! Wage workers share rooms since times of Egiptian Pyramids or Great Wall.
  - collyw 11y ago
    I upvoted that comment, on the assumption that it was sarcasm.
fallat 11y ago
You know I was thinking "why aren't there free services like this?", now I see this, and I'm REALLY wondering "why the hell did AirBnB catch on and this didn't?!". I had to rent a place for a month via AirBnB, for myself and my partner. My AirBnB fees came out to like $200, and when I told the owner they were like "wow, I didn't know that! I would have rather just paid via cash and save you guys from paying the extra!". Seriously fuck AirBnB. We need to push these free alternatives. We need services that truly just connect people, instead of ripping them off. I understand a system like AirBnB has to pay for maintenance and developers, but holy shit the fees are insane because there are investors too.
- glomph 11y ago
  Couchsurfing did catch on.

fnordsensei 11y ago

I'm not sure I really follow the line of reasoning in this article. It starts with the word "communism" in the title, probably because it's a tried and true way of getting people riled up with minor effort. Then it seems to make the argument that these business models don't create new markets, but optimize existing ones. But then the argument that would justify the title, as I understand it, is "if communists took over things, we would be living in a communist society". Indeed! And if martians took over, we would live in a martian society.

usrusr 11y ago
The complete absence of anything warranting the letters "communism" in the title was a huge letdown. And it would be so easy to make a relevant point: in a traditional market economy, it is very much possible to incrementally grow from a single taxi into a larger operation, or from a small b&b into a hotel, into a chain. Both communist and centralizes "market as a service" economies don't want that to happen, hence "dotcommunism".
- fnordsensei 11y ago
  Do you mean that if you're driving for Uber, you're pretty much prohibited from creating your own fleet of taxis? If that is what you mean, isn't that the case when driving for traditional taxi companies as well?
  - usrusr 11y ago
    Sure, but in the traditional taxi system, it did happen, over and over again, therefore it must be possible. I really don't see how the same would happen under Uber without them weighing in to either claim the share of that additional middleman or to protect their "drivers are not really doing business, so regulations for professionals do not apply to them/us" illusion.
    - fnordsensei 11y ago
      Agreed, that's a problem, and it sounds primarily like a problem of labor law. If part of the strategy for Uber has been to effectively keep taxi drivers in some kind of employment grey zone, then I assume that the goal is to have the drivers sign away as many rights as possible, while at the same time burdening Uber with as little responsibility as possible. The point of entrepreneurship is that you are able to trade security for freedom and potential material success. If Uber drivers (or anyone else for that matter) are left with no security, no freedom and no prospects for material success, then something's not right. I write all this without actually knowing what Uber's strategy or philosophy with regards to this is, hence all the "if-then"'s.

crystaln 11y ago

"Once the platforms to rent out things, services or time are stable, textbook economics states that the cost of using them should fall." I'm not sure what textbooks say about economics these days, but the pure supply and demand economics assuming rational actors taught in economics 101 has never been a good model of real world behavior. Marketplaces are valuable because they provide monopoly profits. They are real estate, and participating in them requires rent.

amelius 11y ago

> But I can be a producer in this business as well as a consumer. I can rent my own flat or register my own car to provide cab rides. Yes, and Airbnb and Uber, being the gatekeepers of the network, can extort you.

vegancap 11y ago

*Powered by consumer Capitalism

jokoon 11y ago

I imagine it would be so much better if one day the government could regulate such things. I know many people would scream, but honestly there is a gray area when it comes to rights and damage insurances. I don't think all consumer trust those business models.

sgnelson 11y ago

dotFeudalism would probably be a better descriptor.