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[-] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 134 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I shared this before.

If you were a person of color, having Uber and Airbnb were a game changer. Taxis and hotels were awful from the 80s-2010s.

Taxis were racists and often wouldn't even pick you up. If they did, they often took you on a joyride. Hotels were absolute shit holes. Want to complain about your room? Go pound sand.

Those industries werent good for decades. And the disruption actually made car sharing much more consistent and hotel experiences better.

[-] whoisearth@lemmy.ca 49 points 1 month ago

Interesting perspective I never accounted before thank you. Cabs were notorious for not picking up black people. Can't speak for hotels.

Hotels prior to the Internet would do shitty things like:

  1. Rates increased. Pay triple.
  2. You want this moldy room or not.
  3. Lie and say this is the only thing available in town

Hotels took a long time to actually get online checking. Most hotels were still requiring phone reservations way past 2010. And even if you get a reservation over the phone, they could always take one look at you upon arrival and reject it.

Airbnb forced them to move to the digital age. They forced them to show the pricing up front. They forced them to have photos of the room types. They made them take reservations and actually hold it, else face bad reviews.

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[-] Microw@lemm.ee 11 points 1 month ago

At least here in a european countries, taxis and hotels were overregulated and monopolized af. The business models of Uber and Airbnb may not have been the best at the start, but like you say: it was a needed disruption.

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[-] sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 103 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Fake money for criminals only because it was useful for me when I wanted to buy drugs while living in a place with little access to them

[-] littlebluespark@lemmy.world 58 points 1 month ago

It's especially funny since criminal enterprises have used "legal" currency since its invention. It's almost like criminals are gonna criminal, regardless of the "tender". 🤌🏽

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[-] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 92 points 1 month ago

Illegal delivery services are my fav ones. People are physically running or riding like slaves to get you tendies from a KFC across the street. No, you are probably not a person who needs that due to some health conditions, you are privileged to buy their labor cheap and further their abuse.

[-] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 67 points 1 month ago

I'm disabled, and I'll very occasionally make use of them, but I hate them too. Fucking the workers, making my $11 chicken into $24, and complaining that they aren't profitable to both sides. Absolute bullshit.

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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 58 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Uber

Airbnb

Bitcoin

OpenAI

did I guess right

[-] LostXOR@fedia.io 54 points 1 month ago

I think the last two are more general, just cryptocurrency and generative AI respectively.

[-] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 23 points 1 month ago

There are also at least three ubers where I'm at. It's more about a business model.

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[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 31 points 1 month ago

As a fan of major environmental catastrophe, can I vote for all four?

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[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 31 points 1 month ago

I like the map that shows me where public toilets are. I don't know how that fits into this paradigm.

[-] RGB3x3@lemmy.world 30 points 1 month ago
[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 18 points 1 month ago

Nah that's a different app

[-] feedum_sneedson@lemmy.world 27 points 1 month ago

I guess I've found the plagiarism machine the most entertaining so far.

[-] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 26 points 1 month ago

Extremely confident source of misinformation

[-] IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world 24 points 1 month ago

All of you pre Uber zealots are adorably naive. The cab industry is scum.

[-] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 month ago

Uber is also scum tho. Seems there's always going to be something dodgy about getting into cars with random strangers.

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[-] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

replacing scum with even scummier scum? like, taxis were bad but they were fucking regulated.

[-] ssj2marx@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 month ago

If uber had simply been an app that handled payment and calling for service, it would have been a panacea to almost all of the problems taxis used to have. Unfortunately they also took the opportunity to screw over their drivers and now that they seem unstoppable they're taking the opportunity to screw over their customers too.

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[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 21 points 1 month ago

Probably illegal car company. AirBNB isn't terribly different (as a renter) from previous renting sites. I made some money off Bitcoin but even then it is so much wasted power for something not terribly useful. Generative AI and AI art is fun as a toy but eh, that's mostly it.

Being able to pretty easily get a cab from anywhere to anywhere (obviously within reason) is actually kind of a cool innovation to me. It's probably saved lives too by giving inebriated people an easy way to get a cab home. (But I'm not giving them a huge pass because I think they've been accused of finding ways to charge drunk people more.)

[-] ssj2marx@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 month ago

Being able to pretty easily get a cab from anywhere to anywhere

Well before smartphones and uber were a thing, you could call the cab company from anywhere and get someone to come pick you up and take you anywhere else (within their range, of course) - back when I had a clamshell phone the numbers of the three taxi companies in my area were all on my speed dial I used them so much. There is no reason that the simple innovation of putting that capability on an app instead of a phone call should also require enlisting an entire fleet of "independent contractors" who coincidentally also bear the brunt of the costs of running the cab company.

[-] madasi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 1 month ago

You're not wrong, but you are leaving out some convenient parts of the experience. Yes, before, you could call a cab company and they would come pick you up and take you somewhere. But, you didn't know how long it would take for your driver to pick you up. had no idea how much the ride would cost you, and there was a pretty good chance the driver wouldn't accept a credit card for payment whether it was company policy to or not.

When illegal cab companies came along, they forced competition by giving you realtime information on where your driver was and how long until they would pick you up, price estimates before your ride begins, and a guaranteed method of payment that isn't cash. Cab companies had to modernize with mobile apps, lower their prices to stay competitive, and improve the overall customer experience.

For as badly as the drivers are treated by the companies, the services were successful because the existing experience with established cab companies sucked.

[-] nickiwest@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

Taxi accessibility varies wildly depending on where you are.

I lived in a small city (700k-ish people) for a decade and almost never saw a taxi on the streets. One morning, I locked my keys in the house and had to call a cab to take me to work. It took 30 minutes for a taxi to arrive. I lived literally one block away from the city's taxi depot.

A couple of years later, Uber hit the scene. With their service, I never waited more than 8 minutes for a ride anywhere in the city.

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[-] 737@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 1 month ago

fake money for criminals is just money in general, at least some crypto currencies don't allow for tracking

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[-] TheControlled@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

Jesus fucking Christ this is cynical.

[-] ssj2marx@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 month ago

That doesn't make it wrong.

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[-] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Definitely Illegal hotel chain. It's actually weirdly exciting to me to go to an airbnb not knowing what amenities or rules to expect, compared to the standardized experience of a hotel.

[-] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 month ago

It's like a quest in an adventure game. Follow the map to to get to the inn, follow these clues to find the key, is the inn owned by cool NPC or is it owned by a villain? Boss fight! You've done well adventurer, you only owe $30 in cleaning fees!

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[-] MiDaBa@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 month ago
[-] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 month ago

I guess? It's social construct what we all agree to because trading 20 bushels of wheat for a chicken is a pain in the ass.

[-] TheLowestStone@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

That's 1200lbs of wheat for one chicken. You've been getting ripped off.

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[-] MehBlah@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

AirBnb by far is the worst.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 month ago

Well yeah but... Fake money, is "real" money real? The support structures behind bitcoin and dollars or euros are different and both have positive and negative aspects. All in all bitcoin is worse, mainly for the power usage, but if it comes to ease and speed of transfer for the average user bitcoin rules. I guess we can mostly thank banks for that.

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[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 month ago

I think the first three technologies were good in that they shone a light at how shit and abusive currently existing systems were.

The problem is that in the case of hotels and taxis, the systems were immediately monopolized so they could exploit the crap out of it, and in the case of crypto, the technology is foundationally bad, and governments were (and still are) too protective of the abusive banks.

To dive a little more into detail; yes, block chain is a bad and unsustainable idea from the start. World wide credit card transactions coas the electricity of a few servers and the payment machines which are there anyways. Bitcoin, even with a tiny tiny fraction of all worlds credit card transactions, already takes more electricity than multiple countries combined. It's not sustainable.

Having said that, fuck banks and their horrendous technology and their abusive policies and fuck governments for supporting it. It van be done better, it must be done better, and crypto is NOT the solution.

Uber and Airbnb should be burned to the ground, and an open protocol should be created for this that allows people up to a reasonable degree to rent out their house if they're gone and want to do so, or give people a ride in their car if they opt so, and the system should adhere to local government laws.

AI is laughably bad right now, but it's a start. We're looking at a technology in it's infancy and it WILL grow to the point where we should be worried about a lot of things. Then again, hopefully, by then AI will be able to help us fix those worries... Until then, though, fix the power usage of AI because right now its aiming to be even worse than crypto

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[-] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 month ago

Tweet[s] now protected but thanks to Netscape/Mozilla founder and San Francisco night club owner JWZ, Jamie Zawinski, here were some results.

[-] 58008@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

Anonymous and untraceable internet traffic tool for paedophiles, data thieves and occasionally a journalist living under an oppressive regime. But mainly paedophiles.

[-] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

I used Tor once out of curiosity. Wanted to know what kind of stuff I could run into. I FAFO. I don't use Tor anymore.

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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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