Uber was only ever cheap because the rides were being subsidized with VC money in order to try to run the competition out of business. It was the Walmart model, the “tech” element was puffery, novelty pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes.
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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As someone who never really took taxis in the pre-uber times I guess I'm not the one to know, but was it just puffery? obviously they only did it to kill competition, avoid regulation and taxes, etc. but was it not also genuinely more convenient to order a taxi through an app with your GPS location, vs calling and doing it over the phone (and presumably waiting longer)? In cities without the densities required to just be able to hail a taxi from the street, I assume it was a big step up, even if it was evil and all the other promises were fake.
The taxi industry was so decimated by the time I was old enough and in a big enough city that I don't have a good frame of comparison.
It used to be that you'd have to google the number of the local taxi companies (if you're lucky enough that they have a web presence (pre internet you'd ask the hotel concierge, or check the yellow pages, and many of them never updated past that model)) then call the dispatcher, who would grunt something at you and hang up, and if you were super perceptive you might be able to tell whether they said a cab is coming or not. If you were leaving the airport or a really busy hotel then you'd just walk into the next cab to pull up with no dispatch, though.
There were pre-Uber attempts at app dispatches for cab companies, but different cab companies would use different ones, they were all shit, and most of them didn't do it.
So the cab companies did fuck this up and Uber did a better job, and Uber replaced them, and everything "improved" exactly how it's supposed to under capitalism. But cab companies and Uber aren't people; the actual people (drivers) all got fucked over.
Taxi drivers were / are often unionised too, they shut down a few blocks on the cbd here over a decade ago
One of the reasons so many libs support ride share apps. It's union busting without risking your scabs getting shanked on the picket line. Instead, just a quiet takeover.
Oh yeah apps make things more convenient for sure. But functionally the app is just pre-populating ride request information in the system for dispatch instead of taking it down over the phone like in ye olden days. Nothing of the economics of fleet management changed, in fact if anything Uber’s decentralized system is less efficient, the costs from the inefficiency just get pushed to the gig worker drivers.
A lot of taxis now use similar apps for requests and dispatches; NYC has been using Arro for years for yellow cabs, and you can request accessible taxis to boot. There wasn’t anything particularly proprietary in the app, which meant the established industry would pick it up sooner or later.
I think this is why Uber has been pushing Uber Eats as of late, as there they’re just competing with Seamless/Grubhub, who also employ gig worker drivers for restaurants that don’t have delivery drivers.
Others have gotten the main points, but I'll add one more.
Before Uber, there was no guarantee that your taxi would ever come.
You had to tell the dispatcher both your location and the destination, it would be relayed, and then the drivers would decide if it was worth the effort.
Often short suburban trips outside weekends would not be as profitable to drivers and so they wouldn't pick you up and there was no way to tell except repeatedly calling up.
So, imagine 11 year old me, standing outside alone in 40 degree summer heat for 90 min waiting for a driver that never came. This happened several times.
Uber really did make things better for awhile.
Being expected to navigate your way home alone as an 11 year old seems like a bigger issue than taxies being unreliable tbh :(
It wasn't a regular thing, both my parents worked and sometimes no one could pick me up from an event. Also this was a pretty safe area and kids playing outside alone was still a thing.
I have some mild taxi trauma (or something) from catching them as a kid so I'm glad youre okay!
The 90s. Our protection from pedophiles was learning to yell “stranger danger” and threats of physical violence if we arrived home after sunset.
There wasn't much in the way of innovation in Uber/Lyft. Private Taxi companies and the regulated cab commissions were able to get competing apps going pretty quick. They just couldn't compete because they had to charge some kind of fee to the Taxi operators, while Uber was giving users a huge discount.
The venture capital firms knew from the beginning that Uber wasn't about technology or innovation, it was about being the next tech monopolist.
Get in between businesses and customers in an industry that's going through a technological change. Subsidize to the benefit of the businesses and the customers to prevent competition. Grow until you have monopoly power. Increase the costs to the users, then increase the costs to the businesses. Next step is usually offering to sell the customers to the businesses(usually by selling ads), but I could see it being some kind of Uber driver gold subscription or something that gives you priority in the app.
My most accelerationist take is we should cheer this on forever to get an ever app-changing service industry kept afloat by VC money to pay for shit. I feel like if you play this right you could basically get the "good" Uber forever. Once Uber tanks, you get Nuber, once that tanks, you get New-Nuber etc.
Basically I'm proposing a system of relocation of money via VC until we hit FALGSOC
A lot of people do that with cell phone providers, they switch to a different one every time their introductory price ends and then they start a new introductory price.
The thing is ISPs and Telco providers aren't kept afloat by VC-Money. It just makes business sense to them to do that because they figure x% doesn't switch and then gives them money. What I'm saying is that option should not exist, registration should be VC-floated App easy and then we continue into $3 uber rides forever, where the driver also gets paid appropiately (don't hate me I know Uber never really did this), I don't pay much, but Peter Thiel does. I want Elon Musk to pay for my ride home from the bar and I want him to lose asstons of money on it, before he is replaced by the next idiot, who also loses asstons of money on it, until we have distributed all the failsons wealth
The early days of Uber were a bit Jokerfying for me.
The current days of Uber are jokerfying. I've seen techbro budgets that have hundreds of dollars going into Uber every month and over $1000 on food delivery and that's just normal to so many people.
Waymo is now being subsided. And thus the cycle beings anew. Sometime soon they'll be cheaper than Ubers and then the money will dry up.
Pirating is just as cheap as it ever was! 
Electricity costs more these days too 
all going according to plan, entrenched, monopolized, collecting fees
The ideal life cycle of a product under capitalism is: innovate, kill off competition, institute monopoly, charge more for less until somebody else is able to surpass you
Unfortunately the US is a communist dictatorship that strangles the free market with authoritarian regulations, making what would be a fair market resort to scamming customers in order to survive under communism
Look I hate to be that girl but this is a terrible Business Insider tabloid shit
Ubers are way cheaper than taxis still. Largely due to paying their workers way less than what cab drivers make. The article cherry picked a ride from downtown NYC and a trip from a busy airport
Cloud computing is still way cheaper to rent than to build out by yourself. It'd take years and tons of millions yearly to get people to develop the same capabilities
This is some weird contrarian Luddite article for boomers reminiscing about the good old days where capitalism wasn't destroying the world nearly as much as it is now
Yeah they could have limited the scope to movie/tv streaming services and been fine. But music and video games streaming are still decent value propositions for consumers.
Specialization isn't inherently a problem, nor are centralization or decentralization. The problem ultimately comes down to private property and the resulting power imbalances and adverse incentives.
Cloud computing CAN be cheaper but it can also be way more expensive. It is not a panacea.
It’s cheaper for companies that have unpredictable traffic/capacity. It lets you scale up/down without having build out physically.
For businesses with steady, predictable traffic it can be far more expensive. You buy the servers, you own them. They can run for years.
Cloud can get pricey veeeery quickly.
If it was cheaper large companies would not all have moved to cloud, especially since it costs a very large upfront cost to migrate all that over if you already have a full setup
Netflix used to have one of the best homegrown infrastructure and even they moved everything off to AWS
I've worked at a place that mostly just served videos and had 100M users (no idea what the DAU/MAU was). The AWS bill was ~800k a year
Just buying the land and building all the data centers across multiple continents would probably bankrupt the entire company, forget about building all that software and setting up the hardware and configs by themselves
It's only cheaper for tiny companies, but even then, no company ever has the goal of staying small
Hosting video is exactly elastic demand and a perfect use case for cloud computing. But not every business hosts video.
I’ve worked with companies that are moving at least some of their infrastructure back on premises.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2336102/why-companies-are-leaving-the-cloud.html
There’s tons of good reasons to use IAAS, but there’s also a reason folks joke about the cost of aws.
the reddit thread on r/technology was surprisingly anticapitalist.
I guess constant mass layoffs in tech are finally getting people to realize the system might not be working in their interest.
maybe. i'm not sure if that sub is /. gun pointed at the printer types or consumerist gadget perverts
hopefully the game dev unionization wave beaks into other tech workers.
Game devs have definitely been leading the way here, so definitely hope it spreads.
Anticapitalist, or anti product getting more expensive and hoping that the government fixes it without addressing the root problem?
a mix of actual socialist talking points and radlib not making the last connection stuff
It surprises me a lot how many people use these services. Like, you're such a gullible dummy. TV? Pirate. Music? Newpipe and Bandcamp. Taxi? Random taxi company's web API or just call. Podcasts? Patreon and Black wolf feeds.
Like, I don't know how people end up paying so much for any of this shit. Even if I was a millionaire I wouldn't change because life's so easy. Why complicate things with a gazillion subscriptions and apps I don't want on my phone.
for music I simply use the spotify family plan of someone I dated an entire decade ago and have not spoken to in years, I recommend everyone else do the same
The easiest alternative for taxis is just not using taxis. It's worked pretty well for me.
Say it with me enshittification