[bigbugbag]

I have to point out that blablacar is not about solidarity, ecology or social relationships, to the contrary actually, it's about being a vampire draining money from solidarity and ecology and market domination.

I mean carpooling was about solidarity and ecology, then blablacar seized the market and turned it into "no mobile phone, no credit card, no access to carpooling", "give us money first". I used to carpool before blablacar and many times I did not ask that much money or even no money at all, sometimes I got barter out of carpooling. Or the other way around, people enjoyed my company and refused my money. Now this social link is over because everybody is using blablacar and blablacar requires expensive upfront payment.

I hate how blablacar turned something that was about helping each other and bringing people together into a capitalist profit making venture aiming for world market domination.

[_5nsu]

> I have to point out that blablacar is not about solidarity, ecology or social relationships, to the contrary actually, it's about being a vampire draining money from solidarity and ecology and market domination.

So you just hate it because it's a company and it's making money. Right ?

> I mean carpooling was about solidarity and ecology, then blablacar seized the market and turned it into "no mobile phone, no credit card, no access to carpooling", "give us money first".

BlaBlaCar single-handedly created the huge carpooling market that now does exist in France for example. They didn't seize the market, people gave it to them. There are still other carpooling websites which you can use, and carpooling panels in events are still a common thing.

Up-front payment, not directly giving out people's phone number : you pretend this is bad practice, but this is exactly the security that was needed to bring the masses to carpooling, and as a matter of fact it did.

You seem to dislike that people would be ok in a win-win situation, where they both get paid for their expenses, and are happy to chat with other people while doing a small move for the planet. This is what's happening.

> I hate how blablacar turned something that was about helping each other and bringing people together into a capitalist profit making venture aiming for world market domination.

This is truly misguided. The opposite equivalent to my parent, but now with an anti-capitalist idealistic view of the world. Do you not see that? People are not into this ideological warfare of yours. The "world market domination" ... of carpooling? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?

Please find a mindset where you are able to leave BlaBlaCar be. Seriously, these are people too, and they are providing a great service. And I'm worried people, just like you do, are too prone to ranting on companies for all the bad reasons. The very reason you're using the excessive word hate, to me, seems to prove you're personalizing the entity and are a bit out of the rational realm in your claims.

[bigbugbag]

I have no problem whatsoever with a company making money. But here we're talking about a single company in a close to monopoly situation and who uses its position to dictate its rules.

I think you are misremembering here, when blablacar started and was called covoiturage.fr there were a variety of other carpooling websites, some having been around for several years notably covoiturage.com. At the time carpooling through websites was on the rise and many competitors existed (123envoiture.com, easycovoiturage.com, vadrouille-covoiturage.com, and more), all were free to use. I remember because I was an active user of pretty much all of those sites. covoiturage was one website among others and not the most popular, then came Frédéric Mazzella who bought covoiturage.fr and create a company Comuto to operate it with the intent of aggressively capturing the carpooling market.

first step was to offer the service for free and build a community around it while buying the competitors, next step was to push the remaining competitors out of business with the network effect and use the fear card to position blablacar as a unavoidable middleman (so people could not communicate directly and strike a deal outside the website as was the usage until that point), then pivot from free to paid for. Last step is domination of the market and increasing prices to very expensive as there is no competition as Mazella explained in an interview:

"Pour l'instant, seul les services Français et Espagnol sont payant, pourquoi ne pas toujours commencer avec le modèle économique ?", Kevin Deniau.

"Tout est un problème de masse critique et d'absence d'offre de covoiturage", Frédéric Mazella.

F.Mazella n'a pas souhaité dire que le passage en mode gratuit de Blablacar est uniquement pour capter l'attention des utilisateurs et qu'une fois le marché écrasé et dominé sous couvert de gratuité, le système payant se mettait en place. Ce fut le cas en France de manière progressive pour faire passer la pilule et c'est la même chose en Espagne, où la fronde s'organise petit à petit. https://blogs.mediapart.fr/evenstrood/blog/110714/covoiturag...

I'm not saying anything about bad practice (good or bad is a relative notion), I'm saying that blablacar destroyed the social component of carpooling to turn it into an economic one. That blablacar put artificial barrier preventing people who need carpooling the most (people who cannot afford a smartphone or a credit card) from having access to it.

I've been doing carpooling for years and had no issues with cash payment or direct contact with other users, but suddenly blablacar marketed these as undesireable and risky and pretended there was a need to move to less freedom for more security by making them the unavoidable middleman and upfront payment, obviously the need was actually on their side and was about putting them in position to maximize profit.

And I'm not alone to have noticed this, this is quite common knowledge [1][2][3][4][5]. It's around that time that I notice a change in carpoolers, before all were people going from one place to another, now appeared people with no need to go from A to B with large vehicles taking as much passengers as possible to make as much money as possible.

You may think this is win-win situation, but it's really not[7] (also the testimony at the end of [2]), it's a business as usual situation where capitalist parasitic company turning something desireable into an economic commodity/convenience [8][9]

we'll have to agree to disagree on me despising blablacar for what they did as being misguided. Frédéric Mazella knows well what he did and he dit it on purpose with intent. I do realize how realistic and sad it is that a capitalist company killed the human potential of carpooling to try to meet ROI expectation of those who funded them while aiming for world market domination by his own admission. The social element of being human ought not to be controlled by finance.

I hope that by reading all this including sources, you understand where I'm standing and that I know what I am talking about.

[1]: http://carfree.fr/index.php/2014/07/04/la-finance-a-t-elle-t... [2]: https://comptoir.org/2015/05/08/blablacar-comment-ils-nous-o... [3]: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/evenstrood/blog/200614/blablacar-... [4]: http://alireailleurs.tumblr.com/post/89843872188/blablacar-a... [5]: http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/contribution/891698-covoiturage-... [6]: http://simplifier-la-mobilite.tumblr.com/post/112955153091/b... [7]: https://forum.quechoisir.org/frais-de-covoiturage-non-rembou... [8]: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2013/10/DENOUN/49720 [9]: https://www.journaldunet.com/management/expert/60567/abus-de...

[_5nsu]

I had read [1] to [4] (maybe [5]-[6] too, but I don't remember) when they were posted, and I did think at the time that BlaBlaCar was a bad thing. But these are only blog rants, and I shortly changed my mind after that. I perfectly remember the (IMO) shitty UIs all carpooling websites had at the time, and I do remember people being doubtful about it in general. I was too. Now, there's nothing less common than carpooling, and you have to admit it serves ecology well. This is one of the things those blog posts couldn't or didn't see, four years ago.

[7] is a collection of problems people encountered. I had read a few of these long time ago, and re-read them now : these seem to be situations any service linking people together would encounter, and I don't see how any other website could avoid those entirely.

[8] I can't read; [9] is quite general.

> I've been doing carpooling for years and had no issues with cash payment or direct contact with other users, but suddenly blablacar marketed these as undesireable and risky and pretended there was a need to move to less freedom for more security by making them the unavoidable middleman and upfront payment, obviously the need was actually on their side and was about putting them in position to maximize profit.

You are personnalizing BlaBlaCar as a sneaky fox whispering into people's ears, playing on their fears and need for security. BlaBlaCar's position was the result of people's acceptance of their services in free will. You cannot change that. Also, it is very clear in some of your links that BlaBlaCar targeted the conductors (this "critical" mass) with economical incentives in order to bring the market to the next level, which, again, succeeded like nothing had before. I'm not sure destroyed is really what would describe their rise if you take a broader point of view.

> I'm not saying anything about bad practice (good or bad is a relative notion), I'm saying that blablacar destroyed the social component of carpooling to turn it into an economic one.

You are appealing to relativism, and then clearly implying that social and economic components are mutually exclusive, and I'd go as far as to say you also implied which one is evil and which one isn't. I just wanted you to notice that.

Also, it's not because something isn't free that you have to be an ass about it and that it's not social; and the inverse is also true. That's not something very common in France, but you can actually charge people and, at the same time, give them a good social experience.

> That blablacar put artificial barrier preventing people who need carpooling the most (people who cannot afford a smartphone or a credit card) from having access to it.

There are no people who need carpooling the most. Everyone needs to travel around for cheap money. It kinda feels like virtue signaling from your part to imply that you think about the poorest users, as if the person talking to you wasn't.

Also, this is quite untrue. On Leboncoin you will find older or used smarpthones from 10 euros, to 100 if you want fancy ones, while the cheapest phone plans, including internet, start at 2 or 3 euros a month. This extends worldwide with 3 billion smarpthone users in the world [1]. The magic of capitalism...

Technically speaking, to counter BlaBlaCar's existing monopoly on carpooling users, you'd have to create an open-sourced meta-platform for carpooling where people can register, and choose to use either BlaBlaCar as a middleman (that's what they do best), or not, or any other company or system that has been built to do just that. Over time, you would acquire an open database of carpooling users, which would serve for the greater good. This, and only this, improves free choice and resources efficiency, without the abuse that might come from a centralized platform such as BlaBlaCar. In my opinion, destroying or hating the business that built this carpooling community (I'm sure you did your best, but realistically it didn't exist before) doesn't. I also don't think you should go so far as to despise the CEO specifically: it seems far-stretched to me, mixing your feelings with a rational situation. And I don't think it brings you any good.

Anyway, if you're ready to do the open-source meta-carpooling part, I'm interested.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartph...