[khawkins]

The gig economy exploits the efficiencies of a trusting society masterfully. It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that we'd let total strangers drive us home from bars and use our houses like hotels. But it turns out that with only a little oversight, we can trust our fellow citizens just as well as an employee of a professional company.

Systems of maintaining trust are very important, but having a trustworthy culture and populace is just as important. In the words of William Easterly, these systems can either be virtuous cycles or vicious cycles. Either trust flourishes or mistrust flourishes and going from one to the other is challenging because of its game-theoretical properties.

[xyzzyz]

Contrary to what might be the common understanding in SV, we've actually had cabs before we had Uber. They also involved total strangers driving us home from bars. We've also had people rent their private homes as lodging: that's how I vacationed with my parents in Eastern Europe in early 1990s. Even today, if you go to any town on Baltic Sea, you'll find plenty of "Rooms" signs (in local language) on private homes; many of them have been up for decades.

All of what Uber and Airbnb do, had most definitely existed before. What Uber and Airbnb brought was making it much more efficient, convenient and safe. Uber and Airbnb use some level of social trust, but they also provide extra trust on their own, which comes from the rating function they provide. Before Uber and Airbnb, if you had bad experience in a cab or a rented lodging, there was little recourse, and the service provides had little incentive to behave well. Now, they can easily get kicked off the platform after too many complaints.

[TeMPOraL]

Uber and AirBnB actually burned extreme amounts of trust. Blatantly illegal business practices and general sociopathy of the former, facilitating destruction of local neighbourhoods in case of the latter - adding an app on top of existing practices doesn't pay back for what it cost to get there.

[xyzzyz]

> Blatantly illegal business practices and general sociopathy of the former,

Trust, morality and legality are not the same thing. Sure, Uber was operating illegally in many places, but millions of people used these illegal services and saw nothing wrong with it. They didn’t see using an unlicensed cab company as anything bad.

Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it morally wrong, or socially destructive. There have been plenty of cases where it’s the laws that are morally wrong and socially destructive. If you want to argue that Uber destroyed trust, you can’t simply say it broke the law and call it a day, you need also to argue that the law they broke was good and desirable.

So, what was the evil and socially destructive thing that Uber actually did?

[TeMPOraL]

> Trust, morality and legality are not the same thing. Sure, Uber was operating illegally in many places, but millions of people used these illegal services and saw nothing wrong with it. They didn’t see using an unlicensed cab company as anything bad.

People baited into purchasing new cars and screwed over car insurance sure did. But more importantly, everyone saw that the legal system in cities around the world isn't powerful enough to deal with direct offense. We saw you can build a multi-billion dollar megacorp not on just regulatory arbitrage, but plainly illegal business - and nobody got hold accountable (except for an off driver caught without proper insurance). All of this fundamentally erodes the trust in the rule of law - the trust on which modern society stands.

> Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it morally wrong

It doesn't, but it was illegal and greedy and exploitative, and dragged people into gig economy which arguably is itself morally questionable.

> If you want to argue that Uber destroyed trust, you can’t simply say it broke the law and call it a day, you need also to argue that the law they broke was good and desirable.

Taxi laws differ by the city. "Taxi mafia" was mostly a phenomenon of some places in the US; in many cities, taxis worked just well. Uber violated law almost everywhere they got, without any care for whether the law was useful or justifiable. It wasn't some act of civil disobedience - they did it for pure profit, to undercut competition and dominate the local markets they entered.

> So, what was the evil and socially destructive thing that Uber actually did?

Now, that's actually a topic much bigger than what I outlined above. The mischief of Uber's sociopathic management has been well publicized and well documented over the past 5+ years. It was a recurring topic on HN for a long time, too. I suggest starting with these two links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber#Criticism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber#Controversies

(Though they do seem to downplay the insurance issues and threats against journalists.)

[xyzzyz]

> But more importantly, everyone saw that the legal system in cities around the world isn't powerful enough to deal with direct offense. We saw you can build a multi-billion dollar megacorp not on just regulatory arbitrage, but plainly illegal business - and nobody got hold accountable (except for an off driver caught without proper insurance). All of this fundamentally erodes the trust in the rule of law - the trust on which modern society stands.

It's not that it wasn't powerful enough. The governments could fight Uber just fine, and they in fact did in many places. What actually happened was instead the government in most places have figured that the customers liked the illegal service so much, that if they do fight it, they will actually reduce, instead of increasing their legitimacy. Imagine the government tomorrow decides to ban shaking hands. Would prosecuting the hand-shakers increase the trust in government and its legitimacy? No: people would rightly conclude that it's the government that's wrong, and it doesn't deserve trust or charity here. This is the case with many aspects of the regulatory state: its legitimacy depends on people being unaware of how crippling and authoritarian it is in many situations. Making stupid laws and keeping people unaware of their stupidity is no way to build trust.

> It doesn't, but it was illegal and greedy and exploitative, and dragged people into gig economy which arguably is itself morally questionable.

Taxis have always been "gig economy". Even before Uber, few taxi drivers were salaried employees. Most of them were independent operators, or working on commission.

> Taxi laws differ by the city. "Taxi mafia" was mostly a phenomenon of some places in the US; in many cities, taxis worked just well.

Which cities were these? In every city I am aware off, on both sides of the pond, traditional taxis have not been able to compete very well with Uber. Sure, in some places the taxis were less bad than in others, but almost everywhere they were overpriced and untrustworthy. Have you tried paying with card in a taxi in Poland before Uber came up? Somehow, despite MasterCard sticker on the window, the payment terminal always happened to be broken... Also, try taking a non-Uber cab from the airport in Warsaw or Krakow.

[TeMPOraL]

> What actually happened was instead the government in most places have figured that the customers liked the illegal service so much, that if they do fight it, they will actually reduce, instead of increasing their legitimacy.

I don't think it's that, unless you think the dissatisfaction expressed by officials is just posturing. I believe that it's just because bureaucracy moves slowly - and the core of Uber's strategy was to corner the market and gain sympathy of the riders before local regulators could gear up - at which point they'd be fighting their own citizen. Basically, pitting people against their local governments.

> Imagine the government tomorrow decides to ban shaking hands. Would prosecuting the hand-shakers increase the trust in government and its legitimacy? No: people would rightly conclude that it's the government that's wrong, and it doesn't deserve trust or charity here.

I get your example and it's a fair point - but I must say we generally did just that in 2020 with COVID restrictions :). That itself initially impacted the trust positively, but I guess it's easier to imagine the threat of a pandemic than a threat of an underpaid and uninsured driver operating an illegal cab having an accident.

> In every city I am aware off, on both sides of the pond, traditional taxis have not been able to compete very well with Uber. Sure, in some places the taxis were less bad than in others, but almost everywhere they were overpriced and untrustworthy.

I'm not saying they weren't in need of some competitive pressure, but generally, taxis weren't able to compete very well with Uber because it's really hard to compete with an international corporation that just ignores the law, while subsidizing its offerings from practically infinite VC budget. Whether the existing taxi services in any given city were good or bad or in between, it didn't matter - they didn't stand a chance.

> Have you tried paying with card in a taxi in Poland before Uber came up? Somehow, despite MasterCard sticker on the window, the payment terminal always happened to be broken... Also, try taking a non-Uber cab from the airport in Warsaw or Krakow.

I am from Kraków, I was born there, and I moved out only ~3 years ago. I've been riding taxis ever since childhood. From my perspective, network taxis weren't all that bad (it was common knowledge you don't use the "entrepreneurs" that park outside airports and railway stations, you probably even remember a TV show that revealed how they scam you if they think you're a tourist). Uber itself didn't introduce anything substantial over what iCar did a decade before. And while iCar was also playing a bit loose with the regulations, and there were some conflict with the local taxi networks (I recall articles about some tire slashing), they've ultimately managed to settle it through courts and iCar could deliver its value proposition completely legally. Uber didn't even bother.

[yamrzou]

> It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that we'd let total strangers drive us home from bars and use our houses like hotels.

Well, unfortunately it's still unthinkable in a lot of third-world countries nowadays, and it's precisely because of lack of trust.

[foobiekr]

A lot of things were unthinkable 20Y ago that were perfectly normal for the century leading up to the mid-1960s.

Pretty much everything you list was, at one time, somewhere between commonplace and not-infrequent. It was the commercialization that brought with it the divide.