How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/trust-in-the-share-economy/?

by cryptoz • 12 years ago

19 13 12 years ago

samuli• 12 years ago

Another and not so pretty viewpoint to why AirBnB and Lyft are becoming more popular: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/sharing-economy...

thisisrobv2• 12 years ago

This seems like a more realistic theory. I've only ever known people to use these services to save money or in a few rare cases because their was no other supply for the service at the time.

100k• 12 years ago

Absolutely. Outside the tech echo chamber, the economy has never recovered from the "jobless recovery" of the 2000s.

I read a good point about this somewhere: renting out an apartment on Airbnb is a good way to make money now, but the free market being what it is, that extra value will be captured by rent eventually. Landlord knows you can make $500/month renting on Airbnb? Add $500 to the rent.

tzs• 12 years ago

This article spent a lot of time on how the Lyft driver is trusting strangers like this level of trust is something new. Yet, as they point out, the Lyft drivers have a lot of information about these "strangers", such as their Facebook profile and how previous Lyft drivers who have given that person a ride have rated them.

It seems to me that Lyft drives aren't coming anywhere near the level of trust in strangers that regular taxi drivers have to place in their passengers. Am I missing something?

viscanti• 12 years ago

While facebook validation is possibly helpful in some cases, I'd imagine it's relatively trivial to create a fake facebook account. Lyft's success so far probably hasn't had much to do with the pre-verification (which is flimsy at best). Their success is probably driven by the fact that they've found a small subset of the US population who is comfortable with "ride sharing". Their branding; with pink mustaches, fist bumps, riding in the front seat and a sense of "community" (presumably going through that ritual with another makes you part of an exclusive community), has self-selected a group of people who is comfortable with giving up some level of trust, in return for the ability to participate in their transportation marketplace.

That said, I think we see taxis in most cities actively avoid areas that could cause trouble. From anecdotal reports, the same isn't true of Lyft. The implied trust (facebook verification and sense of community) likely puts those drivers in more dangerous situations more often (although it's a group who is either comfortable with that, or hasn't thought it through).

There's also an open question as to whether or not their trust system can scale. While initial marketing can help you pitch to a select group to start with, can that effectively reach a larger audience? Fun and quirky might be antithetical to the safety and reliability concerns most of the general public probably has for their preferred transportation system.

graeme• 12 years ago

I know on Airbnb Facebook validation shows number of friends. That's still fakeable, but harder. You need a mobile number + email to verify the FB account, then to build fake friends.

Airbnb usually combines FB verification with mobile, ID and passport verification, + reviews.

The effort to fake all of those is high, relative to the potential reward.

I've never had a problem so far, but I'd be interested in statistics on whether faked accounts occur much.

pmorici• 12 years ago

Lyft also has credit card info for each user and the transaction is typically cash-less. The kinds of people that would rob a taxi driver probably aren't going to have a smart phone and a credit card and are probably doing it to score cash to buy drugs or some similarly short term reward. In the case where they got their hands on a phone by stealing it it seems unlikely that they wouldn't just pawn the phone for cash vs concocting some elaborate scheme to hail a lyft and rob it's driver only to find out that since lyft is cash-less there isn't much worth stealing that they couldn't have gotten by mugging some random passerby on the street.

Pinatubo• 12 years ago

It should be noted that the people who use Airbnb and Lyft are not a random cross-section of Americans, but are all likely to be very similar to each other (young, white, technologically literate, not poor). Social science research shows that interpersonal trust is high in homogeneous groups, and lower otherwise (see for example Putnam's work on immigration and trust).

thisisrobv2• 12 years ago

Agreed. I'd love to see demographic info from these companies. That said, they can still be pretty successful this way, I just feel it's disingenuous to claim otherwise.

cowbell• 12 years ago

I came here to say the same thing and reference an earlier article I saw on this site

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7226871

bayesianhorse• 12 years ago

The story will be different, when finally two Americans meet who both practice their constitutional right to carry concealed automatic assault rifles...

alttab• 12 years ago

They'd probably have a lot in common.

jgalt212• 12 years ago

Not sound flip, but didn't Ebay first solve this trust problem in the earliest days of the consumer Internet (late 1995)?

How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other

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