Airbnb and Uber’s sharing economy is one route to dotcommunism

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/21/airbnb-uber-sharing-economy-dotcommunism-economy

by mjohn • 11 years ago

41 48 11 years ago

return02• 11 years ago

I dont think he is backing the argument he makes in the title well. People using these platforms are in the process of repurposing their assets (rooms and cars) to make them look more like hotels and cabs, rather than the other way around. Airbnb and uber are becoming like any other capitalist monopoly. Their effect is to de-regularize the market, which is pretty much the opposite of what you would expect from "dotcommunism". It's not a free market utopia either. It's business as usual.

smil6• 11 years ago

Airbnb and Uber have nothing, 0.000%, to do with sharing. They have simply built a digital infrastructure for renting out rooms and selling taxi fares. Their success lies in the fact that digital communication systems are significantly lower cost and more flexible than pre-internet ones. They now own that infrastructure 100% and aim to become monopolies.

(Edit: Another good example of a digital infrastructure company is Amazon. That's what they are, not a retailer or anything else.)

aaronbrethorst• 11 years ago

Yeah, but "sharing economy" makes for much-better sounding TED talks.

smil6• 11 years ago

Indeed. Ad-financed media has to be entertaining, not factual.

cactusface3• 11 years ago

When you take a roommate, aren't you sharing the cost of rent? Sharing can mean mutual contribution as much as it means mutual partaking. Also, what? Amazon is not a retailer? They have giant warehouses, they ship physical product with Amazon logos on the boxes, and they accept returns. They allow for 3rd party vendors, but they are still very much their own retailer. eBay perhaps, but not Amazon.

smil6• 11 years ago

renting out isn't sharing.

michaelt• 11 years ago

You could say that if you buy a washing machine or a pack of tampons or a computer chip you and other buyers are "sharing" the cost of the production line, designers, marketing and distribution.

Personally, I wouldn't call it sharing even though it meets some dictionary definitions.

jahnu• 11 years ago

Whatever your views on it, the fact is another big part of their success is providing a novel method of regulation avoidance.

return02• 11 years ago

What will they become when regulation catches up with reality?

dschiptsov2• 11 years ago

Multiple causation, as usual. They manage to push themselves as a payment-processing man-in-the-middle in an Asian-style ride-sharing service. Same for AirBnb. It is automation (payment processing) of "third world's" practices. Very clever in retrospect, but it is a matter of chance that these particular startups picked up momentum. Like Facebook.

mattlutze• 11 years ago

The advance from the two companies is using the ubiquity of the Internet to replace the inefficient part of renting/fare-searching -- the middleman who coordinates searchers with providers.

Uber is a taxi company without a scheduler and dispatch desk. Airbnb is a hotel reservation system where the hotel rooms aren't in the same building, and the front desk has "perfect" knowledge of which rooms are open, when.

makeitsuckless• 11 years ago

Their success lies in undercutting existing market prices by circumventing regulation.

Circumventing regulation not just by using soon-to-be-closed loopholes, but by encouraging people to break the law.

Airbnb and Uber have more to do with organized crime and right wing activism than with sharing.

Animats• 11 years ago

The article suggests that such services don't really need a central company to make it all work. It could be much more distributed, or federated.

This should be even more true for social networks - what value does Facebook really add? Yet no one has a successful distributed social network. We used to have Usenet, but few use that any more. (It still works fine.) There's software for federated social networks, but nobody uses it.

The two main problems are lack of promotion, and asshole amplification. Without heavy promotion, a new networked service has trouble overcoming the noise level and getting enough users to be useful.

Can one jerk ruin it for a large number of people? If so, the system is vulnerable to asshole amplification. 80% of email spam is generated by only 100 spam operations, according to Spamhaus. Many approaches have been tried to fix this kind of problem, from crowdsourced reputation to proof of work. There's still nothing that works really well.

Solve those two problems, and we might have a non-exploitive sharing economy. What we have now is exploitation of the masses by the ruling class.

mwfunk• 11 years ago

It's not sharing if one person is still paying another person for a good or service. It's just cutting out a middleman (or two or three). This has the potential to be a great thing, but it's still not sharing.

collyw2• 11 years ago

Is it really cutting out a middleman?

My girlfriend showed me an internet cleaner service I wasn't interested, as I view that as a middleman taking their cut, and cleaners are already pretty poorly paid. I would rather go on word of mouth recommendation / or an add in the local shop noticeboard, as I did before this sort of service sprung up.

I view Uber or Airbnb as a monopolized version of the middleman.

smil6• 11 years ago

indeed, they are the super-middleman because digital platforms can grow much larger than analog ones.

beatpanda2• 11 years ago

This is asinine. There is already a free, federated gift economy for rides and places to stay -- hitchhiking and hospitality exchange, both of which existed, and made it to the internet[1][2][3], well before Airbnb or Uber.

[1]http://hitchwiki.org [2]http://couchsurfing.org [3]http://trustroots.org

beatpanda2• 11 years ago

See also: articles about how programmers in San Francisco invented the practice of a bunch of twenty-somethings sharing a rented house.

dschiptsov2• 11 years ago

Oh, come on! Wage workers share rooms since times of Egiptian Pyramids or Great Wall.

fallat• 11 years ago

You know I was thinking "why aren't there free services like this?", now I see this, and I'm REALLY wondering "why the hell did AirBnB catch on and this didn't?!".

I had to rent a place for a month via AirBnB, for myself and my partner. My AirBnB fees came out to like $200, and when I told the owner they were like "wow, I didn't know that! I would have rather just paid via cash and save you guys from paying the extra!".

Seriously fuck AirBnB. We need to push these free alternatives. We need services that truly just connect people, instead of ripping them off.

I understand a system like AirBnB has to pay for maintenance and developers, but holy shit the fees are insane because there are investors too.

glomph• 11 years ago

Couchsurfing did catch on.

archagon• 11 years ago

For me, the fees are usually worth it for the identity verification, reviews, insurance, support line, and ease-of-use, especially for stays of about a week. (When you get closer to a month then yes, you're better off looking elsewhere.) Also, I'm usually traveling while working, and I'd much rather pay so that I didn't feel indebted to my host, socially or otherwise.

IsaacL• 11 years ago

Heh, I'll simply quote my own comment from 6 years ago, when AirBnB was first featured on HN:

I'm a couchsurfing afficionado as well, but this site appeals to me, partially because it ISN'T free. I always feel too obliged to my hosts, and handing over a small some of money would assuage my guilt that I hadn't thanked them enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=653727

To be clear, Couchsurfing was entirely no-money -- you didn't pay the hosts either, the idea was you "pay-it-forward". Are you asking for a paid marketplace with no fees?

Anyway, you can disintermediate AirBnB. The last AirBnB I stayed in, in HK, I booked for 3 days via AirBnB and then decided to stay 3 weeks, paying the owners in cash.

(I also did that with an Uber driver in San Jose. We'd gone to the office in an Uber, but I realised I needed to head home, and my phone was broken. The driver asked my friend to book a journey via Lyft, as he wanted the ratings from that platform. Then I needed a 3rd journey, and realised I could simply pay him in cash. Makes you realise that all marketplace sites do is connect people, once two adults are in contact with each other they can arrange any economic deals they want).

smil6• 11 years ago

I'm REALLY wondering "why the hell did AirBnB catch on and this didn't?!"

Marketing budget

javaispoo• 11 years ago

Sigh - the continued slide into awful "journalism" at the graniud continues. I know someone has to give all the "new media" graduates a job, but, at least supervise the output!

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

Here's the thing - there's no money to be gained in "supervising the output". Decency is not profitable. General population apparently doesn't give a damn about quality or reliability of the news (or even if they do, it doesn't seem to affect the profit metrics in any way).

JonnieCache• 11 years ago

To be fair to the gruan, they are not fussed about profits. They are financed by a trust arrangement, subsidized by other publications they own. They make a huge loss every year.

Hasn't stopped them becoming a kind of glossy magazine for narcissists though. I guess the data showed that buzzfeed was stealing their clicks.

prawn• 11 years ago

Not even general population. The article made it to the front page of HN.

walshemj2• 11 years ago

That is in CIF not the main paper I would agree that some of the Guardians hacks output is "variable" to be generous

justincormack• 11 years ago

"Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News."

fnordsensei3• 11 years ago

I'm not sure I really follow the line of reasoning in this article. It starts with the word "communism" in the title, probably because it's a tried and true way of getting people riled up with minor effort.

Then it seems to make the argument that these business models don't create new markets, but optimize existing ones.

But then the argument that would justify the title, as I understand it, is "if communists took over things, we would be living in a communist society". Indeed! And if martians took over, we would live in a martian society.

usrusr2• 11 years ago

The complete absence of anything warranting the letters "communism" in the title was a huge letdown. And it would be so easy to make a relevant point: in a traditional market economy, it is very much possible to incrementally grow from a single taxi into a larger operation, or from a small b&b into a hotel, into a chain. Both communist and centralizes "market as a service" economies don't want that to happen, hence "dotcommunism".

fnordsensei3• 11 years ago

Do you mean that if you're driving for Uber, you're pretty much prohibited from creating your own fleet of taxis? If that is what you mean, isn't that the case when driving for traditional taxi companies as well?

crystaln• 11 years ago

"Once the platforms to rent out things, services or time are stable, textbook economics states that the cost of using them should fall."

I'm not sure what textbooks say about economics these days, but the pure supply and demand economics assuming rational actors taught in economics 101 has never been a good model of real world behavior.

Marketplaces are valuable because they provide monopoly profits. They are real estate, and participating in them requires rent.

amelius• 11 years ago

But I can be a producer in this business as well as a consumer. I can rent my own flat or register my own car to provide cab rides.

Yes, and Airbnb and Uber, being the gatekeepers of the network, can extort you.

vegancap• 11 years ago

*Powered by consumer Capitalism

jokoon• 11 years ago

I imagine it would be so much better if one day the government could regulate such things.

I know many people would scream, but honestly there is a gray area when it comes to rights and damage insurances. I don't think all consumer trust those business models.

sgnelson• 11 years ago

dotFeudalism would probably be a better descriptor.

Airbnb and Uber’s sharing economy is one route to dotcommunism

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