

How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other - cryptoz
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/trust-in-the-share-economy/?

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tzs
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?

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viscanti
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
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.

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Pinatubo
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).

~~~
cowbell
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7226871)

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samuli
Another and not so pretty viewpoint to why AirBnB and Lyft are becoming more
popular: [http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/sharing-
economy...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/sharing-economy-is-
about-desperation.html)

~~~
100k
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.

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jgalt212
Not sound flip, but didn't Ebay first solve this trust problem in the earliest
days of the consumer Internet (late 1995)?

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

~~~
alttab
They'd probably have a lot in common.

