
Airbnb and Uber’s sharing economy is one route to dotcommunism - mjohn
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/21/airbnb-uber-sharing-economy-dotcommunism-economy
======
smil
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.)

~~~
cactusface
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.

~~~
smil
renting out isn't sharing.

~~~
cactusface
It is if you live there. You share space and cost.

~~~
pjc50
There is a big distinction between houseshare (two people on an equal basis
jointly renting from a third party), renting (one person is the property owner
and the other isn't), and subletting (the person in the middle is both renter
and landlord).

Only the first can reasonably counted as _equitable_ sharing.

~~~
cactusface
On reflection, I concede that AirBnB is largely landlords renting their space
or tenants subletting for substantial profit without their landlord's
permission. However, I think subletting is fine, as long as you aren't making
a substantial profit without your landlord's permission. I've sublet many
times with my landlord's permission, it's regulated by tenancy laws, etc.

------
beatpanda
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](http://hitchwiki.org)
[2][http://couchsurfing.org](http://couchsurfing.org)
[3][http://trustroots.org](http://trustroots.org)

~~~
fallat
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.

~~~
IsaacL
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](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).

------
Animats
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.

------
return0
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.

------
mwfunk
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.

~~~
collyw
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.

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

~~~
walshemj
a middleman that becomes the gatekeeper in ubers case

------
fnordsensei
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.

~~~
usrusr
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".

~~~
fnordsensei
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?

~~~
usrusr
Sure, but in the traditional taxi system, it did happen, over and over again,
therefore it must be possible. I really don't see how the same would happen
under Uber without them weighing in to either claim the share of that
additional middleman or to protect their "drivers are not really doing
business, so regulations for professionals do not apply to them/us" illusion.

~~~
fnordsensei
Agreed, that's a problem, and it sounds primarily like a problem of labor law.
If part of the strategy for Uber has been to effectively keep taxi drivers in
some kind of employment grey zone, then I assume that the goal is to have the
drivers sign away as many rights as possible, while at the same time burdening
Uber with as little responsibility as possible.

The point of entrepreneurship is that you are able to trade security for
freedom and potential material success. If Uber drivers (or anyone else for
that matter) are left with no security, no freedom and no prospects for
material success, then something's not right.

I write all this without actually knowing what Uber's strategy or philosophy
with regards to this is, hence all the "if-then"'s.

------
crystaln
"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.

------
jokoon
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.

------
amelius
> 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
*Powered by consumer Capitalism

------
sgnelson
dotFeudalism would probably be a better descriptor.

------
javaispoo
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!

~~~
TeMPOraL
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
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.

