
Drawing The Line Between “Peer-to-Peer” And “Jerk” Technology - spectruman
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/start-ups/drawing-the-line-between-peertopeer-and-jerk-technology#.U8ljozhSp3Y.hackernews
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pessimizer
None of this is peer-to-peer, it's all highly centralized. "Jerk" technology
is an indicator of gaps in the definition or enforcement or the law. In the
case of Uber, there probably should never have been any distinction to the law
between taxis that can be hailed and hired cars, for example.

There were no gaps in the law when it came to Monkey Parking.

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wmf
Hence the scare quotes around "sharing economy" or "peer-to-peer". They're
creating something that appears to be about people helping each other, but
it's actually about a middleman sucking money out of those people.

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thaumasiotes
It seems more like the middleman sucking queueing time away from third parties
and converting it into money, really.

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pessimizer
Either way, it seems like a middleman.

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thaumasiotes
Sure, but you say that like it's a bad thing in itself. There's a long, long
tradition (thousands of years at least!) of despising middlemen because their
products aren't tangible. But they get rich because a connection through a
middleman is _better_ than missing the connection in the first place.

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fleitz
Middle men are hated by those who see no value in human relationships.
Otherwise the value is quite apparent.

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pessimizer
You're talking about "middle men", I'm talking about "middleman." These
services do not have middlemen, they have a particular middleman. Individual
actors who choose middlemen to broker a deal with other individual actors is
still peer-to-peer: take real estate for an example, or the stock market.
Having to go through Bob in particular is centralization, and I don't think
you can infer anything about my belief system when I tell you that if
everything has to go through Bob, it's the diametric opposite of peer-to-peer.

>Middle men are hated by those who see no value in human relationships.

Thanks for thinking you know me.

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jannotti
The question of "Does the seller actually own the thing being sold" is
interesting. For example, I consider StubHub jerktech, even though the owner
does indeed own the ticket. But encouraging people to buy up tickets for
resale at markup seems jerky to me.

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thaumasiotes
> But encouraging people to buy up tickets for resale at markup seems jerky to
> me.

StubHub isn't doing that; the act (or venue) is. Knowingly selling something
in bulk at 50% or less of its value is "encouraging people to buy up [the
thing] for resale". They do it because they like packed houses.

edit: having read the article, it's striking that all three of these examples
(entertainment tickets, public parking spaces, and restaurant reservations)
involve valuable things being given away. It's difficult to complain that
people who sign up for valuable freebies and resell them are "just being
jerks"; even if Parking Monkey never makes its business work, and dies, it can
perform the societally-valuable service of restructuring the parking situation
generally.

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fleitz
Bring it on, many of these are great services.

I guess in today's economy being a jerk means understanding the time value of
money.

Why is paying people to look for parking spots such a big deal? It reminds me
of when the City of Vancouver arrested an old grandmother because she would go
around adding nickels and dimes to people's parking meters.

If cities would invest in the kinds of infrastructure people actually want
this would be far less of a big deal. Many people want parking spots,
therefore if you reduce the number of spots it increases the value of them to
the point where it becomes worthwhile to act as a parking scout.

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normloman
Big companies do this all the time. They skirt regulation, harm people, pay
the miniscule fine, and keep on operating as if nothing happened. In most
cases, limited liability means nobody goes to jail.

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jqm
Same two suspects (one of which has already agreed to desist) different
article.

If you want to read about the parking guys and restaurant reservation guys
again, read the article. But if you have already read 7 articles about how
evil they are, you can safely skip this one as it has nothing new.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
Telling startups "Don't be a jerk" is premature optimization or at least
foolish. "Everyone is a jerk" seems like much better advice.

