A brief note that the "sharing economy" has always to some extent depended on straight up lying to make top-down services sound sharey
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Replying to @arthur_affect
"Ridesharing" means stuff like the slug lines in DC, or like hitchhiking - "I'm already taking this route, I have an empty seat"
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Replying to @arthur_affect
The degree to which something like that could scale up without causing serious privacy problems was always low
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Replying to @arthur_affect
So Uber and Lyft are just... not that. The drivers are workers doing a job, they aren't "sharing", they're selling
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Replying to @arthur_affect
"Group-buying" is a real thing. Vendors do give discounts in return for bulk customers. There were clubs based on that kind of negotiation
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Replying to @arthur_affect
But the degree to which you could organize something like that was always, similarly, limited
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Groupon was... not that. It wasn't a true "bulk discount", it was a promotional discount - often to below cost
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Replying to @arthur_affect
It scaled up the way true group buying didn't because it mostly was funded by venture capital giving vendors big up front payments
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Replying to @arthur_affect
There's always some obscuring done that way to try to blur the lines of what's actually happening
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The Internet allows loopholes in laws intended for small-scale exceptions to be exploited to create massive businesses
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Like AirBnb pretends all they're doing is letting you find friends to crash with when you're all at the same convention
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