You might ask the same about any exploitive relation.

Why is there prostitution?

Why are slaves doing work for their masters?

Why are children going through our garbage in some distant country, if they hardly earn enough to eat?

It's a bit like a payday loan — the drivers need money _today_ and effectively borrow against the depreciation of their vehicle.

All because you’re being exploited doesn’t mean you can’t voice your want to change things.

Some of these workers might find that the only gig that they can rely on is ride share for various reasons.

To pay for tomorrow perhaps.

Food and shelter?

what a revealing question. why don't you ask one next time you're in a car?

Why are children mining rare minerals in Africa? Why are workers handling toxic waste in the name of recycling in Bangladesh? Surely they can all work from home and leave their jobs if it’s that exploitative

Why do people that need money to live often work for companies that exploit them? Were you born in a vat yesterday or are you unaware that this is the entire modus operandi of capitalism?

I’d guess because most don’t correctly account for wear and tear and depreciation of their car when they do their mental profit calculation.

I think truth is that tech companies are really bad at business unless they can scale with free unit economies. Even the unit costs with per seat subscriptions seem insane when you stop and think of the numbers in isolation. Ofc, compared to amount they pay their employees they are cheap, but in other places and industries it looks way overpriced.

R&D is not cheap and similarly executive comp is not cheap. They appear to have made a net income of 1.5 B last year (2025), but if. you look at exec comp, the top 5 execs took in 100 M. If you check all their creamy layer, it is likely they spent a quarter billion in stuff that did not need to be paid if all you had were private taxies :) with an open source app // I exaggerate of course since you need some servers to coordinate this, just pointing out where money goes. If someone could run and popularize an open ride platform, that quarter billion would go somewhere else, maybe to the drivers, maybe to the riders.

They would make plenty of money if they went in to maintenance mode and just kept the lights on development-wise instead of pouring billions into R&D each year.

There's probably a big opportunity in the startup world for building businesses that have an end goal. Like a TV show that has a whole story to tell and then stops... a business that has an entire development plan which finishes and at the end you have a stable business that stops adding features, cuts development costs to maintenance, and just exists.

Like I don't need my taxi app to change, we're good, you can just be done making new stuff.

Taxi companies in most cities were exploitive oligarchies - it was textbook regulatory capture. Often their workers weren't any better off in terms of lopsided deals. And the customer experience sucked sooo bad. The smells, the illegal "cash only" bait and switch, the runarounds. I remember. I was there, Gandalf. And I'll take Uber any day over going back to the old system.

I'm sorry, but those "small local" taxi companies were rife with discrimination and horrible user experiences. "Small" is not inherently better.