Some additional context to the #deleteDidi online campaign and the death of 2 passengers, which was missing in the article but important in understanding Didi struggle, not just financially, but with its product and culture: the victims were using the low-cost product inside Didi (akin to UberX) that somehow allows drivers to see would-be passengers' photos and in order to "increase engagement." The driver who murdered the most recent victim has been reported by other passengers for suspicious/inappropriate behaviors before, but was not taken off the platform. This victim just happens to be an attractive flight attendant. This is all to say the product culture within Didi is not just cut-throat and competitive, but borderline amoral--driving growth and engagement at all cost, literally at the expense of their customers.
I see a lot of reactions down there, but we have no idea how much negative feedback and what kind was left about the driver right? Can you imagine if only a few unfair complaints could get drivers out of the system?
Just One valid complaint of harassment/abuse should be more than enough for any system to remove a driver. The problem shouldn't be number of complaints. We seem to equate quantity with veracity in a lot of system designs, but those are absolutely different things. On the one side we see complaints that shouldn't need volume/quantity to make a difference to prevent further harassment, and on the other side we see brigading tactics where volume is easy to bot/sheeple and has no necessary basis in veracity.
Quantity !== Veracity
Quantity is a metric that is easy to program and to understand for systems design, so we use it as an easy stand in, but we need to get better at finding Quality, not Quantity.
Validity of a complaint is also a hard problem to solve as it's mostly one's word against another. Crafting a well-worded negative review isn't difficult and there's been enough anecdotal stories from systems such as Yelp where a customer will threaten to leave a horrible review on a business if they don't cater to their every whim that using one valid-looking review to remove a driver would also be seen as unfair.
The number of negative reviews serve as a way to help strengthen the signal that a driver is truly "bad" in some way. Of course, the quality of those reviews should also be taken into account.
It's absolutely a hard problem, but I think it's one that we _need_ to solve. Quantity is too easy a solution, too easily gives us a false sense of security, and we've let that be a default for too long, collectively having just about stopped there.
So yes, I don't have any easy answers. I think this a problem for our industry, and probably one we need to collectively solve sooner than later, giving how antagonists are using our systems against us.
I think some form of government-backed authentication is inevitable for the commercial web... digital drivers licenses. Maybe that'll finally get us off social security numbers too.
Not something I want to see or use, but I think it's the only way to go about review-backed sites like Yelp or Uber. It's impossible to generally validate statements, but at least a persistent identity lets services decide whether to trust the person.
What about having a "black box" in the vehicle that records audio and deletes itself within an hour of the ride if either party doesn't flag the ride to Uber/Didi?
This is about flagging unacceptable behavior and removing bad drivers way before someone is murdered. In the Didi cases, the drivers had already had multiple reports against them. The reports weren't taken seriously because they were basically hearsay.
Anyway, why even bring that up if the solution is just to store the ride audio for a bit longer.
For the past 3 years, every yellow cab I have ridden has had an always-on camera.
I like it. If I wanted privacy I would call a friend or drive myself... cabs are for convenience. Security footage protects both drivers and riders from abuse, which translates to lower costs and greater availability.
Cab companies like Uber already track routes and riders, that's the valuable and privacy-sensitive information... security footage? Doesn't add much.
In someone else’s car with a perfect stranger? I truly don’t care about privacy in that situation, and having an expectation of privacy there is delusional. In my car, I want the option for as much privacy as being surrounded by windows in a public space allows, but the whole point is that this would not be my car.
If I was one of these drivers damn right I'd have CCTV cameras in my car. It's not just malicious reviews they have to worry about, potentially they have to worry about malicious complaints to the police too.
I wish I did have a good solution. It's absolutely a hard problem to solve, but it does seem like a problem (if not _the_ problem of our times) that we _need_ to solve as systems designers, before things get worse.
Isn't that a very slippery slope? Maybe it should be enough to trigger extra monitoring/background check, especially since the driver has a lot of power over the customer, but just fire the driver without any due process?
What's preventing anyone who doesn't like you from getting you fired?
In this exercise, we're creating the process (the system is the process). I'm pointing out that establishing "due" is the hard part. We keep defaulting to "quantity of complaints" as if it were a due process, instead of actually establishing due processes. I'm asking all of us, as an industry, as a peer group, to question this default. If it is a slippery slope, we're already caught on it.
Yes, establishing due process is hard, but "X% of respondents complain" has never been a due process (it hurts people when it takes too many complaints to fix the thing [and sometimes with things like harassment and murder One is already too many complaints], and it hurts people when it is easy to get X% from a mob). We need to get out of the mindset that just because computers are great at tabulating quantity and numbers are "objective" that doesn't make that the right process, and certainly doesn't make that the due process.
Absolutely, too, we should include workflow steps like "extra monitoring/background checks" in our processes. Often those get ignored because they likely require people/labor and when designing systems we don't always want to include those elements.
I can't believe that you wrote this comment trully believing that one negative advice is enough to take down someone. Should one negative review kill a movie? Or a restaurant? Or a company?
Well, they managed to murder someone - I'm not sure the fact that it was or wasn't closely observed makes such a difference.
There can be a fair argument as at what stage would it be necessary to remove the driver, but I think the main thrust of the issue is that to the clients, it is promoted as a taxi service and to the drivers, it is promoted as a dating service.
EDIT: This is literally what happened:
"As Huang Jieli—the woman who had served as Hitch’s general manager until she was demoted last week—said in an interview in 2015: “Like a coffee shop, or a bar, a private car can become a half-open, half-private social space. It’s a very sexy application scenario.” And in another interview (link in Chinese) in 2017, she said “the biggest motivation for our drivers is to share a trip with a passenger.”"
I agree that the problem isn't "the company should or could have done something to detect and eject the murderer-to-be", there's always going to be a few individuals with extreme behaviour, and in any given instance it might be tricky to prevent that, even if companies or organisations are aware of the risks and acting in good faith to minimise them.
I agree with your characterisation of the problem:
> to the clients, it is promoted as a taxi service and to the drivers, it is promoted as a dating service.
The company is misrepresenting what the nature of the interactions between drivers and clients in its marketplace. This misrepresentation predictably increases the risk to women who use the service --- it should not be surprising that a service that allows drivers to see photos and share tags of clients before they agree to take rides structurally and predictably offers more opportunities for abuse. This is frankly pretty foul. I hope the company continues to get hammered for it.
For example, suppose didi was an online dating service, and clearly and unambiguously advertised itself as a dating service to all parties involved. How many women would choose to go on a first date with someone they'd never met before by getting a ride in their car? You're obviously going to be far, far more at risk and unable to get away if the person turns out to be abusive than if you meet in a more public location.
> The service had a feature on the app that let drivers tag passengers with phrases like “long legs” and “hot as hell.” All Hitch drivers were able to read the tags, which have since been removed from the app, and they were also able to specify a preference for female or male passengers,
I don’t understand this argument. Murderers will find ways to murder people. If that’s their goal, then that’s their goal. So why is Didi related at all to the bad behavior of a few outliers?
You’re far more likely to die on the highway or being robbed.
It is Didi's responsibility to police their platform. If the offending drivers had already been reported multiple times and Didi had not taken action, it clearly indicates passenger safety was not high on their list of concerns.
If you are a predator, bring a driver affords you all kinds of opportunities to prey you people that you otherwise would not have. How often are you going to find a young woman walking in a dark park by herself late at night? Compare that to how easy it is to pick one up as an Didi/Uber driver.
At the end of the day, a ride sharing company's users literally entrust their lives to the company. It is the responsibility of the company to act on a way worthy of that trust. If they don't, it is definitely a reasonable response to #deleteDidi.
As much as I'm against the Uber corporate culture, which seems to be pretty similarly reflected here in this particular Chinese counterpart; so devils advocate here: it's probably not easy to police a huge pool of contract drivers.
I mean if anything, it's more an argument that ride-share companies should vet their drivers, do basic background checks .. you know, treat them as real employees instead of this "gig economy" bullshit.
Even then, you're still going to get a psycho in the mix, but at least you can say you attempted to do due diligence.
it's not easy to policy a pool of drivers, but that's not my concern as a consumer - that's on you to figure out your business model - if you've lost the consumer confidence, that's a direct threat to your business, not just a 'whoops I tried my best I promise I'll do better'
The argument is that Didi made it easier for this alleged killer to get his victim into a vulnerable position (as a presumably backseat passenger in his car).
Didi allegedly did not respond to multiple negative comments about this guy's behavior, nor did they expose these comments to future passengers, which might have flagged him as a threat.
If not for Didi, or if they had been more safety-minded as a company, then this guy would not have had the opportunity to rape and murder this woman, allegedly. That's the argument.
Didi significantly reduced subsidies after Uber left the market - in Shenzhen at least this means prices aren't any better than taxis. It's usually faster to get a taxi in most places and times of the day than waiting the 3-5 minutes for your Didi to arrive. Back when it was a lot cheaper to Didi, people would wait a couple minutes to save 50%, but if the price is the same, they take what's faster.
On top of this there's additional competition from the huge numbers of people using bike sharing like Mobike or Ofo - which not only taking a bike much cheaper, but it's often faster because you avoid traffic jams.
Amazing how much the market has changed in such a short time.
Slightly related - it's the same situation in Singapore when GrabTaxi "merged" with Uber.
After Uber pulled out, Grab stopped handing out promotion codes that would save you anywhere from $2-5 bucks per trip (or occasionally more), and they slashed the rate you earn reward points for every dollar spent by ~13-16 times.
Grab became the market, quite literally. It's such a drastic change in just a matter of weeks, and what makes it worse is that there is practically no competition in the ride-hailing scene over here (for now, at least, and hopefully).
The same thing happened here in Vietnam when (as elsewhere in SE Asia) Uber pulled out leaving Grab as the only provider. Prices went up, service quality went down, and lots of people I know went back to using taxis. Go-Jek (aka Go-Viet) recently expanded and entered the market so maybe that will spur more subsidies again.
I'm surprised that with Uber leaving the market, Didi didn't get better at response times. Surely all those Uber drivers would have switched to Didi, increasing the number of drivers. And with prices rising, drivers would get paid more money.
Thanks for sharing. Important context regarding Uber’s pivot into all forms of transit (bike, scooter, public transit). They must see the same writing on the wall.
There's a lot of vc money floating around China(lots of nouveau riche people + limited ways to invest). This means a lot of competition. Unlike Uber Didi has a lot of competition. Consumers will use whichever service discounts rides the most.
Recently didi has seen a few new, well funded competitors and coincidentally a rash of negative PR.
I get the impression that ride-hailing is the new file storage or image upload business of our days: tempting but inherently not a valid business model.
I have lived in NYC since long before Uber and co were on the scene. I used to call a car service switchboard and give them my location and destination and they'd have a car there in 5-10 minutes max. They'd bring a car seat if I asked. The driver would get my number and call me if he was stuck or couldn't find me. Price was reasonable, drivers were pros. It was literally just one lady answering a phone. And now Uber/Lyft/Didi are employing like 10,000 highly-paid developers and providing a marginally better level of service. The biggest value-add by far is that they have a consistent name and brand that can provides drivers anywhere instead of having to pick a car service off of yelp. It's mind-boggling how over-engineered these businesses are in order to justify their status in Silicon Valley.
The fact that Uber has several of orders of magnitude more users, and that there cultural shift has been so great that cities around the world are struggling with how to regulate ride hailing services, suggests that there is something a bit more than "consistent name and brand" that is driving users in droves to these services where they didn't use your "one lady answering a phone" service.
The original comment has a point about not raising the quality of service in NYC but the consistency of Uber across states and even countries is a huge value add. I have been able to quickly get a car in less populated areas of the USA than NYC or SF (the suburbs of Portland, Maine for instance) without having to guess at or research the quality of local car services.
I have requested Ubers in almost a dozen different countries and been able to easily get a car without worrying about language barriers or being pressured into increased tourist prices. I actually deleted Uber due to the concerns about their company culture and ended up re-downloading their app because it's so helpful for international travel.
Hmm .. maybe an option in this startup space is a unified app for existing taxi and limo services? You see Taxis in every city with adverts on the side saying "Download our app." You can support local taxis if you want, but it takes that effort and no one does it.
The last time I was in Berlin, Uber drivers were required to be taxi operators. The Uber app just hailed a taxi driver, so there was no real difference in getting a Uber vs hailing a cab.
Instead of each Taxi company trying to stay on top with their own individual apps (which are probably made by like 3 US companies who sell/rebrand their services to everyone), why not an app system that connects you to local Taxi services?
Support your local Taxi company. Put in your destination and get a list of rates and estimated wait times from companies .. you could put fancy Limo companies right next to the Taxis in the rare case someone wants to pay some crazy amount for a limo (or so they can use the same app to book one for a big engagement/later time).
The biggest shock to me is how fast culture changed, I go to the bar on the weekends a lot and we had a DD rotation for years. Once we figured out that we could pay $12 for an uber anywhere in town we started having so much more fun.
Uber didn’t succeed because they cut prices, if that had been all they would have been just a moderately more successful taxi company. They succeeded because they realized that cutting prices and a bit of branding would mean unlocking a huge untapped market. They became the way Evereyone got too and from every club/party/pub, where taxis where just never an option.
There's a little more to it than that. In some cities, the taxis refuse to leave the city center.
In New York, for example, hailing a hack outside of Manhattan or the trendy boros was virtually impossible. "Car service" became a thing because cabs left more than half the city unserved. But even those were limited in availability in some areas.
In Las Vegas, it was rare to see a taxi outside of the entertainment corridor. If you called for a taxi, they'd ignore you. The new state taxi commissioner even tried it, himself. He phoned three times for a taxi from a mall just a mile from The Strip, and every time he was ignored.
That's why Uber works in many places. And the app showing the position of the other cars encourages drivers to fan out into underserved areas.
Some people have even done that math and found that Ubering around town is cheaper for them than owning+maintaining+insuring+fueling a car.
This is very NYC-centric. A big part of the value of Uber/Lyft is that they provide a similar service in many places where it simply wasn't available before. The automation and deprofessionalization played a big role in making that possible.
Not only NYC-centric, but affluent NYC-centric. One of the advantages of Uber is that you can get your ride to wherever you need to go, whoever you are and the drivers have far less to worry about.
I've heard many stories about people saying that cabs and private hire companies simply wouldn't go to <neighbourhood> or pick up people who sounded non-white-affluent, meaning a large swath of people were discriminated against and couldn't get rides.
With Uber/Lyft, the driver doesn't know what I look like, what I sound like, or where I'm going until I'm in the car. And the driver has no reason to discriminate because he's getting paid regardless.
Yes, aesthesia makes a very important point. Uber/Lyft & Co. standardized the UX just like you can expect what a Big Mac tastes like at any McDonalds in the world.
It's not just homogeneity. Cab and car services basically didn't exist in many US cities prior to ride sharing. I'm a carless transit fanatic, but 10 years ago I'd probably have to buy a car to live comfortably in my current neighborhood.
In all fairness, that is NYC (and mostly Manhattan in particular) which is very atypical. On the other hand, the cost structure seems insane and, like many "businesses" in .com 1.0, you have these services that are being subsidized until they "make up for it in volume" rather than simply accepting that their cost structure makes them relative luxuries--as in the case of black cars in Manhattan.
This wasn't for Manhattan. It was a part of Brooklyn that never gets yellow cabs. There's car services in most suburbs too. They're just less saturated because most people have cars.
The introduction of low-cost options for Uber/Lyft were arguably as important a development as their original ride-hailing app ideas. Once the fleet was no longer constrained to professional drivers, and anybody with a spare hour or two (and a car) could go online, the size of the fleet exploded. That meant the likelihood of having a car near you - no matter where you are in a city - dramatically increased. Sure, call your local car service from home when you're heading to JFK and he'll be there in 10. How about when you're in the Village at 1am? How about Red Hook? Not to mention this allowed the service to be provided in cities all over the world which didn't previously have a car service at all.
> 10,000 highly-paid developers
Uber probably services more than 10,000x the number of rides than your car service did. I suppose you could try employing 10,000 "ladies with a phone" to handle that volume - but of course human dispatch quickly becomes unable to handle those kinds of volumes. Sorry, those developers are necessary for scale.
> and providing a marginally better level of service
Car-sharing with strangers was impossible before Uber/Lyft operated at scale. Share a car to work with some of your colleagues, who happen to live near you, sure. But to car pool anywhere at any time requires a huge fleet, and the technology to match riders who are taking the same route. That is an very difficult problem to solve, and yes it takes capable engineers. That car pooling allows fares which are probably around a third of what your car service charges. More improvements are on the way which should see short-medium trips of a comparable cost to public transport.
Not to mention providing this service in under-served and otherwise unprofitable areas, to minorities, at all times of day, all across the world. Plus of course a consistent name and brand, by far the biggest value-add ;)
Now integrate with other modes of transport - public transport, bikes, and yep even scooters. These companies are positioned to shape entire cities' transit systems (they already have, for better or for worse). They're not the same as your small car service, and they're not over-engineered. They're certainly not setting out every day worried about justifying their Silicon Valley existence.
> Sure, call your local car service from home when you're heading to JFK and he'll be there in 10. How about when you're in the Village at 1am? How about Red Hook?
New York is a bad example. The system that was here before was pretty exceptionally good.
Standard protocol if you were in the boroughs was to simply ask for the local car service number. Restaurants, bars and bodegas all had it ready. If you were in the city, just flag down a yellow.
We can stop calling it car sharing. The Uber and Lyft pools are car sharing. Sending out a driver to pick up someone and bring them to another place the driver wasn't going to go, isn't any sort of car pooling. It's just putting the costs of fleet maintenance onto the driver.
It was a short term gain for Uber, but now that the business has gone on long enough drivers are pricing in the maintenance costs to what they need to drive. That's going to drive up costs for Uber and other ride hailing companies because having every individual maintain their car personally is inherently less efficient than having a centralized fleet with professional mechanics who also make sure to perform preventative maintenance that most car owners avoid
I was referring to Uber/Lyft pools in that paragraph: "Share a car to work with some of your colleagues, who happen to live near you, sure." Agreed, ride sharing is a much misused term.
I can't give an informed opinion on just how profitable driving for Uber/Lyft is right now. Everything I've read on the subject has been (potentially) biased, devoid of real data, or since shown to be incorrect. I'd love to read studies on this if there are some available. I do think the best solution is to make as much data on profitability available to drivers, so the market can correct itself if necessary, like you suggest.
However I don't think the ride hailing companies are blind to the economics of their markets. If there is a problem with the economics, that's an existential risk and they're not going to be sitting on their hands. If we're comparing ride-hailing with traditional car services, it's the ride-hailing side which have a whole lot of knobs they can twiddle to make the market work, and they're adding more all the time (e.g.: Uber/Lyft Pool can go a long way toward mitigating driver "opex" - minimizing those empty seats, like any efficient transport operator.)
I just don't think the efficiency of centralized maintenance is really that big a deal. Even if we ignore all the other factors at play, if that's the make-or-break feature Uber could easily provide centralized mechanical support for their fleet. They already have driver centers in each city they operate in.
Maintenance costs are not going to drive up costs for Uber/Lyft. It will just increase driver churn once they've been wrung out of their maintenance subsidy gift to these platforms.
On the other hand, here in Atlanta, it was horrible before these rideshare services came along. I remember as a poor student in the last decade, I had to spend 4 hours each day to travel 24 miles (12 miles each way) for my internship. While for you uber might be redundant, it certainly provides a valuable service for cities with worse public transit options.
Would it be as useful if it weren't being subsidized? Say 2x the current costs?
It varies by city of course but there were at least two largely orthogonal issues with cabs in a lot of places. General crapiness (unreliable, hard to get dispatched, won't go some places, credit card readers broken, etc.) and high cost.
e.g. I get a car to and from the airport were I live. It's comfortable and reliable but not cheap.
> Would it be as useful if it weren't being subsidized? Say 2x the current costs?
Yes. Outside of a few markets in the US it was a gamble to get a cab at any price. You'd call and it would be something like "30-45 minutes" and then an hour later you'd call again and hear the same thing. And this just on a regular night, forget about it if there's an event going on.
Fair enough. I admit to rarely taking cabs (especially outside of standard traveler routes, e.g. airport to hotel) even when I'm traveling, as I do frequently, so I don't have a lot of experience.
Definitely yes. I can see the student me taking advantage of the uberpool even if it was 2x the cost (since it would have saved me 2-3 hours each day).
Uberpool in particular seems to start to look like an almost slightly premium alternative to public transit. Depends on the real cost of course but minivan buses are pretty common in some countries. Not sure why they're not more so in the US even with higher labor costs.
Yes, this is the inherent issue at play nowadays. Investors are throwing silly money at startups in an attempt at global domination. What then happens is that the start-ups rely on pricing at a loss to get the majority market share and absorbing the loss through their silly money funding. End result is that simple business models end up getting destroyed because the customers are now sensitive to any price hikes above the loss making prices. The funded company now has to pursue a mish mash of money making strategies to try and break even. It remains to be seen whether this strategy will work long term.
Uber is 9 years old, "remains to be soon" makes you wonder how long it takes for investors pumping money into hypothetical winner-take-all markets to get tired and leave.
Pre-Uber try getting cab service like that in Harlem or the other boroughs. You mostly rely on gypsy cabs who were always sketchy and always tried to cheat you. Coming back from the airport one time, one driver even tried to put my bags in another cab and tell me he'll finish the ride.
If the pre Uber cab service were so great, Uber wouldn't be such a popular success there right now.
And God help you if you were black and trying to get a ride.
Things are much better in SF now too. I remember ~8 years ago, we would call for a cab in SF after going out at night. We typically would end up standing at a street corner for 30 minutes waiting for the cab and it usually wouldn't show up. This would sometime leads to missing the last caltrain of the night, which was always a bummer...
Oh, ride sharing (and file sharing) are valid business models. It's just that competing on price alone means that some companies will take a loss.
When I interviewed for my current job, (corporate file sharing,) the founder and CEO was very aware of this. He used the terms "race to the bottom" for companies that compete on price. Then, he explained that we had to focus on solving real problems for our customers that our competitors didn't solve.
7 years later, our cheapo competitors are out of business and we're a leader. This, in part is because we offer a feature set that no one else offers.
What does this mean for ride sharing? It means that Didi needs to stop discounting its services and offer features that their competitors don't have. They might have to offer features that the rest of the market thinks are crazy; but crazy enough that Didi's chunk of the marketshare just won't choose the competitor.
I don't think this is a viable option for ride-sharing. Once you get past the basics that all competitors can provide (non-buggy app, good response times, and a rating model to incentivize good driver behavior), the only thing that matters to the vast, vast majority of people is price. People just don't care about the "extras" that much to change their price-consciousness.
but if the extras amount to discounts, eg vegas taxi that takes you to a strip club and takes care of the cover charge (with kickback from club), then those extras will sell it
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. I think there is a real question whether ride-hailing services can be anything more than commodity businesses. I.e. the multi-billion dollar valuations for Uber and Didi are largely around the network effects and "winner take all" aspect of a two-sided marketplace, but there is a real argument to be made that users will always pick the lowest price service (within "table stakes" parameters such as available cars and decent app functionality which actually aren't huge barriers to entry).
So while I wouldn't necessarily say the business model isn't valid, I would say the business model should be more akin to an airlines model than a winner-take-all Facebook or Google model.
Also the value of businesses is in their ability to produce future cashflow (as reflected in market cap), not in their quarter-to-quarter income statement.
Not at all. Free storage and free image upload don't have a business model, it has no revenues stream while it has high infrastructure/bandwidth to cover.
Taxis apps are a very solid business model. 2 digits commission for every ride. There is hardly any costs or work involved to match a guy with a nearby taxi.
Subject to certain assumptions of how much customers are willing to pay, price/volume sensitivity, the geographic areas where the company can operate economically, customer acquisition costs, how much drivers need to make to work for you, fixed vs. variable costs, etc.
I suspect that to survive the "ride sharing" app companies will end up significantly increasing prices when it becomes clear there's no magic bullet on the horizon.
ADDED: Which means of course volume will go down and, almost certainly, valuations. But there is almost certainly a business model for some scale at some highish price in sufficiently dense areas.
How does it work when the didi driver calls you to ask where you are (given the poor state of urban mapping)? This was extremely common in Beijing a couple of years ago, and I only got by because my Chinese was st the taxi level (able to tel them where I am and give simple directions). A foreigner using didi without any Chinese skills would be completely helpless in that context.
They now have a txt message system that should be relied on:
1. It has translation built in.
2. It has pre-canned responses
In practice, with #2, the most common pre-canned response you give is "follow navigation" and my drivers tended to just respond with the pre-canned "ok". Drivers don't call me -- their app even tells them I'm not using a Chinese language app.
Didi drivers will very, very often call you. I deal with this problem by having a pre-baked message explaining that I don't speak chinese, and where do I want to go. As soon as didi assigns me a driver, I quickly send this message through the messaging feature of the didi app, then I use one of the predefined messages of the app (which appear in english on my end) to determine if my pickup location is correct, or if I want him to follow my GPS bead instead. Should the driver call me anyway, I just send him the aforementioned message through sms a couple times.
It is not perfect, but this method allows me to move around easily with didi without speaking chinese. I had no urban mapping problems, but I do test whatever address I want to go in baidu maps first, or any other chinese map app. That way, in case of problems, I can just show him the location or use whatever voice guidance, but I rarely needed this.
Expatriate in Shanghai since 201708, I don't speak Chinese and cannot use Didi for this reason. About half of the ~50 Didi rides I had (always accompanied by Chinese-speaking people) implied such a conversation with the driver, and nearly any of them speaks English. BTW this problem also arises with all apps I tried, as most are not available in English, and among the rest some are poorly translated and all display from time to time a slab of text and set of buttons in Chinese, leaving the ignorant me completely stuck.
>“We have to ask some hard questions: does Didi have core values, are we only a company that focuses on interests and ignores safety and social responsibilities,”
I wish this tired "asking hard questions" trope would stop. I think this maybe started with Zuckerberg. It's nothing more than a rhetorical device. It allows CEOs to acknowledge a PR problem without having to provide any meaningful or prescriptive guidance to the culture that created that PR problem in the first place. You will never read a blog post by a CEO titled "The Answers To Those Hard Questions."
>"Cheng said in an email, according to people who’ve seen the memo and verified its authenticity. “The problem is within ourselves. Our desire for success caused us to forget our mission."
Ugh. When success and your mission can have such orthogonality, it could be argued that your "mission statement" was disingenuous to begin with.
These companies should hire me as their CEO. I'll lose them only 1/10th of the money over 10 times the amount of time. That's 100 times better performance.
Apple spent about 15 years being regularly referred to as "beleaguered" so it's somehow apropos that the ride sharing service they invested in has inherited the mantle.
