The problem is with the information inbalance. Before, a salesman, for example would look at what kind of clothing you were wearing and what segment items you're looking for.
Now let's do a little thought-experiment with the Uber ride and look at the information you and Uber have to make your price and choice on:
For Uber:
- What time is it? +
- Are you far away from home? +
- Have you been here before? -
- What have you paid before? +
- Where do you shop usually? +
- Are you rich? ++
- Are you ill? +
- Are you pregnant? +
- Are you drunk? ++
- Are you very drunk? +++ (bonus!)
- Are you sad? +
- Did you just break up? ++
- Do you have any friends? +/-
- Do you have any friends with cars? -
- Are you alone? +
- Are you going home? +
- Are you already home? -
- probably a lot more...
For you:
- Price?
- How screwed am I if I don't take the ride?
There are not many other options. Maybe a taxi's while they last and Lyft probably has the same algorithm.
Although it lacks a notification in WhatsApp it's just as easy to check a phone number for 'aliveness'. When you select 'new conversation' you get a list of your contacts with a name (from your address book) and a picture and tagline.
This is all based on your address-book so it doesn't matter if the other party knows your number or not.
Not only that, but their suggested migration path (without a complete rebuild/rsync) [1] from bare-metal to an VPS was very painful and actually broke two VPS-instances. In the end it didn't work and I only got my C2 to restart after 10 hours.
Their support was unhelpful and they charged me three days of runtime for the broken VPS and all storage used during my migration attempt (before the VPS were shutdown during routine maintainance, not due to my support ticket).
Besides that the migration from bare-metal forces you to use the second-most expensive VPS size because of 10GB storage difference.
I'm really pissed of at how they handled that situation and I'm migrating away from them as soon as possible, especially now with the price hike. I wanted to like them and gave them a more then fair chance but they've wasted it. I think I'll be migrating to Hetzner now.
Recently I tried to get Dirt Rally 2.0 to run on my Linux gaming machine. Apparently, according to ProtonDB [0], the solution to get it to work is installing a fully trusted root-certificate from Codemasters on your system (not only in the Wine/Proton environment) [1].
In case you don't know, this means Codemasters can now man-in-the-middle every https connection from your computer. This is insane imho.
I tried to comment on that thread but they need full system information before you can post anything on ProtonDB.
Now let's do a little thought-experiment with the Uber ride and look at the information you and Uber have to make your price and choice on:
For Uber:
- What time is it? +
- Are you far away from home? +
- Have you been here before? -
- What have you paid before? +
- Where do you shop usually? +
- Are you rich? ++
- Are you ill? +
- Are you pregnant? +
- Are you drunk? ++
- Are you very drunk? +++ (bonus!)
- Are you sad? +
- Did you just break up? ++
- Do you have any friends? +/-
- Do you have any friends with cars? -
- Are you alone? +
- Are you going home? +
- Are you already home? -
- probably a lot more...
For you:
- Price?
- How screwed am I if I don't take the ride?
There are not many other options. Maybe a taxi's while they last and Lyft probably has the same algorithm.