Turo is the Airbnb of car rental in the US. I’ve loved using it for years. 

As I was returning my Turo rental today, I got a chance to have a lengthy conversation with the car owner on how the platform has been decaying in both customer service, and value extraction out of  the car owners with various shady mechanics.

Long story short, it sounded like typical late stage enshitificafion for Turo and I’m surprised at least another competitor hasn’t already stepped in. At Airbnb has VRBO, Uber has Lyft (now Empower too). But competition in these centralized platforms would still be futile for consumers as it’d only reset the enshitification clock as another closed platform.

Yep… You already know where this is going. Only way I can think of to break this cycle is decentralization, skipping the middlemen and their anti-consumer fee race to the top. 

It would have to start like a normal company, unbenknownst to all users that this is a “cypherpunk project on Nostr”. Just a regular company focusing on a local market first. Capturing users by treating them right, while still charging enough to profit and grow, like a regular company.

It would likely have much less overhead too. Little to no customer support. Not trying to micromanage every aspect of the transaction with complex programming and design. Little to no lawyers. Just move most of the trust to the users, communicate that very well, and let them enjoy freedom. 

The first big app to do this built on Nostr would reap a lot of the rewards for penetrating the mainstream market with a “Turo/Airbnb/Uber alternative”, but couldn’t monopolize (not that that’d be easy) or abuse users as it’d also initiate the race to the bottom in an open protocol. 

As this platform/app grew, competitors (other Nostr apps) with less fees will try to break in. And early adaptor users would discover and learn what Nostr actually is and begin switching apps to find the best/cheapest one. Pure interoperability.

Maybe this isn’t possible now or ever will be, but I suspect it’s exactly how Nostr could go big - silently in the background for platforms that should belong to the people and remain a free market. 
https://blossom.primal.net/92f7766e28d390fee2f2fe9ebf537deaa5293aae4dd1d130b6d7228016708df4.jpg