Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools within your neighborood?

Re:Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools with... by WA on Thursday March 14, 2019 @02:37AM (#19386945)

This kind of app existed before (keyword "sharing economy") and it never really took off. I don’t know exactly why, but one obvious drawback is that I have to signup for a service (that none of my friends or neighbors use yet), post my list of 3-5 tools I’m willing to share and then never look in the app for 6 months, because I don’t need anything. An all like that is basically the same as sending an email to my friends and putting a piece of paper on my door for my neighbors to let them know what stuff they can borrow from me. It’s not exactly something you use everyday.

My guess is: yes, people would share their tools, but an app might not be the solution for this problem.

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Re:Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools with... by muzani on Thursday March 14, 2019 @07:58AM (#19388397)

We've done it as a community for a while. The downside is sometimes someone borrows a ladder but doesn't return it. Apps would help.

I'm not sure if people would want to rent their tools though. It seems like the benefit of being neighborly exceeds the $3 you'd get from renting out a ladder.

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Re:Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools with... by shoo on Saturday March 16, 2019 @06:53PM (#19410909)

  > Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home
  > hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting
  > expedition, he found one of the successful
  > hunters dropping off several hundred pounds
  > of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man
  > objected indignantly:

    > "Up in our country we are human!" said the
    > hunter. "And since we are human we help
    > each other. We don't like to hear anybody
    > say thanks for that. What I get today you
    > may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by
    > gifts one makes slaves and by whips one
    > makes dogs.

  > The refusal to calculate credits and debits
  > can be found throughout the anthropological
  > literature on egalitarian hunting societies.
  > Rather than seeing himself as human because he
  > could make economic calculations, the hunter
  > insisted that being truly human meant refusing
  > to make such calculations, refusing to measure
  > or remember who had given what to whom

  -- Graeber , Debt: The First 5,000 Years

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