Something is going wrong if a middlemen takes such a big cut and still can’t make money.

The free market will tell us.

It works well for companies like Apple, Ticketmaster, etc..

That's what I tried to highlight with my post, which seems very reasonable, so I don't understand the massive downvoting.

Looking at Ticketmaster or the Apple app store it seems that a free market will lead to monopoly behavior once players grow beyond a certain size.

Correct, if a business model works and is successful it can lead to a monopoly. And there are laws that try to tackle that.

But its going off topic because Uber and Lyft are far away from that position, they hardly have a functioning business model in the first place.

But that's what the consumers must have wanted. It's "free" market after all. There's no way it can be manipulated. Completely logical, always responds the way it "should" market.

>so I don't understand the massive downvoting

I'm curious about this too. Sure, I'm argumentative and sometimes post a bit too aggressively in my tone, but I've had seemingly innocuous posts get down-voted within a minute or two of posting them.

Normally I wouldn't care, but it seems like HN has an algorithm that punishes people who are consistently downvoted ("slow down"). It is possible to game that system?

This reflects my experience with this post, it was immediately (within a few minutes) downvoted drastically.

Now it has normalized it seems and is neutral.