In what way were early users of Uber different from the current users? Are you saying the drivers used to be better?

To me personally, no, not better, but at one time the phrase “ride share” had a lot more meaning than it does today. People would creatively decorate their cars for example.

A car ride isn't 'content'.

It can be. Have you been in cars that have small snacks, karaoke, or some other sort of entertainment setup?

Not sure about what OP was saying but, for a brief time when Uber was still new, before UberX launched in mid-summer 2012, their only service was black cars. Drivers had limousine licenses, and were merely filling time in between other gigs they had booked traditionally.

A StackOverflow question I asked 13 years ago (and which someone else answered 13 years ago!) was deleted just last month for being off-topic.

All the mods’ accounts were years younger than both the question and answer. Even weirder, the mod who initiated the deletion first tried to answer the question. He only voted to delete it after I commented that the question already had had an accepted answer for 13 years.

There should be something you can do about such blatantly misaligned incentives…

StackOverflow seems to have perverse incentives for bad moderation.

Fortunately it's so terrible I was easily dissuaded from ever answering anything.

I don't think that's necessarily true. HN is one of the few survivors that has maintained its dignity due to the policies and work of the moderation team.

I've run huge forums and they have mostly enshittified because I didn't put the work into moderating them correctly. I would promote good users to moderators, and six months later they would all literally become Hitler and I would have to fire them, and then they become weaponized and the destruction of the site becomes circular.

Its not because HN has better moderation/policy than others. Its because HN never needs to hit DAU/revenue goals.

This helps, but the sites I ran never comingled revenue goals with content moderation and they still enshittified.