Personally, that strikes me as completely orthogonal to being nice or mean. Your statement makes as much sense as saying that Uber has created jobs so they must be purple.
Uber has done good for the world. I give that weight when trying to determine if they're good/bad mean/not mean. To me, they clearly care about people (they're trying to make things better for millions of riders and tens of thousands of new drivers ever month).
One of the big arguments for Uber being mean, is that they recruited drivers from competitors. The goal there was to help extend an economic opportunity (the alleged benefit of capitalism) to more private contractors. We complain when large tech companies collude to keep salaries down, and I embrace companies who work to counter that. The fact that Uber appears to be doing that for tens of thousands of people every week puts them in the "not mean" category for me.
It's very possible that we have different criteria for what is mean or not mean. I'm basing mine on the facts I have, rather than sensationalist reports from blogs masquerading as real journalism (the fact that obvious hit piece have been written about Uber doesn't put them in the "mean" category for me, although it makes me wonder about their competitors who would do that). I haven't seen Uber playing dirty in the press, with their riders or with their drivers. They seem to genuinely be making the world a better place, with a focus on helping both sides of their marketplace. That said, I'm open to other points of view. Am I missing something?
"Mean" is about attitude, not outcomes. You can be a really nice person and be nothing but a drag on everything. You can be a complete asshole and improve the world.
We've managed to set up our civilization such that improving the world is usually the best way to gain power and wealth. While the ancients may have gone in for conquest and pillage, now the best way to make it big is to figure out how to give people what they want in a way that nobody else has done before. But that doesn't mean that the people working within this arrangement are good people.
> But that doesn't mean that the people working within this arrangement are good people.
Just working within that arrangement doesn't make them good/bad nice/mean. But I see the on-demand events to collect winter clothing for people in need. I've seen them do similar things over the past few years. I've seen them work hard to provide economic opportunities for tens of thousands of people.
I'm not giving them any awards just for participating. I'm seeing a company working hard to change the world and doing it in a way that doesn't seem "mean". I see competitors crying about things being unfair (but I don't buy the argument because I'm of the opinion that private contractors should have all the opportunities they can get, not limited by non-compete agreements like we see in other industries). I see blogs masquerading as real journalism posting attack articles (which happens to coincide with reports that one of their competitors was upset that they weren't acquired by Uber and had threatened to go "nuclear").
What I don't see is enough to make me think they're "mean" or "bad". I guess I take the obvious attack pieces with a grain of salt (spurned competitors who are struggling are going to do everything they can to dirty Uber's name, that makes me think less of their competitors not Uber). It's possible that I'm missing something, but I haven't seen anything that would suggest they're actually mean, and I haven't met anyone who has an actual report that would suggest such a thing either.
