This comparison strikes me as bizarre. The medallion racket is lobbying politicians to use the force of the law to prevent competitors from doing business. What discordorama describes is paying people money to install and sign into your app. This is... either a poorly designed incentive system that was then fixed, or a clever campaign that gets a lot of future drivers through the earliest hoops and puts them in a position where it's easy to incentivize them to start driving. (Clever to the extent that that works.)
I can't see why you think there's a similarity, other than that you think they're both underhanded, and that they're both done by companies providing taxi-like services.
My sense of Uber has been a company using technology innovatively to provide a much better user experience, while using currently existing but idle resources (the cars and drivers that serve customers on Uber but otherwise don't for various reasons, reasons Uber has rendered irrelevant, hence the resistance they've seen).
But if they need to subsidize their drivers or customers, what does that say about their value proposition? To me, it makes them just another company using mundane, old school tactics to outdo their competition.
Medallions and subsidies are old school tactics. One keeps new players out. The other throws old players out. Neither has anything to do with the value you bring to the table.
This comparison strikes me as bizarre. The medallion racket is lobbying politicians to use the force of the law to prevent competitors from doing business. What discordorama describes is paying people money to install and sign into your app. This is... either a poorly designed incentive system that was then fixed, or a clever campaign that gets a lot of future drivers through the earliest hoops and puts them in a position where it's easy to incentivize them to start driving. (Clever to the extent that that works.)
I can't see why you think there's a similarity, other than that you think they're both underhanded, and that they're both done by companies providing taxi-like services.