I dislike all of these companies, but I'd have put it all differently:

The first one, Reservation Hop, is simply indefensible because it relies on fraud. It's deceiving restaurants into thinking the person asking for a reservation is a real person. Not only does it involve lying, but it's fundamentally different from scalping a ticket because if no one "buys" the reservation, the restaurant gets nothing and was perhaps force to turn down legit customers, whereas the scalper actually paid for the ticket (though it may have been inefficiently priced, see below for more on that). It also creates no-value-added intermediary in the process. It's just a dick move all around. I do suspect that a trade group for the restaurants could get Reservation Hop cease-and-desisted, but the general solution here is for restaurants to take a credit card as part of the reservation process.

The parking ones are a bit different, in that they're taking advantage of inefficiently priced parking. Ever notice how it's really hard to find a spot on a street full of first-come-first-serve, inexpensive parking? It's for the same reason there are long lines and empty gas pumps before a storm with anti-gouging rules in effect, or in stories about the Soviet Union. You can park there for long periods of time even though you may not have a pressing need for the spot, whereas people who have such a need can't get one. Normally we manage such supply and demand issues through prices, so if you need a spot badly enough you might be willing to pay for it and one will be available because most people aren't. [1] What happens almost inevitably when you have an inefficiently distributed good is a secondary market or some sort of cultural mos, both of which are usually ethically dubious. In Boston, people "reserve" spots by putting cones or lawn chairs in "their" spots and expect you to respect it less you get your car keyed, thus compounding the inefficiency. There are places where you can pay for people to "hold" your spot, and I've had someone try to sell me theirs once. These companies are filling in exactly there, except with technology. To be clear, I think these companies are pretty crummy. But my point is that they're the almost inevitable consequence of a pretty terrible system for allocating resources. I.e. if we want to fix this, the best way to do it is to fix the underlying problem rather than shaming businesses like this. EDIT: to be clear, I'm not against shaming them if it makes you feel good; I just think it's not the solution to the problem.

Even though that description overlaps in places with the article, I like my framing a lot better. The article is coming from this place where entrepreneurs are expected to be these angels descended to Earth to fix all the "common man's" problem through innovation. Then we immolate ourselves because the community/scene turns out to be full of non-special people who are sometimes kinda shady and take advantage of bad policy and lax enforcement to make money, just like people in all other walks of life. (In an age where so much relies on technology, I don't even think it's reasonable to think of "startup tech stuff" as a scene or a space or a community at all.) Maybe it's fun to wring your hands about it and I can see a publication like TC likes to see things through that lens, but I don't think it's a very helpful way of approaching these problems if your real goal is to solve them.

[1] An important question here, given the context, is doesn't this just help the rich get parking at the expense of poor people? Well, yes, it kind of does. On the other hand, if you can't find a spot, it doesn't help poor people much, except insomuch as poor people may be willing to spend a longer time trying to park (in which case, we're making them pay for it with their time, which doesn't seem good either). But more importantly, if we want to make things easier for poor people, we should give them money so that they can do what they want with it (including parking!). That's way better than making parking artificially cheap, because a) it's a lot more flexible from the poor person's perspective and b) it distorts the allocation of resources way less.