Do you think middle-men are bad? Consider probably almost every thing in your life - not knowing where you are, I cannot know what those things are. But the point is that likely you would have zero of them, and zero access to them, if not for middle-men.

One man wrote a book for framers regarding how to sell with less middle-men or even directly. Cause they're ripping them off.

I think middlemen exist because they typically provide a useful service to the buyers and sellers of a product. Think of Uber for example. Before Uber, someone could advertise themselves as a driver on Craigslist or maybe get some customers on Facebook. Similarly, you might be able to find someone to give you a ride online. But, Uber was successful in making this easy and convenient by making sure that there was enough drivers and enough customers. They did this through advertisement and by educating people on the demand for this sort of thing. Before Uber, most people that wanted to freelance by driving people around simply either couldn’t find enough people on free platforms or didn’t bother to try finding people on free platforms. The same goes for people that wanted to find people to drive them around.

Basically, there was a coordination problem because not enough people were creative enough to use the free platforms for taxi services. The middleman insures that everyone does know that they can use their platform for this sort of thing and thus it actually creates demand for something just by giving people great ideas about how to solve their transportation problems or their employment problems. Another thing that Uber does is offer a great software interface and features that free alternatives do not have. It has geolocation so you can see who’s nearby, it has reviews and ratings of drivers and customers, it allows you to report bad drivers and bad customers and so on. It would be much riskier to try to be a freelancer or try to get a freelance service from someone on Craigslist and that’s a big reason why middlemen exist as well. Middlemen can isolate the bad actors and make sure that all service providers and customers are good and honest people which is just something that someone needs to do but unfortunately nobody is just going to volunteer their time to do it for free.