Here's an idea. Order from restaurants that actually exist
If you haven't seen it and knows where it is then don't order from it
Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
81–90 of 153 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#82PSA: If you have been burned enough times using these apps then Perhaps you should give up ever believing they will change for the better. Cook food at home or skip the delivery and eat at a restaurant you know will be nice.
Consider the ratio of experiences you’ve had with any delivery app after the first order, good experiences to bad. Was the food late, cold, poor quality, damaged, or was its price marked up beyond what you initially believed?
If the same thing keeps happening and you expect different results then… well, you know what I’m getting at :)
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#83Seriously, all of you lazy toads, learn to cook It's one of life's exquisite pleasures. You'll save a ton of money. Massively improve your health. It really impresses any potential partner - many a lifelong relationship started in the kitchen not the bedroom. Cookbooks are recipes are really fun. Surely my fellow hackers, don't we love to know how things work and be in control?
Unfortunately, the hotels I spend around 40 days a year at don’t have full kitchens.
There are dozens of things I would rather do in my limited time than spend time cooking.
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#84It's insane. I once found a restaurant that had ghost kitchen'd itself EIGHTEEN times: https://i.imgur.com/7jwBlFG.png Some of the name variations are pretty funny though.
Where I live (Spain), delivery restaurants have also become a total clusterfuck. There are thousands of options which are barely undistinguishable from one another - like those cheap Chinese brands that flood many product categories on Amazon. You'll occasionally find a name that stands out, like the ones you've posted, along the lines of "Thunderfuck Porn Burgers". But they don't entice me to order, since whatever t…
I'm in a small town just outside Barcelona and although it's not widespread because we don't have many restaurants here there is one place which does this which is particularly frustrating...
One restaurant which serves burgers, tacos and pizza. None of it particularly great but nice if you're feeling lazy. Problem is they split across three brands on Glovo for each food category even though it all comes from the same place.
If one of us feels like burger and the other fancies tacos you gotta pay two deliveries. That is unless you pay for a subscription of course. Someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Doordash officially endorses these "virtual restaurants". I wouldn't be surprised if they like the idea that it might push people to premium subscriptions to access free delivery so they get a diversity of food options.
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love to cook, but this view is incredibly condescending. People have busy lives, you don't know what some internet person's life is like. I know a lot of people that simply don't enjoy cooking.
Interesting choice of word. Condescending implies talking down , whereas I am in fact talking up . Poorer nations spend much more time per capita on cooking. India averages 13 hours per week. The average American male spends two and a half hours per week (20 mins per day) in "food preparation". We all have equally "busy" lives, yet our labour is distributed in different ways. The 'first world' problems I am poking fu…
Why just focus on cooking? Do you give up other creature comforts that you can afford just because “people in poorer countries do”? Do you also farm or is that “beneath you”?
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#86One of the absolute worst dark patterns I’ve seen was on Foodpanda. When you’re just browsing, you see prices crossed out, with a cheaper price below it, which seems to indicate there’s some sort of promotion. You can continue browsing a specific restaurant, and order a “discounted” item, your total price will be the sum of the discounted items. That is, up until you actually want to check out, suddenly your total ju…
I have a (not really serious, but kind of) theory that metrics driven organizations stumble into various dark patterns through software bugs. In this case, that would look like: 1. You want to convert people to "pro" users so you try to show them all the money they can save by doing so. 2. Because of a bug in the code somewhere, you end up showing the discounted price in the cart until checkout. 3. Because some numbe…
I don't think you need bugs for that:
1. You (as a product owner/manager) want to convert people to "pro" users so you try to show them all the money they can save by doing so.
2. You don't care about the the experience of the non-pro users, because that's not the metric you're optimizing, so you never specify to developers what should happen when lower-class users shop, except that at the end they have to pay the full price
3. Developers build something that works like the dark pattern described above (they are incentivized by keeping their sprint goals, not by making non-pro users happy).
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#87Just an FYI: YCombinator backed food delivery services…
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#88There are a few of these delivery firms now, has at least one realized the best niche to use should be “trustworthy”? E.g require any restaurant to have a brick and mortar restaurant with actual customers in it, or it’s banned. And requiring each such restaurant to have only one listed name in the app - which must be the same as the name on the sign of the physical restaurant. And clearly highlighting the age of the…
> E.g require any restaurant to have a brick and mortar restaurant with actual customers in it, or it’s banned.
Why on earth would it matter to me as a delivery app user if I'm ordering from an ordinary restaurant or a dark kitchen? The only thing I care about is the food being good. And ordinary restaurants with actual customers in it often treat deliveries as something not really important.
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#89One of the absolute worst dark patterns I’ve seen was on Foodpanda. When you’re just browsing, you see prices crossed out, with a cheaper price below it, which seems to indicate there’s some sort of promotion. You can continue browsing a specific restaurant, and order a “discounted” item, your total price will be the sum of the discounted items. That is, up until you actually want to check out, suddenly your total ju…
Amazon does this bullshit all the time with VAT.
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#90Seriously, all of you lazy toads, learn to cook It's one of life's exquisite pleasures. You'll save a ton of money. Massively improve your health. It really impresses any potential partner - many a lifelong relationship started in the kitchen not the bedroom. Cookbooks are recipes are really fun. Surely my fellow hackers, don't we love to know how things work and be in control?
I refuse! I mean I know how to cook, I just refuse to cook now days. The actual cooking isn't _that_ bad, but all the stuff around it absolutely sucks and isn't worth it for me. You need to go shopping for food, you need to pick ingredients, manage "freshness" so that food doesn't go off and plan what meals you'll cook with the ingredients you bought. It would create situations where I had to choose between going out…
>You need to go shopping for food, you need to pick ingredients, manage "freshness" so that food doesn't go off and plan what meals you'll cook with the ingredients you bought. It would create situations where I had to choose between going out after work to a restaurant or letting food spoil.
This reminds me of Rob Rhinehart's (Soylent) old (now deleted) blog post about groceries:
>I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears.
Still quoted here: https://www.businessinsider.com/soylent-ceo-rob-rhinehart-qu...