381–390 of 461 posts
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What I do not understand is why nobody copied yelp with an ethical business model yet.
It's a network effect. Readers go to databases with the most data, and creators / reviewers go to the places with the best 'audience'. Same reason why it's been a very long and hard road to replace craigslist for many things.
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It's a network effect. Readers go to databases with the most data, and creators / reviewers go to the places with the best 'audience'. Same reason why it's been a very long and hard road to replace craigslist for many things.
Is craigslist unethical?
It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value. In this example, what benefit is GrubHub providing to anyone? The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that? Why, because they made a deal to give X% of it to Yelp, and convinced…
Grubhub's value to me is that they send out surveys to most (or all?) customers who order from restaurants, so the star ratings are actually useful to me. A lower rating is a huge red flag when I'm checking out new places, at least. But is that worth 15%? Most definitely not.
The interface when clicking on a web page from Yelp is worse than using the browser directly; therefore, instead of tapping, I read the web address and just go type it out.
And don’t even get me started on E-mail/communication with businesses. Recently I tried contacting a contractor, and happened to start the request from a form in the Yelp app. Since the very first thing on the form was asking for my E-mail address, I logically assumed that I would receive an E-mail reply. Instead, nothing; after awhile, I assumed just needed to find somebody else. Then, days later (or whenever I wandered into the Yelp app again), and only after I just happened to tap on some stupid icon in the corner, I finally see a reply: in the app. That is utterly useless! In fact, all of these “E-mail look-alike” interfaces are useless: I don’t need your company to completely recreate your own in-box interface that will surely suck in some way, when you could have just allowed E-mail to be used. Heaven forbid I dare to communicate with someone without your knowledge. So, yet again, like with URLs, now I just dig up the web site manually, dig up a real E-mail address or phone number manually, and contact them manually.
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It's a network effect. Readers go to databases with the most data, and creators / reviewers go to the places with the best 'audience'. Same reason why it's been a very long and hard road to replace craigslist for many things.
Is craigslist unethical?
It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value. In this example, what benefit is GrubHub providing to anyone? The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that? Why, because they made a deal to give X% of it to Yelp, and convinced…
Yelp should be prosecuted under RICO.
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"Something else" indeed. Recently a scam site popped up that copied the branding of our site, autotempest.com. (They registered autoStempest.com and copied our logos and such.) They claimed to be a dealership based in Texas, but were actually posting fake vehicles and having people wire them money (which they obviously kept). One of the things these scammers did to appear legit was set up a Yelp page with a bunch of…
What I do not understand is why nobody copied yelp with an ethical business model yet.
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I wouldn't necessarily frame that as an inevitability of Dropbox as a product, as much as an inevitability of the traditional VC funding model. It's likely you could build a very healthy business selling people file syncing — I personally use a tiny minimalist Dropbox competitor that seems to be doing just fine. The hypergrowth demanded by investors when you take on $1.7B in funding is what's the challenge.
> tiny minimalist Dropbox competitor what is it? I'm lookin for alternatives
It just fucking works. Took a few minutes to set up and it's been working great. Several TB of storage for the price of hardware I already had lying around doing nothing.
It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value. In this example, what benefit is GrubHub providing to anyone? The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that? Why, because they made a deal to give X% of it to Yelp, and convinced…
I really wish there was a GrubHub competitor that charged a monthly fee instead of the model of paying more the more successful you are. Restaurants pay x per month with normal processing fees and that's it.
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Agreed, but unfortunately not how a lot of sites work (especially Google's properties) - they'll sniff a Mobile Safari user agent and say "Here's the gimpy phone edition with half the options missing!" 13" iPad Pro? Gimped version. 12" MacBook with a smaller screen and worse CPU/GPU performance? Full version! I would've thought that it'd be simpler to have one codebase and make some UI modifications so that it works…
Unfortunately if your site is interactive, you still need to know if dealing with touch versus keyboard. For touch, extra spacing is needed around click targets (allow for fat fingers). For some touch data entry, you need to allow for different input methods, because accessing symbols and numbers is different from a real keyboard versus a virtual keyboard. Also a virtual keyboard: covers some of the page, causes scro…
Detecting a mobile browser vs regular won't handle this well for laptop touchscreen users... especially for anyone using a laptop in a tablet mode. I suspect the larger targets would also help some regular keyboard + mouse users with poor fine motor control.