Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
seattletimes.com
Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
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Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#2I had come across a video couple of months ago showing this in action. Captcha was mentioned a few times on the thread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwCh4rtAOWc
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#3Any system - or market - sophisticated enough will see the emergence of bots as the ultimate decision makers/arbitration players. It’s quite fascinating.
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#4Article also at https://www.seattletimes.com/business/instacart-shoppers-bes...
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#5Maybe the best strategy is to tip low when placing the order, then increase the tip after delivery to reward the guy who needed the money enough to take your order with a low tip.
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#6This strikes me as unethical.
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#7I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this is only possible on Android, right? The video linked by ultimoo shows an Android, and my perception is that iOS sandboxing is much tighter.
How can Instacart combat this? They can't require iOS among their shoppers. Is it going to be an arms race of heuristics and anti-cheat code like it is for games that want to prevent aim-bots?
Or they could start running their own algorithm on the back-end, release juicy batches first to shoppers that haven't gotten a good one recently.
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#8Is there a reason why instacart even allows you to pick orders? It seems like this exploit can be stopped just by only letting shoppers look at the first few items of the queue, and limiting the amount of skips.
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#9Maybe the best strategy is to tip low when placing the order, then increase the tip after delivery to reward the guy who needed the money enough to take your order with a low tip.
why not just tip them in cash?
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#10Maybe the best strategy is to tip low when placing the order, then increase the tip after delivery to reward the guy who needed the money enough to take your order with a low tip.
Then you'd also incentivize workers to take orders with low tips and be disappointed when they really get a low tip.
Seems more fair to me to require the company pay their employees a fair wage and benefits rather than redefine those that work for them as contractors to dodge those obligations.