Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
11–20 of 148 posts
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#12Article also at https://www.seattletimes.com/business/instacart-shoppers-bes...
Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/instacart... on the assumption that more people can read it. Thanks!
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#13Is 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.
That could be construed as Instacart assigning orders to their shoppers which would likely make them employees eligible for benefits, something they want to avoid at all costs. This may already be the case in CA regardless of what they do, but they definitely want to avoid paying any benefits for their workers in any state where this is not yet currently the case.
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#14Is 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.
Grocery shopping is a bit different from just picking up a food order. You may only have the time (or desire) to do smaller orders and not want to deal with larger more time consuming ones. Or maybe you don't want to drive farther to certain stores etc....
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#15Maybe 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?
Many or most deliveries are contactless: https://news.instacart.com/introducing-leave-at-my-door-deli...
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#16I'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…
They can add any sort of captcha challenge or publish fake juicy shopping orders as honeypot, since the bots will instantly grab them.
Of course, the next step will be to pay a sweatshop in a poor country to contantly monitor and grab the offers. There's no end to human greed, as evidenced by the Uber Eats couriers outsourcing to undocumented migrants at pennies on the dollar (or the euro) in France.
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#17I'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…
Smaller teams than Instacart have put up effective fights against cheating. It's an arms race, but so what? The goal is to make cheating uneconomical, not impossible.
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#18I 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
I love how the kneejerk reaction to any bot problem is "captchas". I'm not sure how that would even help. If there are 20 jobs available, and 3 of them are high paying, having a bot sort through the list for you still gives you an advantage. Sure, it's better than having someone claim all 3 of them at the same time, but you can achive the same effect by having a cooldown of 5 seconds (enforced server side). Also, with a cooldown, you can't get an advantage (eg. entering a captcha faster with keyboard)
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#19Maybe 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?
I don't even see the delivery driver, he drops the food off, knocks, and leaves.
Besides, I don't want to have to keep a supply of small bills around just to pay a tip that I could have just put on my credit card. I rarely pay in cash these days (even pre-covid)
Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders
#20Is 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.
Grocery shopping is a bit different from just picking up a food order. You may only have the time (or desire) to do smaller orders and not want to deal with larger more time consuming ones. Or maybe you don't want to drive farther to certain stores etc....
Sure, but all of those could be addressed by allowing setting available-for criteria rather than browse-and-select.
Or they could just not display tips in advance; since tips can be altered after delivery, it's misleading to treat them as part of the bargain of accepting a delivery anyway, advance entry should be viewed as a convenience for the orderer to enter a default amount based one expected service, not an inducement.
If the tips aren't visible in advance, bots can't snatch “lucrative” orders, because they can't find them.