Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

seattletimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 148 posts

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#71

Post by subhro »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

> some shoppers are paying software developers who have created bots — in the form of third-party apps — that run alongside the legitimate Instacart app and claim the best orders for clients Instacart is a real-time market. In real-time markets reaction time is paramount. "Cranking up pressure against app makers and banning violators when they find them" is swimming up a waterfall. The solution is in the market struc…

> This could take several forms. They could, on order submission, open a 60-second auction window.

It will just end up being sniped like it happens on eBay. Lookup gixen.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#72

Post by 082349872349872 »

fosk wrote: post #3

Any system - or market - sophisticated enough will see the emergence of bots as the ultimate decision makers/arbitration players. It’s quite fascinating.

My groceries are delivered by employees (either of the chain or of the postal service, and on rare occasions, of DPD). No need to hate the player when one simply avoids the precariat game.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#73

Post by m463 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

> some shoppers are paying software developers who have created bots — in the form of third-party apps — that run alongside the legitimate Instacart app and claim the best orders for clients Instacart is a real-time market. In real-time markets reaction time is paramount. "Cranking up pressure against app makers and banning violators when they find them" is swimming up a waterfall. The solution is in the market struc…

I always thought the same thing about ebay.

I thought... if someone bids at the last minute, it should extend the auction a short amount of time. Let people get into it personally, not through pre-bid and/or software.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#74

Post by redis_mlc »

tesmar2 wrote: post #70
malwarebytess wrote: post #50

When I was in college 10 years ago I did Amazon's Mechanical Turk to pay my way through. One of the things I did to make my life less miserable was to automate a lot of the searching, sifting, and grabbing of jobs (hits.) Bot would only accept jobs that fit my specified time/money ratio, or known hits that paid well and predictably. Having the experience of using these "gig" side jobs I don't think there's anything w…

If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost.

> If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost.

Cue the obligatory pedantic HN Econ 101 analysis.

Actually, most interviews with Turks say the payment is less important than being able to do hits between classes, or without any commuting.

Also, some workloads are done on Turk as carefully planned statistical trials, which cannot easily be done offline.

So, nothing to do with HN Econ 101 today. Class is out.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#75

Post by MichaelGlass »

tesmar2 wrote: post #70
malwarebytess wrote: post #50

When I was in college 10 years ago I did Amazon's Mechanical Turk to pay my way through. One of the things I did to make my life less miserable was to automate a lot of the searching, sifting, and grabbing of jobs (hits.) Bot would only accept jobs that fit my specified time/money ratio, or known hits that paid well and predictably. Having the experience of using these "gig" side jobs I don't think there's anything w…

If there was an alternative, higher wage they would pick that. This is the market labor cost.

"below market" because Instacart (and uber, etc) forgo normal labor law, have by-default but not by-contract full-time workers without any full-time benefits. Companies can achieve great benefit by externalizing cost on society, but should they? (And should they be able to?)

e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/12/16/is-uber-cheat... https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#76

Post by botwriter »

rtsil wrote: post #16
function_seven wrote: post #7

I'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.

funny you say that I think the same thing is happening in the UK with these fast food delivery apps they all seem to be Eritrean.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#77

Post by galkk »

> When Marsh opens her Instacart shopping app, she sees promising orders disappear before she can act. “No human can click that fast,” she said. “Instacart needs to fix this. These bots are literally taking the food off my kids’ table.”

While I understand the wish to get the best/any batch, this is significant exaggeration. If your kids food depends on getting the batches from the website, then you have much larger problem than bots.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#78

Post by dheera »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

> some shoppers are paying software developers who have created bots — in the form of third-party apps — that run alongside the legitimate Instacart app and claim the best orders for clients Instacart is a real-time market. In real-time markets reaction time is paramount. "Cranking up pressure against app makers and banning violators when they find them" is swimming up a waterfall. The solution is in the market struc…

There's a much simpler solution -- just pay all the shoppers flat, fair, per-hour rates and eliminate tips.

If shoppers get paid for their work, not a percentage of orders, there won't be any of this mess.

UPS drivers don't get a percentage cut of what's inside the boxes they deliver; grocery drivers shouldn't be treated any differently.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#79

Post by cjg »

m463 wrote: post #73
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

> some shoppers are paying software developers who have created bots — in the form of third-party apps — that run alongside the legitimate Instacart app and claim the best orders for clients Instacart is a real-time market. In real-time markets reaction time is paramount. "Cranking up pressure against app makers and banning violators when they find them" is swimming up a waterfall. The solution is in the market struc…

I always thought the same thing about ebay. I thought... if someone bids at the last minute, it should extend the auction a short amount of time. Let people get into it personally, not through pre-bid and/or software.

Except that eBay uses a particular auction model where by extending the time doesn't matter much.

If you bid the most you would be prepared to pay for something - you don't pay that price - you just pay enough to beat everyone else.

If you bid in a genuine way there's no pipped at the post situation - you just weren't prepared to pay more.

Now there are some secondary psychological effects, like a high price bid so far might increase bidders willingness to pay more, so there may be some advantage to bidding later, but overall there's less of a problem than it initially appears.

Perhaps bidders just need to be more honest with themselves about how much they were really prepared to pay.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#80

Post by jclulow »

cjg wrote: post #79
m463 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought the same thing about ebay. I thought... if someone bids at the last minute, it should extend the auction a short amount of time. Let people get into it personally, not through pre-bid and/or software.

Except that eBay uses a particular auction model where by extending the time doesn't matter much. If you bid the most you would be prepared to pay for something - you don't pay that price - you just pay enough to beat everyone else. If you bid in a genuine way there's no pipped at the post situation - you just weren't prepared to pay more. Now there are some secondary psychological effects, like a high price bid so f…

I think you're grossly underestimating the effect of other visible bids on behaviour. When I was buying a lot of IT equipment, years ago, sniping was the only reliable way to win auctions. It was almost like people would only bid on things others had already bid on.
Post reply on HN