Earlier quoted context omitted.
One could always use a Captcha to stop bots if it became a problem.
A service that solves captcha for you can cost as low as $2/1000 captcha
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Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
51–60 of 167 posts
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#52Perhaps the restaurant should raise its prices.
I think a lot of the business is probably generated because they are sold out all the time. Raising pieces threatens that.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where I work (PagerDuty), we follow up with everyone who cancels -- my favourite was "I only signed up to be alerted by a script as soon as PAX tickets went on sale" He got them.
There's probably a whole market of "notify me when (plane tickets get cheap, apartments look good, tickets go on sale, etc)"
If Amazon had a notification when product X dropped below price Y then not only would it allow people to track that something was now affordable to them, it would allow Amazon to feed back to manufacturers that they could sell N items if they dropped their price to Y.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#54This is remarkable. Concert tickets are also being bought this way by bots for scalpers. Ebay sniper bots are commonly used. High Frequency trading is the high end this. Perhaps it is unavoidable, perhaps other means for selling things online should be sought out, text messages with semantic replies required or something?
That's why I stopped buying things via auctions and stick only to "buy now" solutions. Sniper bots combined with friends bumping up prices on auctions means that a typical auction is a waste of money (price bumped up) and time (you can't win with 10 sniper bots aiming for the very millisecond the auction ends).
Yeah, playfield got leveled because now everybody and their dog can use snipers (hey, where's the reward for technical competence?). So the "game" looks similar to before automation, but is more complicated. A positive feedback loop of increasing complexity if you like. For me, "the only winning move is not to play".
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#55Priceless! When I studied history I learned how to recognize a significant historical document, and this definitely qualifies as one. I wonder what historians reading this two-hundred years from now would think of our culture.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's probably a whole market of "notify me when (plane tickets get cheap, apartments look good, tickets go on sale, etc)"
If Amazon had a notification when product X dropped below price Y then not only would it allow people to track that something was now affordable to them, it would allow Amazon to feed back to manufacturers that they could sell N items if they dropped their price to Y.
Isn't there a risk that this type of notification would break the market segmentation that they're aiming for? If you make discounts too easy, maybe you'll start pulling in people who would have paid the full price.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#57A perfect place to implement a captcha.
Or the equivalent of a shadow ban. Once a bot is detected, always return "no reservations available".
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#58You folks don't actually think that opentable/urban spoon reservation availability is representative of a restaurant's entire table inventory on a given night do you? Pick up a phone (dirty little secret, restaurants segment customers too).
Ah, but then you need the correct phone number...
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#59Perhaps the restaurant should raise its prices.
Do restaurant's scale? Find a bigger venue. Open another store. Maybe they should just deploy to Heroku or Appengine and have them scale to meet their table needs.
The demand doesn't scale, this is a fashion market where new restaurants are in incredible demand until ... the next hot new restaurant gets it's day in the sun.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#60Soon - "Auction Sniper now supports urbanspoon! First 3 reservations are free!" There's something frustrating about reading this. Perhaps its that a technological advancement that was supposed to make life easier is being capitalized on by a small group of technically competent people, shutting out the average user. I was thinking of going to PAX next year a few hours ago and decided to do a bit of research. For this…
Yes, in todays technological society, people who understand technology have advantages. I don't see why that is surprising, given the website you're commenting on.
Ultimately this is not about technology, it's about economics. Surely the restaurant should raise their prices until not enough people want to book 2 months in advance to make bots and make this an issue. Or PAX should raise their prices so they don't sell out in 23 minutes but still sell all their tickets before the show. Or either business should increase their capacity. Or perhaps they are capitalising on the fact that they are oversubscribed as some kind of marketing device. Either way, any time there is a limited supply of something people are going to figure out ways to get some, and if the limited supply is available on the web, people who understand the web will have an advantage.