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Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

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Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#141

Post by laumars »

PeterisP wrote: post #106
laumars wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the result of more people going is a side effect of raising prices; it shouldn't be the main reason. In fact if anything, prices are usually raised to decrease the number of people who pay out for it (ie exclusivity). The issue here is bots, so the solution should be to make such reservation / booking sites unfriendly to bots. Then the event organisers / restaurants can choose to adjust their prices based on the…

The issue here isn't bots, the issue is that there are a lot of people who want to go, and they can't decide which ones will stay home (as there isn't enough space for all of them). You need to decide on some kind of system to decide who will get to come. You can draw randomly, you can determine who you want to come and invite them, or you can determine who want it the most by asking them to pony up a lot of resource…

The issue here is exactly bots. The problem is people who have bots are gaining an unfair advantage over those who do not have bots. But raising prices, all you're doing is shifting that unfair advantage from people with IT skills to people with a higher disposable income. Thus you're not solving anything.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#142

Post by pyoung »

pyoung wrote: post #8

Seems like Urbanspoon should be using some sort of scraping counter measures to make things a little more fair. I sent them an e-mail through their contact form (of course I wouldn't be suprised if those are sent straight to the trash/spam folder). Also, is scraping legal? I would imagine, at the very least, the OP and others are violating the TOS. I have written a few scripts of my own for fun, but I would be carefu…

Well, looks like they do actually respond to the contact form, got an e-mail from them a few moments ago saying they were "aware of the situation". Although, looks like this blog has been picked up by some mainstream news outlets, who have been getting comments from Urbanspoon:

http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2013/07/25/are-automate...

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#144

Post by moheeb »

michaelochurch wrote: post #126

Do people actually use "foodie" unironically? I thought that was something people invented to stereotype suburbanites who'd caught on to "gourmet" meaning absolutely nothing; I didn't know until now that people actually called themselves "foodies". Wow, it's a weird world out there.

Well you have to have some way to differentiate them from the people that don't like food.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#145

Post by moheeb »

zalew wrote: post #26
bpodgursky wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please for the love of god keep the shitty memes on reddit.

sorry, forgot to apply the stick up my this morning, so I couldn't appreciate the seriousness of foodie reservations in sf.

Non-hipster technique would have included invoking Yogi Berra and his "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." line.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#146

Post by linuxhansl »

Reminds of the tickets to "walk" up Half Dome (Yosemite park). After some folks died a few years back, the number of folks is limited and you have to get a ticket.

All tickets for the year are gone on the first day they become available and then lo and behold you can suddenly buy the tickets (for a considerable markup) elsewhere. The folks scooping up the tickets like this are parasites. The solution is to limit the number of tickets per person or to disallow reselling.

(Haven't tried for a while out of frustration, might be different now)

I know, slightly tangential to the article.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#147

Post by wizzard »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #125
wizzard wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the services utilize human interaction to solve the captcha and that would almost certainly prevent all the openings from being taken in <1 minute.

Here's the thing though: you've got two people who are eagerly waiting for the purchase / booking of something to become available. One of them is going to do it all manually. The 2nd person has a bot to do all the form filling in leg work but will manually solve the captcha. Who wins?

True, but there are multiple openings available. I guess they're probably already executing in parallel though. When I looked earlier the DBC average was 17 seconds... with browser form fillers you could beat that!

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#148

Post by enraged_camel »

__david__ wrote: post #127
Fuzzwah wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you ban bots with out implementing an arcane, clunky, painful, expensive manual system? PS: your answer isn't allowed to be captcha.

You don't. I'd much rather suffer through a captcha than have the tickets/reservations sell out in seconds.

Yeah, pretty much this. PAX is a huge, widely popular event. It has an entire community built around it. I suspect that the vast majority of people would not mind filling in a captcha if it means they will have a much better chance of hanging out with friends they made in previous years' PAXs.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#149

Post by sien »

namdnay wrote: post #61
sien wrote: post #2

This 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?

I really don't get the outrage against scalpers. They're just buying commodity futures, taking a bet on the future value of the tickets. If the value goes up, they make a profit, if the band suddenly become unpopular or whatever they lose. We're in a capitalist system, the price you pay the scalpers is the "real" price of the concert: it's the law of supply-and-demand. Now, if scalpers win every time, this is an issu…

The outrage at scalpers relates to how people feel what something is 'worth' against what you pay for it.

The existence of scalpers is curious. Artists could get the money they do. There are reasons why they still exist, one of them being that artists use scalpers to get cash in hand.

There is a really good episode of Planet Money that looks at why there are scalpers, how they work and what can be done by artists if they don't want them to make money:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-rock...

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#150

Post by westicle »

If an establishment wants to give non-techies the opportunity to attend, yet remain "accessible" to those without piles of money, there are a few solutions.

1. Don't take reservations.

My favourite restaurant operates on this basis. On a Friday or Saturday night you will queue for up to an hour for a table. If you prefer to avoid peak hour, there is rarely any queue for lunch. I've eaten there over 100 times and I still don't begrudge the time spent in the queue.

2. Run a lottery

Popular theatrical productions are great at this. If you don't want to book months ahead (or can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars), Book of Mormon offers a ticket lottery before every show. Just show up at the theatre and enter for your chance to win one of 21 discounted, front-row tickets.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting that the establishment in the OP wants to let the poor and/or technological illiterate to attend. However other places have managed to do so without hurting their brand.

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