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Stop The JerkTech

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Re: Stop The JerkTech

#121

Post by gfodor »

eevilspock wrote: post #31
wpietri wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentor at startup events, so I know exactly what kind of people they are. The good ones are people who just haven't thought it through. They've found some sort of demand, and they're doing the standard hack-the-system thing that the startup culture trains them to do. Once it's rolling, it's like Mencken said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it…

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Because nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising, a lot of good people jump through hoops to convince themselves that they have not made a deal with the devil. The downvotes[1] come fast when I point out this moral and cognitive dissonance, usually without any counter argument since t…

Why is advertising "fundamentally manipulative and dishonest?" People aren't stupid. Give them more credit. Truly effective advertising gives more credit to its viewers than you seem to. Have you ever run an advertising campaign? Do you know anything about marketing a product? Cynically manipulating people may help you in the short run, but good sales and marketing is about informing people of value you can provide in a way that respects their time and intelligence.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#122

Post by eevilspock »

enraged_camel wrote: post #109
eevilspock wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count all of the web content you've consumed and all the web services you've used in the past year. Now count all the ones you've paid for. Also, those paid-for services you mention are of such high quality (to you, not advertisers) because you pay for them. You are the customer not the product, as they say.

You're right, and it's depressing that you're being downvoted. Then again, HN can be a very hostile place if you bring an unpopular perspective to a discussion, even if that perspective is presented with clarity of thought and reason.

Thanks. The vote total on my original comment has swung up and down so many times that I know it's getting lots of downvotes. The same goes for many of my previous comments in this vein. As to vdaniuk's claims of an anti-advertising meme on HN, I say: "show me". I've seen little.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#123

Post by gfodor »

potatolicious wrote: post #68
onewaystreet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's very hard to get small businesses, especially restaurants, to signup for unproven new services. This is why you had companies like Groupon spending millions on hiring local sales people.

That's an excuse, not a reason. "Because doing the right thing is too hard" is not a valid reason for doing the wrong thing. "Let me do the wrong thing, I promise (disclaimer: not a real promise) to do the right thing once I've gained sufficient profit" is even less of a reason.

Bullshit. Many, many startups have a chicken and egg problem like this and artificially create demand or supply through 'questionable' tactics in order to prove the business model simultaneously to themselves and to their potential customers. This guy can now go into restaurants and tell them how much people are willing to pay for their reservations. Nobody else can do that, and that just might make the difference to getting those restaurants on board with his product. Once the engine is humming then of course not only will it be unnecessary to keep doing what he's doing but it won't scale anyway.

There's often no other option and the ends in fact do justify the means if the net result is a more efficient market for both parties once it has been bootstrapped up "in the small." Of course, this requires you to not be an evil scumbag and be honest with yourself, but I see no reason to assume a path of execution is inherently evil, the intent and overall strategy greatly matters.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#124

Post by cromwellian »

grey-area wrote: post #102
wpietri wrote: post #7

God yes. The whole point of commerce is the creation and exchange of value. The great startups have been great because they create massive amounts of value in the world. Startups like this don't create value. They just shift the value around. In the case of these startups, they shift the value to rich people while pocketing the cash. They are essentially parasitic. Not only is that a dick move, it's dumb for a startu…

Startups like this don't create value. This is a very old hypothesis, and you are shadowing Marx in decrying parasitic middlemen. Value is such a indeterminate notion that anyone could be said to be creating it, but so many activities we take for granted (and which render us service) are parasitic in some sense - taking rent, opening a store of any kind, transporting goods, paying interest, manufacturing goods are al…

> it doesn't create significant value for end users with advertising

It doesn't? Google ads fund YouTube, Gmail, Docs, Chrome, Android, and lots of other hit Google services that are Google produced products/content, not a middle-man service between content producer and advertiser.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#125

Post by bildung »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #77
metaphorm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Assuming that rich people is richer because society decides that their time is more valuable, they can create more value in the same amount of times of some other poorer people." are you fucking kidding me? why would you assume that?

Economic theory. A rich person earns more money per hour than a poor person (by definition). Money is a representation of value (by definition). In Economics, value earned is at least proportional (if not equal) to value created. So a rich person creates more value in the same amount of time than a poor person. Their time is literally more valuable. In theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In prac…

Economic theory. A rich person earns more money per hour than a poor person (by definition). Money is a representation of value (by definition). In Economics, value earned is at least proportional (if not equal) to value created. So a rich person creates more value in the same amount of time than a poor person. Their time is literally more valuable.

The assumption of a rich person being rich because of the value created may sound plausible, but is empirically falsified for at least the USA and Germany. Statistically, a rich person is rich because she inherited.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#126

Post by Patrick_Devine »

silencio wrote: post #101
icambron wrote: post #84

I dislike all of these companies, but I'd have put it all differently: The first one, Reservation Hop, is simply indefensible because it relies on fraud. It's deceiving restaurants into thinking the person asking for a reservation is a real person. Not only does it involve lying, but it's fundamentally different from scalping a ticket because if no one "buys" the reservation, the restaurant gets nothing and was perha…

> inefficiently priced parking This is not really relevant in the context of San Francisco. The city has been running a pilot program since 2010 to change meter pricing based on demand. Interested startups could have worked within this program and with SFMTA to help. All Monkey Parking et al. have been doing is screwing with this program which has been actively adjusting prices and rolling out to more areas. http://s…

Completely agree. Hats off to the city as SFPark is absolutely brilliant.

Are people actually using these "jerkTech" services though? If you've got the SFPark app, why would you bother with Monkey Parking? I get the feeling that they're all enjoying the free hype/hate which is being doled out right now as it's probably steering more users their way.

Ultimately though there is no way any of these services will be viable. If you face a $300 fine for renting out your parking space (as is the case in SF) and Monkey Parking makes it easy for law enforcement to track you down with their app, not a lot of people are going to want to bother.

It's a similar thing for making restaurant reservations. If restaurants start getting hit with a ton of no shows to the point where they're losing money, it doesn't take long to figure out that it's listed and file a cease-and-desist order.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#127

Post by theforgottenone »

icambron wrote: post #84

I dislike all of these companies, but I'd have put it all differently: The first one, Reservation Hop, is simply indefensible because it relies on fraud. It's deceiving restaurants into thinking the person asking for a reservation is a real person. Not only does it involve lying, but it's fundamentally different from scalping a ticket because if no one "buys" the reservation, the restaurant gets nothing and was perha…

reservation bailing, like scalping can be solved through new business models: for reservation fraud, start by taking a creditcard and charge a 5$ reservation fee that is deducted from your bill. For scalping, there are a lot of various approaches that work.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#128

Post by icambron »

jl6 wrote: post #119
enraged_camel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The parking ones are a bit different, in that they're taking advantage of inefficiently priced parking. The reason parking is priced the way it is is because it is a public good. The only thing "efficient" pricing would do is give wealthy people a massive advantage over the consumption of that good. You might like to live in a world where only rich people can afford public parking - I don't. That's exactly why the…

I think the point re rich-vs-poor is that efficient pricing should be decoupled from wealth redistribution initiatives. An inefficient allocation of resources only has the side-effect of kind-of sort-of assisting the poor. The real solution is to efficiently allocate resources, and then separately take action to correct economic injustice.

I wish I'd used those exact words in my clumsy footnote.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#129

Post by ipsin »

Drivers selling parking spaces in San Francisco are potentially open to fines of $300 according to the city attorney.

It seems very polite that they're going after sites like Monkey Parking instead of simply reserving spots for $5 or $10 and then busting the sellers at $300 a pop.

I suppose that in that case, Monkey Parking would just become a component in an entirely different sort of ecology.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#130

Post by venomsnake »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #77
metaphorm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Assuming that rich people is richer because society decides that their time is more valuable, they can create more value in the same amount of times of some other poorer people." are you fucking kidding me? why would you assume that?

Economic theory. A rich person earns more money per hour than a poor person (by definition). Money is a representation of value (by definition). In Economics, value earned is at least proportional (if not equal) to value created. So a rich person creates more value in the same amount of time than a poor person. Their time is literally more valuable. In theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In prac…

A rich person usually inherits more money. Abolish inheritance and almost all of the capitalistic problems disappear.
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