Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders • Hacker News Board

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#111

Post by nuker » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 1:01 PM UTC

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…

> .. I did to make my life less miserable was to automate a lot of the searching, sifting, and grabbing ..

So it is not bots, it is your own customers, that know how to code. You should not fight your own customers, right? Coding skills in this century is like reading skills in previous one.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#112

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 1:03 PM UTC

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…

So groceries are high-frequency trading now?

I suppose the effect of technology is to accelerate every market, so we'll gradually see this and its accompanying sniper bots in more places. Food. Housing.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#113

Post by dylan604 » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

qppo wrote: post #67

dylan604 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taping an envelope to your door clearly visible for the delivery person would still remain contactless. If the envelope is still there when you pick up your items, then no harm in trying

Is there an app to deliver cash to my house? I haven't been to an ATM in at least a year. /s but only kind of.

you do have a point. i have used cashapp more in the past 4 months than i have ever used it.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#114

Post by octernion » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #60

gonehome wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be surprised if Instacart could pull this off, their app is one of the worst pieces of software I use on a regular basis. Really confusing UX, simple things like looking up previous orders are several clicks and popups away. It's extremely, painfully slow (page loads take seconds and refresh often, I have a gigabit connection). Want to add things you always buy? It'll show you things you often buy in a weird side…

Instacart rivals AirBnB in how bad their software is. Wipe from your resume bad.

you base this on ...? it still boggles my mind that people log onto this website and think that they are contributing.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#115

Post by jgalt212 » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

whyhow wrote: post #103

I think this could be fixed by making each job be posted for a fixed block of time, say five minutes. Then it is randomly assigned to one of the shoppers that selected that job. This would remove the incentive around reaction speed and I don't think the customer would care about the slightly increased time for an order.

I was here to say the same thing. But you don't even need to extend the time frame to five minutes to defeat the bots. Lisa Marsh, in the article, complained "no human can click that fast." I bet she only needs 10-15 seconds to assess an order.

Not for nothing, this is the same mechanism by which the "unfair" advantages of HFT practitioners can be defeated. Run mini-auctions every whole second and randomly allocate fills if there are ties for best bid and/or best offer.

Of course, as long as the exchanges deeply care about vanity metrics such as trading volume (trading volume !== liquidity) such measures will never be broadly enacted.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#116

Post by sokoloff » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

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…

EBay has a fundamental flaw with bid retractions that discourages early bidding.

If you bid $100 on an item that is currently at $5, it becomes $6. If someone else (possibly in cahoots with the seller) bids $150 and then retracts their bid, the fact that you’re willing to pay $100 has been leaked.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#117

Post by simsla » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

nuker wrote: post #111

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…

> .. I did to make my life less miserable was to automate a lot of the searching, sifting, and grabbing .. So it is not bots, it is your own customers, that know how to code. You should not fight your own customers, right? Coding skills in this century is like reading skills in previous one.

Sometimes you should.

Apart from it being zero-sum and this depriving other people of opportunity, with some of these services there's a promise of "starting fulfillment" upon acceptance. This is voided when a bot picks it up.

Real life example: I ordered an Uber, which was accepted by a "driver" just two streets down. Except the car still hadn't started moving 10 minutes later. So I walked over, and the GPS signal seemed to be coming from a parked car, no driver in sight. Messaged and called the driver, but no response, even 20 minutes after acceptance. Had to contact Uber to get the cancellation fee back.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#118

Post by specialist » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

godzillabrennus wrote: post #83

MichaelGlass wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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-...

Free market idealists think the market can determine the minimum wage without government or organized labor enforcing higher wages.

The Freedom Markets™ faithful proclaim

  - efficient markets

  - rational actors

  - no transaction costs 

  - power imbalances are moot

Any notions otherwise are apostate and must be purged.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#119

Post by BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

Uber handles this by not letting drivers know the destination before they arrive for pickup. Can't instacart offer the same functionality? Like you see the order, shop location, but do not see the amount and other "lucrativity" info. And there is a penalty for cancelling after you accepted.

Re: Instacart shoppers besieged by bots that snatch lucrative orders

#120

Post by notyourday » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

angry_octet wrote: post #59

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…

What you're working up to is a reverse auction for delivery service. Who is willing to do a batch of deliveries for the least price? Constrained time TSP+Knapsack, a very challenging problem. (Because you can choose many different subsets of delivery jobs, run TSP for each, and calculate a bid price for each job that will win, or if you don't, minimises regret.) The real problem with instacart is that some orders are…

All of this is pretty simple. Instacart simply needs to block ability of those that make an order from decreasing the tip after the order is live and automatically charge the shopper a penalty in the amount of the tip and service fee for accepting an order and not completing it.

The first will remove incentives of customers to create orders that are tasty for shoppers under the false pretenses.

The second one will make it costly for shoppers to accept good orders that they cannot complete.