Regulate or save your breath. Jerks don't care whether people think that they're jerks or not.
Stop The JerkTech
141–150 of 202 posts
Re: Stop The JerkTech
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Because nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising" Citation please? There are many "internet businesses" that don't derive their revenue from advertising, e.g., AWS, Dropbox, Netflix. Spotify derives some revenue from advertising, but their core business is subscriptions. ad nauseum
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.
Most people don't pay for Wikipedia, how are they the product?
Many people pay for Hulu and many other services, and still get ads, how are they not the product?
That cliché can't die soon enough.
Re: Stop The JerkTech
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the restaurants could enjoy higher margins if they made great websites which let you bid for last-minute reservations?
Because talking to a human for 30 seconds is that much of a chore when making a reservation? And how, exactly, would that do anything to prevent reservation scalping without adversely affecting the user experience of making a reservation or making life even easier for reservation scalpers? Probably it will be easy to use and easy for scalpers to screen scrape, or the UX will be a some kind of CAPTCHA-filled monstrosi…
Because talking to a human for 30 seconds is that much of a chore when making a reservation?
In my experience, the problem is not the 30 seconds call, it's the minutes of waiting to get someone free to answer. Most restaurants can't exactly afford a call center.
There was a story recently on HN of a restaurant who did just that successfully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786
Re: Stop The JerkTech
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scalpers do not create value. At a concert the value is being created by the performers, and it's not like scalpers create seats or make the show longer. They just shift value around to people with more money.
Scalpers do create value. After a complete scalping transaction: - the original ticket purchaser is happier with the cash received than with the ticket they had before - the final ticket purchaser is happier with the ticket than with the cash they paid - the scalper is happy with his/her profit - the promoter's/venue's revenue is unaffected So, three people are better off. Value has been created.
By shifting the demographics of the audience, it can reduce the value of the show. Quoting Kid Rock, who has been trying to eliminate scalpers:
Kid Rock and his team are reserving the first two rows for die-hard fans
only. No matter how much money you've got, you can't buy your way into them.
"They are not for sale, " Kid Rock says. "I'm tired of seeing the old
rich guy in the front row with the hot girlfriend. And the hot girlfriend,
you know, with her boobs hanging out,with her beer in the air, just screaming
the whole time. The old rich guy is standing there like he could[n't] care
less. It's a very common theme at Kid Rock concerts."
Re: Stop The JerkTech
#145I 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.
Saying that "It's easy to solve, so if the restaurants haven't yet, it's probably not a problem" is pretty bad as excuses go.
The point isn't that it can't be solved, the point is that if it need solving, it's probably a problem, and companies are supposed to solve problem, not to deport them from their paying customers to non-paying third-party.
Re: Stop The JerkTech
#146> Thankfully the city of San Francisco is fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking with cease-and-desist orders. The city of San Francisco should be fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking by cutting out the middleman and drastically raising their parking fees.
They're doing some of that. But there's a problem with that: plenty of people who live here can't afford a sudden major bump in living expenses. In the long term, correct pricing is part of the solution. But in the short term, it'd be unfortunate to solve the problem by screwing poorer people. And anyway, this could be a temporary spike in demand. Once places like ZipCar and Uber get ahold of self-driving cars, I exp…
plenty of people who live here can't afford a sudden major bump in living expenses.
Where I live, residents can get a small sign from the municipality that they can put in their car to avoid parking fees (when parked near their home). Seems like a simple solution.
Re: Stop The JerkTech
#147Early squatting on parking spots - like when a company is early to offer people social networking or online video, and they can then charge people endlessly based on their proprietary spot for activities that should remain free - public domain video and human interaction? Yeah, the parking guys are the only exploitative, piggybacking guys around on the web.
Re: Stop The JerkTech
#148It seems that the part of young generation is extremely demanding. So demanding that they misunderstand "communal" with "my". I am part of generation that is happy to destroy public property just because they can. Generation that sells what is rightfully owned by all. Its sad that mentioned startups are more like vultures rather than tigers. Good that someone finally publicly named those companies.
Oh, please. Every generation had people selling common goods. The "tragedy of the commons" wasn't exactly coined last year.
The reason these companies are made of young people is because they're tech startups.
Re: Stop The JerkTech
#149There is certainly a high level of jerkiness in making fake reservations, but I think it's overblown in the article. If a restaurant is exclusive and popular enough to require reservations, and people are willing to pay $5-10 for a reservation, why don't they just charge $5-10 for reservations themselves, or require a small membership fee to make reservations, or start rejecting customers who can't prove they are the "Dick Jerkson" who made the reservation, etc? (That last one would only need to be a temporary measure, as most people are going to ditch the app after being turned away once or twice.)
Re: Stop The JerkTech
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That was the grandparent's whole point - the value (at least in this naive conception) Google creates comes from its non-advertising - and non-profitable - parts.
(If some other organization got the profits Google was making as an advertising middleman, who's to say they wouldn't produce equally good products/content?)