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Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

theatlantic.com

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Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#21

Post by Illniyar »

danso wrote: post #14
woolvalley wrote: post #7

I love how you can see the original less-clickbait headlines of 'Who charges those electric bird scooters?' in the title tag and 'charging-electric-scooters-is-a-cutthroat-business' in the url.

How do you know that the tag contains the "original" headline? It seems to be more tailored for SEO, i.e. to attract the people who wonder (and then Google), "Who charges the electric scooters?"

Never thought about that. Do they really do different titles for different entry points?

The webarchive supports that this has always been the title.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#24

Post by Ambroos »

woolvalley wrote: post #7

I love how you can see the original less-clickbait headlines of 'Who charges those electric bird scooters?' in the title tag and 'charging-electric-scooters-is-a-cutthroat-business' in the url.

Any decent CMS allows for these to be configured differently for each page because they serve different audiences. Your title tag, open graph title tag, Google metadata title and actual all serve very different purposes. For Facebook you might want something clickbaity, while for Google a clearer title will usually do better.

For most content this sort of optimization would be a bit much, but for a piece like this it could definitely work.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#26

Post by tlrobinson »

lordnacho wrote: post #17

I want to hear more about Bird's business model. How can it be worthwhile for them to give hundreds of dollars out to have the scooters charged? What do people pay for using the scooters? As per the article, it also seems incentives are not quite thought out yet, so people can grab the $20 "hard-to-find" fee reasonably easily. It sounds like you can have a friend stash them until the fee goes up, then go and collect…

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/10/how-to-understand-the-fina...

Anecdotally, working/charged/available scooters are hard to find in downtown San Francisco.

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#27

Post by dcposch »

danso wrote: post #11

> “Charging scooters for Bird is like Pokémon Go, but when you get paid for finding Pokémon” A modern version of Rip Van Winkle would only have to be asleep for 2 months to be just as clueless and out-of-touch as the original Van Winkle was when he took a 20-year nap.

Pokemon Go was two years ago

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#28

Post by jlebar »

Illniyar wrote: post #10

Doesn't seem at all out of control. Seems like an awesome idea and the process needs to be refined to dissuade bad behavior. Considering the company was founded about a year ago is probably a lot of room for improvements and innovation (and angering your contractors in the process).

There headline may be a slang reference, "out of control" = "awesome" or "dope".

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#29

Post by danso »

Illniyar wrote: post #21
danso wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that the tag contains the "original" headline? It seems to be more tailored for SEO, i.e. to attract the people who wonder (and then Google), "Who charges the electric scooters?"

Never thought about that. Do they really do different titles for different entry points? The webarchive supports that this has always been the title. https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

Not sure what content-management system The Atlantic uses, but WordPress (or at least its popular SEO plugins) allow you to specify different values for and article headlines. A lot of news orgs are now savvy enough to use varied titles for different formats. For example, this week's New Yorker print issue has a story titled, "Behind the Wall", which works in print because your eyeball can scan the article's entire presentation and see the headline in context with a photo and subhed "As the U.S. abandons diplomacy, an Ambassador resigns in protests".

In the online version, the story's title is "The Diplomat Who Quit the Trump Administration", and the subhed (which is also the description) contains proper nouns: "For John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama, moral failings at home seemed to compound tactical failings abroad"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/28/the-diplomat-w...

Re: Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business

#30

Post by nicky0 »

guessmyname wrote: post #8

I wonder if the company is asking these teens, during the registration as contractors, if they have permission from their parents to charge all those scooters at home. I can imagine several parents getting angry for excessive increments in the electricity bills every month without having a clue about their children's "business". Of course, many of them will probably find the scooters in the garage in a regular mornin…

This is why you didn't found a scooter startup.
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