Privacy Badger Is a Free Browser Extension Made by Eff to Stop Spying
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a browser extension called Privacy Badger that blocks online trackers, sparking discussion about its effectiveness and redundancy with other extensions like uBlock Origin.
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There is an easy solution to this --- it is called "context sensitive" advertising. And the idea is simple --- ads are prioritized based on what you're currently viewing, not your viewing history (aka "personalized ads").
What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?. But if I'm currently looking at an auto dealers web site, the odds are pretty good that I'm still interested in buying one.
What's wrong with advertisers? Without any real proof, they have bought into this vision of advertising that is illogical, ineffective and simply not true in many cases --- the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future.
In the process, they have surrendered their ad budgets to a "black box" process that they have no insight into or control over and can be easily manipulated against them.
So why do I care? Because we *all* pay a price for this.
I do not want to see an unskippable 60 second ad for a skincare product I do not care about whatsoever in the middle of a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90s French hot hatch. I especially don’t want that ad to bisect a word or sentence.
At least try to show me something that might have some passing relevance to what I’m watching, will you, please?
I do appreciate it, but I listen to YT a lot while doing something else, and it's often inconvenient or impossible to touch the screen, because my hands are dirty for example.
And fixing old TVs / C64? Could literally show ads for any retro game company, or digikey, or pcbway, etc etc.
Youtube Devs: Boss our customers are asking for better ads / less focus on AI related stuffs
Youtube Execs: What do you mean? Do you mean we need to make videos auto dub and have it on every video available by default which can't be closed or being very hard to do so
Youtube Devs: :-/
Youtube Execs: Oh yeah , btw Our share price just rose 15% after mentioning AI.
We don't care about sustainability. I want to have a yacht larger than my neighbour and this AI crap is doing that shit.
What do you mean we should listen to the consumers, how would that increase the stock prices.
Meanwhile the stock market being the most evil hungry pretentious group of people a semi quote said by robert downey jr): As long as you can make a short term profit, I don't care. I want profits, sure it maybe a bubble but its profitable and Its not my money anyways, I am selling trading courses to young people who are feeling desperate for jobs in an economy which has abandoned them.
And guess where the people are going when feeling abandoned/frustated... that's right youtube... and guess what sort of ads they are getting.
Is this exploitatatitive, Yes, but is it legal, well maybe, we got bribery to make it legal.
Oh yeah, also make the person believe in small issues to be really big issues and don't really give them an option on the one thing fucking them in their asses which is economy and the extreme gap between billionaires.
This post is pure copium from my side but I want to let you know dear viewer, that when I was a child, I used to wonder how we used to have monarchy when I was studying first about democracy.
Like, surely, we all know that this is superior form, we could reason about it and so on so why did we just adopt democracy so recently in terms of human history/civilization.. Like there are millions of people and some people in between, they could've changed the system... I felt as if I was questioning the people of that time, and I feel a lot of people feel that way in woman empowerment and what not too..
Are we not gonna be questioned by our future generations? Think about it, Grandpa where were you when this whole shit happened. I hope the answer is better than idk man just surviving, since that's what I am doing right now. People have become involuntary celibates the way the dating scene is so fucked and the dating standards so they might not even have grandkids.
We can act tho. We can somewhat share this message or the spirit and be emboldened by it. By having less regrets while existence, fighting a bit. People have things hard but we need to get shit together if we want things better I suppose.
lets just make noise tho and be happy. "The pigs are fools because they know too much"
Dear reader, I want to end it in a positive note. I want to say that it isn't the system that is fucked. It is all of us which are fucked.
Either for staying silent if someone does something wrong.
Or silently doing the wrong thing for ulterior motives.
Yes we are human but dear reader, I feel like corruption only goes to top if it reeks from bottom too as well. Its messed up but maybe we can all try to acknowledge it and try to just know that we are all gonna die anyway and well, giving a other unique human smile and happiness might be the most precious thing.
Not even sure if I am on the right platform with this one given how I see so much AI AI AI bonanza here & well this is a YC funded orange website and what I did was another form of just some self pleasure of sorts, just a way to distress myself from the thing which frightens me while knowing I am doing my part.
My point being that, I thought that we have this carefully crafted society yet its just a mask of elegance and the machine is barely working behind the cogs. Yet, we try to hide from this uncomfortable truth when in reality so much of it dictates all of us down to the ads which are pushed down our throats when we want to watch a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90's french hot hatch.
Try to help somebody today please. Donate please. Volunteer please. Stop infighting between all of us, we have more common than differences, stop bullying, be there for someone. Just say thank you to your loved ones, I am going to do it just now. Idk man, we take shit for granted. even this mask of elegance of society is breaking which we were taking for granted.
Edit: I'm not familiar with data on context based ads but I'm very skeptical they are significantly better in the general case. They are already used in things where it makes sense like when you're searching for something.
Who are these folks doing this "scatter-shot" approach? How do we get some insight into their practices?
The major company doing context sensitive advertising nowadays is Amazon. When you search on Amazon, they display relevant "sponsored" products that are clearly labeled as such.
So how is Amazon's "context sensitive" advertising business doing? By most accounts, pretty good actually.
https://www.campaignlive.com/article/amazons-ad-business-soa...
The real problem in my opinion is the lack of competition to the "personalized" approach. Everyone (except Amazon) just accepts "personalized" as the default --- mainly because there is no credible, large scale, organized, generally available alternative to compare it to.
1. You can easily argue that these "context sensitive" ads are actually personalized ads: They're personalized based on the search query you just made! Amazon context ads are the same as Google/Apple App Store "context ads". Suppliers are paying for higher ranking.
2. It's a shopping website! Of course those context ads are going to have high ROI because they're showing an ad relevant to the thing you're shopping for!
When people talk about context ads, they mean "Why doesn't Facebook or the local newspaper use context ads?" They don't mean "Why doesn't Target put up a coupon for beans in the beans aisle?"
The problem is with data mining and tracking and nudging behavior. I want the things driving my behavior to be originating from my own intentions or from my preferred sources of inspiration (e.g. friends, family, media I'm most interested in consuming.)
You'll never be able to fully control the range of things that influence you, but you can still be intentional to a meaningful degree. For me that means supporting free and open source culture, and using subscription-based model rather than an ad-supported model for content. I'm not perfectly consistent but I am somewhat, and I think I'm operating from a coherent vision of what I believe my interests are, which is no small thing.
Havent almost everyone including MKBHD said youtube ads doesnt give them enough to be used as the only revenue.
Contextual ads are more effective. You type shoes, you get shoes ads. It doesnt first need the shoe data and then later show shoe ads after you started searching for socks. And with no middlemen,more profitable. Duckduckgo employs this IIRC.
Behavioural ads are easy cos you are setting up an api. Contextual ads would mean you need a worthy product and having to handle your ad folks yourself. You cannot buy a domain and immediately start showing ads.
Behavioural ads breakeven because they sell your data. Not ads.
The whole reason why new media outlets moved to subscription model is bizarre to me. They could've just started doing it old school and it would have made news open and more privacy friendly.
There are so many articles on why your FB or Google ads are not doing well. They show ads the way THEY can make money. Not value for you. This is theh same going when you use adwords.
Channels like MKBHD (and LTT) need more revenue than what they get from YouTube ads because their expenses have greatly increased, particularly staff.
You can't automate contextual ads in news media, otherwise you get airline ads next to stories about airplane crashes. Or travel ads for places experiencing natural disasters or political upheaval. People pairing ads with stories increases the labor costs and there's already not enough money being paid for actual journalism to increase the cost of having ads.
The only issue is going to be that you will have to handle this when you implement ads for your website/app. And each of them will have to do it.
They won't say this, the children in their audience will throw a fit, but tech audiences are stacked with content freeloaders.
Not contextual ads which you will setup for just your website / app. They are just <img> tags or equivalent. The entire reason why people use ad-blockers are because it is bad UX, anti-privacy and just sheer garbage amount of data gathering. Use a website with and without ad-blockers. You will see the difference. With middlemen comes problems for users.
The internal data you were viewing and the metrics they track are, in part, to show people and convince them to buy the ad service. That’s like pure uncut ad-guy ad-material.
It definitely works, and the more tailored the ads, the better they work.
The key is remembering we are talking about average people, not nerdy techno anarchists with router level ad blocking and a pavolonian vomit reflex to seeing the word "sponsored".
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
> The key is remembering we are talking about average people, not nerdy techno anarchists with router level ad blocking and a pavolonian vomit reflex to seeing the word "sponsored".
Sure, dump everyone who is skeptical of ads into this niche weird person case, and it makes it easier to ignore them. Have you actually talked to these “average people,” though? My experience has been that most people just find ads annoying.
Edit: to be clear I would believe the effect of ads is overstated, it's just the idea they are ineffective is wrong and people claiming that you can get more effective ads without tracking people at all doesn't seem plausible based on what I know of the industry. I could see contextual ads working in niche use cases (which again we already see when searching for products. YouTubers have relevant sponsors all the time. We even have affiliate marketing, where it's not only contextual but part of the content).
I think this is more of an effect for things like search or ads on an e-commerce platform (somewhat ironically the contextual ads people here are advocating for are much more susceptible to this) but less so for a lot of the more random ads, especially for niche products.
Edit: For me they are obviously effective. I think the more interesting question is exactly what the return on ad spend generally is but that would take very specific data that I don't have access to.
Targeted ads are definitely better for the publisher, but hard to automate (the matchmaking between publishers and advertisers is less automated), but the percentage of ad spend that goes to the publisher is much higher, and the quality of each ad impression is higher.
There’s some win for targeting on the margins, where there’s no good place to buy ads.
Also, there’s an infinite inventory of targeted ad slots (like invisible windows displayed by malware or redirect spam), which could be better than display ads, where you might not be able to spend your marketing budget, at least in theory.
I basically agree with this. I think because people don't like personalized ads, there's a temptation to argue they don't work.
But I think it's motivated reasoning in this case. And I actually think the argument against them is stronger when you acknowledge that they are more effective. The privacy issue goes hand in hand with the effect that ads collectively have to socialize people into consumer behaviors.
Whenever we hire someone, a restaurant to cook our meal, a lawyer to help settle our house purchase, a plumber to fix the leaky pipe, we almost never know what we are buying into.
So e ask people that have previously had someone do those jobs for them.
And here's the rub, they have no idea whatsoever on the quality of the person being hired, only that they've not NOTICED any poor results.
I've highlighted noticed, because, unless the person you ask is qualified to assess the work, they have no idea on is quality.
And this affects us all, because we use references to guide us on people to hire for jobs, and we have no idea on the quality of the person providing the reference.
Do we ask for a reference on the person giving the reference? Even if we do, do e get a reference on the person giving the reference for the person giving the reference?
This is a good enough bar for me to take a chance on someone. If I'm satisfied with the result... I proceed. My "car guy" has a track record of saving me from over-spending on things that don't matter. I don't have a good enough reason to try someone else.
There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either:
1. trust in the person, or somewhere along the chain of referrals or;
2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
> 2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
Yes, that was the point.
Heck, businesses will sue you if you put bad feedback on glassdoor.
I've even been offered 2 months salary by a business to NOT disparage their (toxic) culture on social media.
I trust people I know more than I trust machines that can be manipulated by people I don't know.
If someone gives you a bad recommendation, you make a mental note not to take recommendations from that person in the future.
It's how things have been done for the last 5,000 years.
Never move from your home community.
Like, in the US at least, most licensed professionals are not catastrophically bad at their jobs and you can probably get by with slightly worse contractors and lawyers for most day-to-day issues, for a couple years, while you get integrated into the local community. Especially in areas that you actually want to move to, which tend to have large populations of problem who’ve moved there recently and so are well organized to integrate them.
Some cultures have been very destructive when they've moved into new places, others have learnt to live in harmony with the natural environment.
And, it's new environments that provide us with new problems to try to sollve, and that's probably the most interesting thing in the universe.
Without moving to places where I have no pre-existing social support structures I would never know that the problem exists, nor how brittle the current solution (asking people for their experiences) is.
If I know someone who I think is sensible, and they hired someone to do some work on something that they know nothing about, and the thing was fixed and has kept working for a good amount of time, that is useful information.
What is your proposed solution to deal with this perceived problem? Hire another expert to judge the work (how do you know to trust that expert)? Be an expert in everything yourself?
Lead to ideas of (certain-to-fail) locals-only review websites (that might even enlist folks to do potentially-compensated exit interviews with diners leaving restaurants).
For a functioning community you need to have reason to know your neighbours. Maybe you need to borrow things or lend things, go into town together to share a vehicle, or spend time together in the local pub. The list is endless, however, nowadays, when everyone is car dependent, there is no need to ask a neighbour if you can borrow something, you can just hop in your car and get your own. Or you can just get Amazon to drop it off for you.
In a functioning neighbourhood, you might ask your direct next door neighbour about something such as needing a cleaner, and they might know that the other neighbours, a few doors down have one. You might merely be acquainted with that neighbour, but you would know them well enough to ask them to make the required introductions.
It actually requires a little bit of work to have relationships with neighbours, you also need a functioning street with chance encounters made on a regular basis. Being a pedestrian helps.
Another surprising factor is home ownership. If people are merely renting then they are not invested in the community in the same way.
In the olden days there were opportunities for teenagers to do work such as newspaper rounds, household cleaning, car washing, babysitting, gardening, dog walking and other jobs. But then we stopped having 'free range kids' due to 'stranger danger'. I am from the former times when I did the whole gamut of pocket money jobs for whomever in my village and my mother would know exactly where I was and if anything ever happened to me. If I was late delivering newspapers then someone would call and my 'last known sighting' could easily be ascertained. I could also always hitchhike into town because one of my newspaper customers would stop for me and give me a lift. My neighbours looked after me, and I did my best for them. I also did not do everything, for babysitting I could 'outsource' to my sister and her friends, for gardening gigs I could 'outsource' to some other kid in the village.
What I find interesting is how many of these teenage jobs have become professionalised. For example, washing cars. Nowadays that is 'detailing' and a very different deal with all kinds of potions. Saturday jobs also became professionalised, so you no longer see teenagers serving customers in shops. As for babysitting, you probably need full background checks nowadays.
All of my neighbours that I did things for gave me a little bit of mentoring, and Christmas was amazing due to the amount of tips and gifts that I received.
Oh, how I miss those days. Apologies for the reminiscing!
In some sparser places there might also only be a couple contractors working anyway. Might be able to get suggestions just by asking around wherever you get permits.
People just don't want to do that
Before that, there were classified ads in papers. Those were lightly vetted by the local newspaper. Also, with a warrant, the police could generally track down the person that placed the ad, which broke a lot of bullshit scams. (Like house sitters that don’t exist, but are instead getting lists of people that will be out of town.)
You're right, they'll find whatever incumbent cleaner instead. A marketing ban is something that all incumbents would love, because they don't need to attract more customers whereas marketing is basically the only way that upstarts can get a foothold.
Reputation based platforms are pretty much the only way to go around here. (Yelp barely counts at this point.)
Yes, and anecdotally I've heard of better experiences using services that do not appear on the top search results. The reason being that the top results have already captured the local market and so are less incentivized to respond quickly, accept the job or task, or offer a better rate. They already have their business and may not need yours.
They've already lost the case with this, and are currently trying to prevent what needs to change: Google must be forced to divest large portions of its ad business to reintroduce competition in the marketing space.
Is there any evidence of them abusing that knowledge? Or was the lawsuit over them having a monopoly and/or anticompetitive practices?
Also, note that Google was caught intentionally deleting evidence they were ordered by the court to retain.
Which case is this?
(Note the separate case which determined Google is running an illegally anticompetitive operation in Search was a separate case which can be referred to as "United States v. Google LLC (2020)" and there is a third case they lost recently, Epic Games Inc. v. Google LLC, which determined Google operates an illegal monopoly with Android as well.)
The modern web was designed by predatory middlemen who want a cut of transactions they otherwise have no business being involved in. It's a textbook case of rentier capitalism.
So what needs to change is that we need to identify the design decisions made by those middlemen, rip them out root and branch, and fix the gaps with something that takes as an input the trust graph of the users so that the only way the middlemen can stay relevant is to personally gain the trust of each user whose transaction they've gotten in the middle of, and we need to publish the result as a protocol, not a platform, so it can be used without us (the authors of the protocol) being at risk of becoming the problem we're trying to solve.
I don't get it, is google blocking people from making or requesting word of mouth referrals? Or are people switching to google ads because it's more convenient? It just sounds like you're using "rentier capitalism" to describe companies you don't like.
It would be nice to block them from doing so, but the real fix is to give those users something better to use. Not much has gone into using technology to amplify the innate peer-to-peer trust/distrust mechanisms that we've spent millenia evolving such that they scale to the demands of our times, and quite a lot (thanks to google and friends) has gone into suppressing them.
What does google's control over web standards have to do with the death of word of mouth referrals? You might not like FLoC or webusb but those aren't the reasons why everyone doesn't bother with word of mouth referrals to hire cleaners.
Now I don't know if there are any home cleaners that attempt to reach a wider audience on YouTube. Maybe there's a different medium that might suit their business better. But whatever it is, if it tries to be faster than meatspace gossip, there's some advertising platform selling the ability to interfere with it.
That Google isn't blocking a better model doesn't mean they aren't at fault. Ads are like pollution for our minds, we need a better web
Are you sure you don't have it reversed? Companies would be quite happy if they could enter into some sort of no advertising pact so they don't have to spend any money on ads at all.
>The trouble is, for Google, the customers are the companies buying ads, not the people browsing the web. It's a classic example of not paying for your externalities
No, it's fully internalized, because consumers are getting free content (ie. sites where the ads are placed) and services (eg. gmail) in exchange. I'd be far more sympathetic to your claims of "externalities" if google stuffed its ads into your computer like junk mail makes its way into your mailbox.
That's why it's a local optimum. Any company that try to unilaterally leave advertising will be punished. The global optimum would be no advertising at all, of course.
Anyway the people are already fighting back. I block ads everywhere, at least.
no app can patch this 'analog hole' of the gig industry.
Cutting Google out of the mix can be seen as a net positive for the community. The same can't really be said for taxes that go to your local services.
By avoiding paying taxes, you first and foremost damage the community you live in.
It’s a big stretch to assume that the current tax regime is related in any way to the will of the group of people who are currently subjected to it.
Of course the legal and ethical way to perform a tax protest is to simply have so little income that you don't owe them a thing
That's the way it works. If you're really wealthy your team of accountants can find all sorts of ways to hide income and reduce it to zero or less. The more money you have coming in the less income you have to report, until the government you bought fair and square ends up owing you. Taxation is wonderful extra teat at which to suckle.
I know it's considered a sport but a moral duty?
It is very plainly morally and ethically unambiguous to pay in cash.
Cash is good and I accept 0% of the blame of what other people do in response to me paying them with cash instead of something else.
> very plainly morally and ethically unambiguous
unambiguous[ly] _what_? Bad? Good?
This seems like a trope put forth by the middle men other than the government who want to keep getting their cut of every transaction in the world. "Don't cut out Visa and PayPal, that's practically stealing from your neighbor!"
You can obviously accept payment in cash and report it as taxable income, and not doing this is a good way to get caught, because if you're spending thousands of dollars a year more than you're declaring in income and the government asks you where it came from, you're going to have a bad time.
Meanwhile people who want to risk going to jail can do it just as well by deducting personal expenses as business expenses, or just making up business expenses and hoping nobody comes to check. All while letting payment processors siphon off something like 5% of your gross revenue, which for these kinds of things is often in excess of half your net income because your net margins were less than 10% to begin with.
I think mainly it helps property owners skirt the whole “I’m a landlord” thing and all the legal obligations it entails.
Same for food delivery.
Very different for a cleaner: you never need a cleaner "right now", you can schedule it.
Sometimes you want a ride right here right now, other times you want "a ride to the airport at 6am tomorrow".
Uber let's you "schedule rides" but that doesn't actually do anything to guarantee a ride. You could wind up without a driver if you're unlucky.
Directly contacting the person driving you, 12 hours in advance, is a much better way to guarantee a ride.
...if they haven't had any car trouble, and haven't quit providing car service, and are intending to work then, and haven't scheduled another ride for the same time, and are willing to schedule something when they don't know where their unscheduled fares are going to leave them just before.
The apps that match workers with customers are actually doing something useful. The main problem is that people keep trying to get them to be considered employers, which increases their costs, and then those costs get passed on so that more of what you pay goes to overhead and less of what you pay actually goes to the worker.
I suspect that delivery apps crafted a moat by building a network effect with cheap prices, and now people just use them out of habit. If you know what kind of food you want it can be cheaper just to order directly from the restaurant, and you often get better service. Our local Indian restaurant has a 10% discount for directly ordering through their own app website instead of a delivery app.
For food delivery (at least takeout) and ride share, the app actually provides a real value; it handles matching drivers and customers who want to make a deal now, for a service that is not really super differentiated. It makes sense to stay in their ecosystem and it seems fair that they would be continuing to make a profit.
The problem with a food delivery network is that it should be a dumb network, not a big profit center. It should be like an ISP, with the food being the high value packets being delivered to you.
If you look at pre-UberEats times, each restaurant employed a couple of delivery drivers on scooters. Some might have shared those if the restaurants were on the same street, but that's about it.
During low times these drivers would laze around doing nothing, effectively wasting productivity, whereas during peak times, the restaurant didn't have enough drivers.
Having one delivery driver network for an entire city should have made things more efficient and cheaper. But because for example in Europe, JustEat-TakeAway and UberEats have inserted themselves as the middleman and crushed out all competition. Delivery has gotten more expensive and inconvenient because of it.
These days delivery costs €3-5 and there is a €15 delivery minimum. Before, no delivery charge and there was no official minimum. One time one of my friends order a 6-pack of cola, although I doubt they would have delivered that to the edge of the city.
Worst of it is, restaurants are not allowed to charge lower prices themselves than they offer on the app. On top of that, JustEat-TakeAway will make a branded store site on restaurantname.localdeliverycompany.com, of which they get a cut versus if you used the restaurant's own site.
If delivery is more expensive, more inconvenient and often slower now than before 2015, what 'real value' was added?
This was not my experience. Hardly any restaurants had delivery other than pizza.
> If delivery is more expensive, more inconvenient and often slower now than before 2015, what 'real value' was added?
More expensive maybe, but I strongly disagree that it's more inconvenient or slower.
> This was not my experience. Hardly any restaurants had delivery other than pizza.
Your parent commenter appears to be European. Europe enjoys better city living in many ways than the United States does because the US is relatively underpopulated. (On the other hand, urban Americans have much larger homes.)
But the standard Dutch takeaway food has always been Chinese (Dutch Chinese-Indonesian, actually), and I think even now that might still be more takeaway than delivery.
> But the standard Dutch takeaway food has always been Chinese (Dutch Chinese-Indonesian, actually),
Well, those and things like spareribs, burgers, kapsalon, etc., which makes it a rather broad spectrum of takeaways that already had delivery.
In case you didn't know, Takeaway = Thuisbezorgd (or rather, the other way around). And in the 2010s, Thuisbezorgd and Just Eat had a pretty active fight for marketshare, until they decided the most profitable course of action was for Just Eat to operate in the countries where it held a majority marketshare, and Takeaway to do likewise, creating regional monopolies. Later on they merged, which any sane regulatory agency would have blocked.
What is interesting is that UberEats hasn't tried to compete on price at all. They charge similar, semi-extortionate prices. They just offer delivery from more and more upscale places.
I wonder why the apps out-competed it. Delivery apps are often not even supported officially by the restaurants, right? It’s just sort of like—if somebody comes in for the pickup and gives the right name, they don’t typically care and will just give the delivery guy your order. So it isn’t like some vendor lock-in thing, seems just like network effect from the users or something…
You order on Uber Eats, Toast, Seamless, and they set the prices pushing them up.
It’s a completely parasitic market and if a restaurant does not participate it’s squeezed out due to not being able to compete with online ordering.
You notice how you can’t just order from xyzpizza.com and choose 1-7 vendors to deliver the pizza? They should class actioned into the depth of hell.
Imagine going to Nike.com, but Nike has to sell on the usp website at the ups price because they deliver the last mile package…
That's basically how retailing worked before direct-to-consumer? Even with Nike you can get their goods through a variety of distribution channels.
Pizza is already sold, the last mile delivery should have zero impact on its retail. Right now the last mile delivery has a near monopoly on retail of a restaurant. Pretending that toast/grubhub/seamless somehow benefit the customer is pure rubbish.
Exactly.
Networks (markets) operators must be prohibited from competing on their own networks.
Apple's App Store must be spun off as a separate entity.
Amazon cannot offer their own competing products on their Marketplace.
Google must divest their digital advertising from their search engine (or vice versa).
Doctorow & Giblin's Chokepoint Capitalism is a terrific take on our current rentier economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokepoint_Capitalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_....
Nintendo was the first widespread closed platform.
Which food delivery network has big profit margins?
I usually find the place I'd like to stay on AirBnB and then google the title & description and the property management website usually pops up.
Since they don't need to pay AirBnB, its usually 20% cheaper via their website or calling.
AirBnB takes an obscene amount for doing almost nothing.
Maybe it's selection bias but 80%+ of the airbnbs I stay at are mom and pop establishments with 0-2 other properties listed on their profile. I doubt they have enough scale to bother set up a separate booking website for their properties. That said I have noticed hotels advertising on airbnb, but they represent a small fraction (ie. <10%) of listings that I see.
This simply doesn't work.
I'm half a century old, go on vacation several times each year, and it happened only once in my lifetime that I wanted to go to the same rental as before. I pulled the card from the owner, called him, and found out that it's not free at the time I can go there.
I also don't know anyone who was in the same rental more than once.
So yes, Booking, Check24 and similar always take their cut in my case.
Once again, "I don't do that" is not the same as "no one does that".
I do have some relatives that like to rent the same place year-after-year for family events, for whatever reason. They are a little picky so I think they just like to go back to a place if it worked out. I’m actually not sure if they go through apps at this point, or what…
That value doesn't persist over time because you already know the maid. So there's an expectation that you make a direct arrangement with her.
I know several people who tried this and the cleaner said no. I think (not sure) the cleaner signed some kind of contract/agreement with the website not to do that and worries that if they are discovered they will be banned from the site and thus lose the other 90% of their income. Dunno how rational that fear is.
Caveat: your SO must not be allergic to going to the same place more than once in a lifetime. My ex was.
Households pay $200 a year, they get 2 credits. Each credit grants you a stay at another member's house. Anytime someone stays at your house, you earn a credit.
I think something like this, if it finds traction, is really cool. Of course, that probably means you probably wouldn't be able to use this network to stay in some random remote area, but if it's in a host happens to be in an area you want to stay in, it can be even cheaper than AirBnB.
Apps seem to be very good at bringing people together initially, it is up to us to develop relationships after that, and apps are not as good for that.
Well. Communication apps are! Signal et el.
When you call up your local plumber, you are doing everything under the counter.
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