For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again. This is mostly Australian frequent flyers, when it was a high barrier to entry it conferred advantages and now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage, and no points flight availability.
So yes. Status seeking, and differential price seeking probably is a-social as a pattern when it's weaponised against the consumer.
That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door (how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me) and they continue to export all the profits offshore, but taxi services had become shit and now we have got used to Uber and I just don't worry about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.
My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.
The European push to mandate included luggage in flight is seeing a fair bit of trolling. So there are still true believers who think needing clean underwear is weak.
> My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.
I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping. Its a slippery slope - I know these guys are underpaid but if you start tipping the wages will just drop and we're all worse off.
1.) Owner needs workers and wants to make the position attractive.
2.) Owner is given the option to enable tips, and entice works with "Pay, plus tips!"
3.) Owner doesn't pay tips, patrons do.
4.) Workers blame patrons, not owner, for not tipping.
5.) Patrons feel guilty and tip. Workers make pretty good money from this, and enjoy the job more.
In a way it's kind of like a social mind virus, where the workers and owners benefit, and the patrons feel pain for not going along with it.
The only fix I can come up with is a law that tips can only be solicited after a service has been rendered. And entering something into a computer is not a service.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work. It's supposed to seep into every crevice of society and pull money out of the poorest, weakest people and into the hands of the richest and strongest. This isn't a coincidence, it is in fact the most important aspect of the system.
Tipping went from some generous gesture to recognize exceptional service and it's turned into a mandatory, arm-twisting shakedown by businesses that simply do not want to pay their employees. Not just avoid paying a living wage (those days are long gone) but not even a _minimum_ wage. Many people involved in or invested in the restaurant businesses wouldn't have thought about getting in if they had to pay employees for an honest day's work.
Many restaurants these days aren't just local mom and pop family run businesses but large corporations who own many franchises and operate in the billions of dollars yet people like you and I are expected to pay most of the wages of the servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darden_Restaurants
Sure, you can never eat out or only eat at locally owned small businesses. But that's just one small slice of society. The only realistic solution for many of us is to try to run the rat race faster.
Tipping is just a tax on losers. My friends were all about how they always tip and that’s why they get Ubers faster but then it turns out I never tip and I get them in the same time.
I’m a regular at this bakery / coffee store and I buy a doughnut there every day and I never tip.
Uber and Lyft are expensive but anyone who says they are worse than what they replaced doesn’t remember well the heydays of taxis. Sure, people in big towns like NYC could always get one fairly easily, but everyone else was stuck dealing with whatever potentially shady operation they could dig out of a phonebook, and even then getting a car wasn’t guaranteed.
Now, anyone anywhere can get a ride, often quickly. I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.
I'm really not sure old school taxis are actually that bad.
I had two incidents in the UK recently where my app of choice failed me and I was quickly bailed out cheaper by googling "taxi $TOWN" and having a one minute conversation with an operator.
> I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.
So which of the laws that uber broke to get big are what prevented these new issues, and which are what made the old way bad?
I remember the time before Uber arrived here, where ”here” obviously is not USA.
I don’t mind the old ways.
Taxis had apps before Uber arrived here, they had geolocation with ETA, contactless payment, up-front pricing, and never refused service (because they were required by law to offer service to anyone anywhere).
The problem probably never was incumbent taxis, it was how they were regulated (or not).
Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.
> about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.
Not sure how it is in the US (I used uber there on vacation in the past, but on vacation, I don't worry about prices too much), but here prices jump heavily during surge; often from 40->50->38 euros in a few minutes; I'll just keep an eye on the app for a few minutes and pick it at a good point. Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price. I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them (these two are related). The last one I took was 3 weeks ago; I was 10 minute drive to the airport from some horrible 'business hotel' and I had an early flight, so I checked out, ordered an uber at 5am and waited; in front of me stopped a 'real' taxi (both are now legal and need licenses, but Taxi have Taxi on top); the driver got out to welcome his client which was not me but obviously he thought I was. We talked for a bit waiting for his real client and then he asked how much uber was; E15 I showed him. He said; cancel it and give me E15. Ok, so I got in front, the other client in the back. We arrived, and while waiting to park up, he shoved a terminal in my face with E15 on it, so I paid. We got out, he got the luggage from the other guy who asked 'how much is it'; E72,-. Cheers bro; made almost E90 for a 10 minute trip.
Point being; hating uber (and I used to refuse to use them) is making your life very hard for very little benefit. The taxis needed a kick up the arse and they still didn't learn anything. Still need to order far upfront, their app sucks and far more expensive. Not sure how they can exist (of course I do, they don't know uber exists, how to use it or they refuse to use it). I find if you are with 2+ people, they are often cheaper than the trains which is quite mental really in a country where 'people should take the train if they can'.
Yup. The price jump isn't just a "surge." It's the algorithm calculating the highest price you'll tolerate without abandoning the app long-term, no matter availability of cars (which can be related, but from CFOs perspective that's not the metric to optimize)
This personalized price discrimination is precisely the kind of manipulation geohot is describing.
It's the same principle as (an old story) booking.com charging Mac/Safari/iphone users more.
> I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them
You should check if there are taxi apps where you live. In Europe a lot of these apps consolidated under bigger brands (e.g. FreeNow) so it's a good bet that you'll find one and then you have the same experience as Uber. Just check which gives you a better price.
When the service providers feel cheated by the app they have to use to reach any audience (Booking, Uber, etc.), they'll find ways to make more money. Hotel owners gave me hefty discounts just to cancel a Booking reservation and pay directly, Uber drivers did the same. And with taxis it's getting ever so slightly harder to cheat when people have a recording device in their pockets at all times. I know cases where friends used Strava to record a trip and could show it's impossible for the trip to cost that much at advertised prices. Driver complied.
Startup idea: Strava for taxi rides, disrupt the market of shady taxi drivers with an app dedicated to tracking the trip to calculate/estimate costs.
> Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price.
Not where I live. Here, Uber is 50-100%
more* than the price of a local taxi, at all times of day. Uber is also at least 30% more expensive than hailing a black cab.
So even though I have the app, after optimistically checking the Uber price, I invariably choose to book a taxi instead.
The shorter arrival times shown in the Uber app are sometimes tempting, but after waiting nearly 30 minutes for a car that Uber continuously said was 4 minutes or less away, with their location moving around (so not stuck in traffic) and driver repeatedly changing, I don't take the time seriously any more.
I just wanted to correct the impression that's often put out that Uber is cheaper (or faster) for the customer. It's evidently true in some places. But where i live, other than when they ran a 50% discount for the first few months after arriving in town, I've never seen Uber be anything other than the most expensive option.
It's not due to lack of drivers: I've been told most drivers at the biggest local firm switched to Uber as soon as they arrived in town, and that's backed up by seeing Uber-marked cars everywhere.
Regarding Uber, I agree that their price transparency is very much appreciated.
However it's not rare to find bad drivers on Uber. On Christmas this year I took an uber from the airport, the driver had supposely arrived but he was nowhere to be seen. We called each other and I could hardly hear anything. After wasting about 30 minutes (and battery almost depleted) we finally found each other. It turns out he didn't know how to speak English or the local language. He had two phones, one he used to call a colleage who could (barely) translate english for him, the other phone he used to talk to clients, and both phones were placed mic-to-speaker to bridge the calls. What about the extra time that the driver wasted? I was billed for it and I had no way to dispute it. I could only report this behavior in a review to a driver that didn't seem to be him (was the main driver subletting his account?).
> Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.
That’s because the ”priority” queue for those carriers is really a ”paid for a proper carry on”-queue. But the airlines realised that they could brand it as a priority queue to make the upcharge to bring a bag more palatable. You’re not spending €40 just to bring a bag that used to be included in the ticket, you also get to feel more important. At least the first time until you realise 2/3rds of the plane is also important.
I really want to dislike Uber because I'm generally much in favor of locally-operated public services rather than a big foreign corporation, but man, taxis really make it hard.
In my country (Spain) there can't be more than 1 Uber (or similar) per 30 taxis by law (obviously pushed by the taxi lobby). That's actually enforced, at least in my region (I think in some regions, like Madrid, it's not). Additionally, in my region Ubers are further nerfed by requiring booking 15 minutes or more in advance and not allowing trips inside of a city, but they just disregard that law and at the moment it doesn't seem to be actually enforced, although taxis are protesting a lot about it so it might be in the future.
Normally I would be indignant at a foreign big corp disregarding laws, but it's hard not to support Uber when taxis are clearly not enough to meet demand (sometimes you need to wait half an hour for one, in a small city where if you are fit you get to most places walking in that time anyway. If I want a taxi it's because I'm in a hurry and walking or taking a bus won't cut it, if I have to wait 30 minutes for a taxi it becomes useless) and they constantly push not only to limit the number of Ubers, but also the number of taxis themselves. They prefer to be guaranteed to always have customers waiting and see the taximeter numbers go up constantly, and screw the people who have to put up with a terrible quality of service because they don't meet demand. In the past I used to take a taxi to the train station if I'd rather work some more instead of stopping 30 minutes earlier to take the bus, now I don't even bother because you might need the same time to go by taxi than by bus due to scarcity of taxis.
Add to that that many taxi drivers are rude, and many drive Dacias which are the cheapest low-end car here... come on, I'm not saying they should be luxury cars, but you are serving customers in a car that is your whole means of production, your image and your calling card, and that will be amortized very fast, and you go for the absolute cheapest that you can find in the market? What does that say about your care for the customer?
I take Ubers whenever I can (which is also seldom, because obviously with the 1 to 30 rule they are even further than taxis from meeting demand) because taxis really go the extra mile to make me hate them.
> What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again
Wouldn't the market purist argue that this just means the good is mispriced, and tickets should actually be what the price is with the premium added? What you really need is to just raise the prices of the tickets and the price to jump the queue?
The market purist might argue for a second-price auction for boarding order, where people board in the order of highest sealed bid for boarding order to lowest, but pay the amount bid by the person behind them in the sequence; or for "Paris Metro Pricing" where everyone being in the "priority" line results in a large fraction of them opting not to pay the premium for the next flight they take. Or they might think up something I haven't thought of.
For market purism to work people need to have an idea what they are paying for. If this is changing too quickly or there is personalized pricing it becomes a very different kind of game.
People don't make buying decisions from a purely rational headspace, though. Charge too much for the upfront ticket and people will go to someone advertising it for lower (but with additional back-end services that are must-have)
My guess is the hidden fees end up making businesses more money
especially the australian airline example and perhaps with much broader applicability, I know that companies are completely happy with managable competition (Australian domestic airlines are functionally 2 players, and similarly across many large industries here that's true) where over time once they can establish profitable gimmicks neither party really wants to rock the boat and they're able to lock in that margin forever more. It doesn't suit established players to compete on that, they both open up losing situations in the game theory compared to silent non-competition.
In high capital businesses like airlines and supermarkets it seems to play out all over the place these days.
> For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again
There's a freedom that comes with not caring and just accepting I am last in the line. I don't pay the premium and I can sit and relax in the lobby while the sheep that paid wait in line. Only when the queue is nearly depleted it is my turn.
The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate. Boarding last means there's no more bin space and the gate agent will put the bag in the belly of the plane. This adds extra hassles of waiting an extra 30+ minutes at the arrival terminal to wait for the bag on the conveyor belt and/or the bag getting lost.
Yes, it can look "irrational" to hurry up and get in line because as some like to say, "No point in fighting to get on the plane first since we're all leaving on the same plane at the same time!" ... The issue isn't the departure time -- it's the limited bin space.
EDIT add reply to : >bag put in the belly lf the place, and my bag was never lost.
There are more complications because at some airports with widely separated terminals, going outside of the security zone to pick up a bag at the conveyor belt also means using slower buses instead of the tram to go to another terminal to get a car. E.g. at Dallas airport, the faster railway trams are only available inside the secured area. So not getting that bag in the overhead bin has domino effect of waiting for buses (another +30 minutes) which can add up to 1 extra hour of waiting at the arrival destination. Getting in line early for boarding is a small price to pay to avoid all of that.
> now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage
Why would you want to be on the plane earlier than necessary? Only thing I can think of is better access to the overhead lockers, which fill up fast these days.
Asocial people are great because they lack exactly this kind of status seeking and don't feel the need to engage in zero-sum social games. They just do what they like, which often is something actually productive or fun.
This behavior is anti-social. It actively harms everyone else except the person (or group) doing it.
Australian FF points programs ceased being about flights long ago, now they are a complex web of data harvesting and cross promotion. Why are our airlines offering homeloans, health insurance and retirement investment funds?
If you wanted to be generous you could say it the other way around, moving some features to premium allows people who value time and money differently to still get the bulk of the value they want out of the proposition. I don't for one minute think that's the actual conversation had in HQ but it's still valid I guess.
> What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium
That's simply discovering the true price of a product. We're living in a mega-inflationary period, but most people won't accept that a dollar or a euro is actually worth no more than 30 cents. So sellers are putting things which used to be included at a premium price. If people pay, then that is the price.
It's highly annoying as a customer, but the general public won't accept that product and services they pay for cost double than they used to. At the same time the general public demands that their real estate and stock investments should be valued at triple or quadruple than what they used to.
"how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me)"
The essence to breaking crony capitalism. No prosecution. No change. Fines do not work. For a start, it's the shareholder that pays. Prosecute the executives with more than just a wag of the finger, and it changes behaviour.
I thought the name of Uber was all you needed to know, what kind of company names themselves after "Deutschland über alles", or Übermensch? The smug superiority was all the clue I needed.
>My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.
Eh I wouldnt speak for all of us. I like having the ability to reward contractors with some extra cash for a job well done. The issue is structurally relying on it.
Shit, when I was 14 or so I worked as a baggage handler. And I will never forget the time we took on an overflow job from an american cruise liner at circular quay. Not only was I getting 20 bucks an hour (decent pay at the time), but I took home an extra 1100 or so completely tax free. Nothing as australian as cash in hand.
>That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door
Its always moral to break unjust laws. The taxi monopolies needed to be broken. Having those laws challenged thanks to the donation of US VC money was just a bonus.
Actually theres still work to be done. Sydney CBD is still extremely hostile to rideshare.
We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.
This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.
Not to me. I don't want to manipulate the manipulators. I just want to not be manipulated. I want to be able to go through my day without having to fight off manipulation in order to do and be what I want to do and be.
The goal is my freedom, not to "stick it to the man" in some way that won't actually matter to them.
> The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people
>> That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".
The fact that there's such a market now, means something on it's own I believe. Regardless if it's a "lifestyle", it's a lifestyle people are choosing now. I know more and more people who either don't own a smartphone or have it on DnD at all times.
It's the same for "manipulation awareness" or whatever. You can't will a market into existence, the market has to already exist because people are drawn to it.
I am not saying that it will matter in the end, but I can say for a fact that there are people consciously disengaging from social media.
I think pretty far. I expect the future involves nonsense layer full of AI slop being read and written by AI's. Mapping it onto the actual humans will be difficult unless you have a preexisting trust relationship with those humans such that they can decrypt the slop into your actual communications.
Have you read anything by Mark Fisher? He spoke about capitalism absorbing all resistance which makes it almost impossible to ever escape from. Which is what you’re saying I think. Resistance becomes the next market and works through the same economic systems it’s attempting to resist.
> I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.
Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window.
Analysis: This user loses disengages during 75% of the
time and belongs to a group of 5% who do the same. The
expected revenue for this group over a longer period
and with multiple users is 24% lower than for the
average user.
Action: Since 80% of theirs engagements last for at
least 12 hours, ads should be shown and prices
increased only within the first three hours.
You cannot disengage from capitalism. The tricks you describe are perhaps useful to not be the slowest antelope in the herd but that doesn't mean you are fully free from being exploited.
Let's be clear: it's entirely possible to leave the "herd". People can and do go completely off-grid and thus disengage from capitalism. The crucial point is that the vast majority of us choose not to. That choice is what makes your "slowest antelope" analogy so much more complex.
An antelope's greatest desire is to be in the herd, because while it may contain a lion, the world outside contains a thousand wolves.
We've built a herd—society—that is incredibly effective at holding those wolves at bay: famine, plague, and chaos. We willingly participate because it provides "shields" our ancestors could only dream of. The problem isn't the herd itself; it's the lion that we allow to stalk within it.
What I am suggesting isn't to abandon this safety and comfort brought by modern capitalism. It's to improve the herd—to enjoy its protections while finding ways to tame, cage, or evade the lion of exploitation. What we're discussing here aren't futile attempts to escape, but vital tactics for building a better, safer herd for everyone.
> We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement.
It's worth adding that "disengagement" does not mean "not giving a f*ck", and I worry that it isn't a good human response either.
So what's the difference between "not giving a f*ck" and "disengagement"? I think where the former works on the individual level, the latter is supposed to work on the collective level. I'm no scholar on any social sciences, mind you, but I worry that disengagement can only lead to positive change in conjunction with the Broken windows theory[0]. Here's the bummer: A lot of us are already in said stage of disengagement.
We somehow are in an atmosphere that makes it unpleasant for everyone and let the environment decay together, but the provoked collective change is just not happening. The dumbphone and digital detoxes are outliers. What happens instead is that the threshold for what's acceptable is systematically being lowered, and my biggest gripe is that it's done in the name of equality and inclusion while the imbalance between demographics is just growing. Tell me why?
There was a movement after Occupy Wall street and the Arabic Spring where it got fashionable to Not Giving a F*ck[1]. It contrasted a movement of self-optimization, growth-hacking, and some data-driven lifestyle usually reserved for corporate marketing. Morphemes such as hyper/super/über got resurrected from a nostalgic sentiment of the economic boom in the 80/90s, the neoliberal free-market Accelerationism and Bitcoin certainly fit in there. While "not giving a f*ck" was a critique of the established attention-grabbing system to promote the individuality of citizens, it also got misinterpreted by political representatives and corporate operators that started to put more focus on their own career than the responsibility of their current role. They all "didn't give a f*ck" anymore in a world that got more and more connected, year after year.
> If you open a government S&P 500 account for everyone with $1,000 at birth that’ll pay their social security cause it like…goes up…wait who’s creating this value again?
This is a good point. Some VCs were major proponents of this (and tons of other business people I'm sure), but this is of course just a guaranteed inflow into the largest companies and the companies that think they will be large some day. Yet another way to reallocate public cash to private companies.
Another similar example is UBI -- its proof of an economy that is not dynamic. It's a tacit approval and recognition of the fact that "no, you probably won't be able to find a job with dignity that can support you and your family, so the government will pay to make you comfortable while you exist".
During the depression this was done with a job guarantee. Instead of paying people to sit on their ass they paid people to build stuff like the Lincoln tunnel, which was preferable for them (and even for us, we still use that stuff).
UBI is more like the grain dole which Roman Emperors used to temper mass unrest and "prove" their benevolence.
It seems to be in vogue among tech moguls who cant distinguish between abject dependence on the Chinese industrial system/systematic underinvestment in infrastructure and all jobs being automated thanks to their glorious genius.
If everyone gets an equal raise (whatever the UBI is), wouldn’t the entire market simply adjust to price that in, leaving everyone in the same relative position?
> I don't think there are many proponents of that type of ubi.
Another good sign of a difficult policy to implement successfully/an idea that isn't ready for primetime. If everyone has different ideas of what the thing is, it's very hard to make good decisions, and easy for the "wrong" UBI to sneak in.
Other commenters have already made this point, but there are other ways to guarantee "subsistence". I think the hard to answer question is why are the targeted methods currently available not good enough? If we want to ensure people have food, then food subsidies/support make sense.
Also, if unemployment is the problem, fix that. If unemployment isn't the problem and people who are working aren't getting subsistence wages, fix that.
I think part of the problem is that no one wants to stick up and define what we think every human deserves and what we want society to provide. Does every human deserve housing? Access to green space? etc. Trying to clearly define this will lead to really interesting discussions that lay bare the disagreements core to society.
I think my early point still stands, UBI is not needed (we're making do without it now), and if it ever is needed, it's a sign of a lack of dynamism in the economy/ineffective wealth distribution mechanisms (basically, taxation).
It is an allocation to the biggest companies at any time.
ETFs need to rebalance, increase, decrease shares of a given stock and even evict them. Buying shares on SPY exposes you to the current companies but also any companies that will join.
If a company gets evicted, then there is massive drop in their stock pricing as most movement is mechanistic and done by ETFs.
Well massive is relative. For example last week we saw quite the drop in pltr after it was removed from russel2000.
FYI this is not true and has been debunked in newer studies; the reason why it seems true is because companies that enter the SP500 tend to enter it because they're doing well which makes its stock go up. If you control for that factor, presence in the SP500 does not significantly affect the stock price. https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...
Hedge Funds call ETFs, pension funds, etc. "dumb money". I suspect they also feed the finance media narrative stating how on average they are not good at trading.
No, but it makes the stock price appreciate which is even better than a cash inflow for an inside investor since your wealth increases without a taxable event.
I generally avoid George’s non-technical posts because they are… let’s say uninspired.
But here is one that actually makes sense. Of course the self-reflection with who he otherwise praises and spends his time with will never set in, but at least others may take the time to look inward and do something differently.
Something has to change. Even HN seems to have had an increase in sentiment like this in the past few years. Maybe I’m just noticing it more myself. Maybe it’s not just the existence of the Grape, but rather where it came from.
I was hopeful that by titling his post “Are we the baddies?” that he would spend at least a little time reflecting on his role in all this. But he didn’t.
I have to wonder if some people are just trying to follow the hype. This reads like the "put a cell phone camera on your dashboard to make a car self-driving" approach to reflection.
I think there is genuine burnout. Also it makes sense that the more grizzled on HN have lived long enough to see the fruits of the labor, perhaps just tangentially, and what it has wrought. Coupled with the industry treating its workers pretty poorly right now and shattering all illusions, it makes sense this sentiment is rising.
I worked on the original browsers and modern internet infrastructure. I worked on building the hyperscale cloud infra that enables the modern internet. I’ve had my fingers on so much of what is happening. And I felt genuinely like I was helping build some thing better. Then the role of product manager was invented and I regret everything I’ve done.
Context: built a viable business which I ran for many years. Eventually got seduced and went to work for big(ish) tech as a product manager. It was so divested from what I understood about building great products - however I was fantastic at doing things my way and getting shit done; largely based on what I learned from doing "all the things" at a small business. I had lots of success while also suffering with burnout and anxiety almost constantly.
Worked on incredibly popular cloud and OSS software. Hated most of it - especially what product management and the product-management-industrial-complex was distorting that role to be (divorced from much of reality but also expected to fix bullshit founder/c-suite/old-guard behavior). Oy the Miro boards and endless GDocs comment threads.
I left product (and some wild comp) to go back to building things.
So, I'm not disagreeing, I am just hoping you could expand a bit more on your own personal experience with rise of the product manager role.
Nevertheless, I also don't think PMs and PM-centric culture, are to solely to blame. I've not yet met a leadership team who's behavior and decisions I respect and/or can live with (and yes, it's highly possible I'm the problem).
>But eventually the market will fix this, right? People will feel sick of being manipulated and move elsewhere?
You can literally go outside and talk to people. There's no moat around dating apps. Human beings continue to exist in meatspace. I am yet to see a dating app contract that prevents you from being casually approached by strangers. Heck matchmakers still exist.
> You can literally go outside and talk to people.
You can't . If you talk to modern city people the way you casually said 'hi' to strangers in the 90s , at best you 'll end up in a tiktok branded as a creepy person
> You can't . If you talk to modern city people the way you casually said 'hi' to strangers in the 90s
It is true, in some places, that talking to strangers are generally frowned upon without having a good reason to do so.
The trick is to either only open up the conversation when you have something relevant to say (or funny, seems to work sometimes too), or move to city/country where it's socially accepted.
As someone who used to live in a country where talking with strangers is basically implicitly forbidden and straight up weird, but then moved to a country where it's completely normal, the amount of interesting conversations easily skyrocketed as soon as I landed in my new home country.
I've done this a few times over the last few days alone (in Seattle no less, a city infamous for being antisocial - though I'm willing to accept some were tourists for the 4th).
IME, people are actually starved for human interaction.
I agree with the premise that it is really difficult and sucks to "just go out and talk to people". Depends on where you live I guess though. I think thinking you'll end up on a TikTok because you talk to a person in a queue is just a far off excuse.
This exchange highlights the huge difference in experience people have w.r.t. dating. Some people get approached all the time and others never get approached and it's always been like that. I blame humanity for this unfair system rather than some stupid app.
I usually see this as an anti immigration dogwhistle.
I live in an actual hellhole by these standards.
For 40 years, every refugee or immigrant population was forced to live in my region. Every time the government wanted to do A/B testing on welfare, my region.
When I first wanted to move here I considered that I would need amazing security and reviewed crime stats. OH NO, its a CRIME HOTSPOT. How could I subject myself to that, I would have to live in fear.
Then I turned off "Drug Crimes" in the police statistics, and that completely normalised the results against much richer, whiter suburbs.
If anything we have a greater density of churches, because everyone wants to hear the bible read in their tongue. Theres an islander community just over the main drag from me where twice a year I see like 200 big islander kids dressed in choir costumes being loaded into busses for a big church thing.
My wife literally takes my toddler out for walks unassisted in the middle of the night.
I have no issues talking to people, or being approached by people.
Readit News
So yes. Status seeking, and differential price seeking probably is a-social as a pattern when it's weaponised against the consumer.
That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door (how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me) and they continue to export all the profits offshore, but taxi services had become shit and now we have got used to Uber and I just don't worry about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.
My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.
The European push to mandate included luggage in flight is seeing a fair bit of trolling. So there are still true believers who think needing clean underwear is weak.
I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping. Its a slippery slope - I know these guys are underpaid but if you start tipping the wages will just drop and we're all worse off.
1.) Owner needs workers and wants to make the position attractive.
2.) Owner is given the option to enable tips, and entice works with "Pay, plus tips!"
3.) Owner doesn't pay tips, patrons do.
4.) Workers blame patrons, not owner, for not tipping.
5.) Patrons feel guilty and tip. Workers make pretty good money from this, and enjoy the job more.
In a way it's kind of like a social mind virus, where the workers and owners benefit, and the patrons feel pain for not going along with it.
The only fix I can come up with is a law that tips can only be solicited after a service has been rendered. And entering something into a computer is not a service.
The custom of tipping came to America from Europe after the First World War, and tipping was seen as deeply un-American until the 1950's.
It is sometimes mentioned in films and radio dramas of the period. See the Bettie Davis movie Petrified Forest for one example.
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This is how capitalism is supposed to work. It's supposed to seep into every crevice of society and pull money out of the poorest, weakest people and into the hands of the richest and strongest. This isn't a coincidence, it is in fact the most important aspect of the system.
Tipping went from some generous gesture to recognize exceptional service and it's turned into a mandatory, arm-twisting shakedown by businesses that simply do not want to pay their employees. Not just avoid paying a living wage (those days are long gone) but not even a _minimum_ wage. Many people involved in or invested in the restaurant businesses wouldn't have thought about getting in if they had to pay employees for an honest day's work.
Many restaurants these days aren't just local mom and pop family run businesses but large corporations who own many franchises and operate in the billions of dollars yet people like you and I are expected to pay most of the wages of the servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darden_Restaurants
Sure, you can never eat out or only eat at locally owned small businesses. But that's just one small slice of society. The only realistic solution for many of us is to try to run the rat race faster.
I’m a regular at this bakery / coffee store and I buy a doughnut there every day and I never tip.
You can just do things.
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Now, anyone anywhere can get a ride, often quickly. I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.
I had two incidents in the UK recently where my app of choice failed me and I was quickly bailed out cheaper by googling "taxi $TOWN" and having a one minute conversation with an operator.
So which of the laws that uber broke to get big are what prevented these new issues, and which are what made the old way bad?
I don’t mind the old ways.
Taxis had apps before Uber arrived here, they had geolocation with ETA, contactless payment, up-front pricing, and never refused service (because they were required by law to offer service to anyone anywhere).
The problem probably never was incumbent taxis, it was how they were regulated (or not).
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Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.
> about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.
Not sure how it is in the US (I used uber there on vacation in the past, but on vacation, I don't worry about prices too much), but here prices jump heavily during surge; often from 40->50->38 euros in a few minutes; I'll just keep an eye on the app for a few minutes and pick it at a good point. Taxis are almost always twice or sometimes (airport) 3x the price. I never take them as they are also often rude and I cannot rate them (these two are related). The last one I took was 3 weeks ago; I was 10 minute drive to the airport from some horrible 'business hotel' and I had an early flight, so I checked out, ordered an uber at 5am and waited; in front of me stopped a 'real' taxi (both are now legal and need licenses, but Taxi have Taxi on top); the driver got out to welcome his client which was not me but obviously he thought I was. We talked for a bit waiting for his real client and then he asked how much uber was; E15 I showed him. He said; cancel it and give me E15. Ok, so I got in front, the other client in the back. We arrived, and while waiting to park up, he shoved a terminal in my face with E15 on it, so I paid. We got out, he got the luggage from the other guy who asked 'how much is it'; E72,-. Cheers bro; made almost E90 for a 10 minute trip.
Point being; hating uber (and I used to refuse to use them) is making your life very hard for very little benefit. The taxis needed a kick up the arse and they still didn't learn anything. Still need to order far upfront, their app sucks and far more expensive. Not sure how they can exist (of course I do, they don't know uber exists, how to use it or they refuse to use it). I find if you are with 2+ people, they are often cheaper than the trains which is quite mental really in a country where 'people should take the train if they can'.
Yup. The price jump isn't just a "surge." It's the algorithm calculating the highest price you'll tolerate without abandoning the app long-term, no matter availability of cars (which can be related, but from CFOs perspective that's not the metric to optimize)
This personalized price discrimination is precisely the kind of manipulation geohot is describing.
It's the same principle as (an old story) booking.com charging Mac/Safari/iphone users more.
You should check if there are taxi apps where you live. In Europe a lot of these apps consolidated under bigger brands (e.g. FreeNow) so it's a good bet that you'll find one and then you have the same experience as Uber. Just check which gives you a better price.
When the service providers feel cheated by the app they have to use to reach any audience (Booking, Uber, etc.), they'll find ways to make more money. Hotel owners gave me hefty discounts just to cancel a Booking reservation and pay directly, Uber drivers did the same. And with taxis it's getting ever so slightly harder to cheat when people have a recording device in their pockets at all times. I know cases where friends used Strava to record a trip and could show it's impossible for the trip to cost that much at advertised prices. Driver complied.
Startup idea: Strava for taxi rides, disrupt the market of shady taxi drivers with an app dedicated to tracking the trip to calculate/estimate costs.
Not where I live. Here, Uber is 50-100%
more* than the price of a local taxi, at all times of day. Uber is also at least 30% more expensive than hailing a black cab.So even though I have the app, after optimistically checking the Uber price, I invariably choose to book a taxi instead.
The shorter arrival times shown in the Uber app are sometimes tempting, but after waiting nearly 30 minutes for a car that Uber continuously said was 4 minutes or less away, with their location moving around (so not stuck in traffic) and driver repeatedly changing, I don't take the time seriously any more.
I just wanted to correct the impression that's often put out that Uber is cheaper (or faster) for the customer. It's evidently true in some places. But where i live, other than when they ran a 50% discount for the first few months after arriving in town, I've never seen Uber be anything other than the most expensive option.
It's not due to lack of drivers: I've been told most drivers at the biggest local firm switched to Uber as soon as they arrived in town, and that's backed up by seeing Uber-marked cars everywhere.
However it's not rare to find bad drivers on Uber. On Christmas this year I took an uber from the airport, the driver had supposely arrived but he was nowhere to be seen. We called each other and I could hardly hear anything. After wasting about 30 minutes (and battery almost depleted) we finally found each other. It turns out he didn't know how to speak English or the local language. He had two phones, one he used to call a colleage who could (barely) translate english for him, the other phone he used to talk to clients, and both phones were placed mic-to-speaker to bridge the calls. What about the extra time that the driver wasted? I was billed for it and I had no way to dispute it. I could only report this behavior in a review to a driver that didn't seem to be him (was the main driver subletting his account?).
That’s because the ”priority” queue for those carriers is really a ”paid for a proper carry on”-queue. But the airlines realised that they could brand it as a priority queue to make the upcharge to bring a bag more palatable. You’re not spending €40 just to bring a bag that used to be included in the ticket, you also get to feel more important. At least the first time until you realise 2/3rds of the plane is also important.
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In my country (Spain) there can't be more than 1 Uber (or similar) per 30 taxis by law (obviously pushed by the taxi lobby). That's actually enforced, at least in my region (I think in some regions, like Madrid, it's not). Additionally, in my region Ubers are further nerfed by requiring booking 15 minutes or more in advance and not allowing trips inside of a city, but they just disregard that law and at the moment it doesn't seem to be actually enforced, although taxis are protesting a lot about it so it might be in the future.
Normally I would be indignant at a foreign big corp disregarding laws, but it's hard not to support Uber when taxis are clearly not enough to meet demand (sometimes you need to wait half an hour for one, in a small city where if you are fit you get to most places walking in that time anyway. If I want a taxi it's because I'm in a hurry and walking or taking a bus won't cut it, if I have to wait 30 minutes for a taxi it becomes useless) and they constantly push not only to limit the number of Ubers, but also the number of taxis themselves. They prefer to be guaranteed to always have customers waiting and see the taximeter numbers go up constantly, and screw the people who have to put up with a terrible quality of service because they don't meet demand. In the past I used to take a taxi to the train station if I'd rather work some more instead of stopping 30 minutes earlier to take the bus, now I don't even bother because you might need the same time to go by taxi than by bus due to scarcity of taxis.
Add to that that many taxi drivers are rude, and many drive Dacias which are the cheapest low-end car here... come on, I'm not saying they should be luxury cars, but you are serving customers in a car that is your whole means of production, your image and your calling card, and that will be amortized very fast, and you go for the absolute cheapest that you can find in the market? What does that say about your care for the customer?
I take Ubers whenever I can (which is also seldom, because obviously with the 1 to 30 rule they are even further than taxis from meeting demand) because taxis really go the extra mile to make me hate them.
Wouldn't the market purist argue that this just means the good is mispriced, and tickets should actually be what the price is with the premium added? What you really need is to just raise the prices of the tickets and the price to jump the queue?
My guess is the hidden fees end up making businesses more money
In high capital businesses like airlines and supermarkets it seems to play out all over the place these days.
There's a freedom that comes with not caring and just accepting I am last in the line. I don't pay the premium and I can sit and relax in the lobby while the sheep that paid wait in line. Only when the queue is nearly depleted it is my turn.
The supposed "sheep" that want to get on the plane first are people that want to get that precious overhead bin space to avoid checking a carry-on bag at the gate. Boarding last means there's no more bin space and the gate agent will put the bag in the belly of the plane. This adds extra hassles of waiting an extra 30+ minutes at the arrival terminal to wait for the bag on the conveyor belt and/or the bag getting lost.
Yes, it can look "irrational" to hurry up and get in line because as some like to say, "No point in fighting to get on the plane first since we're all leaving on the same plane at the same time!" ... The issue isn't the departure time -- it's the limited bin space.
EDIT add reply to : >bag put in the belly lf the place, and my bag was never lost.
There are more complications because at some airports with widely separated terminals, going outside of the security zone to pick up a bag at the conveyor belt also means using slower buses instead of the tram to go to another terminal to get a car. E.g. at Dallas airport, the faster railway trams are only available inside the secured area. So not getting that bag in the overhead bin has domino effect of waiting for buses (another +30 minutes) which can add up to 1 extra hour of waiting at the arrival destination. Getting in line early for boarding is a small price to pay to avoid all of that.
The actual strategy is not that you are last, but that you choose to be part of the smallest group.
Why would you want to be on the plane earlier than necessary? Only thing I can think of is better access to the overhead lockers, which fill up fast these days.
Getting on the flight 15 minutes early also beats dawdling in a slow moving like for 20.
Lounge access is worth it alone! Especially on international connections!!
Asocial people are great because they lack exactly this kind of status seeking and don't feel the need to engage in zero-sum social games. They just do what they like, which often is something actually productive or fun.
This behavior is anti-social. It actively harms everyone else except the person (or group) doing it.
That's simply discovering the true price of a product. We're living in a mega-inflationary period, but most people won't accept that a dollar or a euro is actually worth no more than 30 cents. So sellers are putting things which used to be included at a premium price. If people pay, then that is the price.
It's highly annoying as a customer, but the general public won't accept that product and services they pay for cost double than they used to. At the same time the general public demands that their real estate and stock investments should be valued at triple or quadruple than what they used to.
just scale premiums in cost and number...
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Eh I wouldnt speak for all of us. I like having the ability to reward contractors with some extra cash for a job well done. The issue is structurally relying on it.
Shit, when I was 14 or so I worked as a baggage handler. And I will never forget the time we took on an overflow job from an american cruise liner at circular quay. Not only was I getting 20 bucks an hour (decent pay at the time), but I took home an extra 1100 or so completely tax free. Nothing as australian as cash in hand.
>That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door
Its always moral to break unjust laws. The taxi monopolies needed to be broken. Having those laws challenged thanks to the donation of US VC money was just a bonus.
Actually theres still work to be done. Sydney CBD is still extremely hostile to rideshare.
Washing clothes was discovered several thousands years ago.
And boarding plane is much faster. I really do not want to pay for your luggage!
So you carry high quality detergent, and clean washing machine with delicate setting, and then air dry your clothes? Nice.
This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.
That disengagement metric is valuable, I'm not gonna give it away for free anymore. I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works.
> The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people
That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".
> People are feeling the manipulation
They don't. Even manipulation awareness is a market now. I'm sure there are YouTubers who thrive on it.
---
How far can you game a profiling algorithm? Can you make it think something about you that you're not? How much can one break it?
Those are the interesting questions.
If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
Not to me. I don't want to manipulate the manipulators. I just want to not be manipulated. I want to be able to go through my day without having to fight off manipulation in order to do and be what I want to do and be.
The goal is my freedom, not to "stick it to the man" in some way that won't actually matter to them.
>> That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle".
The fact that there's such a market now, means something on it's own I believe. Regardless if it's a "lifestyle", it's a lifestyle people are choosing now. I know more and more people who either don't own a smartphone or have it on DnD at all times.
It's the same for "manipulation awareness" or whatever. You can't will a market into existence, the market has to already exist because people are drawn to it.
I am not saying that it will matter in the end, but I can say for a fact that there are people consciously disengaging from social media.
I think pretty far. I expect the future involves nonsense layer full of AI slop being read and written by AI's. Mapping it onto the actual humans will be difficult unless you have a preexisting trust relationship with those humans such that they can decrypt the slop into your actual communications.
Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window.
Hope this helps :)An antelope's greatest desire is to be in the herd, because while it may contain a lion, the world outside contains a thousand wolves.
We've built a herd—society—that is incredibly effective at holding those wolves at bay: famine, plague, and chaos. We willingly participate because it provides "shields" our ancestors could only dream of. The problem isn't the herd itself; it's the lion that we allow to stalk within it.
What I am suggesting isn't to abandon this safety and comfort brought by modern capitalism. It's to improve the herd—to enjoy its protections while finding ways to tame, cage, or evade the lion of exploitation. What we're discussing here aren't futile attempts to escape, but vital tactics for building a better, safer herd for everyone.
watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY linkhead removed for language and content, but you know what to do (and probably who it is)
It's worth adding that "disengagement" does not mean "not giving a f*ck", and I worry that it isn't a good human response either.
So what's the difference between "not giving a f*ck" and "disengagement"? I think where the former works on the individual level, the latter is supposed to work on the collective level. I'm no scholar on any social sciences, mind you, but I worry that disengagement can only lead to positive change in conjunction with the Broken windows theory[0]. Here's the bummer: A lot of us are already in said stage of disengagement.
We somehow are in an atmosphere that makes it unpleasant for everyone and let the environment decay together, but the provoked collective change is just not happening. The dumbphone and digital detoxes are outliers. What happens instead is that the threshold for what's acceptable is systematically being lowered, and my biggest gripe is that it's done in the name of equality and inclusion while the imbalance between demographics is just growing. Tell me why?
There was a movement after Occupy Wall street and the Arabic Spring where it got fashionable to Not Giving a F*ck[1]. It contrasted a movement of self-optimization, growth-hacking, and some data-driven lifestyle usually reserved for corporate marketing. Morphemes such as hyper/super/über got resurrected from a nostalgic sentiment of the economic boom in the 80/90s, the neoliberal free-market Accelerationism and Bitcoin certainly fit in there. While "not giving a f*ck" was a critique of the established attention-grabbing system to promote the individuality of citizens, it also got misinterpreted by political representatives and corporate operators that started to put more focus on their own career than the responsibility of their current role. They all "didn't give a f*ck" anymore in a world that got more and more connected, year after year.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving_a...
This is a good point. Some VCs were major proponents of this (and tons of other business people I'm sure), but this is of course just a guaranteed inflow into the largest companies and the companies that think they will be large some day. Yet another way to reallocate public cash to private companies.
Another similar example is UBI -- its proof of an economy that is not dynamic. It's a tacit approval and recognition of the fact that "no, you probably won't be able to find a job with dignity that can support you and your family, so the government will pay to make you comfortable while you exist".
I don't think there are many proponents of that type of ubi.
The way, at least I, see ubi is absolute subsistence - with a right to earn above that without affecting your subsistence.
IMHO something along UBI is needed for a democratized market economy - and I think the Scandinavian countries are the support for this claim.
UBI is more like the grain dole which Roman Emperors used to temper mass unrest and "prove" their benevolence.
It seems to be in vogue among tech moguls who cant distinguish between abject dependence on the Chinese industrial system/systematic underinvestment in infrastructure and all jobs being automated thanks to their glorious genius.
Another good sign of a difficult policy to implement successfully/an idea that isn't ready for primetime. If everyone has different ideas of what the thing is, it's very hard to make good decisions, and easy for the "wrong" UBI to sneak in.
Other commenters have already made this point, but there are other ways to guarantee "subsistence". I think the hard to answer question is why are the targeted methods currently available not good enough? If we want to ensure people have food, then food subsidies/support make sense.
Also, if unemployment is the problem, fix that. If unemployment isn't the problem and people who are working aren't getting subsistence wages, fix that.
I think part of the problem is that no one wants to stick up and define what we think every human deserves and what we want society to provide. Does every human deserve housing? Access to green space? etc. Trying to clearly define this will lead to really interesting discussions that lay bare the disagreements core to society.
I think my early point still stands, UBI is not needed (we're making do without it now), and if it ever is needed, it's a sign of a lack of dynamism in the economy/ineffective wealth distribution mechanisms (basically, taxation).
ETFs need to rebalance, increase, decrease shares of a given stock and even evict them. Buying shares on SPY exposes you to the current companies but also any companies that will join.
If a company gets evicted, then there is massive drop in their stock pricing as most movement is mechanistic and done by ETFs.
Well massive is relative. For example last week we saw quite the drop in pltr after it was removed from russel2000.
But here is one that actually makes sense. Of course the self-reflection with who he otherwise praises and spends his time with will never set in, but at least others may take the time to look inward and do something differently.
Something has to change. Even HN seems to have had an increase in sentiment like this in the past few years. Maybe I’m just noticing it more myself. Maybe it’s not just the existence of the Grape, but rather where it came from.
It's Hotz. Why would you waste time expecting that.
Can you share that that post is about and the significance of it in relation to this link?
https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/a8ec08e5bbc2be0a32...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/20/23519922/george-hotz-geo...
Worse! He volunteered, then went "Hey anyone want an internship? Fix twitter search, Make the code MIT, and then maybe I'll give you an internship."
...had 0 authority to give anyone an internship btw. Dudebro just wanted free fix.
Context: built a viable business which I ran for many years. Eventually got seduced and went to work for big(ish) tech as a product manager. It was so divested from what I understood about building great products - however I was fantastic at doing things my way and getting shit done; largely based on what I learned from doing "all the things" at a small business. I had lots of success while also suffering with burnout and anxiety almost constantly.
Worked on incredibly popular cloud and OSS software. Hated most of it - especially what product management and the product-management-industrial-complex was distorting that role to be (divorced from much of reality but also expected to fix bullshit founder/c-suite/old-guard behavior). Oy the Miro boards and endless GDocs comment threads.
I left product (and some wild comp) to go back to building things.
So, I'm not disagreeing, I am just hoping you could expand a bit more on your own personal experience with rise of the product manager role.
Nevertheless, I also don't think PMs and PM-centric culture, are to solely to blame. I've not yet met a leadership team who's behavior and decisions I respect and/or can live with (and yes, it's highly possible I'm the problem).
Dr Death is also a very apt take on modern technology
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Skl71urqKu0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRbj1Q4tXNo
You can literally go outside and talk to people. There's no moat around dating apps. Human beings continue to exist in meatspace. I am yet to see a dating app contract that prevents you from being casually approached by strangers. Heck matchmakers still exist.
You can't . If you talk to modern city people the way you casually said 'hi' to strangers in the 90s , at best you 'll end up in a tiktok branded as a creepy person
It is true, in some places, that talking to strangers are generally frowned upon without having a good reason to do so.
The trick is to either only open up the conversation when you have something relevant to say (or funny, seems to work sometimes too), or move to city/country where it's socially accepted.
As someone who used to live in a country where talking with strangers is basically implicitly forbidden and straight up weird, but then moved to a country where it's completely normal, the amount of interesting conversations easily skyrocketed as soon as I landed in my new home country.
I've done this a few times over the last few days alone (in Seattle no less, a city infamous for being antisocial - though I'm willing to accept some were tourists for the 4th).
IME, people are actually starved for human interaction.
I agree with the premise that it is really difficult and sucks to "just go out and talk to people". Depends on where you live I guess though. I think thinking you'll end up on a TikTok because you talk to a person in a queue is just a far off excuse.
Only in small towns with high trust societies, sadly.
I usually see this as an anti immigration dogwhistle.
I live in an actual hellhole by these standards.
For 40 years, every refugee or immigrant population was forced to live in my region. Every time the government wanted to do A/B testing on welfare, my region.
When I first wanted to move here I considered that I would need amazing security and reviewed crime stats. OH NO, its a CRIME HOTSPOT. How could I subject myself to that, I would have to live in fear.
Then I turned off "Drug Crimes" in the police statistics, and that completely normalised the results against much richer, whiter suburbs.
If anything we have a greater density of churches, because everyone wants to hear the bible read in their tongue. Theres an islander community just over the main drag from me where twice a year I see like 200 big islander kids dressed in choir costumes being loaded into busses for a big church thing.
My wife literally takes my toddler out for walks unassisted in the middle of the night.
I have no issues talking to people, or being approached by people.