Hacker News Reader

Comment by lemmox | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea Waze was powered by anon crowd sourced map editors. If anybody here is doing it, what's the motivation? Personally I'd never disclose my shortcuts or free parking spots.

View on HN

Not quite the same thing but I've contributed a correction to Google maps before. My motivation was that my address on maps was in the middle of a cornfield and I was tired of explaining exactly where my house really was when new people came over.

Have you tried using Plus Codes as a solution to this? https://plus.codes/

Google maps and Apple maps traffic is cross sourced anonymously too

Interesting, so you're suggesting that the Google and Apple navigation apps are also crowd-sourced social networks like Waze? If that's true I wonder why Waze is singled out for these types of articles.

AFAIK, this is not really accurate; Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze often pick different routes between the same two points at the same time of day in my (admittedly informal) experiments. Google and Apple pretty consistently favored major roads unless there were serious traffic backups on them, while during anything remotely resembling commuting hour, Waze was frequently acting like your crazy uncle who swears taking 28 residential roads, two of which are unpaved and the last of which is an alleyway that ends in an unprotected left turn across three lanes of dense traffic, is clearly the best route.

(And while that's an exaggeration, Waze has consistently been far more likely to send me down unpaved roads, ridiculously steep hills, and, yes, unprotected left turns onto busy highways, presumably because the residential road I was on was lower traffic than the parallel road one block away with traffic lights.)

That was similar to my experience but I haven't used it in several years, shortly after the Google acquisition my account broke. Waze seemed to want to route me through school zones all the time. Google Navigate didn't seem to suffer from this quirk. It never occurred to me that those quirky routes could be due to competition in an anon social network ranking contest.

Waze feels more like a social network. You get a little cartoon car avatar to represent you and can see other people's avatars on the map. There is a leveling/experience system for your character. Waze also allows the user to manually share the location of speed traps and red light cameras.

Sounds like the tragedy of the commons.

How did you imagine it worked?

They know where all their users are, so they can see people moving down the main road are moving slower than people using the side roads. I wouldn't expect them to have actual human editors for this stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com