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Comment by sanex | Hacker News Reader

I don't think people understand the price we pay for these ads. Companies _generally_ are going to operate so they don't lose money. In an industry I am familiar with, I booked someone to clean my home. The total cost was somewhere around $350, about 125 of that went to the actual person cleaning the house. The rest went to a combination of google for the ad and the company I booked through. This industry generally has a 35% marketing expense (sometimes way more) so somewhere around $75 of what I paid to get my house cleaned went to Google. How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local?

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you can solve this by direct action. when your cleaner arrives, explain you'd like to make a direct arrangement next time, and ask for their phone number.

no app can patch this 'analog hole' of the gig industry.

100% spot on. I do this with subcontractors quite frequently for house related stuff and most of them are quite happy to work with me directly.

Wanna really make their day? Pay with cash.

That's really more of a "Want to pay more than your fair share of taxes? Help them commit tax fraud".

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.

Bulk of income taxes go to the feds. Plumber will still pay plenty of sales tax. I'd say the value of having a plumber that likes you outweighs what benefits one receives from government programs, making it rational to stiff the man.

It's your moral duty to avoid paying tax, if you're an American.

Uh? What? Care to explain?

I know it's considered a sport but a moral duty?

Given that America is a democracy, it would appear that a majority of Americans do not share your morals, so on the contrary it is your moral duty to pay your taxes.

It's debatable that we're a democracy.

I would bet that in aggregate, more than half the taxes you pay go to your state, or some local polity smaller than state. Local political entities (county, city, town) are absolutely democracies and also have the maximum amount of actual impact on your life. The federal government is mostly irrelevant.

By avoiding paying taxes, you first and foremost damage the community you live in.

Fun fact: precisely nobody who voted to elect the congresspeople who voted for the income tax amendment are alive today.

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.

I don't know if I would agree with that take taken by itself without qualifiers. "if you're American" is doing some lifting but could mean anything. But otherwise I kind of agree, the average American is getting fleeced while the ultra wealthy are avoiding massive tax costs while benefiting the most from state infrastructure and economic policy.

No taxation without representation, so if your Congresscritter declares they don't represent you (because you identify as the opposite party and therefore are the enemy) then you have no responsibility to pay tax, a uniquely American sensibility

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

> 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.

Paying in cash in no way helps anyone commit tax fraud.

It is very plainly morally and ethically unambiguous to pay in cash.

...

> very plainly morally and ethically unambiguous

unambiguous[ly] _what_? Bad? Good?

Paying in cash absolutely helps commit tax fraud. It doesn't mean your contractor will commit fraud, but if they wanted to, it's a lot easier if you pay with cash compare to check or credit card.

That's 100% on them. I'm under no obligation to give some credit card company my personal information just so more fingers are in the pie when accusing the contractor of fraud.

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.

Of course, that's fine. I was just responding to "Paying in cash in no way helps anyone commit tax fraud", which is clearly wrong

Then you also have to agree that building roads helps thieves to escape.

> That's really more of a "Want to pay more than your fair share of taxes? Help them commit tax fraud".

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.

That might work for cleaners, but not for rideshare, food delivery and vacation rentals, which probably account for the vast majority of the "gig economy".

Good point. I think lack of competition inflates the 'share of revenue' online marketing services can extract. And competitive alternatives are nerfed due to the app store hegemony and the anti-competitive behavior and dark patterns of giants like Google & FB. They needed to nerf the open web to maximize their profits, so they did.

Owning and renting a vacation accommodation is gig economy? Those poor renting seeking plebs.

Ever heard of airbnb?

I think mainly it helps property owners skirt the whole “I’m a landlord” thing and all the legal obligations it entails.

Yeah, I just don't really consider sitting on you fat butt and collecting rent a "gig". That's called rent seeking, or a scam.

You can do the same as the cleaner example. For example get the rideshare numer, food delivery etc

I'm not convinced. What makes an app like Uber efficient is that it connects you to the closest driver when you need it. If you have the number of a driver, they may not be working at that time, or they may be far away.

Same for food delivery.

Very different for a cleaner: you never need a cleaner "right now", you can schedule it.

Well, sometimes.

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.

> 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.

Sure, yes, you do actually have to have a conversation with the person you are personally contacting for a ride and get them to say "yes".

Which is a cost, because then you have to call around trying to find someone who is willing to do it then, which is exactly the thing the app does for you.

In practice you have one or maybe two people you call, and then fall back to using the app anyway if that fails. So the person comes out ahead, in that they have a decent shot at a guaranteed ride, better service, and lower cost. The absolute worst case scenario is the standard app experience.

I'm not sold on the food delivery front. In the UK you used to be able to just ring up a local restaurant and order a free local delivery, especially indian, chinese, kebab, pizza, and chip shops. My family did it once a week in the 90s and early 2000s and it was always quick and easy. The restaurants clearly had enough demand to offer it as a service each night they opened.

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.

It will not work for discovery, but if you develop an ongoing relationship it can work for that.

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.

For vacation rentals, I have had the owner give me their card afterwards.

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.

> For food delivery (at least takeout) and ride share, the app actually provides a real value

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?

> If you look at pre-UberEats times, each restaurant employed a couple of delivery drivers on scooters.

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.

>> If you look at pre-UberEats times, each restaurant employed a couple of delivery drivers on scooters.

> 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.)

I live in Netherland, and here UberEats was a latecomer to what Thuisbezorgd had been doing for ages, but other than that it rings true. Before Thuisbezorgd, it was mostly just pizza that got delivered. Maybe also other Italian food, and maybe a little bit of Asian. Since Thuisbezorgd we can get any cuisine you can imagine delivered to your door.

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.

> Before Thuisbezorgd, it was mostly just pizza that got delivered. Maybe also other Italian food, and maybe a little bit of Asian.

> 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.

> The problem with a food delivery network is that it should be a dumb network, not a big profit center.

Which food delivery network has big profit margins?

In the US, delivery was pretty spotty in the pre-app days (pizza places tended to have it almost always, other restaurants were case-by-case). The idea of more community organized joint delivery services is really interesting, it just didn’t exist anywhere I lived in the pre-app-days (maybe it was a thing in major cities, that wouldn’t surprise me).

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…

Because it decouples the restaurant from controlling the means of purchase and delivery and thereby creating a market on top of the restaurant.

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…

>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.

Sure because you had to distribute sales and place product. You shifted marketing off to the retail location and distributor and you still controlled the price / mark up.

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.

> The problem with a food delivery network is that it should be a dumb network, not a big profit center.

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

Nintendo ruined it for everyone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_....

Nintendo was the first widespread closed platform.

The app is also providing real value for maids; the point of consulting a trusted maid registry is to hire a maid who won't steal everything in your house.

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.

For vacation rentals you can often save 20% by Googling.

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.

>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.

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.

I'd like to say I feel a lot better about having AirBnB help handle any problems or disputes that makes it worth paying some overhead... but it's really the other way around.

> For vacation rentals, I have had the owner give me their card afterwards.

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.

FWIW I actually didn’t use the card ever, haha.

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…

My family and friends (sometimes up to 5 families together) have gone to the same summer beach rental for more than 25 years. I know dozens of families who do the same thing. I have several large groups of friends from college who have rented the same mountain places since we graduated (we are almost 2 decades older than you).

Once again, "I don't do that" is not the same as "no one does that".

Anecdotal but I have found that at least some times, rideshare drivers are willing to take cash for rides under some circumstances. Not at all common though, most of the time I have asked I’ve been unceremoniously shot down. The one time I distinctly remember it working out was during a packed event in Vegas (EDC LV, music festival). I just asked if they were going to be driving for the concert the second day, since it was so ridiculously packed and hectic to get a ride the first day, and they said yes and I just offered $100 for the ride tomorrow (I was already paying that much with uber, but with poor service from the app and many cancelled drivers). They agreed, they got a double-rate fare for one unsanctioned ride, I got better service since they were better incentivized to get my ride done, and overall everyone was happy. Except Uber I guess. YMMV

Because rideshare drivers and food deliveries are not done by a single individual only, they are in contract and they are doing it as an employee of a company.

When you call up your local plumber, you are doing everything under the counter.

You used to be able to ring up certain restaurants and order a delivery. And it was often free.

Even for cleaners it might not work.

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.

It's very real, according some folks in the business I know. They are very aggressive in trying to prevent this, because otherwise why wouldn't someone paid what a cleaner is paid try and cut the middleman out.

It does work pretty well for rideshare in my experience. I've settled cash with an uber driver before. Neighbor has a specific driver they use for the airport they pay a flat rate for.

I've received cards from taxi drivers so I can contact them directly next time. Food delivery I prefer to do through the restaurant's own website.

It 100% works for vacation rentals. I found an AirBnB I liked in Spain, went there 3 more times over the past few years. One time it was already booked and the owner put me in an even better, larger (4BR) place at a discount.

Caveat: your SO must not be allergic to going to the same place more than once in a lifetime. My ex was.

I heard a pitch by a company, its name escapes me, but it's like AirBnB for Muslims. The idea is to bring back the community aspect of hosting families, where values are aligned (ie you know that the cookware has never been used to cook bacon for example).

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.

Every service I know of explicitly bans this practice, so unless you can employ the cleaner full time then if they accept your arrangement they risk getting fired.

I don’t know the service company in question, but if it’s a gig-style matchup, how would the company know what their contractors are doing? Also, wouldn’t this incentivize the contractors to develop as many personal relationships as possible, as a hedge against getting arbitrarily kicked by the contracting company?

Semi-related:

If I'm not mistaken, services like Upwork and Fiverr will look at certain metrics for outliers, like repeat business in a particular industry. And for eBay, I think they’d look into cancelled bids on high-value items and check messaging history.

Disclaimer, based on old memories

Data analysis. If someone has a low repeat customer stat, but high ratings, smells fishy.

I used to tutor using a company called Wyzant. I got banned from their platform because I directly contacted my client via phone.

I don't know if all such platforms have a similar policy, but it only makes sense. If everyone did direct, these companies can't make money.

Then you are losing out on the insurance the company is supposed to provide, usually through bonding, in case the cleaner pockets your favorite jewelry, for example. Or they knock over the Faberge egg while dusting.

You cannot directly hire a housecleaner in the US without that person becoming your "household employee". You will need to withhold Federal Social Security tax and Medicare tax. In some states you will need to withhold state income tax and pay unemployment insurance.

https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc756

unless they are an independent contractor. which would likely be the case.

> How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local?

Let's be honest here, if you got rid of their advertising expense it's not going to cause the company to offer the contractor more when they're willing to do the job for less. In a competitive market what happens is that the price goes down, so that you pay $227.50 instead of $350, the cleaner still gets $125, and now there is $102.5 in overhead instead of $225.

But that's still good. Overhead is inefficient and you could use the extra money to hire other people which increases labor demand which is the thing that does cause people to get paid more. Or maybe some of the gig workers are doing jobs for people who are themselves not rich and paying less helps them out.

The real question is, how do you replace the function of the advertising expense? Suppose you even want to set up a non-profit gig marketplace that doesn't take anything, it just hooks people up with customers and people accept payment with cash or Venmo or whatever. That's pretty much just a website. But then how do you get people to find out about it and use it?

I belong to a local Muslim Chamber of Commerce that is basically this. Every business that wants to be a part of the network pays a membership fee (like $300 a year) and gets put into a directory. We have Muslim plumbers, contractors, real estate agents, etc.

I think such things can only work at small scales. Once there are too many competing interests it's not as effective.

I feel like you're just describing a different form of advertising (pay $300 to be listed in the directory) rather than an alternative to it.

In general it seems like the problem is that a marketplace has a network effect. The sellers go where the buyers are and the buyers go where the sellers are. And then the marketplace gets captured by the likes of Google or Facebook who, instead of showing results based on reviews or customer ratings or some other kind of useful curation that allows high quality providers to rise to the top even if they're small, just sell the top slot to whoever bids the most.

Perhaps, but the difference between what the comment I was replying to and the Chamber is just the membership fee. Maybe that's just what distinguishes advertising from organic networks.

Yelp used to be pretty good until it started putting ads pretty much everywhere. I'd see reviews for a totally different restaurant when looking at one restaurant.

I think one of the big differences is charging enough to maintain the network and charging to extract as much money as possible.

That's a good point. At some point the fee to play becomes exorbitant (or some might say, extortion).

This is one of those 100% insane things. We all pay a massive Google tax on every purchase. Marketing has always been a part of business, but since Google has engaged in illegal anticompetitive behavior, the price has also skyrocketed, and we all pay for it.

I ask friends and neighbours for recommendations for this kind of thing. Given you know the industry, what made you search online in this case?

I don’t know what an example is.

The person you are asking doesn’t say that they looked and found the service through ads. They say that the cleaning companies spent 35% on marketing. And therefore everyone that uses these services pays 35% more as a result. Not only customers that find the service through ads.

It really does read like they booked through a booking intermediary although the advert part is less clear. In either case, I prefer a personal recommendation if I can get one and we both gain by avoiding the intermediary fee.

Given I'm in the digital marketing industry my case was a little unique. Partly it was for UX research.

Sorry, this triggers me a little.

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?

> they've not NOTICED any poor results

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)

> There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either:

> 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.

I noticed this with booking.com. When we asked people for recommendations we got way worse sleeping arrangements than when using booking.com. I believe that the first reason, as you outlined, is that we followed many persons' recommendations instead on a single person's, but there is also fear of bad online review that keeps the service providers on their toes. It's a pity though that the 3rd party is needed for this.

The eBay type feedback (A++++++ would gladly trade again) or the yelp problem, where malicious feedback was being placed to attack another business.

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.

If we could just get normal people to use the darkweb, the latter two issues would disappear.

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 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.

> It's how things have been done for the last 5,000 years.

Never move from your home community.

Honestly, a huge amount of things would be much better with the world unironically if we were less rootless and didn't feel the need to move around as much as many do today.

I dunno, there's positives and negatives there.

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.

OTOH, if I had never moved away from the place I grew up I would be a much worse person today than the one I became. Many people's roots are in places that are highly immoral, wrapped in a flag or a bible or whatever symbolism suits, but they don't know any better unless they are exposed to outside ideas.

I’m not sure what the other person meant by “less rootless,” and there’s definitely a lot of value to moving around and seeing new places. But, is it possible that you just put down roots somewhere better?

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.

It goes both ways. I asked my neighbors for an HVAC reference. They gave me a name, but also a recommendation to NOT use a particular company that advertises heavily in the area. Although they do not have HVAC certifications, their recommendation to avoid a particular company was very helpful.

This is pretty hyperbolic. Not noticing poor results does give some idea of the quality of the work done. Of course it's not a perfect system, of course more references would be better, of course the work being judged by a known expert would be better.

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?

Reminds me of the potential low value of say a 5-star review for a restaurant from an out-of-towner. Was that phở soup really that good or just the one they happened to have, and it’s trounced by any other Vietnamese spot?

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).

You need a functioning community for this, with people knowing and interacting with their neighbours. Sadly, we live in an era of a somewhat atomised society. You can live in a city of ten million people to not know a soul, with workmates that are friendly but not friends, with those workmates commuting in from the opposite side of the city to yourself.

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!

Many people would not have found this cleaner without Googling, reading reviews, etc. While that may not be an ad directly, it's part of the marketing budget. So what needs to change?

We've had markets for all sorts of domestic help for centuries before we had computers. Perhaps more relatable, think about how your parents might have found such help.

Yep. And sometimes a nearby independant contractor who advertises once or twice a week on Facebook or in the local newspaper is going to provide a better service experience than the one blasting TV commercials on the local channels.

The nearby contractor who gets all their work through referrals is by definition better than the one who needs to blast TV ads. The best people are basically never on the market.

Not really by definition necessarily. But yes, it does seem very likely that referrals are the stronger signal.

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.

Craigslist briefly filled this role.

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.)

Why does that matter? You can still do that. Nothing is stopping you from finding a local cleaner and negotiating the price, like our parents did.

People just don't want to do that

You get it. A couple phrases I live by (taught to me by the haggling parents generation); "you never know unless you ask" and "the worst they can say is, NO" These don't need to just apply to goods and services either. They have lead to very interesting and life altering experiences that wouldn't have happened if I didn't ask a one sentence question.

No, I can't do it that way anymore: my local paper doesn't have classified ads anymore. There are only different online versions, which are a lot cheaper and globally accessible, thus have a lot more fraud.

That tells me that modern advertising isn’t making things more expensive, otherwise companies that spend money on it would be crushed by companies that stick with the old ways and can undercut them.

I mean, the person is looking for a cleaner in their area. If all of the cleaning businesses in the area slash their marketing budget to 0, the author is not going to fail to find a cleaner. All the marketing budget is doing is funneling people who want cleaning to one cleaning company over another.

>If all of the cleaning businesses in the area slash their marketing budget to 0, the author is not going to fail to find a cleaner.

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.

When Google has the monopoly on marketing of cleaning companies in your area, from a consumer standpoint it’s effectively the same as if one cleaning company has the local monopoly. The way to win is to pay Google a bigger cut than your competitors, so Google just takes the incumbency premium as its marketing fee instead of the cleaning company.

> All the marketing budget is doing is funneling people who want cleaning to one cleaning company over another.

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.

You’d be surprised how hard it is to find reliable help in our area.

Reputation based platforms are pretty much the only way to go around here. (Yelp barely counts at this point.)

The problem is that Google operates both the buy side and the sell side of the monopoly-scale ad platform. They're the only party in the transaction who sees what both parties are willing to pay (imagine on eBay knowing what everyone's max bid was), and sets the algorithm to maximize their take from all parties.

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.

>They're the only party in the transaction who sees what both parties are willing to pay (imagine on eBay knowing what everyone's max bid was), and sets the algorithm to maximize their take from all parties.

Is there any evidence of them abusing that knowledge? Or was the lawsuit over them having a monopoly and/or anticompetitive practices?

I mean, the fact they abused that was illegal and anticompetive, yes. This is not a "they are big" problem, it's a "they're big and doing illegal price fixing with it".

Also, note that Google was caught intentionally deleting evidence they were ordered by the court to retain.

>I mean, the fact they abused that was illegal and anticompetive, yes. This is not a "they are big" problem, it's a "they're big and doing illegal price fixing with it".

Which case is this?

This is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_... in particular.

(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.)

If a buyer has access to the stored knowledge of trusted peers--peers who have knowledge of trustworthy sellers--supply can meet demand without involving an arms race between predatory middlemen.

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.

>It's a textbook case of rentier capitalism.

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.

Well yes, that is my main reason for disliking companies. And yes, google weighs in on browser standards in myriad ways which gives themseves and companies like them the ability to elevate the preferences of their customers above the preferences of their users.

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.

>Well yes, that is my main reason for disliking companies. And yes, google weighs in on browser standards in myriad ways which gives themseves and companies like them the ability to elevate the preferences of their customers above the preferences of their users.

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.

I'm watching a video sent to me by somebody I trust, and it stops to show me a video about the same topic made by somebody I don't trust, an interference which was targeted by--and an interference that I'm discouraged from preventing by--those standards. The connection is quite direct.

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.

Google ads is a local optima for companies but not for consumers. 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

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

>Google ads is a local optima for companies but not for consumers.

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.

> 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.

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.

I live in an urban area. Most people I know have a cleaner. Most of those people, including myself, found their cleaner via word of mouth. No services, no googling, no ads.

That's not how advertising works.

You only do ads because you think the net impact on profit is positive.

So in your example of Google getting $75, the alternative isn't skipping Google and keeping the $75, the alternative is the cleaner makes zero because you're not a customer.

I see how Google has a vested interest in hollowing out communities to the point you have nobody to text to refer you to a cleaner.

I frequently see such requests in a local Facebook group aptly named "Exit 10 and 11" (of a highway)

> How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise

Would you have hired or even found the cleaner without the company’s referral?

It appears that the cost of referral is much higher than it used to be. Fifty years ago, you might have looked in a phone book for companies that offer the service you are looking for, or gotten a recommendation from a friend. Everything was local, basically. I am not stating that this was necessarily better or game-theoretically optimal, but when the alternative is paying a large share to a big corporation for suggesting an option not based on merit, but the highest bid in a micro-auction, something tells me things have been going in the wrong direction in this case.

True, also considering the hosting costs of that app (probably also on GCP or AWS), and the payment processing fee.

The capitalist lords demand their tithe. Those superyachts aren't cheap, you know.

We are pioneering the new feaudalism.

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