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Comment by harvey9 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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!

I don’t know what an example is.

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