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Comment by zx8080 | Hacker News Reader

> you can make an OSM account, go to the website, click, add a thing, hit submit, done. Someone will review it.

I will share an unpopular opinion: thil will only make a freeworkforce for those projects who profit from using OSM. And the OSM has surprisingly unreliable data quality for walking around even in the popular tourist places like Tokyo or Kyoto, or New York. I've tried, and it's so worse than GMaps (or Bing) to being completely unusable. No work hours of Starbucks, no local dining cafe, no menu contributions.

It's great for the trail and hike outdiors, sure. But that's very different from the city map, as the nature featutes rarely change, not like city POIs.

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One of the nice things about OSM is you can profit from it from it if you want to.

I don’t think you’ll find even most the die hard OSM fan disagree with you on the POI data.

On the other hand, the road network in OSM is very high quality. As you point out, it’s used and contributed to by companies like Lyft and Amazon.

The fact that anyone can download an accurate detailed global road network for free is pretty crazy.

Call me melodramatic, but I believe that OSM is one of humanity's great achievements in the last 200 years.

Throughout nearly all of human history, one of the most difficult questions to answer was "where the hell am I?" and an even harder question was "how do I get to where I want to go?" Anyone can now answer both of those questions for free, within seconds, with accuracy within 3 or 4 yards. And, when it's wrong, they can contribute back to it instantly. OSM is the logical conclusion to one of the most difficult technical endeavours ever taken on by humans. It's astonishing when you think about it like that.

This is kinda what StreetComplete is supposed to help with, right? it asks me questions about opening and closing hours of cafes and things.

I would assume that tourist places don't have many locals going by and updating them and tourists don't want to fill in info on that kind of app, but that's mostly an adoption question. If more people contributed more info would be mapped.

Yeah, StreetComplete helps both with adding the data in the first place and then keeping is current, since it will also ask those questions again after a while (which also gives an opportunity to check whether a feature still exists). What's less visible there is whether a cafe exists at all – it's not as good to add missing objects as it is for filling in details of existing objects, at least for the casual user.

It's fine to make a project that will only be interesting if people choose to contribute, and it's fine if people want to contribute.

> this will only make a freeworkforce for those projects who profit from using OSM

I don't think this is an opinion, this is just an empirical fact. But it's good! OSM is a public service! This kind of thing should be public, individual citizens should have the agency to improve it, and businesses should benefit from its existence. It's the adopt-a-highway of cartography.

> No work hours of Starbucks, no local dining cafe, no menu contributions.

This moves the goal posts of OSM

Well, those things can be added:

    - opening_hours=*
    - amenity=cafe
    - website:menu=*

But they can easily become outdated again. Still, local QA via StreetComplete, MapComplete, EveryDoor and a multitude of other apps is always needed.

It is a very good point though, Honestly we should have tried to solve that. It is badly needed in a map nowdays. At the moment there is no way to map or display these things and I think there should be.

How so? They have a way of storing that specific information, so why shouldn't we (in part) judge it by the completeness of the information they allow people to store?

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