Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymousDan | Hacker News Reader

The problem with any such site is that if it became sufficiently popular it would result in feedback effects that might destroy its predictions.

View on HN

Or it could do better -- dispense predictions/instructions so as to ensure an even distribution of traffic (e.g. by randomization).

An unethical freemium model for such a site: dispense instructions to ensure an even distribution of traffic to free users, but provide a purely optimal path for paying users, perhaps even making suggestions to free users to move them out of the way.

I wouldn't call that unethical - even free users would benefit from such a system, in the same way that non-users would also benefit, but paying users would benefit even more.

The system actually requires itself to be ethical. The ability to make things better for the paying users is dependant on the system having a lot of free users. Those free users have to be getting some utility out of the site, otherwise they won't use it. And without large numbers of free users, the paying services can't be offered!

True. But if it got that popular it could then be used to optimize the schedule road use of all the participants taking everyone's situation into account. It would probably be even MORE efficient at finding semi-optimal travel schedules for most users. It couldn't be a static database it would have to constantly revised as road usage changed even in response to its own calcs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com