Restaurants rebel against delivery apps as cities crack down on fees - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/restaurants-rebel-against-delivery-apps-cities-crack-down-fees-n1211456 <comment><USER2> I actually looked into opening a restaurant in the London suburbs. A friend of mine runs a chain of sushi delivery shops in central London, so I had some advice from an insider.

It seems to not work at all with a 30% cut going to Deliveroo and those types. I went to look at some locations to find out the rent, and I had a look at the ingredient and staffing costs. Then I threw it all on a spreadsheet to make a guess about the breakeven, and I checked it with my buddy.

The thing about Domino's and the sushi delivery is that they run their own delivery network. They don't have the costs that Uber Eats or Deliveroo have with marketing and tech. The delivery management is fairly complicated, perhaps not in a tech way (except for Dominos, who have a big tech arm) but in terms of marshalling a bunch of drivers to efficiently drop off food during the evening rush, it's a fair bit of work in itself. My buddy talked more about that than making sushi.

<comment><USER3> Deliveroo and Just Eat in Europe seems to have an explicit delivery fee shown at checkout (and distance based according to each restaurant).

Not sure if they take an extra fee on top of the "pre-delivery price" or how does it work.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if European policy drives that because we don't have that kind of transparency in the US

<comment><USER5> What do you mean? I've used Doordash, UberEats, GrubHub, and others like it, and they've all explicitly listed a "service/delivery fee" at checkout.

<comment><USER6> But doordash, Uber eats etc...receive MORE than just the service delivery fee that they charge you. These platforms separately charge the restaurant itself a fee (rumored to usually be between 10% - 30% of the order total) for every order.

This is the lack of transparency discussed in this thread. People would like to know at the end of the day, how much of the order money goes to the restaurant.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. In an ideal world, whatever costs associated with delivery should be completely borne by the customer, not the restaurant.

If the restaurant isn't the one providing the actual delivery, the service provided provides most of the benefit to the customer, and it should be us customers that pay for the convenience.

This reminds me of the debate around NYC banning landlords from forcing tenants to pay brokers fees. The landlords are the ones benefitting the most from brokers' services, and should bear the brunt of the cost.

I'm curious to see if any cities/states take a similar approach with food delivery and prohibit delivery companies from charging the restaurants themselves fees.

<comment><USER7> Technically UberEats etc aren't charging the restaurants for delivery, but for marketing - "you'll get more orders by being on our platform" - at least that's how they're selling it, and I suspect it's true at least for some restaurants

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I delivered for Pita & Sticks in 2015 when it was a new restaurant. The owner refused to pay me my last paycheck after I quit and found another delivery job.

Point is.. delivery drivers were treated like shit before GrubHub and Uber. Before it was restaurant owners. Not all, but many.

Now that the deliveries are all centralized to a few companies, it's an opportunity to get delivery workers better wages and benefits.

<comment><USER9> How much income do they make on grubhub outside the tip the customer pays?

<comment><USER10> Here's one data point

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23217005](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23217005)

Other data points can be found here (take with a pinch of salt, but gets you the right ball park) are here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/couriersofreddit/](https://www.reddit.com/r/couriersofreddit/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There thing that really bugs me is that the net fees to the restaurant are usually hidden from the user, so when users who care (which I admit was probably few, until this recent wave of indignation) couldn't take this into account.

I hope that the result of this new wave of concern is forcing the delivery apps to display the total fees they are charging the restaurant.

<comment><USER12> Are you similarly annoyed that you can't learn the rent, ingredient prices, or wages costs?

I think that businesses have all kinds of expenses and that they're in business to abstract that away and offer me dish X for $Y at place P and time T. I'm not inclined to care about their bank fees, advertising costs, health care costs, or SEO strategy.

<comment><USER13> Delivery cost is different in that you normally avoid it as a customer if you go in person. So it's not actually abstracted away from you. You can't avoid their rent, wages, etc.

<comment><USER14> If you're ordering from a chain then taking delivery could allow them to arbitrate on the rent part. And you wouldn't be taking up any of their table space either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The thing with GrubHub, UberEats, etc... is they are (usually exclusive) marketing services masquerading as delivery services.

What's infuriating is knowing they are charging 30% in addition to the 10% they charge me, the consumer... and still you have to pay the driver. There's one restaurant about a half mile from me... Uber Eats was going to charge me a $10+ fee for the pleasure of using them (not including tip).

I could literally take an Uber there AND back and it would have been less expensive... screw it I'll walk and reheat my food.

It is a completely backwards model.

Open Table seems to be in the same realm... I can't remember if the figure is correct so I'm loathe to mention it... but our favorite restaurant told us Open Table charges $5/head (to the restaurant).

<comment><USER16> Usually exclusive? Every restaurant entrance in Chicago has UberEats, DoorDash, Postmates, Delivery.com, Grubhub, Seamless, AND Eat24 stickers. Walk inside and theres a table with ~8 iPads, one for each delivery service.

<comment><USER15> Most of the places I order from are on only one of these apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a case where restaurants should start a delivery app co-op.

Any time where you have a whole business segment subject to what boils down to rent-seeking tolls, there's an opportunity for cooperatives.

<comment><USER18> The idea that this is just GrubHub or DoorDash or whoever being greedy doesn't seem to jive with these companies losing money too.

It seems more likely that the economics of general delivery service just don't work out very well for most restaurant types. It ends up costing the restaurant too much, such that the prices to compensate themselves and the drivers fairly are higher than consumers will tolerate paying.

A nice, friendly co-op would probably work okay for restaurant types that were already known for delivery (e.g. pizza), probably not for others.

<comment><USER19> Wouldn't it hurt them that they're trying to service every resteraunt in every area simultaneously, with massive marketing budgets? Seems like it would be much cheaper to just service your local area

<comment><USER20> Economies of scale usually mean it's the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's fascinating to see people having such strong moral intuitions that restaurant people deserve to get paid for their work, while food delivery people do not.

<comment><USER22> GrubHub charges a 15-30% fee, of which only 10% goes to the delivery person. On average the app owners are making twice as much as the person who does all of the actual work.

<comment><USER21> By "food delivery people" I mean the entire company, not just the person in the car.

So it's the app developers and management that don't deserve to get paid?

Despite the large fees, these companies are all losing tons of money. So it's not like anyone is getting rich by overcharging restaurants.

It looks to me like maybe food delivery simply isn't a sustainable business with 2020 technology. Or it needs a whole different business model.

<comment><USER23> Seems like it. 10-15 years ago I had a bunch of paper menus in a folder taped to my fridge that I would have to look at to order food. Perhaps I didn't have access to every restaurant in the area, but the selection was broad enough. The only extra fee I paid was whatever tip I chose to give the driver which I always assumed got added on top of a reasonable wage. That system seemed to be sustainable--at least it operated fine for many decades.

It's too bad the old system was cannabilized by the apps. I'm sure some smaller operations that couldn't afford to run their own delivery before have seen an uptick in sales, but as a consumer the choice paralysis, screwed-up orders from over-worked kitchens, and insane fees/price bloat has turned getting food delivery into an unpleasant experience I now try to avoid.

<comment><USER24> > The only extra fee I paid was whatever tip I chose to give the driver which > I always assumed got added on top of a reasonable wage.

I would give low odds on this assumption being true :(.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good! To summarize what I've learned lately:

Grubhub takes

\- 20-30% commission

\- all promotions are on a restaurants back

\- Has a very liberal, no questions asked return policy

This post summarizes how expensive grubhub can be.

[https://www.eater.com/2020/5/1/21243966/giuseppe- badalamenti...](https://www.eater.com/2020/5/1/21243966/giuseppe-badalamenti- chicago-pizza-boss-shares-grubhub-earning-statement-on-facebook)

</comment><comment><USER25> In Malaysia restaurants charge 30% more on delivery apps (Grab, Foodpanda). But they have also published phone number to order directly from them in case of pick-up. So those who can't pickup have to pay the extra fee.

<comment><USER26> That's how it is for me here in the states. The Uber eats prices appear to have the markup baked in compared to calling and ordering for pickup. I am having a very hard time understanding why anyone is upset.

<comment><USER27> Any time someone _else_ makes money people on HN start a tirade about how evil capitalism is and how they should know exactly who is getting every penny they spend on every product or service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I stopped using Grubhub because the majority of my purchases were to the same neighborhood Pizza joint. I just phone it in and literally cut out the middle- man. It takes two extra minutes.

<comment><USER29> For some apps they give you incentives like points that you gain with each purchase to get your free meal later.

<comment><USER12> Suggests to me that perhaps the local pizza joint should get into that same game.

<comment><USER30> If they can also offer the ability to pre-pay for delivery on-line, or at the very least equip drivers with card terminals, they could also capture some extra customers who use a third party primarily for this kind of convenience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I guess I don't understand the uproar here... is anybody forcing people to use these apps? Anybody forcing the restaurants to pay fees to them? Is there some monopoly force at play here?

My city (Santa Monica) recently passed a 15% cap on fees delivery apps can charge, and immediately grubhub dropped Din Tai Fung from us, I assume because they're too far away for 15% to work.

They don't do their own delivery so to get it yesterday I had to place a to-go order and drive and pick it up myself, about an hour total round-trip with no opportunities for efficiently stacking orders. I guess I probably "saved" $40, but I would have preferred to pay it!

<comment><USER32> Here are the instructions for how to fix this ( from the article):

>Shortly after he put the message on the internet, Singh ended his contract with Grubhub.

That's it. End the contract, don't pay the high fees

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The new middle men: same as the old. Any kind of commission based service will always use its position as a wedge to either gain marketshare or increase its profits by hammering on that wedge as much as they can. As long as it moves, keep on hammering. I've yet to find an ethical one. Here in NL 'Thuisbezorgd' pulled the exact same stunts. I hate them with a passion and always search to find out if the restaurant I'm ordering from has a direct process as well, they are usually super happy about that.

</comment><comment><USER34> The delivery fee should be based on distance - not how much you spend on food.

<comment><USER35> Distance doesn't work the same for all cities. 10 miles in NYC is forever away far. 10 miles in Dallas is up the street. Delivery fees should take distance into consideration, but also how long it takes to do the delivery using actual congestion data.

<comment><USER34> OK, time estimate is fine. But it should be same for any kind of food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There must be a business model where every restaurant pays 10 dollars per month to be part of a food delivery program. Each delivery will be paid without additional costs other than the regular delivery rates (paid by the customer) It will be less lucrative than those 30% fee cut companies. But enough to make a good business. Maybe I should start it :)

<comment><USER12> I'd recommend something more like $0.25/order and a $10/mo minimum. You are going to have per-order costs and the restaurant is almost surely happy to realize that and pay them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I haven't kept up with this, but why doesn't the restaurant charge the delivery service whatever they normally charge and have the customer pay the delivery charge?

<comment><USER38> The article conveniently omits discussing this, but I can only assume it's because these restaurants have signed contracts with the delivery services. There's no other way this makes sense, like the taking of commission on fraudulent phone orders (the delivery service setting up a number purporting to the business and then charging a commission).

So it sounds like the restaurants themselves signed up for a terrible deal, and are now trying to change it via the court of public opinion. There can certainly be power imbalances that push parties into detrimental arrangements, but leaving this fundamental fact out makes the article extremely disingenuous.

The real question is are these restaurants locked into some kind of term commitment, or could they sever their relationship with the delivery services tomorrow and set up their own? The delivery services' move would presumably be to blackball the restaurant from the platform (in contrast with how they handle non-contracted restaurants that they're courting), but if enough restaurants got together they could certainly start a competing service.

<comment><USER39> There is no such prohibition. They can set their own price or even different menu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you are ordering online and getting delivery because of the pandemic -- because you think it is a best practice for germ control -- I think you are probably better off ordering takeout and picking it up yourself.

Delivery drivers have been known to sample the food they are delivering and things like that. I am not thrilled with the idea of some underpaid delivery driver having time alone with my food.

Restaurants have to comply with food safety and hygiene laws and their staff get appropriate training. I doubt delivery drivers get similar training (correct me if I'm wrong).

Staff in restaurants are not only trained in food safety, they are typically not alone. This is one of the best ways to ensure that people are behaving. Delivery drivers are going to be alone with your food and therein lies the problem.

[https://www.wasserstrom.com/blog/2018/10/12/food-delivery- ri...](https://www.wasserstrom.com/blog/2018/10/12/food-delivery-risks/)

<comment><USER41> It's not universal, but I've seen many restaurants do a pretty good job of sealing the bag, in order to combat this problem.

<comment><USER40> I have a permanently compromised immune system. I default to preferring takeout over delivery where possible. I occasionally get delivery where that's just not practical for some reason, but it's the exception.

There's a pandemic on. If people are interested in my opinion about _best practices_ for playing defensively in a germy world, there it is. And if they aren't, (shrug).

<comment><USER41> You'll recall that I also have CF. For whatever reason, I don't fear delivery (though I'm more and more sensitive to how exploitative it is for businesses)

<comment><USER40> No, I did not recall that.

I do what I do to be drug free. This is probably not your scenario. The degree of hostility I got on CF lists is why I left them all.

<comment><USER41> I believe we had a couple of conversations in the past under your previous username.

I will agree that CF lists tend to be toxic.

<comment><USER40> My memory isn't what it used to be and HN gets about 5 million visitors per month.

I assumed you had no idea what my story is. That tends to be my default assumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is a real problem that has existed for a long time, but has really only came to public attention because of the lockdowns. I wrote about it here: [https://blog.routesimply.com/why-your-restaurant-should- brin...](https://blog.routesimply.com/why-your-restaurant-should-bring- deliveries-in-house/)

My partner owns a pretty successful craft brewery in the bay area, and he's recently decided to get rid of doordash, grubhub and ubereats. What worked for him is using a network of ex-Uber drivers (there are tons of whatsapp and telegram groups where these guys hang out) together with an app (www.routesimply.com) that I built for him.

He takes orders directly on the phone, instagram and fb messengers and tacks on a delivery fee that the customer pays for and gives 100% to the driver.

</comment><comment><USER43> I drive to all of the eateries I want to support. Some of them don't do delivery, others do, but it's a chance to leave the apartment and it's all money going straight to the eatery, not an exploitative delivery app.

</comment><comment><USER44> Are there any food service establishments out there that solely focus on delivery? No walk-ins, no dining in but only delivery? Their staff would pretty much consist of cooks and delivery employees and the facility would be big enough for a kitchen and prep area.

I would think a setup like that with good food would do well in this new reality we are in.

I imagine it would challenging for a restaurant to focus on a good dine-in experience alongside a good delivery service, especially considering the low margins.

<comment><USER45> Yes, Cloud kitchens. Guess who has the most high profile one?

<comment><USER46> Travis?

<comment><USER45> Yep

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So not only the unprofitable gig-economy apps are going under, they're actually dragging everyone else down with them. How long until the VC and other funding runs out?

<comment><USER30> This was written in 2013:

[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust- economy/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/)

Year after year, I'm appreciating the analogy to locusts more and more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Resteraunts should just put "GrubHub fee" on the bill

</comment><comment><USER49> Maybe delivery costs would be lower if people could subscribe way out into the future... then, set it up like a paper route.

<comment><USER50> Deliveroo offers a subscription service but you still order on demand — the subscription just lowers your fee.

Competitors have suggested options with regular deliveries to pool them. Few offer hot food, many it's fresh but cold (Frichti in France), sometimes it's frozen (AllPlants in the UK) and you might include food-prep kits (Blue Apron in the US).

Based on the growth and successes that I've seen, I'm not sure that warm food on a route is far cheaper to operate; dish to re-heated seems to work, but not as well as food prep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> If the delivery platform is not evil, it can charge as low as PayPal do. But if they charge less, they can only do less advertising, which makes the network effect weaker.

Is there a way to let people discover suitable service without paying a lot for advertising? Like the real word-of-mouth, not the "KOL" one.

</comment><comment><USER52> As a foreigner, it seems to me that the problem in the US is that too many people live alone.

My favorite pizza shop in northern Germany has a minimum order of $22 and charges $4 in delivery fees.

For one person alone, that wouldn't work. So you order together as a family. Or together with your flatmates in university.

<comment><USER53> In Germany, 41.8% of households have just one person.

In the USA, 28.4% of households have just one person.

<comment><USER52> I'd wager they count in different ways. Or I'm living in a total bubble. None of my friends is living alone. All of them are either sharing a house with others or living together with their girlfriend/wife.

Edit: it might be that your statistic is dominated by houses being owned by old people

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Restaurants aren't free from unfair practices, often they charge the same price for takeway as for dine in, whereas takeway should be cheaper not including delivery charges.

Costs including for facilities/rent/upkeep for dining areas shouldn't be added to remote orders. In some jurisdictions(esp in 3rd world), even are supposed to be different for takeaway and dining as orders made in air-conditioned dining areas are often taxed at a higher rate.

<comment><USER55> What an odd reaction to this article.

Do you believe there is some sort of moral or ethical obligation that restaurants must operate at the same margin for every transaction? Should liquor prices be reduced to meet the margin of the steak entree?

Those "air-conditioned dining areas" help create the overall economics available to supply you takeout; few restaurants could sustainably survive on takeout alone. Takeout orders also either cannot buy higher-margin items (alcohol) or typically do not (dessert) so it's not like the are a strictly equal value proposition.

Takeout and dine-in are not two separate business, they both operate together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Amazon, Expedia, Grubhub and others are just middlemen sucking blood from small businesses and consumers.

</comment><comment><USER57> I started using chownow, who has upfront cost for takeouts. Haven't done delivery yet.

</comment><comment><USER58> My friend runs a restaurant. He changed his prices for the delivery services.

<comment><USER59> That sounds like the easiest way to handle this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > owner John Stamos

I had to check; it's not the "Full House" John Stamos.

</comment><comment><USER60> How long until Grubhub starts mandating the drivers to check for such notes?

<comment><USER61> The restaurants can "seal" the bags. Getting the drivers to break those seals to search for marketing materials won't look good for grubhub

<comment><USER62> If the seals are removed entirely, not merely broken, then there's a good chance the customer wouldn't know they'd been screwed with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are restaurants allowed to have Grubhub specific pricing?

<comment><USER63> Yes and many do

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I could write a lot about the benefits these apps provide, but I think we can all agree their ease of use and flattening of the marketplace into a centralized data source is a very powerful combination. This means restaurants essentially have to be on them to compete. Before, more decentralized factors like geography and word-of-mouth helped restaurants gain and hold marketshare.

This isn't a new phenomenon, but it's a definite shakeup of an industry that didn't have to deal with this issue as much before. It's similar to how credit card networks like Visa and Mastercard inserted themselves into the payments space. The ease of use these services offered customers simply outweigh the option for sellers to not use them. Sellers already didn't like how these companies skimmed a few percent off of every purchase. Now you have delivery apps which are taking far more significant chunks of revenue out of each transaction.

However, how many customers know how much of what they're paying is going to transaction costs? Some stores and gas stations offer slightly lower prices if you pay with cash instead of card. Customers are given this awareness so they understand that they are paying more for a feature.

Takeout apps not only add to the transaction cost, but also control the interface between the customer and restaurant. A restaurant wouldn't even have the option to tell the customer how much of the price of their food goes toward middleman fees because it's not in the takeout services' interests to surface that info in their app. Instead, they can hide away the details of price differences between restaurants and then play sellers off against each other for their own benefit. Even credit card networks don't have that much control over the entire transaction process, but these new end-to-end marketplaces control both factors in order to pawn off blame on the sellers.

If this continues, I foresee these takeout services exerting so much control over small-business restaurants that the restaurants either fold or all be homogenized under whatever the takeout services will. Given the propensity for vertical integration these days, the takeout services will probably just stand up their own food services in place of the restaurants, similar to what Uber ultimately wants to do with its drivers. Small business won't be able to compete and even more local restaurants will disappear. Some will continue to exist as a niche as demand for variety/personable service and low prices/convenience fluctuate back and forth between stabilizing somewhere in the middle. This will probably be at the expense of customers and society as a whole, given that restaurants are one of the last bastions of small business in the ever globalizing economy.

In order to combat the shock that restaurants face while takeout apps hold a huge level of control over the marketplace, public institutions and personal will are needed to keep these apps from becoming too powerful. I see it as a more proactive form of anti-trust enforcement. Otherwise, you're looking at a future where local restaurants probably won't exist.

</comment><comment><USER65> While I'm not sure I'm on board with it, I have to admit that it's impressive how much restaurants have managed to moralize their pricing disputes with delivery apps. I didn't expect this genre of article would survive a ban on in-restaurant dining.

</comment><comment><USER66> The fees some of these apps charge is criminal. You're an advertising and coordination company, do you really deserve a huge percentage per order? Gross.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, it's terrible that we force these restaurants to be on these platforms and don't give them any free market choice in the matter to opt out. /s

<comment><USER67> I think your being facetious, but in case not I'll emphasize that you it is indeed terrible. The way these predatory companies go after restaurants until they're added to the roster or create fake restaurant websites and phone numbers is ridiculous.

<comment><USER65> I simply reject the label of "predatory" here. Restaurant owners are sophisticated businesspeople who negotiate supply contracts and such as a matter of course; it's not predatory for delivery apps to offer them a deal, even if they'd prefer a better one.

The fake phone numbers and websites, yeah, I'll grant you those are dishonest. Anyone calling a restaurant's listed phone number is expecting to reach that restaurant.

<comment><USER68> For every sophisticated business person there are four that need basic math and accounting explained to them.

It's all too common to see them base their entire business around a single percentage above total raw ingredient cost.

While I agree predatory is a strong word, you are missing the point. There is an ecosystem of small businesses that are being cannibalized by delivery app companies. These are the places I enjoy eating, places that are unique and amazing but not necessarily the top rungs of the business ladder.

This is happening because these delivery apps that are run by sophisticated business people haven't even worked out their business model yet.

Asking for transparency isn't asking for too much.

<comment><USER65> Most of the time I order delivery, I'm not trying to support my favorite places or really any places at all. I just want some noodles, and I'm entirely insensitive to where they come from. The restaurant industry has no intrinsic moral right to make money from my order; it's strange to propose that I should go out of my way to spend more money and waste more time just for the sake of some random owner's bottom line.

When I'm trying to support my favorite restaurants, the ones I do care about for their own sake, I of course go pick the food up myself. I think most people do the same.

<comment><USER33> If you feel the restaurant industry has no intrinsic moral right to make money on your order then you are 100% mistaken. If they don't make money on your order _you don 't get food_, so it is in your own interest that they do make money on your order. A race to the bottom will get you either crappy food or no food at all.

What surprises me is that on a website with lots of top earners people would still begrudge others to make an honest living. And running a restaurant is a lot more work than writing software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'm all for banning grubhub, ubereats, postmates, and doordash. If people want to order take out, let them get off their lazy ass, come down and pick up their own order.

<comment><USER40> Some people order delivery because they don't have transportation. Others order delivery because they are handicapped and, for example, in snowy, icy weather, their wheelchair plus snow and ice and so forth mean going somewhere is not very feasible at times.

I mostly get takeout and pick it up myself. I think these delivery services are generally a bad idea, but some people getting delivery aren't simply "lazy ass" people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> My question is how long this can go on for before these delivery apps have to lower their fees. The fees are pretty obscene, and it's clear that apps like GrubHub pass that cost to the restaurant rather than the customer because they know that the customer won't want to pay that much and that restaurants at least want some amount of attention and visibility in these apps, especially since more customers are wanting to use these apps rather than ordering through some crappy website or by calling in.

But I'm not convinced that apps actually _should_ require the amount of overhead they might try and claim is responsible for these high fees. Customer and driver support for delivery apps is pretty minimal and almost always outsourced. Nowadays, most driver support is handled via text, which means you can have fewer support staff and they can just multitask. When I drove for GrubHub, when I visited the regional office, it was usually staffed by one or two people who were only there maybe a few hours out of the day(which is why, at least a few years ago, you couldn't just randomly show up). It's possible that they have way more employees at their HQ... but I have to wonder just how much of their costs are essential and not fluff generated by excessive growth from VC funding. Why bother building a lean organization if the money will just keep coming in whether or not the business model brings in enough money? All it has to do is bring in _enough_ money to make lenders confident in the future of the business.

In any case, there seems to be room for a delivery app, or a _system_ of delivery apps, to compete with top-heavy companies like GrubHub and DoorDash. Why not run a leaner delivery app business, charge restaurants a flat fee, don't bother with a big marketing department because partnered restaurants will do most of the marketing by visibility, have restaurants pay the base delivery fee, allow drivers to keep all their tips to encourage more drivers, and pass the $3-4 deliver fee to the customer? Say you charged partnered restaurants $199 a month, and you acquired the market share of GrubHub, which is ~115,000 restaurants; that would be $22,885,000 per months of revenue. Is that really not enough to run a successful delivery app? Or is this a matter of everyone wanting to run a bajillion dollar unicorn?

<comment><USER71> Ignoring marketing won't help, since the restaurants aren't inventivised to promote your app. There's huge opportunity cost switching away from the incumbent apps, too much risk for most businesses.

<comment><USER72> And you have to get the restaurants to sign up, which requires marketing/sales.

It does seem like the sort of thing where someone could develop the app/framework and either focus on some specific lucrative markets (denser areas of higher income cities) and/or have some sort of franchise model.

Very few people do a significant amount of take out delivery when they're traveling. So long as you have a profitable business in a city, there's no particular _network_ advantage (other than any economies of scale) to serving other cities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I'm sure HN has no shortage of ex-Uber engineers given how many people from their tech divisions they have let go of recently.

I am curious to hear what they think about this, in light of them being let go en masse, which in itself shines even more light on things that are outside of this discussion.

Was the company ever sustainably profitable? If so, which divisions/apps? When did they start becoming unprofitable?

Gouging restaurants who are already working with razor thin margins is really strange to me.

I am guessing they thought that as long as VCs kept pouring money in like gasoline, they could turn a blind eye to the fact that they have destabilized a fragile ecosystem that _a lot_ of people depend on (remember: knowing how to cook is an anomaly these days).

I'm guessing they didn't learn anything from Groupon.

<comment><USER50> Not Uber but Deliveroo — and it was long enough that I can talk freely. Mind you: that was a while ago.

The vast majority of people underestimate the cost of delivery, more specifically two things: the duration of delivery or rather how many deliveries per hour of work at peak time, and the utilisation rate.

It's hard, in the best circumstances (good weather, constant demand, professional restaurant, dense habitat) to have a driver handle two deliveries per hour. If you take a £2 free from the customer and a £5 commission over a £17 order, you can pay a rider £14 per hour. At that rate, you typically would get the left wing press to call you exploitative every other day. That's excluding everything else: marketing, customer service, tech. You can't improve anything without capital that has to come from investors.

All that ignore the key problem availability: if you have 100 riders on schedule, about 60 would show up. They are not employees after all, and you can't fire half of your contractors every day when you are growing like weed. Probably fewer than 30 will show up if it rains, but 80 might if the weather looks nice and there's nothing on TV. If you have reasons to believe that you'll get 360 deliveries during the three hour dinner shift, you should be good but… if you get 350 orders and 70 riders show up (nothing unusual exceptional) they'll all get one fewer order than expected and they will complain they are are not making enough money. More likely, half will do six, a third will do five and a dozen not enough to justify them showing up. That's excluding any exceptional case: hail, Premier League finals, etc. 20 riders for 4,000 orders wasn't out of the question with bad enough weather. Your marketing team is quite likely to tell you that means 3950 unhappy customers because most riders will switch off the app after the second of third customer insults them because the website isn't responsive.

There are many ideas about how to increase the number of delivery per hour of work:

* telling people to pedal faster isn't a good idea;

* asking more than 30% from restaurants will get chef's knife thrown your way (not a metaphor);

* paying people any less than £14/h gets you call a slave trader by the international press;

* asking customers for more than £2 is a crime against humanity and will tank your retention faster than spilling broth and bringing cold pizza;

* setting an ordering minimum to something as high as a meal for two people, i.e. £20, is an effective way to become a trending topic on twitter for all the wrong reasons; reasons that my grandmother would wash out of your mouth with soap;

* handling over two deliveries from the same restaurant to a single rider can work at times, but it's hard to find the rare good cases and you get very angry customers ver fast; handling two deliveries from _different_ restaurants is… ::shivers:: Let's not talk about it.

So, you are right: razor thin margins at best in most cases.

What works is looking at the above and seeing in as a stats game:

1\. 360 orders ± 30, 60 riders ± 20 isn't a great combination. 3,600±100 and 500±50 are better: your margin can be improved with just the large number theorem. That means, in any places without the population density of central Paris, to feed a significant portion of the population. It sounds absurd but having 20 riders out in a hail storm means you will have none within an hour, even if the sun goes back (thank you non-sensical May weather); having 200 means they see their peers riding and wait it out.

2\. Another thing where scale really helps is opportunities: if you have more than 3,000 deliveries in three hours per square mile, that's 50 deliveries in the last three minutes. One is bound to be nearby, less than two minutes away. So rather than pay riders to do delivery, then shlep for the next one to a restaurant half a mile away and only then to start carrying food again, you get to pay them to deliver food, then turn the corner and do it again. That way, you can hope riders to handle more than two deliveries per hour. That considerably helps your business models.

3\. What can help a little bit more is that with ten times more order, the rare cases when one rider can pick up two orders and not make it awkward increases as O(n^2) so they go from rare to worth the time to implement an assignment logic for those.

That should give you a hint why you've heard the words "billion raised in a new round of financing" used around that business model: there is path to profitability but it has to go through extreme growth.

I'll let you do the math on rider pay, restaurant, fees, possible subscription models, population density, etc. but if you do, remember that a service like that requires, at maturity, thousands of engineers hoping Silicon-Valley level pay.

<comment><USER74> * handling over two deliveries from the same restaurant to a single rider can work at times, but it's hard to find the rare good cases and you get very angry customers ver fast; handling two deliveries from different restaurants is… ::shivers:: Let's not talk about it.

I think this is the area of most opportunity. You can't really do this with a guy on a bike but in the us there is no reason you couldn't establish delivery windows for certain neighbors and pickup windows to restaurants then have a guy with a meals on wheels like truck come, pick up items from adjacent restaurants and deliver them to customer.

It messes up the delivery driver as disposable and replaceable mentality as timing is critical but if you want to have efficiency sometimes you need to pay a bit more.

<comment><USER50> At the right scale, it is, but the pairing opportunities become significant when a given service represents a significant portion of how people eat. (To give you an idea: at that point, the lobbying against the platform isn't coming from restaurants but supermarkets.)

It also requires to change the expectations and internal organisation of restaurants:

* you have to tell them that the delivery person will pick both — otherwise they freak out when they don't run out with the first one;

* you have to ask them to have two orders come out of the kitchen at roughly the same time: fast-order cooks can do that if they know they have to, but if they don't, those are quite frequently far apart. And there's little information coming out of the kitchen telling you that this will be the case when assigning the order.

Handling that kind of organisational change is ambitious when a restaurant is struggling because they have a staffer whose full time job is to copy orders from the delivery tablet into their point-of-sale because the two softwares are not integrated.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Web Browsers Need to Stop - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/13/Web-browsers-need-to-stop.html <comment><USER2> That's a high density of bad opinions.

The web can and should deprecate features as they're no longer needed, but stopping development on new features is obviously not going to happen.

The internet is not a store of plain-text documents. It's a platform for rich applications. It's moving further in that direction because both developers and consumers want it to.

WebUSB? I'm sorry, have you never heard of a Chromebook? Schools certainly have reason to read files from USB drives. Web browsers don't just run on Windows.

"No one wants AMP. Google knows it, you know it, I know it."

Someone reads too much Hacker News. Escape this bubble and you'll find very different opinions on "sites with the lightning bolt".

</comment><comment><USER3> This article seems to be a rant with lots of random and unsubstantiated claims. The author is disappointed in the web and web browser vendors. Then there's a call for action to stop adding features, which will certainly not be answered given the quality of the article. People are free to write whatever they want on their own blog, but I'm not sure what this is doing on HN.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are a few valid points of discussion buried somewhere in this largely nonsensical rant.

These are, I believe:

* Scope creep on what the web really is and what browsers should be allowed to do or not to do. I agree with this and the need to exercise caution in creating or adopting new specs.

* Google exercising undue control over the open web. (Also a huge problem IMHO.)

* Mozilla imploding being pretty bad for the web.

</comment><comment><USER5> With or without WebComponents, with or without <insert feature X here>, the web is an horrible platform anyway. The web was never made to make UIs, it was made for documents and it's not even that great for that either.

The alien & legacy HTML language & the total incomprehensible mess of CSS rules/layout, the requirement to use JS and nothing else... Everything is a total mess.

Looking back, a big mistake of the web was drawing the line too high for the API. The web forced on us JS that nobody wants (and Typescript & Wasm is the proof of that). The web forced us to use CSS & HTML that nobody wants either (Figma and other design tools systems based on simple elements and constrains is the proof that too).

What we should standardize is a lowlevel code representation + a set of sandboxed APIs. That's all we need.

Wasm + Wasi seems to aim at that, yet they on Wasm side they insist on "how are we gonna make DOM accessible from Wasm ? how are we going to interop between JS and Wasm ?". I don't want the DOM, I don't want JS, I want none of that crap.

I hope that Native UIs compiled to Wasm+Webgl(or vulkan or webgpu or whatever we'll agree on) are the future for the web. So that we can write once and run everywhere decently fast.

When I see the speed of makepad.nl, the power of Godot Engine running in the browser and the simplicity of Figma & the Fidget framework it feels like prehistory that we are still making UIs and apps with JS&CSS&HTML

</comment><comment><USER6> I think that article expresses a generally good opinion in the worst way possible.

It's true that if Chrome becomes the only browser on the market, it'd lead to a very unhealthy monopoly situation. There's an analogy to be drawn with Microsoft's EEE strategy, except that instead of extending open software with proprietary APIs, Google is extending it with so many APIs that no one can ever build anything compatible.

For the web to remain an open and innovative platform, there need to be multiple competing browser engines. The more features Google adds to Chrome, the harder it becomes for Firefox to keep up, and the more impossible it becomes for anyone to build a new browser from scratch.

But this article seems almost allergic to actual solutions. It is intent on blaming all the wrong people without proposing any real answers.

Look at this bit:

> Mozilla just fired everyone relevant to focus on crap no one asked for like > Pocket, and fad nonsense like a paid VPN service and virtual reality tech.

Of course they did – they had no choice. It takes money to build software. Pocket, even if it is "crap no one asked for," is an opportunity to serve ads. "Fad nonsense" like paid VPNs actually make quite a bit of money these days. Mozilla makes Firefox, Servo, MDN, and Rust, and does it all for free. I love Mozilla for it, but this article seems to believe that all that is needed for this state of affairs to continue is… what, exactly?

> No layoffs or pay cuts at the management level, of course! It's not like > they're responsible for these problems, it's not like anyone's fucking > responsible for any of this, it's not like the very idea of personal > responsibility has been forgotten by both executives and engineers, no sir!

I totally support pay cuts for executives, but you can't save 250 jobs like that, and "personal responsibility" alone can't pay the bills. Not only does appealing to personal responsibility solve nothing, it distracts us from actual solutions by letting us blame individuals for the systemic reasons that our problems exist in the first place.

 _Continued on my blog because I wound up writing more than I expected:_ [https://www.blackcap.site/posts/google_wont_stop/](https://www.blackcap.site/posts/google_wont_stop/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I generally tend to agree. The browser is becoming a terribly fat client, and the complexity and version/brand variations create a testing nightmare and moving targets that make the DLL Hell of the 90's almost look good in comparison.

To better manage the mess, perhaps break up the standards into 3 groups: 1) Art/games/entertainment, 2) Documents, and 3) CRUD/GUI for "productivity" work. We don't have a decent GUI-over-HTTP standard yet.

There also needs to be more coordinate-based options in the standard(s) so that the server can optionally control the layout flow instead of the client. Letting the client do it leads to the browser/brand combinatorial mess mentioned. If you can let the server do it, then you are dealing with only ONE layout engine instead of the many micro-variations we face with fat browsers. (Current HTML has _some_ coordinate based ability, but it's too inconsistent, especially for text.)</comment>


Tiger daughter responds - <AUTHOR> http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/why_love_my_strict_chinese_mom_uUvfmLcA5eteY0u2KXt7hM/1

<comment><USER2> [http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/why_love_my_strict_chi...](http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/why_love_my_strict_chinese_mom_uUvfmLcA5eteY0u2KXt7hM/0)

That's the article from the first page. The link submitted starts on the second.</comment>


"Facebook Is the Internet" and Other Things Media People Debate at Dinner - <AUTHOR> https://redef.com/original/facebook-is-the-internet-and-13-other-things-media-people-debate-at-dinner <comment><USER2> Related: I was recently in Malaysia for a holiday. I bought a SIM card that promised unlimited internet (protip: unlimited anything usually a red flag, I should have known better)

It turned out that I couldn't use 4G to surf the net. All I could do was read Twitter. I went back to the shop and complained about this breach of contract. It turns out I didn't understand that "unlimited internet" meant "unlimited Facebook, Twitter, whatsapp, and Line". It didn't mean unlimited data.

I then spent the next 30 mins arguing with the shop person in a language that I'm rusty in, that no, I don't care about Whatsapp or Facebook or Instagram. I care that I can browse the web with a bloody browser, and connect to my machines via SSH, and no, what the plan promised was in NO WAY unlimited internet.

Still kinda pissed off over it

<comment><USER3> I guess they don't have net neutrality. Those are some of the consequences

<comment><USER4> > I guess they don't have net neutrality. Those are some of the consequences

It sounds an awful lot like Facebook's plan to give free phones and "data" to developing nations... with restricted access only to Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram.[1]

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-free-internet- access-p...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-free-internet-access- program-in-developing-countries-provokes-backlash-1443119580)

<comment><USER5> Or you can go direct to the horse's mouth, e.g.

[https://info.internet.org/en/story/developers/](https://info.internet.org/en/story/developers/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Internet could be better off if the AOL-ian masses started believing "Facebook is the Internet." Let them all move over there--a Reverse Eternal September [1]! It would be even better if all the crap moved over to Facebook with them. All the spam, trolls, ads, tracking, malware, etc. could follow the masses, leaving the rest of us in peace.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

<comment><USER7> The way I remember "Eternal September" was giving UNIX shell accounts to incoming university students.

The problem is when students graduate; no more shell account. Then what?

<comment><USER8> That's the September bit. Frosh would come in, get shell accounts, discover USENET and drive the regulars nuts. Then after a few months they'd acclimate themselves or get bored and USENET would settle into normal, only to repeat the cycle next September.

When AOL flipped the switch enabling USENET newsgroups in the fall of 1993 it was an "eternal September" because AOL had an endless continual stream of chuckleheads getting online foe the first time and not acclimating to existing net culture because they think the network is there to serve THEM.

<comment><USER9> > because they think the network is there to serve THEM.

I can't tell if you mean to imply that it's there to be served by them, or that it is there to serve "regulars".

<comment><USER10> _I can 't tell if you mean to imply that it's there to be served by them, or that it is there to serve "regulars"._

I think he meant that USENET works best as a collaboration between users, whereas the users being complained about see it closer to visiting a restaurant where the other users are the waiters and they are the customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hm, a bunch of relatively shortsighted and narrow-scope bullet points.

I like to summarize the trends and inaccuracies in the article as the "mainstreamization of the internet as the primary mode of life". The internet is now the primary technology for play, work, general communications, commerce, social life, and human knowledge. 10 years ago, the internet still had tinges of being a hobbyist project, and you probably wouldn't be able to find your grandma on Myspace or another equivalent. That era was a smarter, more innocent, and smaller time for the internet, though even then it was vast and deep.

The arrival of the TV cohort to the internet (via Myspace and Facebook's gateways) necessitated a departure from the non-commercialized function- emphatic early days of the net. The media companies correctly view these people as their money farm, and allowing them to escape to the internet isn't acceptable. As a result, we now have internet commodities (user information, paywalled content) that are sustained by the masses. In some ways, the commodification of the internet resulted in unification many smaller content and social sites into a few giants. During this unification, the depth and variety of content on the internet took a huge hit.

At this point, mainstream internet is approaching the locked-down nature of TV, though to the user there is significantly more freedom of customization of content to be consumed. For the most part, people who use the internet for Netflix and Facebook (and probably a few other big name sites) are viewing the same pre-prepared frame of content that they were via the TV, and getting more out of it as they did before in terms of content.

I have to say, there is very little for intelligent/technical people to consume on this mainstream internet relative to the days of yore. Watering everything down for proliterian consumption means that the deep, obtuse, technical, inscrutable, or complex content and discussion is forced far away from the "front pages" so as not to confuse or frighten the primary consumers who are largely treated like children. Of course, there's still bastions of sanity, but you'd need to seek them out or find them via word of mouth. It's not so bad, but effectively places like HN are tiny fiefdoms that are far removed from the reddit/facebook/netflix/whatever dreck that is dominant.

<comment><USER12> I was with you until you said the depth and variety of content on the internet took a hit. that smacks of back-in-my-dayism and doesn't survive even the most basic sniff test.

I'll grant that perhaps _you_ can't find anything that satisfies you, but I consider that a problem on your end. I find more that interests me than I could ever handle, and I don't even try.

so sure, I'm not surprised you have a way you like to dismissively characterize how billions of people use the Internet, but all you're really doing is explaining your elitism in great detail.

<comment><USER13> I'm normally enthusiastic about new things, but honestly I found it much easier to find deep interesting content back when Geocities was live and Yahoo Directory and webrings existed.

In particular I find blogs encourage a throwaway attitude to content. Almost certainly more information is being written down in blogs now than was being written in people's webspace ten years ago. But webspaces were constructed as a permanent, indexed thing (people even made "site maps" telling you what page was where). Which made them worse for disseminating news or other time- sensitive information, but much better for the "long tail" of information that you now simply can't find, short of trawling through a complete archive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Media people ruined the internet.

<comment><USER15> That happened about 15 years ago when Microsoft made the decision to make computing media-friendly and embrace DRM.

A better outcome would have been to divide computing into business computing and consumer computing, and only allow consumer computing to have components that the owner of the hardware can't control.

Now almost every computing device contains parts not under the owner's control. Even trying to see what those parts are doing could constitute a crime. A network of machines you don't control isn't going to be an engine for positive change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Facebook is essentially the second coming of AOL.

</comment><comment><USER17> The person who wrote this could be an alien from the planet Zepton III, for all my ability to relate to him and his opinions.

<comment><USER18> Agreed, but it's interesting in much the same way that the politics of Zepton III would be, were it capable of obliterating Earth without even thinking about it.

What's amazing to me is how few people nowadays are involved in actual value creation, as opposed to marketing value, taxing value and destroying value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> \-- But when people in tech and media company meetings say "social," they really just mean "Facebook." --

And when you say "Internet" you actually mean "Web".

Also, you've omitted Google entirely from your somewhat warped mental model of the web.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Ugh, I only watch like 10% of the stuff on Netflix. Can't I pay 89 cents instead of $8.99?"

I mean... $8.99 is already 10% of the $89.99+ that you'd have to pay to get a cable subscription with premium channels and HBO, but I think this is still an interesting argument. Does make you think about the power Netflix holds though: little stopping them from expanding services and prices until they are the new old cable company. Personally, I think even Netflix will eventually have to do what people have been demanding from the cable companies: break services into more a la carte (but still all you can eat) options.

<comment><USER21> Hulu is sort of doing this. They have their baseline Hulu+ ($7.99, IIRC). And now an ad-free (for most content, some licensing means there are commercials at the start and end of a few shows) for an extra few dollars. And now you can get Showtime (?) content for an extra few dollars.

Personally, I think it's brilliant (mostly). A multi-tiered platform with expanding, customizable content access. Add in a sports package and a few more premium content channels, and it's what cable should have become for a fraction of the cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just disagree with so many of the author's points its not even worth refuting them, because that would be an feature length article in itself.</comment>


The power of the RSS reader - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/03/26/power-of-rss <comment><USER2> Exactly! Also the fact that rss enables this kind high quality, narrow domain, low volumes posting makes the web way better.

I don't want to read professional writers who have to write their quota whether there is good material to write about or not on that day. They too often focus on gossip and sensationalism. Although I might be entertained briefly, in the end I will not have gained much from reading this type of articles and it's a waste of my time.

I want to read the authors who mostly spends their time doing things in their domain of expertise and get out of their lab/office/cave once in a while to write a post on something they feel is interesting and worth sharing. Because they are not frequent writers the prose might be dryer but the facts, ideas and insights are usually much better than what you get from those who's main job is writing.

I love insights that comes directly from an expert's keyboard. They are pearls of wisdom and it would be sad to lose them because of a decline in support for RSS.

<comment><USER2> Writing this made me realize that the closing of G Reader might be a huge opportunity for Tumblr.

Tumblr already has RSS features on the publishing side which means they don't lock in their users content in their platform. Imagine if facebook would allow their users's public posts to be viewable in g+. That's what Tumblr does.

Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a group of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds within Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed reader/blogging platform.

Maybe the kids are on to something.

I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts in the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.

<comment><USER3> > Imagine if facebook would allow their users's public posts to be viewable in > g+. That's what Tumblr does.

I may have missed something but I haven't seen some tumblr post posted on G+ via RSS (yet).

> Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable > social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a > group of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds > within Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed > reader/blogging platform.

A good first step but they (facebook, twitter) all ended up removing it.

> Maybe the kids are on to something.

More like the parents (read: youngsters from the 2000) were on to something. I had high hopes for RSS and even higher for ATOM (I ended up writing my own flat-file blog system that only used ATOM documents as storage, I really liked it with the full xslt mumbo jumbo but in the end it's xml and that was it).

>I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts in the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.

Some tried to monetize RSS by adding ads in the feeds but that didn't take off. Reading a site's content only in the rss feed cuts off its authors from any kind of revenues (worse if the online reader displays its own add along the feeds).

I presented a project when I was a student. It consisted of a website that offered any registered user to transform the RSS/ATOM feeds they would have supplied into a mini updated WAP-enabled website for browsing the feeds on those old nokia of the 2000s. It was nice and all but when one of my advisors asked me "how would you turn it into something profitable or how would you bring it to the market?" all I could say was "this would never work because nobody with profits on his mind is promoting webfeeds".

I though the news-publishing industry would use RSS as a kind of copy-pasta medium but it doesn't look like things are going this way (at least not on the public side of things).

RSS (and ATOM because "i want to believe") isn't dead but I am not convinced it's going to make a come-back on any for-profit social network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This exactly matches my use case for RSS. High volume daily websites - like HN - I read directly. I went through a phase where I tried to read HN via RSS (in Google Reader) and for me it wasn't better than just hitting HN directly.

But for the kind of sites Marco mentions (which I read most of, actually) that update on a semi-daily or weekly basis, RSS readers are perfect because I don't want to go and visit those pages individually just to see they don't have any updates. Typically those sites are narrowly-focused personal/organizational blogs in areas I am interested in.

<comment><USER5> Could not agree more, this is the exact use case for the 'power users' of RSS. And he is right that without RSS I don't know how these low-posting-frequency sites would keep their readership. If I had to give up one, I'd give up twitter or hackernews long before that low-frequency RSS feed. Those posts are gold and for niche subjects (I'm into bio) there is no where else they are aggregated.

<comment><USER6> Tech, video games, etc.. journalists have a very different use case for RSS, which is exactly using it to monitor dozens of other information sources (including their competitors). I think they match the definition of power users, perhaps more than you and I, because that's the primary tool for their job : they will routinely have hundreds of RSS feeds and will skim quickly through thousands of items a day to look for the information that they haven't treated yet. RSS is perfect for that matter and it is precisely the opposite of what marco and you claim is a poor usage of RSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I have different labels. I have a high volume label that I nuke with impunity, then another label with low volume feeds that I treat more like Marco describes in tfa.

This lets me keep up with all of those low volume feeds, but also skim the daily news when I have time.

I also prune my feeds pretty aggressively.

This is probably a much fiddlier setup than most people will want, but really so is any RSS reader.

<comment><USER8> That's how I used to use Reader. One "Important" folder for stuff that I was very likely to read, and another for skimming.

It's a common complaint about Twitter that once you start following a few people who produce high volumes of crap, it becomes useless. The usual advice is to be quick to unfollow, but I've always missed a "must read" feature for Twitter, to specially mark those few people where you really do want to see every single tweet.

<comment><USER9> This is what Twitter's Lists functionality is for. I have separate lists of people for topics I am interested in, such as running, android, infosec, etc. The downside is that people on your lists don't enjoy the same capabilities as the people you follow, so they can't DM and they might be insulted that you show as not following them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The feature I want on RSS readers: Volume sliders.

A volume slider per feed, and perhaps also a global one.

If a feed is posting too much stuff, but I still like some of the stuff on it, I'd prefer not to unsubscribe if I had a better option.

If I notice a feed getting a bit noisy, I'd like to open a view for that feed, with titles and timestamps. Then I'd just move a slider and watch stuff drop out, until I've turned it down to a volume I can handle.

Hopefully, the lower-signal items will drop out of view first and the higher- signal items last. The more data available for making these rankings, the better. Comment counts or scores from the hosting site should help. So should links/shares/likes/comments across the major social networks.

<comment><USER11> Right, the problem is just that "unread counts" aren't _that_ nice of a feature for RSS feeds, because not all posts are created equal. (Hell, it's not even that nice of a feature on email, unless you do a lot of filtering.)

I like the volume slider ideal; I that you could leverage social media outlets as a scoring system. (I'd include HN in that - the more points, the higher the score.) That could give you a nice way to "bump up" the things past some "volume" you haven't seen in priority.

I don't like the idea of "just don't subscribe"; why can't the tool figure this out for me?

Edit: "aren't nice" -> "aren't that nice". I do think counts are useful, just far, far from perfect. What I find myself dong is finding a feed with unread items, skimming, then marking all as read. (Well, when I use Reader, sigh.)

<comment><USER10> I personally don't mind unread counts. That aspect really depends on the way you use it.

I used to have a ton of unread items sitting in the feed reader; now everything is either immediately discarded or immediately shunted into Pocket. (A good phone interface for me might be: swipe left = discard, swipe right = send to view-later service of choice and discard. Fast!)

Of course, that means I now have a ton of unread stuff sitting in Pocket. So I think services in that category could benefit from this kind of scoring too. I can see my Pocket stuff in reverse chronological order. I'd love a really intelligent, adaptive "sort by magic" for that big bucket.

You suggested using HN as a source. That's absolutely along the lines I'm thinking. It's like this: every site can be a source of stories, but every site should also be a potential source of scoring signals for stories -- either its own or elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've read HN over RSS for years. It's perfect for that.

Firefox isn't very well suited for keeping up with blogs and news sites like HN because it's so damn bloated and slow, and you can't really save any articles for later reading without upvoting, opening them in a new tab, or bookmarking them. Bookmarks in Firefox are a total pain in the ass, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. I already have more than enough tabs open, and don't want to waste more keeping some possibly interesting article waiting for me.

In my RSS reader (Newsbeuter[1]), all I have to do to save an article for later reading is not delete it. It will remain marked as new and I can read it later, at my leisure.

If I go for some days (or weeks) without reading HN at all, I can come back whenever I have time and still have all the articles waiting for me, instead of using HN's shitty time-limited "more.." prompt to painfully page through old articles.

Some years back, there were even a couple of "HN Full Feed" RSS feeds that would show the entire linked article in each RSS item, so I could read it in my RSS reader instead of having to click through to some crappily designed website and get pissed off at how long Firefox took to load it.

RSS is really one of the very best ways to read virtually any blog or news site, whether there are a ton of new items per day (like HN), or whether it's some little blog that's updated once every few years, or anywhere in between.

[1] - <http://www.newsbeuter.org/index.html>

<comment><USER13> Newsbeuter is awesome for text heavy feeds, but less so for (say) photoblogs. I'd really like to see more development of different types of specialized rss readers and get away from the OP's argument that there's a "right way" to use rss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ironically, I use IFTTT to read the RSS and push sites like what he is describing into Instapaper. You lose the by-site organization of it, but if you don't overdo it you end up with a nice small selection of things to read every day when you fire up Instapaper.

</comment><comment><USER15> I personally started using an RSS Reader to keep track of webcomics. Especially ones that update infrequently. Now they're all in one handy place and I never miss a panel.

</comment><comment><USER16> The creator of Instapaper doesn't see the value-add of using an RSS reader to skim the postings of a high-volume site, for readability/usability reasons?

That's a curious blind-spot.

<comment><USER17> He didn't say anything to that effect at all. The only things that come close to that characterization are:

1\. "If a site posts many items each day _and you barely read any of them_ , delete that feed." (emphasis mine) If you're skimming all the items in a feed and deriving value from it, this piece of advice doesn't apply.

2\. "RSS works best when following a large number of infrequently updated sites." Works best, not _only_ works.

3\. "It's not enough to interleave their posts into a "river" or "stream" paradigm [...] because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher- volume feeds and people's tweets." It's _not enough_ , not that it's categorically not valuable.

The whole article dovetails nicely with Instapaper's purpose, which is to ensure you don't miss reading articles you find important. Relying solely on a river of news that's filled with high volume sources leads to a high chance of missing stuff you otherwise want to keep close tabs on. Pretty uncontroversial stuff.

<comment><USER16> > _"You shouldn't come back to hundreds or thousands of unread articles."_ ... > _"you shouldn't subscribe to feeds that would generate that kind of unread > volume."_ ... _"you're using it in a way that's not good for you."_

These sorts of prescriptive statements don't read as "I see the value others may derive from other use cases." They explicitly read as "I don't see the value" and "I've looked and I don't think it exists."

Further, using an RSS reader to skim a frequently-updated site, of which I read only a few articles, _is precisely the point_.

High quantities of postings exacerbates the flaws of their designs. But with RSS, it's easy to skim pages of headlines. After a long weekend I can deal with hundreds of unread articles precisely _because_ I'm interested in so little.

If there were aggregating services that delivered what I was looking for, I'd certainly _prefer_ that. But I haven't found them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never got into RSS readers, but I use Hacker News and Reddit for the purposes Marco is describing. I have Pulse on my phone set up to follow a handful of RSS feeds (Hacker News, The Verge, Daring Fireball, Ars Technica, etc.) so I have an easy way to see what's happening if I have a couple minutes to kill throughout my day.

<comment><USER19> I think you're missing what he says. Hacker News and Reddit are completely perpendicular use cases to RSS.

From the article: _The true power of the RSS inbox is keeping you informed of new posts that you probably won't see linked elsewhere._

I feel like I've been shouting this into the void over the last few days of RSS-related submissions, but RSS is _not_ best suited as a news-discovery paradigm. Aggregators like HN or Reddit serve that purpose. RSS's sweet spot is tracking deeper content on niche sites or topics that don't get swept up in hype mills, and if you're interested in more than two or three blogs or sites like that, RSS is essentially _the_ way to track that content. Being able to share that and discuss with a select group of people was icing on the cake that Google Reader added.

Without seeming overly defensive about it, I feel like everyone who dismisses RSS lately with "that's what HN is for" has never used RSS in the way that many of us find indispensable.

<comment><USER18> But if there's an interesting article on marco.org, someone who reads that will post it to /r/programming, and I'll get to read it without having to find and follow the author.

<comment><USER19> Ok, so imagine the site in question is a little-known blog. I follow a link on reddit, enjoy the article, then click around to see what else the author writes. I find it really interesting and want to follow this author more closely. Do I then cross my fingers and hope reddit shares my taste in his other content and also hope I happen to catch it on reddit if that blog's content comes up again? No, I track the RSS and can peruse updates at my leisure without missing anything.

I think it's a different model of consumption. HN/Reddit is browsing, "let's see what the chatter by the watercooler is today". RSS is "I am more than casually interested in particular content and want to be notified of updates".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Something else that Marco didn't dwell on is the diversity of stuff that you can basically just plug into your rss reader if you want notification. A website may choose to use it to publish anything they wish. Misc. examples:

1\. Following a user on reddit via rss:

<http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama/.rss>

2\. Following a search term on reddit via rss:

<http://www.reddit.com/search/.rss?q=manbearpig>

3\. Checking a mailinator throwaway email via rss:

<http://www.mailinator.com/rss.jsp?email=webmaster>

4\. Google Alerts (RIP.)

<comment><USER21> 5\. Blog comments, especially for threads that go like this: "I also have this problem" (2010), "Me too" (2011), "Me too" (2012), "Ah, here's the solution (2013)

<comment><USER22> "Please send me the codes? firstname.lastname@example.com" (2012 a, b, c, d)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I use to mess with rss and agree with Marco on the purpose of them. Then I found a better solution, just subscribe to some of the awesome curated newsletters out there that do all this for you. HN has one - <http://hackernewsletter.com> and Peter Cooper's tech focused ones (<https://cooperpress.com/>) keep you in the loop in a particular stack, plus a lot of others that I've seen.

Now I don't have to check anything these days, except my email, which of course I check everyday anyhow!

<comment><USER24> That may be fine for some, but newsletters are inherently limited by the amount of space they are willing to provide to links, and by their domain, because most letters are topic-specific. While newsletters can support maybe 20 links per week, RSS is adept at handling hundreds if not thousands.

Moreover, one of the great benefits of RSS is that it is customizable and one's reading experience pertains specifically and only to them. With newsletters, one is throwing their reading experience to the mercy of the newsletter editor. This is not to say that newsletters aren't valuable. Their spontaneity and conciseness provides a great reading experience. (Although, I think Twitter is superior at this type of thing anyway.)

But, given the idiosyncrasies of newsletters, I just don't believe that they are tenable alternatives to RSS. Those who want to read a _lot_ of content from an eclectic array of specific sources still need something like RSS.

<comment><USER25> If you want to specifically choose your sources, I think you're right. If you're happy with a 'best of' on a topic by topic basis, newsletters can/do work.

 _With newsletters, one is throwing their reading experience to the mercy of the newsletter editor._

This is part of the appeal for many non-power readers. The majority are not particularly interested in curating or even controlling their sources and are happy to outsource it to either trusted editors (see almost the entire print media or something like Techmeme) or the "cloud" (e.g. Reddit or Hacker News).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how much of a challenge it would be to create an RSS client that provides a direct payment system to content creators. I'm sort of shocked that I can't remember _hearing_ about something like that; the issue was always about getting page views and having a donation link or whatever. They never seemed to consider direct payment of any kind, even though PayPal was definitely around back then.

Take a slice en route and you have a business model.

...I feel like I should append this to the top comment so that it gets seen, heh. I'm not interested in doing this. Someone else do it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think advising people to delete feeds misses a possible feature that I wish was available in the feed readers I've tried: I would like to mark each feed/URL to tell the feed reader if it is a feed in which I care about seeing every new item. The "number unread" cue/badge should only count the important feeds and not ones where I just want to see the latest content if I have free time.

</comment><comment><USER28> The rss2email script apparently works like a charm but it isn't suitable for large number of feed subscription. This is where Google Reader came in handy because I didn't have to care how long it takes to grab however many feeds I have under my account. Ultimately, all RSS feed readers (old and new) are going to be suffering from this issue of retrieving large number of feeds.

</comment><comment><USER29> Everybody thinks everyone uses or should use the internet the same way they do.

I couldn't disagree with this post more. I subscribe to a lot of sites that accumulate thousands of _unread_ items. In fact, I could care less about read/unread toggle. My RSS is indeed a river, but it's a river that sometimes I plunge wholeheartedly into and devour large chunks, other times I merely skim for items of interest. Then there are spots in which most is completely ignored. But it's still there and given the magic of _SEARCH_ , I can pull up all the articles for a topic of interest, confining my query to _just_ those sites I have pre-declared an interest in.

So I like the mailbox metaphor for being able to quickly traverse items and skim item summaries, so the real payoff for me is not just the increased efficiency in reviewing so much more than could be done by visiting each site (or even in a magazine/mosaic format) but also a repository ready to serve up information for any topic that I wish to browse upon in a future moment.

</comment><comment><USER30> Just disable read status in your rss-client and the problem is solved. For low frequency sites that you care about you most likely remember their latest headlines anyway. For high frequency sites just watch the headlines roll by, if you happen to be interested in one then click it, otherwise just ignore.

</comment><comment><USER31> So he advocates never subscribing to high frequency feeds because most clients show the contents of all feeds in one big list.

I find that is the wrong way to adress the problem. A more useful solution seems to be a different way to structure an rss reader. Opera for example incorporates one that works alongside its email client. It fixes the issue by treating individual feeds as email folders which can be structured inside more folders and highlighting folders with unread contents as well as displaying their content counts.

This screenshow should demonstrate usefully how easy this makes it to notice new updates on low-frequency feeds while still allowing skimming of high- frequency ones without one interrupting the other:

<https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10190786/feeds.png>

</comment><comment><USER32> The "tyranny of the loudest" is a problem I wish more reader software addressed. If someone tweets 100 times a day, just show me the one that was retweeted 10 times. If someone tweets once a month I want to see every one.

Maybe give the option to accordion out a "100 tweets hidden" link.

</comment><comment><USER33> Both high and low volume feeds have their use. You just have to know how to manage them.

I use River2 for my high volume feeds while I stick my rarely updated and "must read" feeds into NetNewsWire. Has been working pretty well for me so far.

When using NetNewsWire, I'm in "slow down mode" where just about every item (in theory) is important to me. But when I'm using River2, I'm in "scan and click mode" and just trying to see what the latest news is.

Using separate applications like this helps keep me "in the zone."

If I were to put high volume feeds in NetNewsWire the temptation to read all the posted items would be too great. In River2, items older than three hours just drop off the page. There's no "unread count" or "read older items" button to tempt you.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is not a new problem -- newsgroups had this problem back in the day. I think the solution now is the same as it was back then -- better scoring/sorting/killfile tools that the end user can control.

The death of newsgroups, was also the death of an structured, parseable discussion forum, where the end user had the final say on how they'd see the discussion. Nowadays, we need moderators and the forum software on the server to re-implement these things that newsreaders had worked out.

I've setup my own ttrss instance, and it has some basic scoring abilities. Unfortunatly not all rss feeds provide the text of the article (or even the lede) in the feed directly, so the scoring ends up crippled.

</comment><comment><USER35> Marco, you might also think of RSS readers like an archived narrow band search for high volume traffic. For example: I am a security researcher, so I susbscribe (via RSS) to everything security related that I can find: mailing lists, bleeding edge snort ruls, CVE, blogs, SANS, etc, etc.

Now when I want to see the current state of affairs in Ineternet Explorer security issues, I can simply search for "Internet Explorer" in my RSS reader. I am then presented with the traffic on the latest issues, their possible resolutions, and even possibly the person who discovered the issue.

The beauty of RSS is that it lets me decide what it will be, and when I want it to be that way.

</comment><comment><USER36> I partially agree - I do use RSS to check for sites that publish daily updates (yes, even Hacker News). But even with those, you don't need to overload yourself. Right now I get about ~100 news every day, which is perfectly fine with me. I went away last week, and I was greeted by ~500 news. I was able to skim through those in maybe one hour, so it was fine.

Everytime I feel that my feed reader is overloaded, I write down every site that I follow, and decide about which sites I really care, and which sites i can easily unsubscribe without problems. I also try to remove sites that post the same thing (this happen a lot with news sites).

</comment><comment><USER37> Like many of the points but not following the conclusions because Google Reader doesn't aid long tail discovery...was just best place to subscribe post-discovery.

If the need for RSS reader remains, then others will simply fill the GR niche?

</comment><comment><USER38> Also, it occurs to me, I use Instapaper to deal with this issue in RSS...hmm...

</comment><comment><USER39> > If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete > that feed. If you find yourself hitting "Mark all as read" more than a > couple of times for any feed, delete that feed. You won't miss anything > important.

Actually, this could be an interesting feature of an RSS client. If the user keeps marking items of a feed as read, either put the feed in silent mode (no longer shows up in inbox) or lower the relevance of its items so that they go down the list (if the items are sorted by relevance).

</comment><comment><USER40> This is a very interesting use case, particularly in investment analysis, my area of specialty.

The problem of obscure, rarely updated blogs with fantastic information (but no reader base) is plainly evident here. I can think of a blogger who is a fixture on "who's who" lists, but publishes a blog so ill-trafficked you can hear the crickets chirping. There are hundreds of these guys.

I'm at work on a finance-specific version of this. Hopefully we can announce something before the readerpocalypse.

</comment><comment><USER41> We have been working on developing RSS reader since last 8 months. We felt google reader is not for everyone and we wanted our rss reader to be used by anyone... who may not understand RSS. While implementing the RSS reader, we have learnt a lot and one of them being the power of RSS. I hope what we are building helps a lot of people. Check out <http://multiplx.com>

</comment><comment><USER42> Surely there's a sorting metric that could solve this? Something like score = k_1/age_of_post * k_2/frequency_of_posts with appropriate k-weights.

Personally, my Google Reader has a folder for 'rarely updated', which I usually check first. Then I have the 'All Items' sorted by magic and skim the first few pages or so for things that strike me as interesting. Then I mark all as read.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think RSS is being replaced by Twitter. Many of the RSS feeds I currently consume already cross post to a dedicated Twitter account. If publishers aren't doing this, they should start before Google Reader is shuttered.

As a consumer, set up a Twitter account dedicated to reading "long tail" low volume twitter feeds or use a fancy Twitter client like Tweetbot that manages lists.

<comment><USER44> With RSS I often get the entire content or at minimum a decent sized summary with lots of photos.

Twitter has none of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is precisely why I like Fever as an RSS reader. Fever lets you separate feeds into low-volume kindling and high-volume sparks. Kindling are the feeds you want to keep up with regularly, while items that are mentioned across Sparks bubble up to the top (Its like having your own personal Hacker News).

<comment><USER46> Well, I'd say any reader with some kind of categorization support (tags, folders, etc) lets you do that.

I have folders in Tiny Tiny RSS that never accumulate more than a couple of unread items, and I have a folder with 22000 unread items, it works just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I tend to add feeds only when the site doesn't generate either a significant number of comments or comments that are actually worth reading. Sites like HN I'm often as (or more) interested in the comments as in the actual article, so I'll just visit the site for that reason instead of using RSS.

</comment><comment><USER48> You don't need RSS for monitoring sites for infrequent updates. <http://www.changedetection.com/> Free and well working solution. I use that to monitor all low traffic sites, which do not provide RSS.

</comment><comment><USER38> sorta wish this was the start of the "negative killfile" in the William Gibson Idoru trilogy. Because, you know, 3D cyberspace Walled City and stuff.

</comment><comment> mh- I was very confused to see that I posted this article.

<comment><USER49> Hacking might be difficult if you confuse dashes with underscores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> mathOne, all your comments seem to be [dead].

</comment><comment><USER51> For the same reason that I have 14000 messages in my inbox (half unread), this is bunk. Who cares if you can't read everything? OCD much.</comment>