After one too many times Python breaking changes got me to a point of Gentoo system that can't be updated (and it usually happens midway through bigger system/world update, so potentially many applications/tool also don't work) - I've switched to https://www.calculate-linux.org/
It's still real Gentoo system, and unlike Sabayon Linux (many years ago) where you couldn't easily switch between emerge/portage and whatever Sabayon had - with Calculate it's all seamless. You can still do manual Stage3 tarball install, or just use Live image with GUI installer ...
Most (like 99.95% percent) of packages come as pre-built binary, those remaining 0.05% is just packages where I had niche reasons to deviate from config (use flags) that Calculate used to build those binaries.
And unlike `emerge -uND world` which can easily get stuck and even break (usually if you haven't updated system and toolchain in a while) - `cl-update` has been so good that several years passed and it didn't happen - well kind of.
Combo of some python based apps being old/weird/whatever, and python breaking shit between versions - I do have multiple Python versions installed:
Which actually came in handy one time where (through my mistake) on top of pure Gentoo's emerge/portage, Calculate Linux tools (written in Python) also broke. Luckily older versions of python (with all the libs/packages tied to that version as well) worked - so it wasn't hard to temporarily use older Python version to get things stable.
Oh and it's illegal to lie in those ways (deceive potential customers) just about anywhere in the world.
And though there is legally gray area - majority of that tends to clearly be not ethical...
But you know - Elon "promised" self driving cars in just a month/quarter or so - how many years ago? IIRC he even said it would be good, no not good but best investment because such a car could earn you money on it's own ...
Yet neither we got those self-driving cars, nor Elon is in trouble due to those "forward looking statements" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Traffic distribution is basically never uniform. Unless maybe if you've only got very very few products/pages (like just 1-5), though that definitely changes long before you reach 10_000 items.
And for the majority of mid to big websites - visitors/buyers will look only at minority of products/pages. Let's say it's like Pareto 80/20 percent principle. Though if not 90/10 - for tourism/travel/flights - because places like London, Paris [France, not dozens of them in USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_(disambiguation)], Rome, Las Vegas, Ibiza ...etc are much, much more interesting/visited than say Anchorage/Alaska.
And unless you've got uniform spread of visitors/customers around the world - which I'm thinking that even Facebook/Google/Amazon don't really have (because Flipkart/WeChat/etc are used more in India/Chrina/etc). You're likely to see a daily (per hour), weekly (per work vs weekend days) pattern /where west is different than Israel and predominantly Muslim countries/ - the min/max difference even within one day/week is easily 2 to 5 times.
All of that is to say that by far majority of your revenue will likely be during workday afternoon in your target audiences time-zone, and from those 10_000 items it will probably be <=100 that are seen/bought by majority of your visitors.
Indeed it's both not ethical not legal in most parts of the world.
My educated guess it that only reason it happens anywhere at all - is within "smaller" websites/companies which:
a) don't know better because they are mostly just tech people that didn't heave to deal with big company bureaucracy, they have no legal/ethics team - or (hopefully not big chunk) they do know it's not legal, but count on ...
b) they are small enough that no one bothers to deal with until amount of money company is making suddenly makes it go over whatever amount makes it worth the effort
That's really good thinking - and both wishlist and "bought x times" are nice representation of the real world "social proof" where you're walking next to a store or bakery and see a long queue of people waiting to enter and making you notice they are selling something good/cheap/etc.
Generally going from those towards the "X other people are considering it", and even further towards "only X left" (on their own, and especially both in combination) puts you more towards different effect of "scarcity". And that's what seems to be more polarizing with people.
Besides majority of people not noticing/caring/etc ("bell curve"). Two opposite camps are where one is really not liking it (especially when they think it's not real and just fake scarcity) and vocal about it. Meanwhile on the other end are people finding it valuable info to know, and they tend to be much less vocal. (Which, yeah - is actually same with just about everything else)
Those that find it valuable seem to be people that want specific things. Not just specific apartment/hotel, but also think of cases like parents with school age kids being limited to specific dates due to school holidays or things of that nature.
For smaller websites the "send ping every X seconds", and/or combo of that with "onLoad do +1, onUnload do -1" might work.
Though for really big websites - with millions of users making requests to 1000s of web/api servers spread across DCs in different continents ... It's indeed a variant of what you said.
Analytics can give you confidence to say that X percentile of people spend at least Z seconds/minutes on given page. So you can use initial request + TTL value of Z.
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PS All of the above is at least order of magnitude (if not even bigger) more complex when your page is not simply one physical product, and instead you've got "product x between Start and End dates" since that's millions of products x millions of combinations.
If you go down that route of thinking - any online marketplace (e.g.: Amazon, mobile app stores, Steam ...) and even offline your local green market and groceries store are all screwing everyone over.
Not sure what illegal consumer practice are you talking about.
Reading through the points from the page you posted - I think internally only actions related to that were basically to add more info (e.g. popup/hover or just "on our site") to clarify to people that same as every other marketplace on the Internet ... coughAmazoncough ...
Things we show are just things we know about and have in our "inventory".
And actually after some of those changes - I believe some customers started to complain that reminding them how "X other people are looking at {name of hotel} for your dates" felt much creepier than "X other people are looking at {name of hotel}" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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PS. Only reason I wrote a quoted "inventory" is that unlike physical goods with real stock. When you're renting accommodation - on top of physical rooms, there's extra dimensions due to different dates, meals (because in many hotels restaurant can't support everyone having breakfast, half/full board/meals) ...etc.
> Not sure what illegal consumer practice are you talking about.
> I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned
You were part of a team that cooked up new ways to harm consumers.
Playing the same word games here too is a bit tasteless. When your company is forced to "align practices presenting offers and prices with EU law following EU action", that means you've done something illegal, and you were caught. Nothing else matters.
I hope you realize that picking out only bits and pieces that fit your predetermined view is basically just reinforcing your personal biases, and not bringing you to see the bigger picture.
Though as long as someone doing that is impacting only that person - I don't mind.
However, I would appreciate if you didn't follow taking those bits and pieces you've selected. And then taking them out of context that I've said/wrote them in - re-combining them in ways that would bias others reading just your "curated" version.
Some of your work was unethical and harmful, work that was later on found to be illegal in the European Union. All of this is part of the public record.
It's never too late to reflect on that, and work on making things better at your company, instead of acting surprised that something illegal was called illegal on HN.
AFAIK none of my own work, nor work of the people I was team lead off was unethical, harmful or illegal. Neither in EU or elsewhere.
Before jumping to further conclusions - I would encourage you to look at actual differences in website before and post that announcement you're referring to. Wayback archive should work - though some of this stuff might have not be shown, or shown differently to bots; otherwise over years there have been a bunch of articles covering persuasive techniques with examples/screenshots of Booking.com.
And then perhaps even ask specific questions based on those observations - and maybe, just maybe someone can answer them without actually breaking the law.
Though since it would be against the law for me to give too many technical and business details (employment contract, regulations related to publicly traded companies ...etc). Only way I can think off for you to get a peak into implementation - would be to become a colleague.
And finally - I will agree with you on that last sentence. It's never too late to reflect on things. That includes not acting surprised (or in denial) to hear that some "big company" you thought is doing bad things - is not.
Oh and definitely keep up with the good fight. Based on news with actual specific details of lawsuits and outcomes (some of which I initially only found about when they were used as examples in internal ethics workshops & trainings). There's a lot of companies out there that should be getting more scrutiny both internally and externally.
Thanks ♡ And imagine that our mission is to have everyone feel that same way.
Obviously as middle man you take some part of the pie - though idea is that it's worth for everyone.
BTW - it's not that common to meet customer with 100+ reservations. So excuse me for asking - what do you think of the changes in the account area (My Trips)?
Sorry my bad, on booking.com I only have around 50 (private), the rest are company booking systems. (felt much more!)
Currently I only have the android app (well, traveling again) and I am mostly satisfied with it.
However the web version I always found a disaster. Especially since I had a linked business account too, and the SSO just craps itself into a redirect loop when I try to logout from it.
Everything else seems to be very user-oriented and I am satisfied in general.
(ha, I also happen to know the storage system behind the backend ;-) )
I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned (among other things I did in particular latest version/implementation of "X other people looking at this") and TL;DR: All of it is real - and majority of people don't find it as annoying as you, many even find it helpful
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While I can't really give too many details (BTW I still work at Booking - just moved teams).
I did the real time (it's a stream so technically that's "near real time") processing back-end which collects all the "views events", uses anonymous unique user identifiers to make sure it's truly not counting duplicates, bots are also excluded ...etc. And result is a reverse index of sorts.
On the FE side (technically still BE so think backend for frontend) as part of producing message (or not) we literally do a real-time query on that reversed index to be sure that even if looking only at count it's "1" - we want to be sure that it's not you.
As of things like "Only X left" - that's literally how many rooms we've got left to offer to you for the dates you've entered.
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And speaking generally. Booking.com being 25+ years old global company, one can imagine that company is basically constantly under microscope of various regulators and consumer protection agencies. So even if there was someone that wanted to fake this type of stuff (and that would be going against what they've learned in various mandatory ethics, privacy, legal ... training). Well something like that would've been very short lived.
And with so much money on the line - companies (at least those that don't have walled garden ecosystems and such) actually do look into long term effect of things like Marketing/Sales/Persuasion - because they don't want to annoy potential customers so much that they never come back.
After one too many times Python breaking changes got me to a point of Gentoo system that can't be updated (and it usually happens midway through bigger system/world update, so potentially many applications/tool also don't work) - I've switched to https://www.calculate-linux.org/
It's still real Gentoo system, and unlike Sabayon Linux (many years ago) where you couldn't easily switch between emerge/portage and whatever Sabayon had - with Calculate it's all seamless. You can still do manual Stage3 tarball install, or just use Live image with GUI installer ...
Most (like 99.95% percent) of packages come as pre-built binary, those remaining 0.05% is just packages where I had niche reasons to deviate from config (use flags) that Calculate used to build those binaries.
And unlike `emerge -uND world` which can easily get stuck and even break (usually if you haven't updated system and toolchain in a while) - `cl-update` has been so good that several years passed and it didn't happen - well kind of.
Combo of some python based apps being old/weird/whatever, and python breaking shit between versions - I do have multiple Python versions installed:
* dev-lang/python Available versions: (2.7) 2.7.18_p13{tbz2} - installed (3.6) 3.6.15(3.6/3.6m)^t (3.7) 3.7.12_p1(3.7/3.7m)^t - installed (3.8) 3.8.12_p1^t{tbz2} - installed (3.9) 3.9.9^t{tbz2} - installed (3.10) 3.10.0_p1^t ~3.10.1^t (3.11) ~3.11.0_alpha2^t
Which actually came in handy one time where (through my mistake) on top of pure Gentoo's emerge/portage, Calculate Linux tools (written in Python) also broke. Luckily older versions of python (with all the libs/packages tied to that version as well) worked - so it wasn't hard to temporarily use older Python version to get things stable.