[HN Gopher] Dark Software
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Dark Software
Author : superzamp
Score : 44 points
Date : 2024-06-13 16:44 UTC (1 days ago)
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| mcpar-land wrote:
| I kept waiting for the Dark Kitchen section of the article to end
| with "...and this is a miserable, alienating model that makes
| nobody happy," but it never came.
| necubi wrote:
| Right, the ghost kitchens make (generally) terrible food, but
| are able to get orders by spamming the DoorDash/UberEats search
| pages. And if a particular brand gets too many bad reviews, no
| problem. Shut down and start a new one with another punny name.
|
| Traditionally restaurants (like many software companies,
| incidentally) live and die by their "brand" and by their
| ability to get repeat customers. This more-or-less aligns
| incentives between the restauranteur and their patrons. But
| under the ghost kitchen model, there's no reputation, no real
| brand, so the restaurant is incentivized only to make food as
| quickly and cheaply as possible.
| cyberax wrote:
| That hasn't been my experience with ghost/dark kitchens. They
| work great for niche ethnic foods that might not attract
| enough foot traffic.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| The cloud kitchens I've ordered from were great and often had
| food that you wouldn't be able to get whatever, like just
| basic roasted chicken. I think it's a fantastic model where a
| talented chef can just focus on cooking.
| necubi wrote:
| There's nothing inherently wrong with the disaggregation of
| kitchen and dining rooms, so certainly you can get good
| food out of a commissary kitchen. In my area there's an
| amazing korean katsu place that's run out of one.
|
| But restaurants like that are fighting against the
| incentive structure, and the incentives always win.
| quirino wrote:
| That's also my issue with dark kitchens. Apps list actual,
| physical restaurants, next to what is just people making food
| in their own homes. And I've found instances of the name
| changes you mentioned.
|
| There's this "premium" burger place I like has alternative
| "delivery first" menu with lower cost offerings and a whole
| different name and branding. You can also order from this
| menu in person but you need to ask for it. I find this to be
| an interesting strategy.
| apantel wrote:
| It's the same with news and media. The traditional media
| companies (news, television, newspapers), etc all had to be
| massive brick-and-mortar businesses with huge capex (printing
| presses, broadcast equipment, etc). Very high barrier to
| entry, high cost to play, and you had to organize all of it
| under a real brand tied to real plants and offices... which
| meant you had to care about your reputation... which meant
| you had to make sure your editorial department was doing a
| good job.
|
| Now the web is full of bootstrapped digital media outlets
| that have no skin in the game in terms of real-world
| presence. They don't have printing presses to run. They don't
| have delivery trucks. They don't have inventory to manage.
| It's just air. There's nothing there. Maybe a single open-
| plan office, or just a group of digital nomads working out of
| a corner of a coworking space. You can build and tear down an
| outfit like that in a week. Whereas to spec out, order,
| install, house, operate, and amortize/depreciate a single
| printing press would be a multi-year to multi-decade
| undertaking by a real business.
|
| It's all fluffy clouds now.
| immibis wrote:
| How doesn't it? I've ordered from some; they were fine.
| Expensive, but food delivery always is. This probably depends
| on your city, its regulations, the ratio of dark to normal
| kitchens, and whether enshittification-as-a-service providers
| have entered your city yet.
|
| Disaggregation of food-making services and seated-dining
| services makes a whole lot of sense, actually. Just look at any
| food court - why should each food-maker have its own seating
| area, when seating areas are interchangeable and cheaper to
| deliver at scale?
|
| However, disaggregation of food-making services and branding
| absolutely doesn't make sense for anyone except for people
| trying to confuse you to make a buck.
| mcpar-land wrote:
| Because dark kitchens / ghost kitchens aren't just
| outsourcing their seating area, they're outsourcing
| everything but the logo. Ghost kitchens will frequently "cook
| for" more than one "restaurant," but these separate
| restaurants will have the exact same items on their menu,
| because they're coming out of the same kitchen. It's
| dishonest and done exclusively to put more "options" on
| delivery apps that funnel orders to the same business.
| There's a dozen other reasons ghost kitchens are bad for
| everyone involved (except the business owners).
| immibis wrote:
| Oh, yeah. Maybe it's worth differentiating between kitchens
| that are otherwise legit but exclusively serve via delivery
| apps, and kitchens that are spam. The former can be "ghost
| kitchens" and the latter can be "dark kitchens".
| rockemsockem wrote:
| This is the first time I'm seeing that definition applied
| to ghost kitchens.
|
| I've always seen it used to describe food for
| pickup/delivery out of an industrial kitchen which usually
| has several "restaurants" working out of it.
|
| I've had very good experiences with these.
| Gormo wrote:
| > Because dark kitchens / ghost kitchens aren't just
| outsourcing their seating area, they're outsourcing
| everything but the logo.
|
| Which means that you thought your food was going to be
| prepared by some people you don't know, but ended up
| getting food prepared by _other_ people you don 't know.
|
| > It's dishonest and done exclusively to put more "options"
| on delivery apps that funnel orders to the same business.
|
| How is that any more dishonest than multiple OEMs
| rebranding the same manufacturer's consumer products or
| conventional restaurants using the same recipes and buying
| the same bulk ingredients from Cheney Bros. or Sysco?
| zeroCalories wrote:
| So the future is more repackaging of existing products? Yippy!
| Stand back Vercel, I'm sewing you and a few other human centipede
| startups together into a new saas with 1000% markup. YC25 here I
| come.
| immibis wrote:
| The irony is that Vercel is already doing that. You're making a
| human centipede out of human centipedes. And each layer adds
| 1000% markup! Vercel adds a 1000% markup on AWS, which adds a
| 1000% markup on servers. You could add a 1000% markup too!
| philsnow wrote:
| > The [dark kitchen] model is so powerful that Uber's founder,
| Travis Kalanick, started one after he left Uber that was last
| valued at $15 billion.
|
| This sentence makes it sound like he just decided "you know, this
| $15B company is _fine_ , but I think I can do better" and just
| amicably 'left'.
| FreakLegion wrote:
| It's CloudKitchens that was last tagged at $15 billion. Uber's
| valuation was much higher.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Wasn't Kalanick basically booted from Uber? I think he retained
| his partial ownership.
| Zenzero wrote:
| The logic of this article is all over the place.
|
| At the root of it, the author is arguing that everyone needs to
| reach for common tools to patch together feature-packed solutions
| for a narrow set of customers. This somehow translates into it
| being cheaper to build and more appealing to customers. The
| problems I see:
|
| 1) Stuffing a bunch of third party services together to make a
| product is great for a startup looking to launch quickly, but in
| practice it is usually horrible long term. Quality integration
| between your features becomes difficult, and you will often
| sacrifice the UX as a result.
|
| 2) Outsourcing everything makes you a thin wrapper. Talk about
| commoditization.
|
| 3) The author seems to assume that the brand is the business, not
| the underlying product. That doesn't even hold for hamburgers,
| let alone specialized software verticals.
|
| 4) In an era of software being dumped on the market in droves,
| the solution is not to dump into the market even faster. I can
| tell you as someone coming from the medical side of things that
| people try doing this to us all of the time, and it's just
| endless heaps of garbage software. People would be smart to take
| the time to really think through our problems in the fine details
| where they matter. I know that doesn't mix well with a VC-backed
| growth at all costs model, but frankly that's not my problem.
|
| The article feels like it was written by an MBA, not an engineer.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| > The article feels like it was written by an MBA, not an
| engineer.
|
| I'm trying to come up with a name to describe this style of
| writing. The key components are how hyper-confident the author
| is in The Future and how everyone who has even a day's more
| experience than the author is old fashioned and will certainly
| be roadkill this time next week.
| stratigos wrote:
| I was just thinking it sounds like a very ambitious, engaged,
| and intelligent 24 year old (a kid).
| jordansmithnz wrote:
| No one wants dark/cloud kitchens, and I don't think anyone wants
| dark software either.
|
| It's extremely hard to do many things well. If a restaurant
| specializes in pizza, they're going to get good at doing that --
| their employees will know the best way to cook them, their
| recipes will slowly evolve over time, etc. If a restaurant rarely
| cooks a pizza, none of that experience and refinement is there.
|
| Not to mention, DoorDash doesn't have any obvious health ratings
| visible for restaurants in NYC. I'll happily order from somewhere
| I know, but not some unknown restaurant. And what's to stop a
| poorly rated dark kitchen from closing shop and reopening the
| next day under new branding?
|
| The whole model feels gross. It's centered around profit and
| questionable tactics, rather than making a genuinely good product
| that people come back for.
| alexpotato wrote:
| > I'll happily order from somewhere I know, but not some
| unknown restaurant
|
| Exactly this.
|
| Part of why I go to (or order from) a particular restaurant is
| that I've been there before and I have an expectation of the
| taste, quality, service etc. I could also, in theory, go look
| into the kitchen and see if there are safety issues etc (or
| outsource this to an inspector). Feels a lot tougher to do this
| if the "restaurant" is just a label on top of the dark kitchen
| product.
|
| On a side note, this is why chain restaurants were so
| successful: you could go into one in any part of the country
| and have a predictable experience with some base level of
| quality. The mom and pop restaurant in the town you've never
| been to wouldn't have that same offering to you (it might for
| locals though).
| immibis wrote:
| Mobile games are already using the Dark Kitchen model; so are
| dating sites/apps. I remember that match.com operated almost all
| dating apps - around two hundred of them - at some point in time.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| So just white label software?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| so "Microsoft Windows By Dell" instead of "Dell Computer,
| powered by Microsoft Windows"
| sklargh wrote:
| This strikes me as a rebrand of the "value-added" reseller or
| consultant implementation model; particularly in the middle-
| market space. I'm sure there are imagined differences in theory
| but in practice I can't imagine that it's much different with the
| exception of private capital coming from VCs rather than PEs.
| mushufasa wrote:
| Ya as someone who is a builder in the fintech space... it doesn't
| work to wave hands and stitch together a bunch of third-party
| software into one offering.
|
| Regardless of how neat the integration seems on paper, in
| practice the general "law" is that it won't work in the way you
| specifically want it to work. Often users get frustrated because
| they see the third-party has a feature, but that specific feature
| isn't setup to be integrated well, and instead the third-party
| "integration" hub is just the least common denominator
| functionality, which achieves "logo integration" but barely
| delivers value to users.
|
| Developers are spoiled thinking about super well documented &
| flexible APIs like stripe, whereas in many industries b2b
| software providers are nowhere as robust. If you're not directly
| their customer, they won't put in the extra effort to support
| your integration.
| danjl wrote:
| Dark kitchens are not designed to scale. In fact, they are the
| opposite - they only implement part of a company. There is no
| problem with sass as a business model. It's quite valuable to
| have a company manage software and data for you. The pernicious
| part is that they don't allow you to access your data unless you
| pay them in order to make it sticky. Consumers should demand
| access to their data and that would enable a new type of company
| that provides a service which will switch you between different
| saas services.
| nine_k wrote:
| Game theory opposes this.
|
| The current equilibrium: data are co-located with processing,
| both the storage and the processing ("service") are things that
| clients are happy to pay to offload. Bringing data in is easy
| and often free. Taking the data out is hard / expensive, so
| customers stick unless the service becomes truly poor.
|
| Imagine a player which makes it easy to take the data away. Now
| customers have easier time leaving, and will leave more often.
| They will go to the "sticky" SaaS players, and will get stuck
| there. There could be a bigger influx of new customers because
| it's less risky to try, but "sticky" providers also offer trial
| periods and free tiers.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| > AI will cause these dynamics to spiral even faster, making
| software even cheaper and distribution more expensive. It's still
| early, but there are plenty of fascinating examples of AI acting
| as an increasingly competent replacement for engineering.
|
| I've been hearing this for years and I'm still waiting on it. The
| most I've seen is some employees using ChatGPT or similar to
| produce some initial code. But even those employees reported you
| have to spend the same amount of time painstakingly analyzing
| each section of code because it contains unusual or bizarre bugs
| in edge cases.
| stratigos wrote:
| Ive been working in AI for about a year, and Ive been working
| as a web developer for about 20 years. It appears to me that
| everyone that thinks AI is going to handle development for
| companies (in the reasonably near future) are also folks who
| have never had high level engineering responsibilities for a
| single project for a multi-year period. That is, theyve never
| been exposed to the realities of how nuanced _managing_ a
| software product is at a technical level. The bots can barely
| write code-bootcamp level scripts. Im not confident that we
| will see AI solving the kinds of (coding) problems that
| engineering leaders are handling over multi-quarter projects.
| ok_dad wrote:
| My theory is that they know it won't work, but they're
| scaring developers into using and improving AI and taking pay
| cuts, so that they can eventually replace them. Every penny
| they can take from humans and invest in AI research is being
| used in order to be able to get rid of the humans,
| eventually.
|
| The AGI that might eventually come won't free humanity from
| labor, it will free the wealthy from having to manage and
| support laborers.
| JohnCClarke wrote:
| Curiously, the YouTube algorithm recommended that I read "Count
| Zero", so here I am.
|
| I think Neuromancer absolutely nailed the future of business:
| giant ledgers holding records of every communication, event and
| transaction affecting the organization. And all of that
| information processed by AIs under the control of a small number
| - one even - of owners.
|
| The AIs will decide whether they need to write and compile code
| to process the data or whether the task is small enough that they
| can just do it directly. Exactly like a human deciding whether to
| write a script or just use a spreadsheet. In this future the only
| B2B market is for AIs.
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