I want to mention another infection happening at payment terminals and ATMs if you're using your credit card in a foreign country: You get a message saying "Would you like to pay in your own currency? Click [Accept] or [Decline]", and there's fine print that says there's a 12-15% currency conversion markup.
To give a concrete example, if you're an American traveling in Brazil withdrawing cash from an ATM or buying something for BRL 500, you'll be presented with an option to pay BRL 500 or pay just US$110.58 in your own currency (with text saying conversion includes 15%).
But the typical American (and Canadian) credit card adds at most 2.5% to the Visa or Mastercard exchange rate, which is at most 0.5% higher than the interbank rate. So basically by clicking the wrong button, you're paying an extra 12% to the payment processor. In the example above, your credit card would have charged you about US$99.04 had you declined the conversion, and saved you $10.
I can't imagine a situation where it's to your benefit to accept the "conversion service" they're offering. I wonder if the payment processor is kicking back some of the profit back to the merchant because this swindle is spreading everywhere.
The worst part is that a couple of people that I've tried to warn don't get it. They still think that they should pick US$ (or whatever their own currency is) because that's what their credit card uses.
Some are even worse than this. When I was in Portugal, the machine said "Press (1) for GBP. Press (2) for EUR.", then on the next screen, after you select "(2) for EUR", it says "Rate will Apply. Please confirm. (1) Accept conversion (2) Reject Conversion". If you select "Accept conversion", it overrides your currency decision and you pay in GBP with their markup fee...
I saw the same in an ATM in Greece. The first screen wanted me to let them convert the currency (at a 20% markup), I declined, and the second screen said "are you sure? You might be charged a lot" and had "accept" and "decline" where the small print said "do you want us to convert anyway?".
This happened to me, but it was the merchant that clicked it...
I inserted my card, and then was reading the text and choice that popped up on the screen, and while I was reading it trying to decide which I should click, the merchant grabbed the scanner and clicked the accept...
Of course I got a charge notification on my mobile app immediately and noticed that it was way higher than it should have been, so then I had to go back to them and get them to refund the transaction so we could do it again which took forever and a manager etc etc.
Currency conversion is not only incredibly fraught with traps, but believe me, even for very intelligent and research-savvy individuals, if you're not a professional in this area, you'll struggle to see all the pitfalls and still fall for them. I don't consider myself stupid, but I spent several days seriously researching it, and ultimately, after being exploited by several new tricks, I gave up. I consider those losses as a part of travel expenses and avoid letting it amplify my losses, that ruining my travel. PayPal is even more blatant fraud. You never know how much money is left after a transfer or withdrawal until you're surprised, and then they'll say they mentioned it in some tens of thousands of words of agreement that they would deduct this amount.
On the positive side, it seems that Wise must block it because I never see the DCC "choice" when using a Wise card.
As a negative point, I've noticed that AirBnB, which used to use reasonable conversion rates, has just recently started to use exorbitant currency conversion and not allow you to pay in the local currency of the country you're traveling to (so you can let your own credit card do the conversion at a lower rate). I.e., if you try to book a property in Brazil in BRL (literally clicking on the price to pay in BRL), the charge will nevertheless go through in USD (or whatever currency is your own) with AirBnb doing the conversion at the rate they choose.
Aliexpress also shows prices in one currency but then refuses to take payment in that currency and does their own conversion with an unfavourable rate... Seems to be allowed with some combinations of delivery country and currency but not others.
I have a European currency (not Euro) and I think being charged their USD price is better than my local currency's.. I pay with Revolut and what Revolut charges me (taking my local currency and converting it to USD), is lower than what AliExpress would charge me if I had chosen to pay them in my currency.
So they charge you for an amount different to advertised? Tell your bank. You might get a refund and at least they'll have the complaint on file so the next victim might get a refund. If enough people complain and AirBNB don't fix it, AirBNB gets banned from accepting cards.
It is usually an option in your bank's app. It depends on the bank though, obviously. If it's not there, you have to be vigilant while using your card (always select the local currency when given the option).
I checked and it doesn't look like any UK banks have this option - at least I looked at about 5 different banks websites and all have pages suggesting you always select to pay in local currency but none of them have any information on disabling this behaviour
Gemini confirms it's not a thing, and not really possible (the terminals just detect the country from the card number)
I don’t know a single bank in Europe that provides this option
Edit: Perplexity says this:
> cards cannot block DCC offers because the merchant terminal identifies your card’s country of origin from the card number and offers DCC accordingly. Always manually decline at payment to let the card handle conversion at better rates
My bank (mBank in Poland) has per card options for declining various types of transactions, among others: made using the magnetic strip, with DCC, with added ATM surcharges.
The bank probably cannot disable the "service" offered by the terminal but seems to get enough information to be able to decline the transaction.
A few years ago I was checking out of a reasonably up-scale hotel in Barcelona early in the morning.
They punch numbers into one of those wireless hand terminals. I tap my card, enter the pin and then before I can react to what the screen is now saying they've punched the 'Accept Conversion' button and submit it. By the time I realise what has happened, it's too late and has started printing the reciept.
I insisted they reverse it and redo the transaction without that - the staff didn't understand and didn't care they'd cost me another 10-15%. It really adds up for a week long stay.
I once asked a cashier about this and they said it saved me money. They said representatives from the large national bank had done a presentation and noted how this is the best option for foreigners. I think they truly believe they are being helpful. Closest thing to legalized robbery.
I had the exact same thing happen to me at a hotel in China. I could not get the person at the checkin desk to understand the problem so I ended up having to just eat the extra cost. Very frustrating, it was not a small amount of money.
Well, it’s an unwise strategy to use on me if they’re feeling pressed for time. I will get enjoyment from putting my foot down for as long as is needed to reach a resolution.
That’s a 20+ minute decision they just made to try to save a few seconds.
PayPal does this too. They will offer to do the currency conversion at an outrageous rate. Not quite 15%, though always substantially more than Mastercard’s rate of the day.
Amazon does something like this too, though I'm not sure of the percent. I just know that every time I select to pay in dollars, any change in delivery options will select it back to pay in euros, where the bank is.
I genuinely don't know if this is good or not, but the UIs insistence on reverting back to another currency after my initial selection leads me to believe that my initial selection hits them the hardest the most
Amazon.com does add a ~2% "currency conversion guarantee" fee when paying in EUR, on top of whatever conversion they use. I imagine that the average cost of that "service" to them is closer to 0%.
The even worse part about PayPal is that they have a whole system of nonsensical fees to fall back to when you inevitably figure out how to evade the obvious ones. For instance, sidestepping their dynamic currency conversion by temporarily changing which currency they bill on your card (which by the way is rate limited to only a few times per month) will result in another "non-foreign transaction but with recipient in foreign country" fee appearing, covering the inherent costs of converting German US dollars to American US dollars or whatever. They will at least hide the fee from you for business transactions, but the merchant still has to pay it.
That’s 100% a US problem. Never had this issue in the EU, PayPal etc are obligated to offer the option to “just bill in transaction currency and let the card issuer handle conversion etc” without fees.
Payment terminals used to have good UX, they all clearly showed you the price when paying. Tills had displays with the price facing the customer which were clearly visible.
Now traditional POS terminals have been replaced with tap and go devices by the latest fintech, non of them show the price to the customer by design. Instead you tap a small puck and you hope the price charged is the one asked only to find a transaction fee on top when later check your balance.
It's a deliberate design choice to withhold showing the price on these devices. It's cheap to add a small LCD panel to them, the technology previously existed and still exists however the choice have been made not to.
I was in awe of an old vending machine I saw in the Caribbean recently. I didn't want anything but I spent a few seconds just pushing buttons to check prices. The segmented display read out the price the very instant I touched the button for the item. There was no perceptible delay for a bloated software stack running on some cheap processor that waits for too many bits over a crappy cellular internet connection. Everything needed was right there, between the hard-coded logic and me.
> Instead you tap a small puck and you hope the price charged is the one asked only to find a transaction fee on top when later check your balance.
I'm sorry, but it's a mandatory knee-jerk response here: "Is this something I'm too European to undestand?"
Even the the smallest, crappiest devices are required to have a line LCD to show the final price. Goes to show that consumer protection minimums do really set the bar for eventual exploitation.
In Australia, a lot of places only have a "Square Reader" on the counter where you pay. i.e. cafes, coffee shops, convenience stores, market stalls.
Terminals do exist with full displays but they are less common, mainly if you go to a restaurant as they have options for tipping on the display.
Just looking at the Square website the "Square Reader" is $69 vs $329 for the "Square Terminal". This may be part of the reason cafes etc prefer them given tight overheads.
Yes, I'm referring to European directive mandating final price displays on terminals.
I think this would be the simplest reader one can legally use in Europe
https://www.sumup.com/en-au/air-nfc-card-reader (although European market sites do not even list this model anymore)
I think your retailer has misconfigured their setup. Everywhere I tap against a puck, it is also accompanied by a screen. The puck is always just a plugin module as opposed to being integrated on the terminal.
At least in Brazil, it was very rare. In the last 3-4 years, it's almost every time you pay. And you have to grab and hold the payment terminal (especially if you're using tap / contactless payment) so the cashier or waiter, trying to be helpful, doesn't click the wrong button and cost you 15%.
Some places they're insistent that you must do currency conversion or the payment won't work. Makes me think the merchant must be getting a chunk of that profit and telling their staff to accept the conversion...
As others have said, currency conversion has been a well-known "scam" for as long as I can remember. I'm sure Martin Lewis has been talking about this since at least the early 2000s in some form.
Here in Greece it always asks "Euro or USD?". Most merchants know to press Euro, the rest ask me. I think I've maybe had one merchant press USD by accident in ten years or so.
Exactly, who has more incentive to rip you off, your bank or some random merchant/payment processor/local bank that you are probably never going to interact with again either way.
They seemed to have given up on this in some areas. I don't think they asked me this once during my visit to France in October. This included Paris and smaller towns.
When you think about it, it's just another "Tourist tax" of which are are many. Other times you just get quoted a different base price as a tourist vs. native - openly or not.
An especially egregious case I've encountered was at Berlin train station.
Normally in Germany, you've got those distinct card terminals with a display where you see your total before paying. Some of those have started nagging you for tips which you need to explicitely accept or decline first before tapping your card. Not in this case though: after you've ordered your food, they point you to the combined order/pay display and while you awe at the technology marvel of combining both, you tap your card on that and then you notice that 15% tip has been automatically included and charged. You needed to notice some small text and small buttons in the corner of that display beforehand and actively tap on "0%" or something before tapping your card. I'm already furious they've let this tip begging to be added to the card terminals, but charging tips without explicit consent should be completely illegal.
At Schiphol they offer tipping options to presumably prey on Americans, but the attendant physically reached over the counter to reject it after I ordered in (native) Dutch. Can't imagine how much trouble locals had been giving the shop before training staff like this.
What takes money out of their pockets is not paying a real wage for a real job. TIP destroys the value of a profession and when you don't think a profession is 'professional' you pay less for it. This is a terrible dark pattern at every level.
I am not arguing for tipping culture, but I question the incentive for rejecting a tip as a US Starbucks employee. I very much doubt that playing a part in desired society-wide change overcomes the immediate incentive of the tip itself.
I don't go to starbucks personally but I've been to local ice cream shops, Cafes, fast food businesses, and others and this isn't too uncommon. I'd say it happens about 15% of the time? Its usually at places where tips aren't as expected anyways, but not always.
It is illegal. They're counting on you to be too busy to sue them. That's why you only saw it in a train station. Ask your bank for a refund for the fraudulent transaction — you probably don't have enough evidence to prove it happened, but they'll still put the complaint on file.
Lawsuits and chargebacks are about the only pressure businesses have not to scam you.
An especially egregious case I've encountered was at Berlin train station.
You must have been in Berlin, Wisconsin because we've been assured repeatedly on HN that the tipping plague thing is exclusively an American problem, and never ever happens in Eurosparkleponyland.
The problem is that US is actively exporting all the plagues they call their own worldwide, so that tipping (the mandatory-on-the-card-terminal kind) is currently actively infecting Europe. Which you could have gathered by reading this very discussion.
It's not the tipping culture that's invading Germany, it's the "begging for tips" culture. The worst kind. You buy a piece of bread at the bakery over the counter, pay with card, the card reader is begging for tips. This is exceptionally out of the ordinary, but I'm afraid there is not enough explicit resistance and there is still too much "looking up to the USA" happening so that the society might accept this idiocy as normal some day.
Charging a tip for to-go items is preposterous. When dining in, I will indeed tip, usually by rounding up to the next 5 or 10 euro increment for a group meal, or to the next 1 or 2 euro increment for single meals (e.g. during lunch hours near the office). But this is only if the service is actually good. If a restaurant makes me wait more than 30 minutes for a quick lunch, they will be paid exactly the amount posted on the menu.
This is called a float business in finance. Starbucks has more than a billion dollars in unredeemed balances, and they make ~$200 million per year in interest with this cash. They're basically a bank with a coffee shop side hustle.
How are they getting 20% on a deposit that presumably could be called up at any time, and how can I get in on it when the stupid "High Yield" accounts I can find top out at around 4%?
large businesses have large cash borrowing needs. if they borrow for free from their customers, it reduces the other borrowing they would need to do, so the rate to use is not what interest rate is available to you, but rather how much interest that Starbucks would need to pay for loans that size. Furthermore, whereas dividends are taxed twice (once as profit for the company and again as regular income to the shareholder), interest is a tax deduction to the company (which decreases their taxable profits) and for a percentage of debtholders that interest income is also taxed advantageously.
probably doesn't come up to 20% (unless Starbucks is in junk bond territory) but it's higher than the investment rate of 4% that you're quoting.
If anyone knows of _any_ investment yielding a yearly 20% reliably, I'd certainly be interested. If Starbucks figured that out, I don't know why they're bothering making coffee.
Most of the time they have a buried clause that says that you forfeit all of your credit or get charged an inactivity fee if there have been no account transactions or no credit added for 12 or 18 months. Same reason why you should never buy gift cards.
I mean I’d love to have a free $21M a year, but if you’re already Starbucks then somehow it feels like pocket change compared to your actual earnings and would question if it was worth the effort.
But they also have over a billion cash at hand. I imagine at that scale and customers being private, the amount is pretty stable and Starbucks can just do whatever with this since it's extremely unlikely that customers demand all their money back at once.
I mean, once Starbucks have it, then the customers get it back via product (that has a margin included), or just leave it forever (free money!)
I have a firm "No vouchers" rule because of this, the vouchers in my part of the world inexplicably "expire" if not used within a certain amount of time, cannot be redeemed for cash, and will not be honoured if the business goes belly up
According the laws here they have to. Doesn't mean they won't make it difficult. And it needs to be in a separate account and business (to avoid it being drawn into a bankruptcy). Not that this has ever stopped businesses from abusing it anyway. I doubt this voucher option is available in the Dutch app because of this but I didn't bother to check.
That was actually a bad year, as that "free" $21 million represented a loss of about $30 million. $1.17 billion on Jan 1st 2016 is equivalent to $1.22 billion a year later due to inflation. So they would have had to generate $50 million just to break even in actual buying power terms.
No, they're saying that inflation that year was 4.3% ($1.22B / $1.17B¹) If you're only making 1.8% in investing it, you're not beating inflation, and your money, though nominally growing (number is going up), is decreasing in its real value (amount of stuff the money gets is going down).
(¹I think this is too high; BLS thinks inflation over 2016 was 2.5%. But their core point still stands: interest earned was below inflation.)
If they're intentionally causing the customer to have an unspendable balance, knowing that it's making them $200m/yr, how is that not fraud (or some kind of crime)? I'd expect atleast CA would do something about it.
Customers agree to this when they accept the terms of the app. This is also how a debit or savings account at any bank works. Both businesses have sophisticated models to determine how and when customers are likely to make withdrawals, and based on these models they lend out the money based on acceptable risk criteria.
Even if it is in the T&Cs, this one feels like it wouldn’t actually hold up?
Expecting people to read those for most simple sign ups is already a high baseline, and Starbucks is not technically a banks and offers no consumer protections (FSCS or other), so that feels knowingly misleading, even if the total balances held are small per customer.
Toronto Parking Authority is guilty of this. If you pay at a terminal on the street, then you're charged the exact amount needed for your parking session. If you pay using the mobile app, then it charges your credit card in increments of $20, requires your mobile phone number as an account identifier, and keeps track of your remaining monetary balance.
I don't know a single resident who uses oyster (maybe kids? Dunno, I don't have kids in my social circle), infrequent visitors are actually the only ones I've seen using oyster and that's because they thought that was the only way to use transport
All these silly excuses people make: "I tip when the service is good", "I tip when conversation with bartender is engaging", "I tip when the server runs around me in circles, I count the circles and convert it with an exchange rate of $2/circle". Wow.
I'm from EU, so ymmw. I simply don't tip. Why? Because I don't have to. And if I don't have to, then I don't. It is that simple.
Yes but here in France where service is included and tipping is never compulsory (or expected), payment terminals are appearing where you need to select the tip before typing your code. This is usually shoved in your face by the waiter at touristy places, and they're watching you.
Don't fall for it though! Just select "no tip" or "0" like in this game and you're good.
A restaurant is fundamentally selling an experience. These screens do not improve the experience. Therefore, they have some cost to the business. The question is whether the cost is recuperated.
This is no pressure. You can exert pressure by saying that you are cancelling the transaction because of the tipping screen and you'll eat somewhere else.
You could tell them that you are very happy to pay them the price they printed on the menu and that they can present you with a payment terminal charging exactly that price, but that you will not do that job for them. Basically make the waiter select the 0% option.
But in the end you'll only annoy the waiter and not the owner of the restaurant who is actually running the tipping scam.
At least in that case you can safely select a 0 tip. It's worse when you pay up front and have to worry about a lower than expected tip resulting in some kind of retribution from the staff.
Yeah that's not possible. When you're presented with the terminal the food is already in your system.
Or maybe you can be like our former Ministry of Culture, Jack Lang, who just resigned from a prestigious, if useless, post in the wake of the Epstein scandal. It was revealed that he never paid for anything in his 60+ years of public "service", always leaving restaurants, hotels, etc. without footing the bill.
For you and me, this would be called stealing and would eventually land us in jail. But if you're a minister in France it's called "living like a prince" and being "a little stingy".
I was extorted 15% tips in Paris in a restaurant with shitty food not too far away from the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, I didn't have roaming package at the time so I couldn't check that place's rating on Google Maps before ordering food. Turns out, there were lots of complaints about their service. In retrospective, I should have probably called police when they were actively insisting that 20% tips are mandatory and after like 5 minutes of arguing they "kindly" agreed to lower it to 15%.
I don’t tip either, simply because the work done wasn’t worth tipping. The only time I tipped was in a 7 stars restaurant, and the waitresses were up to their names, literally standing and waiting by our table changing utensils and plates and filling the drinks. North America tipping “culture” is out of control, I remember picking up some street food and the guy asked for a tip.. Most restaurants nowadays buy the food from costco, machines do most of the cooking, and the waitress job can be literally replaced by a robot, it’s just a scam and it should be illegal actually.
The actual scam is that restaurants can and do pay wait staff below minimum wage (like 2-3$), because it’s explicitly allowed, with expectation that the rest comes from tips. So not tipping in USA may in some cases be an asshole move.
Tipping is one of those Moloch coordination problems where if everyone would suddenly decide to make the world better at the same time, it would be, but if only a few people try to make the world better, it gets worse and they're assholes.
It's really not a binary situation where you'd ever see $2 wages with no tips though. If less people tip then the effective real minimum wage will gradually increase to compensate - either because laws are updated or because the restaurant has to compete with other better paying job opportunities. Sure some waiters may get upset when someone doesn't tip, but that is just that - them getting upset - and not the client being an asshole.
This will hurt people in the moment, people who sometimes are few dollars away from not making rent or buying enough food.
And as other commenter correctly pointed out, by the federal law of hour wage plus tips is below federal minimum wage, the restaurant must pay extra to reach the minimum wage. So if we assume that restaurants actually follow this law, wait staff will be kept at poverty wage 7.25/hr.
They legally cannot. If the average wage per hours including tips is under the Federal minimum wage in a pay period, the company must top up so that the wage per hour is the Federal minimum wage.
Well wage theft in the US dwarfs all other forms of theft combined.
But also actually demanding those wages if you dont get enough tip money is a great way for them to get fired. And if they are that poor to work in those conditions they will have a hard time scraping the money to go to court to get an unlawful dismissal case.
But servers are the only industry where they demand we the consumer take care of the problem because they're unwilling to do so themselves:
"Hard time scraping the money to go to court"? You don't go to court, you go to the DOL with your documentation.
"If you don't tip I have to pay/pay taxes to serve you" - no, you don't. The IRS assumes that you get a certain amount of tips. If you document that you got less, then guess what, they tax you on that.
Know why servers don't like to do that? Because the IRS assumption is that the average tip is 8%. What proportion of a server's customers do we think don't tip versus those who tip more than 8%?
"I'll get fired". Sure. That's a risk, I admit, and easy for me to say "You need to risk something". Inertia is a powerful thing. How many servers getting fired for fighting wage theft is enough to make a restaurant start to have problems?
You can't be serious. We're discussing a class of people making sub-minimum wages, barely scraping by to afford rent and groceries (much less any childcare or medical expenses), and your suggestion is "lobby to change that" or "just get a different job"?
As someone who has previously worked for that wage and finally did "get a different job," there was no "just" about it. I had the support of well-off family who were willing to significantly contribute to my education and living situation, and it still took years of hard toil (all while being nearly destitute) before ever achieving anything resembling financial stability. That was not (and likely never will be) an option for 90-95% of the people I worked with in the food-service industry. There is absolutely no justification (beyond abject greed) for that type of poverty wage, and it's the responsibility of everyone in our society to prevent that type of exploitation of the vulnerable, precisely because they cannot afford to "lobby to change that" and often can't "get a different job" outside of the same industry.
> and the waitresses were up to their names, literally standing and waiting by our table
I hate that. My old boss would book us into 5* places when we travelled for work and his wife was also there. People standing over me just felt “ick”. Like when the security guard decides to fallow you around the supermarket! (the latter has only happened a couple of times that I've noticed, when it did I made a point of spending much longer than I otherwise would meandering back & forth, and gave them a grin on my way out after paying…)
It's usually pretty discreet - they'll stay out of your line of sight and, if they're doing it right, you should barely notice them stepping in to top up your wine, etc.
Not sure what star rating system you're going by (Michelin only goes up to 3), but I'd expect that level of service even at 1* restaurants.
I'm meaning hotel (and therefore the bars/other within them) ratings rather than restaurant stars.
Maybe years living in a somewhat ropey town and having to be careful in alley-ways and tree covered areas has tuned me to be extra sensitive to people trying to stay out of line of sight…
One of the things not discussed here is that for many wait staff wages are far lower than our pathetic minimum wage (USA) so these people tend to make sub poverty to start with on the promise of tips.
I do agree though that the whole culture was broken before and now with payment kiosks asking for tips everywhere it's absurd.
Little known (apparently) thing from Spain is that our tips are not proportional. I see percentages everywhere when going out... 10% here, 15% there, so the quantities seem outrageous to me. In Spain if you want you leave a 1€ or 2€ coin, maybe 3 or 4€ plus some other smaller coins if you are more than 2 people. But that's it.
I've never seen a tip reaching 10€ in a restaurant, even in tables of 5+ people.
And imagine people bring their own drinks to restaurants in China (for big family lunch it can be even big plastic bags full of many bottles) and nobody even understand the concept of the tipping - why would you tip someone for doing their work and paying for the meal? One of the things I loved about China. They even come running after you if you forget your change.
What I liked much less is smoking in the restaurants which happens in Beijing even in 2026 despite posters on the wall saying No smoking in Chinese and English and everyone is affraid to tell something to smoker. You would think after years of campaigning it will improve, but I don't see much improvement after visiting after many years.
Of course. After living in Germany I can say that if I has not been not insulted in the process and the staff did not glare at me like I'm interrupting their free time, then the service was already much better than average
Agreed, not a fan of all the "is everything alright" and "can I get you anything else" and other "helpful" interruptions that many US waiters like to do.
Last time I was there (last year), I tried just giving small "trinkgeld" tips (round up to nearest Euro) and the servers were PISSED. I've never seen such rude service.
So why do EU people always say there's no tipping in the EU? This clearly isn't true, at least not any more.
When I traveled in the EU in the 2010s, it wasn't like this at all. WTF is going on over there?
I'm also from EU. I tip only at restaurants, only 10% on average. The prices when recently up like 50% or so. So adding the tip on top of that is a hustle. And 10% on the higher price is also higher tip, so I am double assured I do good
here in Central Europe (SK/CZ) we never done percentage, we were just rounding up the sum, like 283 to 300, but even 292 would become 300, and if it's bill 300 then tough luck for waiter. But not sure what is the situation in recent years with card payments replacing cash, tips must been hit hard, also raising prices and people going to restaurants less and less doesn't help much.
Personally I pretty much stopped going to restaurants completely during COVID when I was treated worse than dog - dogs allowed (to some places), unvaxxed not allowed to enter.
This is the correct approach. If you are an asdhole for not caring about others but using the herd immunity znyway, this is the latest that can be done to show contempt.
My wife is immunodepressed and cannot be vaccinated. She avoids plenty of places because shit people like this do not care.
I once physically threw away someone sick and unvaccinated from a place for babies only that are not protected by the mother and too young to protect themselves. It was violent, I called the police afterwards myself.
Covid vaccines never prevented infection and transmission. If anything, out of the people I know the vaccinated got it much more often because they were more careless.
Whenever someone complains about being treated "worse than dogs" I have to wonder how they think dogs should be treated. To be fair, if dogs could catch COVID and pass it onto humans they'd likely have banned unvaccinated dogs as well.
I also live in Europe and tip, specially if I know that the salary of the staff heavily depends on tips. Also, if the service wasn’t great, I also tip, maybe they weren’t having a good day, like when I’m not that productive some day at my coding job.
If I ever find the system too unfair for the workers, then I won’t go to those restaurants anymore.
> I also live in Europe and tip, specially if I know that the salary of the staff heavily depends on tips.
> If I ever find the system too unfair for the workers, then I won’t go to those restaurants anymore.
Sounds like you only tip once at each restaurant then? Not paying a reasonable salary to employees and assuming they'll beg customers for extra money to make up the difference seems unfair to me.
I can't say if it's unfair or not. I would prefer every worker to get a decent salary, but no idea how they feel in countries where tipping is widespread like the US.
But, if I go to a restaurant in the US, or, Argentina (where tipping is also a thing), then I'll tip, and consider the price of the food to be 10, 15 or 20% more expensive. Otherwise, I won't go, because then I am complicit with the exploitation of the workers.
Incorrect, the reason they don't get a full salary is because tipping is allowed.
If you don't tip, the worker does not magically get a salary. How would they? No, they actually make less money.
This whole "well if you think about not tipping is actually giving them more money" thing is the purest and most refined form of cope I've ever seen. It obviously doesn't work like that. Maybe if everyone did it. But you just doing it does nothing.
You're 100% allowed to not tip. What you're NOT allowed to do is not tip and then somehow try to claim you're helping the worker. You're not. Like, objectively, you're not. That's just literally not true.
No, homeless people should not live from tips, they should be helped by the government. I live in Belgium and tip because I'm used to (I'm from Argentina) and I know the staff is happy when I do it.
Fine but a few things. 1) the service at restaurants and bars in Europe is terrible. 2) the employees at US restaurants and bars often make more money than people doing the same job in Europe. 3) it allows the folks with more money pay a larger share and those with less to pay a bit less.
The problem with tipping is tipping in places which aren't restaurants and bars.
The service in Europe is great in many many places. My experience with US service is that it feels very fake most of the time. Plus, staff having their own table/zone means you cannot ask any other waiter to help out cause "it's not their table". That's one of the many problems with this tip culture.
I agree with the tiered pricing argument, but ehm, you know you are allowed to tip in Europe also right? If you are rich and feel benevolent, feel free to leave cash on the table. You don't need others to be forced into dark-pattern PIN machines or feel guilty for not paying more than the bill for that reason.
>The service in Europe is great in many many places. My experience with US service is that it feels very fake most of the time. Plus, staff having their own table/zone means you cannot ask any other waiter to help out cause "it's not their table".
I'm literally 0 for 3 on those claims. Not sure how you have such experiences. Maybe its a choice of words 'Many many' could be like 20 places out of 10,000. Maybe 'feels very fake' is something that isn't actually a problem, and might be a benefit, so I didn't notice it. And that last line about 'not their table'... I can't say I've ever experienced it.
Service in restaurants in Europe is way better than in USA. I don't want waiter to ask me anything except taking the order. I don't want to be ushered away as soon as I finished eating. I usually do that anyway, but I want to choose so myself and have option to sit and talk with my friend or family sometimes. I don't want to give my credit card to a stranger, who will carry it to some back room without control. An finally I want to pay exactly what is advertised, without scam fees or blackmail "tips".
> Service in restaurants in Europe is way better than in USA.
Eh. Having eaten at plenty of restaurants all over the USA and Europe, they seem equally littered with both good and bad service. Understanding and adjusting to the culture of individual countries helps make your experiences better.
Yes, this isn't a question about the US or Europe.
Some of the absolute worst service I've received have been in the US, yet they ask for tips. I've also received some of the best service at a US restaurant, where the suggested tip was 10% and the prices where pretty low.
The weirdest thing I've experience is the large number of staff in US coffee shops, compared to locally, yet basically not being able to order, and then having a suggested tip at 20%. I've encountered this a multiple locations, and different chains. Four people, one person takes the order, one makes the drink, one continuously mop the floor and the last person just stands around (manager?) You could significantly increase the base pay by getting rid of two of these people.
I totally disagree. The only good service I've found in the US was in very small cities (Fayetteville WV is the only name I remember and probably the biggest one). It also seems like restaurants there don't take their bread from local bakeries, and all their food, even vegetables, even in 30+ dollar meals, are from a food distributor. Here, if I pay more than 20 euros for a meal, I expect that at least the vegetable aren't from Metro, and if I pay more than 30, it's for sure a local fisherman/butcher that provided the proteins.
If I can't tip, I don't go out. Cuz I don't have to.
Granted, I also don't go to the EU if I can avoid it, and most places I make so much more money than the locals I don't mind a bit extra for the worker.
Nobody is entitled to anything, of course. But you're a jackass if you knowingly exploit people. A "livable wage" is a legal concept and does not incorporate your wealth.
Did you ever work a job or were friends with people who did where tipping is a big part of the income?
You make it sound like a general rule, but I don’t see how it is that “simple”. There are few things if any that you have to do in life. It’s all a decision and a tradeoff. Nobody forces you to breathe. Or to be friendly with your neighbors. Or a stranger.
I worked in the service industry for a while and have literally never cared about tips, in the sense that the default expectation in 99% of cases is no tip and the rare time I got a tip it was a few euros extra at most. Of course, I didn't care because it actually paid an actual wage, vs the weird shit you yanks are up to.
Hell, I know some people who have been working at restaurants as waiters for a long time now, and they live perfectly comfortably with 0 expectations around tips.
I still don't tip, basically ever, my only exception is the rare time I get food delivered, because unlike a regular service job the apps don't pay a livable wage and the cut they take is gargantuan compared to what the drivers get.
Your point is valid because waiters earn more money when they have low salary and big tips than high salary but no tips. The problem is though, I simply don't care about how much waiters earn, just like waiters don't care about how much I earn. I will start tipping the day waiters start honestly caring about the software job market collapse.
Most of my friends worked restaurants or bars when I was younger, tips were something some tourists would sometimes do and it would generally go into a pot for throwing a party for the staff few times a year. I have never tipped or seen a local tip in my home country.
Tips weren't a part of my friends income. The restaurant/bar paid them a salary.
I have a feeling that this HN submission is rather some test run which dark patterns work well on technically affine users. :-)
Having the knowledge which dark patterns even work well for technically affine users while still being "socially acceptable" can be worth a lot of money to specific companies.
In fact, odds on someone who was complicit in developing many of the dark patterns that have run billions of dollars from consumers is reading this from their phone, thinking they should go to bed so they can wake up to the acai bowl, cold plunge, and early retirement to hobbies in seattle.
I’m a native English speaker and I have only ever heard “affine” as a technical term in mathematics, e.g. an affine transformation of vector spaces. I would have had no idea what it means outside of math.
However, OP’s usage seems logical, so I wouldn’t be upset if it became popular!
The hosting provider is actually Clover POS and they are using this game to train their AI on which dark patterns yield the highest fee collections for Clover /jk
This reminds me of a gag voting simulation website from the early 2000s when BushJr was running for president against Al Gore. The (maybe flash?) game simulated voting, but when you tried to click, the buttons would “run away” from the cursor, or change size to avoid being clicked… dark patterns… always fun to “play against”.
More recently though, I must say, YouTube has really jumped the shark in terms of perfecting their dark patterns/algo stickiness. I can’t even go to the site without immediately forgetting my original intent.
Yesterday I scrolled down the front page of my Youtube, and saw the "shorts" shelf. I clicked "Show me fewer shorts" like I have a hundred other times.
I did something else for a few minutes, then I scrolled down another page or so.
The shorts were right there again.
Google is evil. Anyone still working for them is enabling this.
I once went to go pick up takeout and they covered the no tip button with a sticker. I was so confused so I put in 10 cents because I could find the button at first. I stopped going to the place since.
I help a blind friend order his groceries online from Walmart once a month. He's disabled and on food stamps (EBT/Link). The groceries are all taken care of, but the site always requests a $30 tip for the driver.
I drop it down a bit and pay it on my credit card for him, but what's the right way to deal with this situation?
"Walmart InHome is a premium service that delivers groceries and essentials directly into a customer's home (fridge/kitchen) or garage, using trained, vetted Walmart associates. As an add-on to Walmart+, it costs an additional $40/year (or $7/month) to provide unlimited, tip-free, and free-delivery-fee service."
Wow, thank you, I had no idea about this. Going to look into it. He has Walmart+ which you get for half price if you are on benefits, which also removes the regular $9.95 delivery fee.
is there a name for the phenomenon where a user immediately assumes the smallest and lowest contrast button on an interface is the option they want, before actually reading any of the words?
Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
[Matthew 7:13-14]
This reversed cta thing is what I've been evolved to do. Always look for the opposite of a cta button and click it. This reconciles with the fact the incentives have been off for the past few years or decades.
Tipping culture is properly weird to me as an European, I probably tip much more than the average European and I still find these prompts obnoxious, and they're popping everywhere in Barcelona. No thank you, that's a part of the U.S. culture I certainly don't want to see imported over here.
Nice! I’ve started only tipping on fridays for coffee, etc.
I’m a great tipper at restaurants
But being hit up for a $5 tip for a $4 drink is way wrong.
I’d tip you, but today is Thursday!
I tip great at sit-down restaurants. I don't tip at fast food places, or carry-outs where they don't actually provide and service, or at the oil change place.
Summary: if I didn't tip in a situation 10 years ago, I'm not going to start now.
I tip my barista and budtender a dollar every visit, personally. I love those people though. Restaurants get 20% unless they fuck up, then it's 15%, unless it was absolutely egregious.
IMO restaurant tips (and other service businesses) are 15% by default, 20% if they do well, 10% if they do poorly. If they do especially poorly (like, completely ignoring the table for an hour while chatting with coworkers off to the side), they get $.02. If they do especially well, more than 20% (I've gone as high as 50% once).
Do you tip your local cashier in the groceries store? Do you tip the bus driver who took you to work? Do you tip a bank clerk who processed your application? If no, then this is a living wage.
Also not having "tips" prevents freeloaders from not paying taxes, which every other worker in the country pays fairly.
Tips (if reported) are always subject to 7.65% FICA tax. And there are several conditions that must be met before tips are excluded from federal (not necessarily state) income tax. (U.S. tax law). In short, many tips are still fully taxed despite false promises to the contrary.
As a European, I never understood why you'd tip automatically. I get that waiters are allowed to be paid less, but I don't see why that would be the customer's problem.
I also don’t get the logic of tipping a percentage of the cost. Asking for several cheap beers is more work for the waiter than a single bottle of expensive wine, yet the latter earns them more?
Because it's part of our culture and it's an easy way to show appreciation. You don't have to do it anywhere. Waiters also explicitly aren't allowed to be paid less. They must make at LEAST minimum wage. If they don't make minimum after tips, their hourly rate is raised each paycheck to equal minimum wage. It's literally not the customer's problem. You should probably learn how things work here if you're that curious!
> Waiters also explicitly aren't allowed to be paid less. They must make at LEAST minimum wage. If they don't make minimum after tips, their hourly rate is raised each paycheck to equal minimum wage.
That means they are allowed to be paid less than minimum wage. Wage is paid by the employer, not the employer's customer. If the employer can deduct the tips from the minimum wage, that explicitly means that they are allowed to pay tipped workers less and that tipping does not provide any additional income but instead only shifts the responsibility of paying people for their work to the customer. Tips are are nothing but gifts to the employer.
> and it's an easy way to show appreciation.
If something is socially expected simply as part of protocol and people only do it out of the social pressure not to deviate from the norm and be seen as assholes, then that is not appreciation.
7.25 is not a livable wage anywhere really, so even at 7.25 they would need tips to live. It really is the customers problem to pay them - their employers get off on 2.13 mostly, and 7.25 if they're extremely unlucky.
And yes, I'm American. Of course it's culture, but more than that we want waiters to not starve to death so we tip. You can, of course, choose not to but I consider it an asshole move knowing what they're making.
For their skill at accomplishing their job. Their jobs are primarily skill-based and customer-facing. A taxi driver who gets you where you want to go quickly and safely, a waiter who never lets your coffee cup get empty, a barber who makes you look... well dang, pretty nice!
If you have something to add to the conversation then just do that. Don't make bad faith interpretations and unsubstantiated accusations against people.
>If you have something to add to the conversation then just do that. Don't make bad faith interpretations and unsubstantiated accusations against people.
You mean like you just did?
Tipping culture in the US is absolutely rooted in bigotry[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. That's not a "bad faith interpretation," it's well-documented history.
The bad faith interpretation is claiming that tipping is racist, not providing any evidence for it, claiming that OP knows that it is racist and supports it for that reason.
>The bad faith interpretation is claiming that tipping is racist,
That's not a bad faith interpretation, the origins of tipping in the US are absolutely based in bigotry.
>claiming that OP knows that it is racist and supports it for that reason.
A fair point. GP certainly did not assume good faith or give the comment to which they responded the most charitable reading.
My apologies for being somewhat knee-jerk about it, but I have a really big problem with bigotry (I am absolutely not claiming that you or the poster to whom GP replied are bigoted) and believe that decent people should call attention to bigotry, especially when it's embedded in society as the tipping culture is in the US.
Bigotry is ethically wrong and harms the societies which it infests. As I mentioned, I feel strongly about that.
If I was less than charitable with your response to calling out bigotry (GP's attempt to do so was rather ham-handed), my apologies.
I also cut my own hair, but sometimes I’m lazy and just hit up the Barber shop.
She charges me $15! I tip +$25 and it’s still a cheap haircut.
My haircut has to be one of the simplest around, but 9 out of 10 stylists will leave me fixing it myself later. Once I paid $50+tip for the same cut at a swanky joint and STILL went home and fixed it. She doesn’t know what she’s worth.
Taxis used to expect tips, black cab drivers often still do.
People used to play this whole unpleasant game of saying "round it up to £30 if you do me a receipt", and the driver providing a fistful of blank receipts in return - almost as if expenses fiddling was less shameful than tipping.
Thankfully, the likes of Uber and mandatory card payment terminals in cabs have ended all that.
Oh, yeah. And I remember a columnist in one of the Sunday papers in the late 90s talking about tipping the butcher for the Christmas goose, but I think that was probably a bit of a "look how old-fashioned I am!" affectation even back then.
My current strategy for how much total I'll pay for a coffee is FlOOR(price+.50) + 1, which keeps the bill nice and clean and kicks some goodwill towards someone who makes less than 1/5th the average earnings of my coworkers.
Probably not. Food service is ruthlessly competitive and making a profit after paying for product, rent, utilities, labor, financing and/or franchise fees is easier said than done.
Fun idea but gets boring when patterns repeat in seemingly random order. The timer also sucks a lot of the fun out of it and makes the game too easy, because the patterns can’t be dark enough. I just plowed through without ever even looking at the wrong options, because it was so obvious what the right one was.
I’d much rather the game progressed in a fixed logical order and the choices became less obvious without a timer. In other words, I think this makes more sense as a puzzle game, not a reflexes game.
Treat them as bribes. Punish the one who gives one with fine(1% of income/net wealth) and one who takes with mandatory imprisonment. After that they will quickly go away.
Great game. I squirmed at typing "no tips" the first time but second time was fine. I'm going to practice this a lot more to tonne down some (frequently abused) empathy
First I will say, I am very much against dark patterns and I believe servers should be paid a fair wage and not have to rely on tips.
But until that I do tip for dine-in service. But I found the "buy me a coffee" link on the button of this to be much funnier / ironic than it probably should have been.
It's also missing what I think is the worst dark pattern:
Having no option not to tip at all. Instead requiring that the customer press "Custom" and manually entering "0.00"
Besides payment kiosks having tipping on by default, I wonder how much of this is an indicator of inflation over the past 5 years. Businesses have dramatically broadened tipping on payment kiosks to avoid having to increase wages. "We'll still pay you 12 dollars an hour, but now you get tips!"
Now more than ever it is against your best interests to tip on any automated platform. The data collected will definitely be used against you in algorithmic pricing.
These days it pays to aggressively demonstrate that you are price sensitive and will delay or cancel transactions at the slightest whiff of additional expense.
I only ever tip off-platform or cash even if I pay with card. Also that helps to enable my gift to go only to the service provider. It fucks me on some platforms but I find that an acceptable cost to not get algorithmically spitroasted. Besides, it also helps to eliminate predatory platforms from my ecosystem.
I’m no industry insider, but tipping would seem to me to be a key indicator for discretionary spending, so a very valuable data point. I have no doubt that a dataset of 1m clients and their tipping patterns would be worth >500k per client (dataset user). A list of consistent, large or skimpy tippers significantly more. (Skimpy so as to know to target them with “deals”, big tippers for the upsell and value added advertising.
E.g. Uber / UberEats offer lower fairs to drivers if the client is expected to tip higher. I'm not an insider, but it can be observed in the wild as discussed on Reddit.
For X-Files fans who might be unfamiliar with the reboot, the reboot has actually one episode dedicated to this - S11E07 - Rm9sbG93ZXJz, Mulder/Scully don't want to tip the robotic self-service and are punished for it.
The most shocking part of the game is the price of goods! $14, $17 dollars for one meal to be eaten standing up? Wow. Here in Paris sandwiches cost between EUR 4 and 6 (usually 5), with a "menu" option that includes a can of soda and sometimes a "dessert" for 9-10. Anything above that would be considered extorsion.
Your user name being a reference to Coluche you're probably French? As a French you probably know these aren't exactly comparable. Yes, the US are probably richer than France per capita -- but not twice as much.
I've considered going back to cash just to avoid these. The social convention used to be the seller writes a price and if the buyer can meet that price the deal is done. These abusive card machines have brought "tipping culture" to the UK and I hate it.
Instacart has these, or at least it used to. You pay an annual membership, thinking that it gets you out of fees, but the FULL invoice (very hard to locate!) show a mysterious service fee of $3-6.
Really nice game OP. Would you consider making a version of the game with no timer?
I was thinking in sending this link to my family but probably the timer is really fast for them but I think they could used your app as "training" so they know how to spot a dark pattern in the future
I'm one of those cowards that always succumbs to the pressure and ends up tipping, but it bothers me enough that I just won't buy anything if I know I'm going to get asked. This is good training.
I always pay in cash, and I would want to know all of the prices (including tips, if any) ahead of time if I can (and also be able understand the prices).
(My draft specification of Computer Payment File is intended to avoid many kind of dishonesty when paying by computer (it is not needed or useful when paying in cash), including this kind; one of the things it requires is that the buyer calculates the payment amount from the information (such as the catalog) that the seller provides; they cannot charge you any other amount of money.)
This was cool, but I got to one where it would load after every button you click. That's fine, but then I "lost" because it simply wouldn't load a winnable option in time it seems. Maybe I was moving too fast and missed the real button, but I still didn't tip in the end, so eh.
I hate the tipping culture in the USA and Germany. Instead of being an extra, it feels like an obligatory surcharge I have to pay just to receive the service, good or bad. I usually don’t return to restaurants or bars that nag for tips. In those few places that I like and visit regularly, I don’t give tips. Me being a regular customer brings them more revenue than any tip I’d give otherwise.
Somehow, employers of these establishments convinced the staff that it's the customer’s fault that their wages are inadequate and that they should go after the customers to get the difference. I would much rather pay a higher price and not hear anything about the tips.
I understand that US has a weird tipping culture which results in such UI.
But these UI's are occasionally slipping into a countries where tipping is not expected.
This leads to a strange situations like "transaction isn't approved by me because instead of ApplePay and walk away, I need to solve some quiz on a payment terminal or payment will not pass".
Every time this happens, it annoys me a lot which affects my wish to visit this place again.
At this point it’s more profitable for companies to just enforce tipping everywhere using the UI as an excuse. It’s a total ripoff especially at already expensive places.
Even if a law was passed in the US to correct the minimum wage at restaurants etc. nothing will be resolved.
Restaurants managed to outsource their wage problems to customers without raising their prices. Even with an adjusted minimum wage, people will say that it’s not enough.
Now do one where you have to withdraw your card from the machine before it starts beeping obnoxiously at you but the screen keeps trying to trick you into withdrawing too early.
Dark patterns are just polite robbery by corporations that realized psychological manipulation pays better than service. The grift is the product, not the bug.
Bot account. Last active with two posts in 2017, then started spamming today with the usual HN spambot formula. As usual, doing the weird thing that only the HN spambots do where it's almost always exactly three paragraphs of 1-2 sentences each. Not sure why they prompt for that formula but it makes it very easy to spot out. For me, I guess. This is voted to the top and the bot has over 50 karma so apparently most people are unable to detect LLM spam even when they make it as obvious as they possibly can.
Gotta try harder than that. There's a certain length to their paragraphs as well, you can see from their post history the general shape of their messages that will cue you off that you're probably about to read spam before you've even read the first word. Also abundant LLMisms. Four "not X but Y" and three lists of three in only five sentences. The sheer density of LLMisms is absurd. Not to mention that vague sense of incoherency despite overall being a grammatically correct series of words. There are so many tells it's criminal people aren't catching it.
I would suggest sending this as an email to the mods instead of a reply, what you're doing is practically a bug report to the bot owner right now. The resulting discussion isn't super interesting either (IMO).
I am not signing up to a mini-moderator who has to e-mail dang 5 times a day. I want to not see these messages in the first place, and for that to be possible, the community needs to learn and be able to recognise this for themselves so this spam can be flagged and killed on sight.
If the bot owner happens to waste their time reading the responses to the dozens of comments one of their many spambots made, and improves the bots as a result, so be it. They're already winning the war as it stands, not like things can get much worse. I'd like to at least try to make an effort to make things better.
Maybe the actual answer is that I just need to stop using HN, though, since the spambots are taking over the site and yet people are more concerned with the people pointing that out than the actual problem.
Thanks - this was a good catch, and it makes steam come out my ears to see any account abusing HN like that.
You don't have to email us, of course! But please understand that we're on the same side. We don't want to see HN overrun by generated comments (a form of spam) any more than you, or other users do. Remember that tomhow and I were avid users of HN for many years before we became mods.
All: generated comments and bots aren't allowed here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If you notice an account that appears to be consistently pattern-matching to this, and have a minute to let us know, we'd appreciate a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, but we do monitor the inbox closely (including fishing through the spam bin for real users) and we take these reports seriously.
As someone very engaged in reading HackerNews comments I observed that your comment and the comment you are replying to have that exact same format of three short paragraphs.
The people behind these bots most certainly found that many engaging, authentic comments follow this clever pattern. It is also worth noting that such comments are remarkably digestible – due to their brevity and decomposition into even smaller logical and lexical parts – and swiftly read, requiring only a very short attention span and little intellectual investment from the reader.
This makes me very curious about the statistics on how HackerNews comments are structured and how well different formats of comments perform in the community. I would be thrilled to dive into the data and might write a neat program to analyze this sharing the results with the community.
The data you'd need for that is all available through both the HN Firebase API (which is a bit antiquated) and Algolia's HN Search API. If you find anything interesting, definitely let us know!
Incidentally, both comments were edited after the fact. Neither my nor Dang's comment were originally of this length but we both made edits that ended up there. I did notice the irony :)
OK, I sent the email myself. You don't have to do it. Just once, not 5 times per day. Agree about community awareness, but I think emailing the mods is more effective than responding to one of the 1000 comments this account is making.
That's right—some users vouched for those 3 after we'd killed them.
That makes sense, because if you look at individual posts in isolation you might think they were unfairly killed. One needs to look at the posting history of the account as a whole to understand what the issue was.
(Btw, thanks for explaining the context in those other threads.)
I've had repeated comment and email exchanges with you over the years over whether or not an explicit "killed" or "dead" indicator on accounts and their posts/comments should exist. I understand the reasons against this, and arguably they'd be more relevant in the case of detected bot accounts (the indicator would be yet more training data, assuming feedback training).
I've also been experimenting with my own indicators for specific accounts based on my own criteria and interactions which I've found useful (applied through my own HN tweaks). E.g., if I see an explicit mod note that an account has been banned, I can mark it as such myself, sparing confusion.
How HN can implement a Voight-Kampff test becomes an increasingly relevant question.... One of several HN needs to consider with increasing urgency.
more important than an indicator it would probably be useful to somehow disable vouching for a killed account. i don't know if it is possible to set the flag counter to some high number so that vouching simply has no effect or to an invalid number like -1
That's antithetical to how HN has operated in the past. Vouching for deads is fair when the account is an actual human, and happens to post valid content. I do this occasionally myself (I read with "showdead" on), though not especially often.
Accounts killed for spamming AI content seem to me to violate that premise, and an unvouchable kill does seem appropriate, especially where it's not immediately evident to the casual reader that an account was killed for posting AI content.
I'm thinking of how I'd like to indicate such accounts myself, and am leaning toward adding a robot emogi via an ":after" CSS rule.
i think we are actually agreeing. i am not talking about making kills unvouchable in general but i am suggesting how an unvouchable kill could be implemented without to much effort. the unvouchable kill should of course be only applied to appropriate cases, it's not meant to replace the regular kill.
Yes, we are in agreement here. I was simply noting what HN's past policy and rationale have been.
LLMs change the calculus somewhat in making automated bot-posting far more viable. It's clearly already a problem. I suspect that moderation policies will have to adapt to this. There's also the fact that such a change would make AI-banned discernable from normal bans, in that AI-banned accounts would not have vouchable comments. If explicitly noting AI banning isn't adopted on the basis that this would provide information to either the AI or its operator of the fact / nature of the banning, the absence of a vouch option would reveal the fact regardless.
(A relatively small example of changes we'll see induced by LLMs in the larger world as well. Interesting times....)
my suggestion would not remove the vouch option, it would just make it ineffective. people using it would not notice. the system would still indicate that you vouched for a message.
I just wish they would use bigger models. These ones always write stuff that makes no sense. Like it says "the same principle applies to mobile games" then describes a different principle
There's some bots on HN who write much more coherently and get a decent # of upvotes. I was only able to catch one because the comment started with something along the lines of "Here's a smart response for a technical audience about _____"
i saw a flagged comment and thought who the hell would flag that? it makes no sense. was going to vouch for it, but i always check the comment history which is where i noticed that all comments had a suspiciously similar pattern, and i found this thread.
some indicator that an account is banned would be nice for those who have showdead active.
one thing that is disturbing is that the comments of the bot are all lowercase. is that a bot feature now? are they doing that to appear less like a bot?
do i have to change my style to avoid looking like a bot? or is changing my style going to make me look like a bot?
No, most of the spambots use proper casing. Whoever is behind this does prompt different bots to generate output in different styles with the intent to appear more conversational/human, so each bot has its own "personality" and typing style. An example of another style here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885996
Astroturfing seems to be the goal. I notice sometimes there are threads in which numerous of these bots converge to promote some dubious product being shilled.
No, I check account history when the text is obviously LLM-generated. I mostly point it out because if I don't make it abundantly clear how obvious the spambot is by its behaviour, I will get people telling me that it could totally be a human and that I'm making a false accusation.
I suppose 15 years ago it would not have been possible to predict how fucking irritating these comments could be. I would rather have the old spambots back at this point. Please, spambots, go back to trying to sell me penis enlargement pills, I beg of you.
At an airport once the coffee stand had a girl behind the counter that would just hand you an empty disposable cup. She didn’t even handle cash, it was card only using a self checkout POS system. And it still asked for a tip with the default of 20%.
If you really want to make a deal out of it, you hand it back to the server and ask them to select 0 for you. Mention that you don't think the service deserves a tip, and that you resent being asked.
If enough of us start doing this, it has a chance of applying some back pressure, although unfortunately that force acts through the poorly-paid checkout operator who doesn't directly have the option to influence decisions.
Why tip someone for a job I'm capable of doing myself? I can serve food, I can drive a taxi, I can and do cut my own hair. I did, however, tip my urologist.
> Every checkout screen has become a guilt machine.
Is bill-paying UI also a guilt machine? If you don't pay, you feel guilty! How about holding the door for elderly people? Going to your kid's event? Not running people over in the crosswalk? Saying please and thank you? Buying birthday presents? It's all so unfair - to me!
I assume that my tip benefits the people who provide the service (Starbucks employees, not Starbucks shareholders). I also assume that the employees' salaries are not “great.” I am satisfied with my income, so I have no problem tipping. I tip little when the service is not good and tip a lot when the service is excellent.
> I assume that my tip benefits the people who provide the service (Starbucks employees, not Starbucks shareholders).
> I also assume that the employees' salaries are not “great.”
The employees' salaries not being “great” benefits the shareholders. How the shareholders get away with paying such low salaries is left as an exercise to the reader.
yeah we all understand the basic premise. But it's applied completely unequally and you subsidizing their salary is keeping starbucks from paying them more. It creates unnecessary friction and decision fatigue for the consumer as well. Those farmworkers doing back breaking work to pick your berries? No tip.
On a separate but vaguely related note: if somebody comps all or part of your bill at a restaurant or bar then you should split the difference on the tip.
As a practical example let's say you take a date to your local trendy sushi place. You both get gold-leafed deep fried Wagyu fatback tuna rolls and some Yuzu duck fat-washed 50-year-old whiskey highballs. The final bill is $100 (I'll use round-ish numbers for this example). The bartender comps you 30% because you all are cool and discuss your shared experience bartending or jetskiing or whatever. Ordinarily your tip would have been 20% for a total of $120. In this case your bill is now $70 plus your newly selected gratuity. Take the difference between the original bill with tip and your current bill without tip and divide it in two. This is the floor for your new tip, in this case (120-70)/2 = $25. This is indeed something like a 35% gratuity but they hooked you upand made that custom drink for your charming new beau. As a matter of fact you should round up from this number because they have side work to do and you make pretty decent money as a software engineer/LLM tickler/product sorcerer. Just make it $30 for a nice round hundo.
If you're friends with the manager and they comp your dinner to do you a solid and impress your date then you should tip 50% of what the bill would have been minimum. This is why you should keep cash in your pocket - shake the waiter's hand on your way out and palm it to them. If that's not possible then go to use the restroom and talk to them on your way back so they can run your card through the POS on a blank check to give them said tip.
This is how you do things with class. This is what I wish somebody had explained to me when I was 20 and kinda broke (i.e. eager to save money that I would have spent anyway) before I embarrassed myself by failing to do such. If you are similarly unaware then now you know too :-)
As an addendum this also applies to coffee and pizza places but the numbers become coarser. Buying them the equivalent of a beer at your local dive ($3ish) is customary.
I'm really not trying to hate, I think you method is great and I love that you have rationalized it, but as someone whose mostly find this kind of social interactions natural, there's something "funny" about finding the algorithm for it. I never did the math and always naturally landed more or less there.
The way to do it with class would be the manager asks the price of the service, and pays the servers and tenders their due fair wage. The moment you bring money to a bunch of "ifs" surrounding a social interaction, you lost all class. Thinking of tips at all is actively detrimental to what you're trying to accomplish.
I've only been given 1 free meal (by the manager). I just gave the entire difference as my tip. I was already going to spend the money, so why not make a random waiter happy.
I always thought that was a casino thing (to keep you drinking so that you gamble more) but I've never been to a casino. I live in Canada though, so we might have laws against that sort of thing.
like, a good looking person will get the occasional comp on the basis of that, but you'll never be friends with the staff on the basis of that. whereas anyone can be friends with the staff, if they are friendly and earnest about it.
I recently had an entire meal at Chili’s comped by the manager, because I waited an hour for food. I guess their system flagged it, or they just noticed, because I didn’t complain. I was hanging with my grandson.
I tipped on the full amount but we had to get the manager again to figure out how. I was going to Venmo her but the manager just sent the $0.00 bill to the table.
> As a practical example let's say you take a date to your local trendy sushi place. You both get gold-leafed deep fried Wagyu fatback tuna rolls and some Yuzu duck fat-washed 50-year-old whiskey highballs. The final bill is $100
I guess I’m still similarly unaware, because nothing about palming people money on the way out like a magician or doing the restroom trick feels classy over everyone just being super upfront about the bill and tips.
I think the procedure is being misinterpreted. This isn't a scam, it's just a common social convention. It's not a scam by the waiter because they have a limited amount they can do this for and they have just chosen to do it for you.
Is this how comping actually works? I’ve never worked in a restaurant, but I assumed there was some system for it (if sometimes ill-defined) and not just employees stealing.
The receipt printer in the kitchen is tied to the POS. Anything rung in for prep is saved in the computer. The manager can run reports and see who comped what and if anything has been voided. This has been a thing since the 90s.
Creating a good guest experience is how you get repeat business. Comps are part of that. You are talking about theft and I mentioned nothing of the sort. If you choose to engage in such behavior then that's your business - don't accuse me of it.
As someone who's worked in restaurant kitchens but did one single day as a waiter for training, I'd basically never work as a server, even for tips and the extra money.
Cooking was way easier.
I agree the whole tipping system in the US is a mess, though.
A guy with short hair should not have to pay more than $20 for a basic haircut, inclusive of tip. If you can't find someone that does it for less than that in your area, invest about $100 in professional grade clippers and cut your own hair. It's easier than it sounds and you will get better at it over time.
Learn to make your own coffee. You shouldn't have to pay more than a couple of bucks for coffee with perhaps some milk in it. An espresso machine and a grinder will quickly pay for themselves.
While you are at it, cancel all those streaming subscriptions, and stream for free in the high seas or YT ad-free with uBlock.
The above "tips" will save your thousands of dollars each year, and most likely also save you time. There are also things like DIY car maintenance that can be fun to learn and save you a lot of money, but you need space (a house) and some tools to get started.
> While you are at it, cancel all those streaming subscriptions, and stream for free in the high seas
Setting up jellyfin+plex (some devices support one but not the other) and most of the arr suite (radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, tunarr) has really been the best choice I've made this year. I have every TV show or movie I ever want to watch, all my favorites, all the classics. And all in one place. And I made sure to keep it local-first so I still have access at home if we lose internet. Started sharing with family and friends and I get a few requests a week to add content, so its being used.
Just removing the "what streaming service is this show on that im watching?" has been a nice improvement.
I'm going to "third" this advice (though not the Plex part). Jellyfin is fantastic. Yes, you have to be careful which devices you use it on, because the client app isn't available for all smart TVs, but you can get around that by just buying a GoogleTV stick (like the $30 one from Onn) and plugging that into your TV; then you can install the JF app on it through the Play store (or even sideload it if you really want). I did this for my wife's parents, and it works great, and my own parents' Roku TV has the JF app in its store already.
> An espresso machine and a grinder will quickly pay for themselves.
Or a pour over filter (like Kalita Wave or Hario V60) plus a grinder. That's a cheaper setup to start, and an easy way to get a big mug of great coffee.
Does annybody worry about sabotage if you don’t tip? Eg the cashier does something to your food? “Nice muffin you got there, I’d hate for it to get accidentally sneezed on.”
I recently bought my mom flowers for her birthday. Despite the price showing no delivery fee, the final price included $15 delivery charge, $8 service charge, taxes, and then asked me for a tip.
I chose no tip, expecting the delivery and service charge should cover everything.
The flowers were left on her front porch in below-freezing weather, they didn’t even knock or ring the doorbell. Luckily my mom happened to open the door and saw them before they completely froze.
So was the delivery person incompetent, or acting out because I didn’t add additional tip?
I want to mention another infection happening at payment terminals and ATMs if you're using your credit card in a foreign country: You get a message saying "Would you like to pay in your own currency? Click [Accept] or [Decline]", and there's fine print that says there's a 12-15% currency conversion markup.
To give a concrete example, if you're an American traveling in Brazil withdrawing cash from an ATM or buying something for BRL 500, you'll be presented with an option to pay BRL 500 or pay just US$110.58 in your own currency (with text saying conversion includes 15%).
But the typical American (and Canadian) credit card adds at most 2.5% to the Visa or Mastercard exchange rate, which is at most 0.5% higher than the interbank rate. So basically by clicking the wrong button, you're paying an extra 12% to the payment processor. In the example above, your credit card would have charged you about US$99.04 had you declined the conversion, and saved you $10.
I can't imagine a situation where it's to your benefit to accept the "conversion service" they're offering. I wonder if the payment processor is kicking back some of the profit back to the merchant because this swindle is spreading everywhere.
The worst part is that a couple of people that I've tried to warn don't get it. They still think that they should pick US$ (or whatever their own currency is) because that's what their credit card uses.
Some are even worse than this. When I was in Portugal, the machine said "Press (1) for GBP. Press (2) for EUR.", then on the next screen, after you select "(2) for EUR", it says "Rate will Apply. Please confirm. (1) Accept conversion (2) Reject Conversion". If you select "Accept conversion", it overrides your currency decision and you pay in GBP with their markup fee...
It's a complete con...
Oh, that one is weird.
I see this feature in Poland. The choice is clear. Or there is no choice and it is paid in local currency.
I saw the same in an ATM in Greece. The first screen wanted me to let them convert the currency (at a 20% markup), I declined, and the second screen said "are you sure? You might be charged a lot" and had "accept" and "decline" where the small print said "do you want us to convert anyway?".
It was really scammy and I almost fell for it.
That one is not weird. There is an intent to deceive, so it is fraud.
This happened to me, but it was the merchant that clicked it...
I inserted my card, and then was reading the text and choice that popped up on the screen, and while I was reading it trying to decide which I should click, the merchant grabbed the scanner and clicked the accept...
Of course I got a charge notification on my mobile app immediately and noticed that it was way higher than it should have been, so then I had to go back to them and get them to refund the transaction so we could do it again which took forever and a manager etc etc.
I've also learned that it is a good idea to physically put my hand around the payment thingy to make sure I am the one pressing the buttons.
Currency conversion is not only incredibly fraught with traps, but believe me, even for very intelligent and research-savvy individuals, if you're not a professional in this area, you'll struggle to see all the pitfalls and still fall for them. I don't consider myself stupid, but I spent several days seriously researching it, and ultimately, after being exploited by several new tricks, I gave up. I consider those losses as a part of travel expenses and avoid letting it amplify my losses, that ruining my travel. PayPal is even more blatant fraud. You never know how much money is left after a transfer or withdrawal until you're surprised, and then they'll say they mentioned it in some tens of thousands of words of agreement that they would deduct this amount.
Nowadays banks usually allow you to block DCC (dynamic currency conversion) and it is definitely worth it if you travel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_currency_conversion
Thank you for telling me what it's called!
On the positive side, it seems that Wise must block it because I never see the DCC "choice" when using a Wise card.
As a negative point, I've noticed that AirBnB, which used to use reasonable conversion rates, has just recently started to use exorbitant currency conversion and not allow you to pay in the local currency of the country you're traveling to (so you can let your own credit card do the conversion at a lower rate). I.e., if you try to book a property in Brazil in BRL (literally clicking on the price to pay in BRL), the charge will nevertheless go through in USD (or whatever currency is your own) with AirBnb doing the conversion at the rate they choose.
Aliexpress also shows prices in one currency but then refuses to take payment in that currency and does their own conversion with an unfavourable rate... Seems to be allowed with some combinations of delivery country and currency but not others.
I have a European currency (not Euro) and I think being charged their USD price is better than my local currency's.. I pay with Revolut and what Revolut charges me (taking my local currency and converting it to USD), is lower than what AliExpress would charge me if I had chosen to pay them in my currency.
So they charge you for an amount different to advertised? Tell your bank. You might get a refund and at least they'll have the complaint on file so the next victim might get a refund. If enough people complain and AirBNB don't fix it, AirBNB gets banned from accepting cards.
Where do you block it? I don’t see an obvious option at any of my banks or that article.
It is usually an option in your bank's app. It depends on the bank though, obviously. If it's not there, you have to be vigilant while using your card (always select the local currency when given the option).
I checked and it doesn't look like any UK banks have this option - at least I looked at about 5 different banks websites and all have pages suggesting you always select to pay in local currency but none of them have any information on disabling this behaviour
Gemini confirms it's not a thing, and not really possible (the terminals just detect the country from the card number)
I don’t know a single bank in Europe that provides this option
Edit: Perplexity says this:
> cards cannot block DCC offers because the merchant terminal identifies your card’s country of origin from the card number and offers DCC accordingly. Always manually decline at payment to let the card handle conversion at better rates
My bank (mBank in Poland) has per card options for declining various types of transactions, among others: made using the magnetic strip, with DCC, with added ATM surcharges. The bank probably cannot disable the "service" offered by the terminal but seems to get enough information to be able to decline the transaction.
A charge in zloty from outside Poland probably shows DCC has been used.
A few years ago I was checking out of a reasonably up-scale hotel in Barcelona early in the morning.
They punch numbers into one of those wireless hand terminals. I tap my card, enter the pin and then before I can react to what the screen is now saying they've punched the 'Accept Conversion' button and submit it. By the time I realise what has happened, it's too late and has started printing the reciept.
I insisted they reverse it and redo the transaction without that - the staff didn't understand and didn't care they'd cost me another 10-15%. It really adds up for a week long stay.
I once asked a cashier about this and they said it saved me money. They said representatives from the large national bank had done a presentation and noted how this is the best option for foreigners. I think they truly believe they are being helpful. Closest thing to legalized robbery.
I had the exact same thing happen to me at a hotel in China. I could not get the person at the checkin desk to understand the problem so I ended up having to just eat the extra cost. Very frustrating, it was not a small amount of money.
What the fuck? Why are they tapping the terminal before you've confirmed the transaction?
In my experience, staff will do this if they are pressed for time, or when tourists don't know how to read or operate the payment systems and linger.
Well, it’s an unwise strategy to use on me if they’re feeling pressed for time. I will get enjoyment from putting my foot down for as long as is needed to reach a resolution.
That’s a 20+ minute decision they just made to try to save a few seconds.
PayPal does this too. They will offer to do the currency conversion at an outrageous rate. Not quite 15%, though always substantially more than Mastercard’s rate of the day.
Amazon does something like this too, though I'm not sure of the percent. I just know that every time I select to pay in dollars, any change in delivery options will select it back to pay in euros, where the bank is.
I genuinely don't know if this is good or not, but the UIs insistence on reverting back to another currency after my initial selection leads me to believe that my initial selection hits them the hardest the most
Amazon.com does add a ~2% "currency conversion guarantee" fee when paying in EUR, on top of whatever conversion they use. I imagine that the average cost of that "service" to them is closer to 0%.
The even worse part about PayPal is that they have a whole system of nonsensical fees to fall back to when you inevitably figure out how to evade the obvious ones. For instance, sidestepping their dynamic currency conversion by temporarily changing which currency they bill on your card (which by the way is rate limited to only a few times per month) will result in another "non-foreign transaction but with recipient in foreign country" fee appearing, covering the inherent costs of converting German US dollars to American US dollars or whatever. They will at least hide the fee from you for business transactions, but the merchant still has to pay it.
That’s 100% a US problem. Never had this issue in the EU, PayPal etc are obligated to offer the option to “just bill in transaction currency and let the card issuer handle conversion etc” without fees.
Speaking of payment terminals.
Payment terminals used to have good UX, they all clearly showed you the price when paying. Tills had displays with the price facing the customer which were clearly visible.
Now traditional POS terminals have been replaced with tap and go devices by the latest fintech, non of them show the price to the customer by design. Instead you tap a small puck and you hope the price charged is the one asked only to find a transaction fee on top when later check your balance.
It's a deliberate design choice to withhold showing the price on these devices. It's cheap to add a small LCD panel to them, the technology previously existed and still exists however the choice have been made not to.
I was in awe of an old vending machine I saw in the Caribbean recently. I didn't want anything but I spent a few seconds just pushing buttons to check prices. The segmented display read out the price the very instant I touched the button for the item. There was no perceptible delay for a bloated software stack running on some cheap processor that waits for too many bits over a crappy cellular internet connection. Everything needed was right there, between the hard-coded logic and me.
> Instead you tap a small puck and you hope the price charged is the one asked only to find a transaction fee on top when later check your balance.
I'm sorry, but it's a mandatory knee-jerk response here: "Is this something I'm too European to undestand?"
Even the the smallest, crappiest devices are required to have a line LCD to show the final price. Goes to show that consumer protection minimums do really set the bar for eventual exploitation.
It may be geographical.
In Australia, a lot of places only have a "Square Reader" on the counter where you pay. i.e. cafes, coffee shops, convenience stores, market stalls.
Terminals do exist with full displays but they are less common, mainly if you go to a restaurant as they have options for tipping on the display.
Just looking at the Square website the "Square Reader" is $69 vs $329 for the "Square Terminal". This may be part of the reason cafes etc prefer them given tight overheads.
Square reader: https://squareup.com/au/en/hardware/reader
> It may be geographical.
Yes, I'm referring to European directive mandating final price displays on terminals.
I think this would be the simplest reader one can legally use in Europe https://www.sumup.com/en-au/air-nfc-card-reader (although European market sites do not even list this model anymore)
I think your retailer has misconfigured their setup. Everywhere I tap against a puck, it is also accompanied by a screen. The puck is always just a plugin module as opposed to being integrated on the terminal.
This was being asked as long as I remember (~15 years now?) but the conversion commissions were around 2%-5% at most. 15% is egregious.
2% is already excessive and 5% is quite egregious.
Plus, the point is that you're asked whether you'd like to pay more for something, where there is no benefit in it for you nor a public benefit etc.
At least in Brazil, it was very rare. In the last 3-4 years, it's almost every time you pay. And you have to grab and hold the payment terminal (especially if you're using tap / contactless payment) so the cashier or waiter, trying to be helpful, doesn't click the wrong button and cost you 15%.
> trying to be helpful
Some places they're insistent that you must do currency conversion or the payment won't work. Makes me think the merchant must be getting a chunk of that profit and telling their staff to accept the conversion...
Another more benign reason possibly be the customer's card might be closed to different-currency transactions.
For example, I can choose my bank to do the conversion at the time of purchase, or pay with that currency when the invoice comes.
> Makes me think the merchant must be getting a chunk of that profit Yes, they are. (No reference handy.)
As others have said, currency conversion has been a well-known "scam" for as long as I can remember. I'm sure Martin Lewis has been talking about this since at least the early 2000s in some form.
The rule is always "pay with local currency"
We have the same thing in Euroland
Here in Greece it always asks "Euro or USD?". Most merchants know to press Euro, the rest ask me. I think I've maybe had one merchant press USD by accident in ten years or so.
Exactly, who has more incentive to rip you off, your bank or some random merchant/payment processor/local bank that you are probably never going to interact with again either way.
They seemed to have given up on this in some areas. I don't think they asked me this once during my visit to France in October. This included Paris and smaller towns.
The fact that people don't believe you when you explain it just shows how effective the framing is
When you think about it, it's just another "Tourist tax" of which are are many. Other times you just get quoted a different base price as a tourist vs. native - openly or not.
An especially egregious case I've encountered was at Berlin train station.
Normally in Germany, you've got those distinct card terminals with a display where you see your total before paying. Some of those have started nagging you for tips which you need to explicitely accept or decline first before tapping your card. Not in this case though: after you've ordered your food, they point you to the combined order/pay display and while you awe at the technology marvel of combining both, you tap your card on that and then you notice that 15% tip has been automatically included and charged. You needed to notice some small text and small buttons in the corner of that display beforehand and actively tap on "0%" or something before tapping your card. I'm already furious they've let this tip begging to be added to the card terminals, but charging tips without explicit consent should be completely illegal.
At Schiphol they offer tipping options to presumably prey on Americans, but the attendant physically reached over the counter to reject it after I ordered in (native) Dutch. Can't imagine how much trouble locals had been giving the shop before training staff like this.
Happens in Spain too, the card machine will sometimes have tip options but the waiter selects no tip if serving locals to avoid the annoyance
I’ve seen Starbucks employees in the US do this often.
Isn't this directly taking money out of their own pocket, or are tips going to corporate?
What takes money out of their pockets is not paying a real wage for a real job. TIP destroys the value of a profession and when you don't think a profession is 'professional' you pay less for it. This is a terrible dark pattern at every level.
I am not arguing for tipping culture, but I question the incentive for rejecting a tip as a US Starbucks employee. I very much doubt that playing a part in desired society-wide change overcomes the immediate incentive of the tip itself.
I don't go to starbucks personally but I've been to local ice cream shops, Cafes, fast food businesses, and others and this isn't too uncommon. I'd say it happens about 15% of the time? Its usually at places where tips aren't as expected anyways, but not always.
It is illegal. They're counting on you to be too busy to sue them. That's why you only saw it in a train station. Ask your bank for a refund for the fraudulent transaction — you probably don't have enough evidence to prove it happened, but they'll still put the complaint on file.
Lawsuits and chargebacks are about the only pressure businesses have not to scam you.
And wonderfully done in a city where people are usually paid a living wage, and even students don’t have to work for free (hi Belgium!)
I am pretty sure it is completely illegal.
Would the credit card company / bank let you dispute the charge? I imagine that's going to be difficult with a card present transaction.
If you purchased $50 worth of items and got charged $75, wouldn't you dispute it?
An especially egregious case I've encountered was at Berlin train station.
You must have been in Berlin, Wisconsin because we've been assured repeatedly on HN that the tipping plague thing is exclusively an American problem, and never ever happens in Eurosparkleponyland.
Ditto for spam calls and texts.
The problem is that US is actively exporting all the plagues they call their own worldwide, so that tipping (the mandatory-on-the-card-terminal kind) is currently actively infecting Europe. Which you could have gathered by reading this very discussion.
And I think people don't mind tipping when they feel it's voluntary
I hate that the tipping culture is infecting Germany now
Tipping culture has been around in Germany for a long time, hasn’t it? It’s surprisingly common there
It's not the tipping culture that's invading Germany, it's the "begging for tips" culture. The worst kind. You buy a piece of bread at the bakery over the counter, pay with card, the card reader is begging for tips. This is exceptionally out of the ordinary, but I'm afraid there is not enough explicit resistance and there is still too much "looking up to the USA" happening so that the society might accept this idiocy as normal some day.
(I'm German. This is my personal stance.)
Charging a tip for to-go items is preposterous. When dining in, I will indeed tip, usually by rounding up to the next 5 or 10 euro increment for a group meal, or to the next 1 or 2 euro increment for single meals (e.g. during lunch hours near the office). But this is only if the service is actually good. If a restaurant makes me wait more than 30 minutes for a quick lunch, they will be paid exactly the amount posted on the menu.
Mostly contained to tourist areas though. But AFAICT, it's been spreading recently.
Not to this extent
Ooooh do the one where hitting ‘payment’ on the app buys $25 of store credit by default rather than just paying and deducts the 9.64 from that credit.
Then when you spend down the credit to $2 any attempt to buy something that costs more refills the credit.
Starbucks app btw. You have to specifically pay with card on the payment screen to avoid buying credit and paying as above.
This is called a float business in finance. Starbucks has more than a billion dollars in unredeemed balances, and they make ~$200 million per year in interest with this cash. They're basically a bank with a coffee shop side hustle.
How are they getting 20% on a deposit that presumably could be called up at any time, and how can I get in on it when the stupid "High Yield" accounts I can find top out at around 4%?
large businesses have large cash borrowing needs. if they borrow for free from their customers, it reduces the other borrowing they would need to do, so the rate to use is not what interest rate is available to you, but rather how much interest that Starbucks would need to pay for loans that size. Furthermore, whereas dividends are taxed twice (once as profit for the company and again as regular income to the shareholder), interest is a tax deduction to the company (which decreases their taxable profits) and for a percentage of debtholders that interest income is also taxed advantageously.
probably doesn't come up to 20% (unless Starbucks is in junk bond territory) but it's higher than the investment rate of 4% that you're quoting.
They may buy bonds or something like that.
For a 20% return in a year?
The numbers given have to be incorrect.
Oh yeah I wasn't taking OPs number at face value
probably 2%, not 20%.
Yielding a yearly 20%?
If anyone knows of _any_ investment yielding a yearly 20% reliably, I'd certainly be interested. If Starbucks figured that out, I don't know why they're bothering making coffee.
Do they include expiring credit in that figure?
Most of the time they have a buried clause that says that you forfeit all of your credit or get charged an inactivity fee if there have been no account transactions or no credit added for 12 or 18 months. Same reason why you should never buy gift cards.
This may apply in the US but not everywhere. In Canada it is illegal to expire and take back money on gift cards.
So they can keep collecting interest on it forever, but they have to keep the balance for you indefinitely.
The U.S. as well.
By law, gift cards never expire.
Unfortunately, I have several gift cards I didn't use before the store expired.
I’ve seen gift cards work around this by charging a “monthly maintenance fee” after a year of inactivity.
A quick Google suggests in 2016 it was $1.17B, and earned $21M, or 1.79%.
(via https://www.amminvest.com/starbucks-sbux-float/ )
I mean I’d love to have a free $21M a year, but if you’re already Starbucks then somehow it feels like pocket change compared to your actual earnings and would question if it was worth the effort.
But they also have over a billion cash at hand. I imagine at that scale and customers being private, the amount is pretty stable and Starbucks can just do whatever with this since it's extremely unlikely that customers demand all their money back at once.
Sorry, can they (customers) demand it back?
I mean, once Starbucks have it, then the customers get it back via product (that has a margin included), or just leave it forever (free money!)
I have a firm "No vouchers" rule because of this, the vouchers in my part of the world inexplicably "expire" if not used within a certain amount of time, cannot be redeemed for cash, and will not be honoured if the business goes belly up
According the laws here they have to. Doesn't mean they won't make it difficult. And it needs to be in a separate account and business (to avoid it being drawn into a bankruptcy). Not that this has ever stopped businesses from abusing it anyway. I doubt this voucher option is available in the Dutch app because of this but I didn't bother to check.
That was actually a bad year, as that "free" $21 million represented a loss of about $30 million. $1.17 billion on Jan 1st 2016 is equivalent to $1.22 billion a year later due to inflation. So they would have had to generate $50 million just to break even in actual buying power terms.
Is that based on not investing that $21 million or am I misreading something about how that money was or wasn't used?
No, they're saying that inflation that year was 4.3% ($1.22B / $1.17B¹) If you're only making 1.8% in investing it, you're not beating inflation, and your money, though nominally growing (number is going up), is decreasing in its real value (amount of stuff the money gets is going down).
(¹I think this is too high; BLS thinks inflation over 2016 was 2.5%. But their core point still stands: interest earned was below inflation.)
I used the CPI
If they're intentionally causing the customer to have an unspendable balance, knowing that it's making them $200m/yr, how is that not fraud (or some kind of crime)? I'd expect atleast CA would do something about it.
Customers agree to this when they accept the terms of the app. This is also how a debit or savings account at any bank works. Both businesses have sophisticated models to determine how and when customers are likely to make withdrawals, and based on these models they lend out the money based on acceptable risk criteria.
Even if it is in the T&Cs, this one feels like it wouldn’t actually hold up?
Expecting people to read those for most simple sign ups is already a high baseline, and Starbucks is not technically a banks and offers no consumer protections (FSCS or other), so that feels knowingly misleading, even if the total balances held are small per customer.
IANAL, of course.
Toronto Parking Authority is guilty of this. If you pay at a terminal on the street, then you're charged the exact amount needed for your parking session. If you pay using the mobile app, then it charges your credit card in increments of $20, requires your mobile phone number as an account identifier, and keeps track of your remaining monetary balance.
The only saving grace here is that it goes to the municipality at least
This is how a lot of transit cards work, unfortunately.
Most of those (used to) work offline too, as long as there was money on the card. Not something an online payment system or app needs to deal with.
if i recall, in singapore, the transit card costs are refundable.
I think that's the only place i've seen it refundable.
London oyster cards also offer a refund of your pay as you go balance.
I suspect most people just use contactless nowadays, Especially infrequent visitors.
> Especially infrequent visitors
I don't know a single resident who uses oyster (maybe kids? Dunno, I don't have kids in my social circle), infrequent visitors are actually the only ones I've seen using oyster and that's because they thought that was the only way to use transport
Many, many people use Oyster cards for monthly or annual passes.
They're refundable in Japan too.
I've been trapped for 15 years!
At minimum, the default should be "pay exact amount"
Einstein's Bagels does this asinine shit, too, like I want to bank with a fucking mediocre bagel joint.
That is wild
All these silly excuses people make: "I tip when the service is good", "I tip when conversation with bartender is engaging", "I tip when the server runs around me in circles, I count the circles and convert it with an exchange rate of $2/circle". Wow.
I'm from EU, so ymmw. I simply don't tip. Why? Because I don't have to. And if I don't have to, then I don't. It is that simple.
Yes but here in France where service is included and tipping is never compulsory (or expected), payment terminals are appearing where you need to select the tip before typing your code. This is usually shoved in your face by the waiter at touristy places, and they're watching you.
Don't fall for it though! Just select "no tip" or "0" like in this game and you're good.
Exactly. Only by selecting 0 this will put pressure to get rid of it
I saw this in two restaurants already and I am pissed
It won't though. A screen on the card terminal is free - if just 1% of people misclick the button and pay a tip, the company still wins.
A restaurant is fundamentally selling an experience. These screens do not improve the experience. Therefore, they have some cost to the business. The question is whether the cost is recuperated.
Doesn't matter in touristy places though, because you don't rely on repeat customers.
> A screen on the card terminal is free
... consulting companies developing the terminal entered the chat ...
(just kidding, I agree with you)
This is no pressure. You can exert pressure by saying that you are cancelling the transaction because of the tipping screen and you'll eat somewhere else.
This is too late, at that stage you have already eaten. I am not sure if they appreciate if you give them the food back.
You could tell them that you are very happy to pay them the price they printed on the menu and that they can present you with a payment terminal charging exactly that price, but that you will not do that job for them. Basically make the waiter select the 0% option.
But in the end you'll only annoy the waiter and not the owner of the restaurant who is actually running the tipping scam.
At least in that case you can safely select a 0 tip. It's worse when you pay up front and have to worry about a lower than expected tip resulting in some kind of retribution from the staff.
Yeah that's not possible. When you're presented with the terminal the food is already in your system.
Or maybe you can be like our former Ministry of Culture, Jack Lang, who just resigned from a prestigious, if useless, post in the wake of the Epstein scandal. It was revealed that he never paid for anything in his 60+ years of public "service", always leaving restaurants, hotels, etc. without footing the bill.
For you and me, this would be called stealing and would eventually land us in jail. But if you're a minister in France it's called "living like a prince" and being "a little stingy".
I was extorted 15% tips in Paris in a restaurant with shitty food not too far away from the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, I didn't have roaming package at the time so I couldn't check that place's rating on Google Maps before ordering food. Turns out, there were lots of complaints about their service. In retrospective, I should have probably called police when they were actively insisting that 20% tips are mandatory and after like 5 minutes of arguing they "kindly" agreed to lower it to 15%.
You don't need a "roaming package": just buy an eSIM from one of many online services like AloSIM or Airalo.
I don’t tip either, simply because the work done wasn’t worth tipping. The only time I tipped was in a 7 stars restaurant, and the waitresses were up to their names, literally standing and waiting by our table changing utensils and plates and filling the drinks. North America tipping “culture” is out of control, I remember picking up some street food and the guy asked for a tip.. Most restaurants nowadays buy the food from costco, machines do most of the cooking, and the waitress job can be literally replaced by a robot, it’s just a scam and it should be illegal actually.
The actual scam is that restaurants can and do pay wait staff below minimum wage (like 2-3$), because it’s explicitly allowed, with expectation that the rest comes from tips. So not tipping in USA may in some cases be an asshole move.
Tipping is one of those Moloch coordination problems where if everyone would suddenly decide to make the world better at the same time, it would be, but if only a few people try to make the world better, it gets worse and they're assholes.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It's really not a binary situation where you'd ever see $2 wages with no tips though. If less people tip then the effective real minimum wage will gradually increase to compensate - either because laws are updated or because the restaurant has to compete with other better paying job opportunities. Sure some waiters may get upset when someone doesn't tip, but that is just that - them getting upset - and not the client being an asshole.
This will hurt people in the moment, people who sometimes are few dollars away from not making rent or buying enough food.
And as other commenter correctly pointed out, by the federal law of hour wage plus tips is below federal minimum wage, the restaurant must pay extra to reach the minimum wage. So if we assume that restaurants actually follow this law, wait staff will be kept at poverty wage 7.25/hr.
They legally cannot. If the average wage per hours including tips is under the Federal minimum wage in a pay period, the company must top up so that the wage per hour is the Federal minimum wage.
Well wage theft in the US dwarfs all other forms of theft combined.
But also actually demanding those wages if you dont get enough tip money is a great way for them to get fired. And if they are that poor to work in those conditions they will have a hard time scraping the money to go to court to get an unlawful dismissal case.
Wage theft sucks.
But servers are the only industry where they demand we the consumer take care of the problem because they're unwilling to do so themselves:
"Hard time scraping the money to go to court"? You don't go to court, you go to the DOL with your documentation.
"If you don't tip I have to pay/pay taxes to serve you" - no, you don't. The IRS assumes that you get a certain amount of tips. If you document that you got less, then guess what, they tax you on that.
Know why servers don't like to do that? Because the IRS assumption is that the average tip is 8%. What proportion of a server's customers do we think don't tip versus those who tip more than 8%?
"That's a lot of work" No. IRS Form 4070 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f4070--2005.pdf) charitably takes less than five minutes a month to fill out.
"I'll get fired". Sure. That's a risk, I admit, and easy for me to say "You need to risk something". Inertia is a powerful thing. How many servers getting fired for fighting wage theft is enough to make a restaurant start to have problems?
>pay wait staff below minimum wage (like 2-3$), because it’s explicitly allowed
Not in all U.S. states, for example California.
I remember dining out one time. In Philly, if memory serves me?
Anyways I remember the hamburger place because they didn’t ask for, or even allowed us, to tip. The price was all-in.
It’s a breath of fresh air! More restaurants should advertise with this feature.
Wait staff can lobby to change that if they want. Or just get a different job and let supply and demand sort out the wages for the remaining waiters.
You can't be serious. We're discussing a class of people making sub-minimum wages, barely scraping by to afford rent and groceries (much less any childcare or medical expenses), and your suggestion is "lobby to change that" or "just get a different job"?
As someone who has previously worked for that wage and finally did "get a different job," there was no "just" about it. I had the support of well-off family who were willing to significantly contribute to my education and living situation, and it still took years of hard toil (all while being nearly destitute) before ever achieving anything resembling financial stability. That was not (and likely never will be) an option for 90-95% of the people I worked with in the food-service industry. There is absolutely no justification (beyond abject greed) for that type of poverty wage, and it's the responsibility of everyone in our society to prevent that type of exploitation of the vulnerable, precisely because they cannot afford to "lobby to change that" and often can't "get a different job" outside of the same industry.
This is what trade unions are for.
I don't know what proportion of waiters are members, but the union for hospitality workers is one of the largest (possibly the largest) in Denmark: https://cf.3f.dk/english/wages-and-sectors/working-in-the-ho...
In Danish, the collective agreement they negotiated with McDonald's: https://www.3f.dk/-/media/files/artikler/overenskomst/privat...
> the waitresses were up to their names, literally standing and waiting by our table changing utensils and plates and filling the drinks
FWIW, this sounds like a deeply unpleasant experience to me
> and the waitresses were up to their names, literally standing and waiting by our table
I hate that. My old boss would book us into 5* places when we travelled for work and his wife was also there. People standing over me just felt “ick”. Like when the security guard decides to fallow you around the supermarket! (the latter has only happened a couple of times that I've noticed, when it did I made a point of spending much longer than I otherwise would meandering back & forth, and gave them a grin on my way out after paying…)
It's usually pretty discreet - they'll stay out of your line of sight and, if they're doing it right, you should barely notice them stepping in to top up your wine, etc.
Not sure what star rating system you're going by (Michelin only goes up to 3), but I'd expect that level of service even at 1* restaurants.
I'm meaning hotel (and therefore the bars/other within them) ratings rather than restaurant stars.
Maybe years living in a somewhat ropey town and having to be careful in alley-ways and tree covered areas has tuned me to be extra sensitive to people trying to stay out of line of sight…
One of the things not discussed here is that for many wait staff wages are far lower than our pathetic minimum wage (USA) so these people tend to make sub poverty to start with on the promise of tips.
I do agree though that the whole culture was broken before and now with payment kiosks asking for tips everywhere it's absurd.
Little known (apparently) thing from Spain is that our tips are not proportional. I see percentages everywhere when going out... 10% here, 15% there, so the quantities seem outrageous to me. In Spain if you want you leave a 1€ or 2€ coin, maybe 3 or 4€ plus some other smaller coins if you are more than 2 people. But that's it.
I've never seen a tip reaching 10€ in a restaurant, even in tables of 5+ people.
And imagine people bring their own drinks to restaurants in China (for big family lunch it can be even big plastic bags full of many bottles) and nobody even understand the concept of the tipping - why would you tip someone for doing their work and paying for the meal? One of the things I loved about China. They even come running after you if you forget your change.
What I liked much less is smoking in the restaurants which happens in Beijing even in 2026 despite posters on the wall saying No smoking in Chinese and English and everyone is affraid to tell something to smoker. You would think after years of campaigning it will improve, but I don't see much improvement after visiting after many years.
The bigger issue, to me, is that the burden is on customers at all. That's what creates all this awkwardness and moral accounting in the first place
What's ymmw? Your mileage may waver?
> I'm from EU
Now we know they mean Germany.
Funnily enough Germans do tip, for pretty average service compared to most European countries where waiters are expecting zero tips.
Of course. After living in Germany I can say that if I has not been not insulted in the process and the staff did not glare at me like I'm interrupting their free time, then the service was already much better than average
Your mileage may wario.
The service in the US is significantly better than in Europe.
You want to feel like a burden when you go out to eat, eat in Italy.
In the US, the servers are dancing excited for you to be there.
Only if by better you mean annoying.
I've always had good experiences in Italy even though I was a stupid tourist during peak season.
Agreed, not a fan of all the "is everything alright" and "can I get you anything else" and other "helpful" interruptions that many US waiters like to do.
That's a matter of taste.
I, for one, can't stand this fake chumminess you often experience in American restaurants.
>I'm from EU, so ymmw. I simply don't tip.
I guess you've never been to Germany.
Last time I was there (last year), I tried just giving small "trinkgeld" tips (round up to nearest Euro) and the servers were PISSED. I've never seen such rude service.
So why do EU people always say there's no tipping in the EU? This clearly isn't true, at least not any more.
When I traveled in the EU in the 2010s, it wasn't like this at all. WTF is going on over there?
You see these things in the EU too.
I'm also from EU. I tip only at restaurants, only 10% on average. The prices when recently up like 50% or so. So adding the tip on top of that is a hustle. And 10% on the higher price is also higher tip, so I am double assured I do good
here in Central Europe (SK/CZ) we never done percentage, we were just rounding up the sum, like 283 to 300, but even 292 would become 300, and if it's bill 300 then tough luck for waiter. But not sure what is the situation in recent years with card payments replacing cash, tips must been hit hard, also raising prices and people going to restaurants less and less doesn't help much.
Personally I pretty much stopped going to restaurants completely during COVID when I was treated worse than dog - dogs allowed (to some places), unvaxxed not allowed to enter.
> unvwaxxed not allowed to enter
This is the correct approach. If you are an asdhole for not caring about others but using the herd immunity znyway, this is the latest that can be done to show contempt.
My wife is immunodepressed and cannot be vaccinated. She avoids plenty of places because shit people like this do not care.
I once physically threw away someone sick and unvaccinated from a place for babies only that are not protected by the mother and too young to protect themselves. It was violent, I called the police afterwards myself.
People don't be dicks with other people life.
Covid vaccines never prevented infection and transmission. If anything, out of the people I know the vaccinated got it much more often because they were more careless.
No one claimed it totally prevented infection or transmission. But it did significantly lower the rate.
Please stop stating idiocies and behave like a grown-up.
Look at the numbers and you will see the drop in BOTH the number of infections, AND the transmissions (because of a reduced viral payload).
These are sensibly larger than would be expected from natural herd immunity due to infections.
Vaccines also greatly reduced the severity of the disease, when caught anyway.
If you do not believe in science, treat this as a religion and do it anyway without thinking.
Whenever someone complains about being treated "worse than dogs" I have to wonder how they think dogs should be treated. To be fair, if dogs could catch COVID and pass it onto humans they'd likely have banned unvaccinated dogs as well.
Inflation my man
I also live in Europe and tip, specially if I know that the salary of the staff heavily depends on tips. Also, if the service wasn’t great, I also tip, maybe they weren’t having a good day, like when I’m not that productive some day at my coding job.
If I ever find the system too unfair for the workers, then I won’t go to those restaurants anymore.
> I also live in Europe and tip, specially if I know that the salary of the staff heavily depends on tips.
> If I ever find the system too unfair for the workers, then I won’t go to those restaurants anymore.
Sounds like you only tip once at each restaurant then? Not paying a reasonable salary to employees and assuming they'll beg customers for extra money to make up the difference seems unfair to me.
I can't say if it's unfair or not. I would prefer every worker to get a decent salary, but no idea how they feel in countries where tipping is widespread like the US. But, if I go to a restaurant in the US, or, Argentina (where tipping is also a thing), then I'll tip, and consider the price of the food to be 10, 15 or 20% more expensive. Otherwise, I won't go, because then I am complicit with the exploitation of the workers.
The only reason they don't get a full salary is because people keep paying the difference with tips.
Is that you, Mr. Pink?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utksPm6KgjU [NSFW]
Incorrect, the reason they don't get a full salary is because tipping is allowed.
If you don't tip, the worker does not magically get a salary. How would they? No, they actually make less money.
This whole "well if you think about not tipping is actually giving them more money" thing is the purest and most refined form of cope I've ever seen. It obviously doesn't work like that. Maybe if everyone did it. But you just doing it does nothing.
You're 100% allowed to not tip. What you're NOT allowed to do is not tip and then somehow try to claim you're helping the worker. You're not. Like, objectively, you're not. That's just literally not true.
No, it's because of crappy labor laws
Those laws are downstream from tipping culture.
Could be, but the way to fix it is with labor laws.
Then give your excess money to a homeless person or donate it to Amnesty. We don't want or need the "pressured to tip" culture here.
No, homeless people should not live from tips, they should be helped by the government. I live in Belgium and tip because I'm used to (I'm from Argentina) and I know the staff is happy when I do it.
And restaurant workers should be paid by their employers. If the goal is to spread happiness then, again, the homeless person trumps the employee.
And they are in Europe, thanks to strong labour laws!
Fine but a few things. 1) the service at restaurants and bars in Europe is terrible. 2) the employees at US restaurants and bars often make more money than people doing the same job in Europe. 3) it allows the folks with more money pay a larger share and those with less to pay a bit less.
The problem with tipping is tipping in places which aren't restaurants and bars.
The service in Europe is great in many many places. My experience with US service is that it feels very fake most of the time. Plus, staff having their own table/zone means you cannot ask any other waiter to help out cause "it's not their table". That's one of the many problems with this tip culture.
I agree with the tiered pricing argument, but ehm, you know you are allowed to tip in Europe also right? If you are rich and feel benevolent, feel free to leave cash on the table. You don't need others to be forced into dark-pattern PIN machines or feel guilty for not paying more than the bill for that reason.
>The service in Europe is great in many many places. My experience with US service is that it feels very fake most of the time. Plus, staff having their own table/zone means you cannot ask any other waiter to help out cause "it's not their table".
I'm literally 0 for 3 on those claims. Not sure how you have such experiences. Maybe its a choice of words 'Many many' could be like 20 places out of 10,000. Maybe 'feels very fake' is something that isn't actually a problem, and might be a benefit, so I didn't notice it. And that last line about 'not their table'... I can't say I've ever experienced it.
Service in restaurants in Europe is way better than in USA. I don't want waiter to ask me anything except taking the order. I don't want to be ushered away as soon as I finished eating. I usually do that anyway, but I want to choose so myself and have option to sit and talk with my friend or family sometimes. I don't want to give my credit card to a stranger, who will carry it to some back room without control. An finally I want to pay exactly what is advertised, without scam fees or blackmail "tips".
> Service in restaurants in Europe is way better than in USA.
Eh. Having eaten at plenty of restaurants all over the USA and Europe, they seem equally littered with both good and bad service. Understanding and adjusting to the culture of individual countries helps make your experiences better.
Yes, this isn't a question about the US or Europe.
Some of the absolute worst service I've received have been in the US, yet they ask for tips. I've also received some of the best service at a US restaurant, where the suggested tip was 10% and the prices where pretty low.
The weirdest thing I've experience is the large number of staff in US coffee shops, compared to locally, yet basically not being able to order, and then having a suggested tip at 20%. I've encountered this a multiple locations, and different chains. Four people, one person takes the order, one makes the drink, one continuously mop the floor and the last person just stands around (manager?) You could significantly increase the base pay by getting rid of two of these people.
I know a server and it very much has to do with the client base.
The poor area? Bad tipping.
Middle class? Depends on the person
Upper middle class? Big bucks.
I totally disagree. The only good service I've found in the US was in very small cities (Fayetteville WV is the only name I remember and probably the biggest one). It also seems like restaurants there don't take their bread from local bakeries, and all their food, even vegetables, even in 30+ dollar meals, are from a food distributor. Here, if I pay more than 20 euros for a meal, I expect that at least the vegetable aren't from Metro, and if I pay more than 30, it's for sure a local fisherman/butcher that provided the proteins.
If I can't tip, I don't go out. Cuz I don't have to.
Granted, I also don't go to the EU if I can avoid it, and most places I make so much more money than the locals I don't mind a bit extra for the worker.
You are not entitled to money beyond what you list as prices
Nobody is entitled to anything, of course. But you're a jackass if you knowingly exploit people. A "livable wage" is a legal concept and does not incorporate your wealth.
The exploitation happens between you and your employer, mainly.
Did you ever work a job or were friends with people who did where tipping is a big part of the income?
You make it sound like a general rule, but I don’t see how it is that “simple”. There are few things if any that you have to do in life. It’s all a decision and a tradeoff. Nobody forces you to breathe. Or to be friendly with your neighbors. Or a stranger.
I worked in the service industry for a while and have literally never cared about tips, in the sense that the default expectation in 99% of cases is no tip and the rare time I got a tip it was a few euros extra at most. Of course, I didn't care because it actually paid an actual wage, vs the weird shit you yanks are up to.
Hell, I know some people who have been working at restaurants as waiters for a long time now, and they live perfectly comfortably with 0 expectations around tips.
I still don't tip, basically ever, my only exception is the rare time I get food delivered, because unlike a regular service job the apps don't pay a livable wage and the cut they take is gargantuan compared to what the drivers get.
The "tips as compensation for your low salary" system exists only in the US and neighboring countries (Canada, Mexico) as far as I know.
Now that they have started abusing it, it's even less defensible.
> Did you ever work a job or were friends with people who did where tipping is a big part of the income?
In the EU people are paid fair salaries for their work, they don't have to beg for money from clients
Your point is valid because waiters earn more money when they have low salary and big tips than high salary but no tips. The problem is though, I simply don't care about how much waiters earn, just like waiters don't care about how much I earn. I will start tipping the day waiters start honestly caring about the software job market collapse.
> Did you ever work a job or were friends with people who did where tipping is a big part of the income?
The friends of mine who worked in bars were paid living wage without tips. So no, no need.
Most of my friends worked restaurants or bars when I was younger, tips were something some tourists would sometimes do and it would generally go into a pot for throwing a party for the staff few times a year. I have never tipped or seen a local tip in my home country.
Tips weren't a part of my friends income. The restaurant/bar paid them a salary.
You could make that excuse for any dark pattern.
I have a feeling that this HN submission is rather some test run which dark patterns work well on technically affine users. :-)
Having the knowledge which dark patterns even work well for technically affine users while still being "socially acceptable" can be worth a lot of money to specific companies.
In fact, odds on someone who was complicit in developing many of the dark patterns that have run billions of dollars from consumers is reading this from their phone, thinking they should go to bed so they can wake up to the acai bowl, cold plunge, and early retirement to hobbies in seattle.
Exactly. We're doing this to ourselves. These horrible patterns are an HN reader's JIRA ticket next week, and they're going to happily implement them.
Are you actually complicit in this or do you really feel such a part of the "tech community" that you truly consider it as a "we"?
If the former, stop doing it right now and atone.
If the latter, I don't think that's healthy, you have nothing to do with it unless you're at a FAANG or something.
Are you using "affine" to mean "for which one has an affinity"? I have never heard that nor can I see that as a wide-spread definition. Just curious!
Maybe non native speaker, here in germany we often say "technisch affin" which means proficient with technology
I’m a native English speaker and I have only ever heard “affine” as a technical term in mathematics, e.g. an affine transformation of vector spaces. I would have had no idea what it means outside of math.
However, OP’s usage seems logical, so I wouldn’t be upset if it became popular!
> here in germany we often say "technisch affin" which means proficient with technology
As a native German speaker, I indeed fell for this false friend. :-(
I was wondering. Maybe "refined", as a derivative of the verb?
I think that poster is saying that here on HN posters typically preserve points, lines and parallelism. Rude, quite honestly.
The hosting provider is actually Clover POS and they are using this game to train their AI on which dark patterns yield the highest fee collections for Clover /jk
jfc new 'orthogonal' just dropped
This reminds me of a gag voting simulation website from the early 2000s when BushJr was running for president against Al Gore. The (maybe flash?) game simulated voting, but when you tried to click, the buttons would “run away” from the cursor, or change size to avoid being clicked… dark patterns… always fun to “play against”.
More recently though, I must say, YouTube has really jumped the shark in terms of perfecting their dark patterns/algo stickiness. I can’t even go to the site without immediately forgetting my original intent.
Also see The Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror XIX, where Homer tries to vote for Obama using an electronic voting machine:
https://youtu.be/47QZ6PoHl44
Yesterday I scrolled down the front page of my Youtube, and saw the "shorts" shelf. I clicked "Show me fewer shorts" like I have a hundred other times.
I did something else for a few minutes, then I scrolled down another page or so.
The shorts were right there again.
Google is evil. Anyone still working for them is enabling this.
i'm old too and remember that, i believe it was javascript, not flash
Buy me a coffee? Jokes on you I just practiced avoiding this.
"But me a coffee" should instantly loose the game forever.
I chortled when I choked an input and accidentally clicked that
I like how at the end the author tries to get you to give him a tip with the buy me a coffee link
I once went to go pick up takeout and they covered the no tip button with a sticker. I was so confused so I put in 10 cents because I could find the button at first. I stopped going to the place since.
I help a blind friend order his groceries online from Walmart once a month. He's disabled and on food stamps (EBT/Link). The groceries are all taken care of, but the site always requests a $30 tip for the driver.
I drop it down a bit and pay it on my credit card for him, but what's the right way to deal with this situation?
A 30$ tip? Does this company not give their drivers a wage, or something?
Ironically, they do not. They are the largest employer of employees on welfare.
Should be illegal to pay someone less than the cost of living. The free labor ”market” has clearly not managed to solve the problem.
(BYW that’s my proposed solution for the tipping problem, too, to stick to the topic.)
Walmart InHome is $40/year and no tips.
Wow, that's not bad.
"Walmart InHome is a premium service that delivers groceries and essentials directly into a customer's home (fridge/kitchen) or garage, using trained, vetted Walmart associates. As an add-on to Walmart+, it costs an additional $40/year (or $7/month) to provide unlimited, tip-free, and free-delivery-fee service."
Can even do it when you aren't home.
My sister has run her Daycare company and family off this service for many years and has high praise for the service.
Wow, thank you, I had no idea about this. Going to look into it. He has Walmart+ which you get for half price if you are on benefits, which also removes the regular $9.95 delivery fee.
Man $30 can still buy a lot of food at Aldi
is there a name for the phenomenon where a user immediately assumes the smallest and lowest contrast button on an interface is the option they want, before actually reading any of the words?
I'm not aware of a specific term, another than just conditioning, but I am reminded of "banner blindness" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness
(I was definitely expecting a level to swap the contrast eventually as a trick.)
This reversed cta thing is what I've been evolved to do. Always look for the opposite of a cta button and click it. This reconciles with the fact the incentives have been off for the past few years or decades.
I was waiting for the cases where they inverted this. That would really trick me. But it didn't happen in the few cases I tried.
Being conditioned.
There should be one.
Tipping culture is properly weird to me as an European, I probably tip much more than the average European and I still find these prompts obnoxious, and they're popping everywhere in Barcelona. No thank you, that's a part of the U.S. culture I certainly don't want to see imported over here.
Nice! I’ve started only tipping on fridays for coffee, etc. I’m a great tipper at restaurants But being hit up for a $5 tip for a $4 drink is way wrong. I’d tip you, but today is Thursday!
I tip great at sit-down restaurants. I don't tip at fast food places, or carry-outs where they don't actually provide and service, or at the oil change place.
Summary: if I didn't tip in a situation 10 years ago, I'm not going to start now.
I tip my barista and budtender a dollar every visit, personally. I love those people though. Restaurants get 20% unless they fuck up, then it's 15%, unless it was absolutely egregious.
That's it. I cut my own hair.
IMO restaurant tips (and other service businesses) are 15% by default, 20% if they do well, 10% if they do poorly. If they do especially poorly (like, completely ignoring the table for an hour while chatting with coworkers off to the side), they get $.02. If they do especially well, more than 20% (I've gone as high as 50% once).
This mentality of doing 20% by default for something you already paid is what got us in this situation.
People should be paid a living wage by default.
Once someone can tell me what, specifically, a living wage is, I imagine this will stop being the most annoying phrase on the planet.
Do you tip your local cashier in the groceries store? Do you tip the bus driver who took you to work? Do you tip a bank clerk who processed your application? If no, then this is a living wage.
Also not having "tips" prevents freeloaders from not paying taxes, which every other worker in the country pays fairly.
There can be a lot of definition but I propose " a wage where you do not need to annoy your customer for tip".
You understand that you are PAYING EXTRA for the especially poor service?
My barber earns his fat tip taming my unruly cowlicks. Barista and bartender? Definitely. Cashier at a convenience store? Oh hell no.
My barber earns his fat tip by being my therapist.
I get it. That's worth the compensation.
Have you taken into account that tips are no longer taxed and adjusted these arbitrary percentages?
>tips are no longer taxed
Tips (if reported) are always subject to 7.65% FICA tax. And there are several conditions that must be met before tips are excluded from federal (not necessarily state) income tax. (U.S. tax law). In short, many tips are still fully taxed despite false promises to the contrary.
As a European, I never understood why you'd tip automatically. I get that waiters are allowed to be paid less, but I don't see why that would be the customer's problem.
I also don’t get the logic of tipping a percentage of the cost. Asking for several cheap beers is more work for the waiter than a single bottle of expensive wine, yet the latter earns them more?
Because it's part of our culture and it's an easy way to show appreciation. You don't have to do it anywhere. Waiters also explicitly aren't allowed to be paid less. They must make at LEAST minimum wage. If they don't make minimum after tips, their hourly rate is raised each paycheck to equal minimum wage. It's literally not the customer's problem. You should probably learn how things work here if you're that curious!
> Waiters also explicitly aren't allowed to be paid less. They must make at LEAST minimum wage. If they don't make minimum after tips, their hourly rate is raised each paycheck to equal minimum wage.
That means they are allowed to be paid less than minimum wage. Wage is paid by the employer, not the employer's customer. If the employer can deduct the tips from the minimum wage, that explicitly means that they are allowed to pay tipped workers less and that tipping does not provide any additional income but instead only shifts the responsibility of paying people for their work to the customer. Tips are are nothing but gifts to the employer.
> and it's an easy way to show appreciation.
If something is socially expected simply as part of protocol and people only do it out of the social pressure not to deviate from the norm and be seen as assholes, then that is not appreciation.
I'm just explaining how people who: either don't think much about it or support it tend to view it. I'm not an apologist.
7.25 is not a livable wage anywhere really, so even at 7.25 they would need tips to live. It really is the customers problem to pay them - their employers get off on 2.13 mostly, and 7.25 if they're extremely unlucky.
And yes, I'm American. Of course it's culture, but more than that we want waiters to not starve to death so we tip. You can, of course, choose not to but I consider it an asshole move knowing what they're making.
Show my appreciation to what?
For their skill at accomplishing their job. Their jobs are primarily skill-based and customer-facing. A taxi driver who gets you where you want to go quickly and safely, a waiter who never lets your coffee cup get empty, a barber who makes you look... well dang, pretty nice!
[flagged]
If you have something to add to the conversation then just do that. Don't make bad faith interpretations and unsubstantiated accusations against people.
>If you have something to add to the conversation then just do that. Don't make bad faith interpretations and unsubstantiated accusations against people.
You mean like you just did?
Tipping culture in the US is absolutely rooted in bigotry[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. That's not a "bad faith interpretation," it's well-documented history.
[0] https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-tipping/
[1] https://www.povertylaw.org/article/the-racist-history-behind...
[2] https://stop-tipping.org/history-of-tipping/
[3] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/17/william-b...
[4] https://inequality.org/article/tipping-is-racist-and-harms-u...
[5] https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/the-racist-histor...
[6] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tipping-jobs-history-slave-wage...
[7] https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurant...
The bad faith interpretation is claiming that tipping is racist, not providing any evidence for it, claiming that OP knows that it is racist and supports it for that reason.
>The bad faith interpretation is claiming that tipping is racist,
That's not a bad faith interpretation, the origins of tipping in the US are absolutely based in bigotry.
>claiming that OP knows that it is racist and supports it for that reason.
A fair point. GP certainly did not assume good faith or give the comment to which they responded the most charitable reading.
My apologies for being somewhat knee-jerk about it, but I have a really big problem with bigotry (I am absolutely not claiming that you or the poster to whom GP replied are bigoted) and believe that decent people should call attention to bigotry, especially when it's embedded in society as the tipping culture is in the US.
Bigotry is ethically wrong and harms the societies which it infests. As I mentioned, I feel strongly about that.
If I was less than charitable with your response to calling out bigotry (GP's attempt to do so was rather ham-handed), my apologies.
I also cut my own hair, but sometimes I’m lazy and just hit up the Barber shop.
She charges me $15! I tip +$25 and it’s still a cheap haircut.
My haircut has to be one of the simplest around, but 9 out of 10 stylists will leave me fixing it myself later. Once I paid $50+tip for the same cut at a swanky joint and STILL went home and fixed it. She doesn’t know what she’s worth.
In the UK the sort-of rule is that you tip for 10% food if you pay after receiving it (and that's pretty much the only situation where anyone tips).
It seems like since the pandemic even that is less expected though, which is nice.
Taxis used to expect tips, black cab drivers often still do.
People used to play this whole unpleasant game of saying "round it up to £30 if you do me a receipt", and the driver providing a fistful of blank receipts in return - almost as if expenses fiddling was less shameful than tipping.
Thankfully, the likes of Uber and mandatory card payment terminals in cabs have ended all that.
I think people also used to tip the postman, newspaper boy and binmen at Christmas.
Oh, yeah. And I remember a columnist in one of the Sunday papers in the late 90s talking about tipping the butcher for the Christmas goose, but I think that was probably a bit of a "look how old-fashioned I am!" affectation even back then.
Where asks you for a $5 tip for a $4 drink? I’ve never seen anything like that.
Ive totally seen it at local coffee shops in the Pacific Northwest. When I do see it, and if I’m in a tipping mood, I slide the other way.
My current strategy for how much total I'll pay for a coffee is FlOOR(price+.50) + 1, which keeps the bill nice and clean and kicks some goodwill towards someone who makes less than 1/5th the average earnings of my coworkers.
I'm going to charge you $1.50, then.
I make my own coffee. It's not hard.
Sometimes I want coffee before I make my coffee
The trick is to prep your coffee machine the night before. I've only done it a few times, but it was very nice to wake up to that surprise.
> kicks some goodwill towards someone who makes less than 1/5th the average earnings of my coworkers.
The coffee shop owners? They're probably making a decent amount of money no?
Probably not. Food service is ruthlessly competitive and making a profit after paying for product, rent, utilities, labor, financing and/or franchise fees is easier said than done.
Fun idea but gets boring when patterns repeat in seemingly random order. The timer also sucks a lot of the fun out of it and makes the game too easy, because the patterns can’t be dark enough. I just plowed through without ever even looking at the wrong options, because it was so obvious what the right one was.
I’d much rather the game progressed in a fixed logical order and the choices became less obvious without a timer. In other words, I think this makes more sense as a puzzle game, not a reflexes game.
The "buy me a coffee" button at the end is :chefskiss:
I was gonna tip the developer but it feels like losing now
Intentionally and knowingly tipping is winning, no?
Unless we start arguing that gratitude is a dark pattern.
It should be illegal to solicit tips when asking for payment.
Easier approach - make tips completely illegal as tax evasion or tax them higher than the meal, let's say 100% tax on tips.
Treat them as bribes. Punish the one who gives one with fine(1% of income/net wealth) and one who takes with mandatory imprisonment. After that they will quickly go away.
Made by https://vladimirj.dev/
Great game. I squirmed at typing "no tips" the first time but second time was fine. I'm going to practice this a lot more to tonne down some (frequently abused) empathy
Yup, apply 93 kg more than an imperial ton on those thieves.
[dead]
First I will say, I am very much against dark patterns and I believe servers should be paid a fair wage and not have to rely on tips.
But until that I do tip for dine-in service. But I found the "buy me a coffee" link on the button of this to be much funnier / ironic than it probably should have been.
It's also missing what I think is the worst dark pattern:
Having no option not to tip at all. Instead requiring that the customer press "Custom" and manually entering "0.00"
Besides payment kiosks having tipping on by default, I wonder how much of this is an indicator of inflation over the past 5 years. Businesses have dramatically broadened tipping on payment kiosks to avoid having to increase wages. "We'll still pay you 12 dollars an hour, but now you get tips!"
Now more than ever it is against your best interests to tip on any automated platform. The data collected will definitely be used against you in algorithmic pricing.
These days it pays to aggressively demonstrate that you are price sensitive and will delay or cancel transactions at the slightest whiff of additional expense.
I only ever tip off-platform or cash even if I pay with card. Also that helps to enable my gift to go only to the service provider. It fucks me on some platforms but I find that an acceptable cost to not get algorithmically spitroasted. Besides, it also helps to eliminate predatory platforms from my ecosystem.
Can an industry insider confirm this tracking? Interesting take, thank you. I hadn’t considered the privacy implications of tipping.
I’m no industry insider, but tipping would seem to me to be a key indicator for discretionary spending, so a very valuable data point. I have no doubt that a dataset of 1m clients and their tipping patterns would be worth >500k per client (dataset user). A list of consistent, large or skimpy tippers significantly more. (Skimpy so as to know to target them with “deals”, big tippers for the upsell and value added advertising.
E.g. Uber / UberEats offer lower fairs to drivers if the client is expected to tip higher. I'm not an insider, but it can be observed in the wild as discussed on Reddit.
Actually doesn't make for a bad reaction time and processing game since you need to think fast and avoid distractions.
Mobile offers a speed boost for taps but heavy nerf to text entry tasks.
For X-Files fans who might be unfamiliar with the reboot, the reboot has actually one episode dedicated to this - S11E07 - Rm9sbG93ZXJz, Mulder/Scully don't want to tip the robotic self-service and are punished for it.
Available to watch here: https://www.tvseries.video/series/the-x-files/season-11-epis...
The most shocking part of the game is the price of goods! $14, $17 dollars for one meal to be eaten standing up? Wow. Here in Paris sandwiches cost between EUR 4 and 6 (usually 5), with a "menu" option that includes a can of soda and sometimes a "dessert" for 9-10. Anything above that would be considered extorsion.
Right, at the same time the median salary for a full time job in the US is $5280/month, that €4450. In France it's €2183, half as much.
Your user name being a reference to Coluche you're probably French? As a French you probably know these aren't exactly comparable. Yes, the US are probably richer than France per capita -- but not twice as much.
I've considered going back to cash just to avoid these. The social convention used to be the seller writes a price and if the buyer can meet that price the deal is done. These abusive card machines have brought "tipping culture" to the UK and I hate it.
I had food delivered the other day and the suggested tip included tax and the delivery fee in it's calculation.
The darkest patterns are fees that don’t exist . Like 300% tax fees and nightly parking when parking is free
Instacart has these, or at least it used to. You pay an annual membership, thinking that it gets you out of fees, but the FULL invoice (very hard to locate!) show a mysterious service fee of $3-6.
shady!
Really nice game OP. Would you consider making a version of the game with no timer?
I was thinking in sending this link to my family but probably the timer is really fast for them but I think they could used your app as "training" so they know how to spot a dark pattern in the future
https://skipthe.tips/?debug=1
Made me want to sing that classic song from the animated movie "sausage party"
"Just the tip"
Reminds me of the game Ad Attack from Neopets. Back when the plague on the internet was popup ads.
Wild how we're back in popup hell now just like we were back then, even though the method for web popups is different now.
I'm one of those cowards that always succumbs to the pressure and ends up tipping, but it bothers me enough that I just won't buy anything if I know I'm going to get asked. This is good training.
I've started using cash more again to avoid the question.
It is fun to look them in the eye as you decline the tip.
Got to round 8 - was too slow with the notifications popping up!
How many of these are real dark patterns? The "new entry suddenly prepended to the list" one I have seen before.
The time limit accurately simulates the experience of being under the accusatory stare of the person who handed you the machine
I tried to tip OP 0$, but that wasn't possible.
Are any of these illegal in the US or Canada?
The one where the options move when you hover over them feels like it should be but might not actually be.
Somebody had to invent it, and a lawmaker had to become aware of it, before a law could address it.
Are all of these dark patterns seen in the wild? OR are some of these merely a dreadful warning of what may happen?
This is where I want a digital wallet on my phone with payment details that I control (no tip, lowest fee possible)
It's one thing to read about dark patterns, it's another to feel your cursor being baited in real time
"Hold to skip tip" was devilish.
Tip-creep is still better than the alternative, which is denying customers the option to tip at all.
Are all these food items real? Some of them sound made up...
and are these California prices? It's totally bonkers.
Should be mandatory training to obtain the ESTA permit to enter USA (even if just for transfers)
I always pay in cash, and I would want to know all of the prices (including tips, if any) ahead of time if I can (and also be able understand the prices).
(My draft specification of Computer Payment File is intended to avoid many kind of dishonesty when paying by computer (it is not needed or useful when paying in cash), including this kind; one of the things it requires is that the buyer calculates the payment amount from the information (such as the catalog) that the seller provides; they cannot charge you any other amount of money.)
I enjoyed the restaurant names
The written price is the written price, and that's final. No tips.
Damn I hit that coffee button and paid $100 tip. Expensive game.
Hilarious. I lost it when it started asking who to fire.
This was cool, but I got to one where it would load after every button you click. That's fine, but then I "lost" because it simply wouldn't load a winnable option in time it seems. Maybe I was moving too fast and missed the real button, but I still didn't tip in the end, so eh.
There is a small "skip tip" link below the button
I hate every bit of this. Well done!
Thank you!
I hate the tipping culture in the USA and Germany. Instead of being an extra, it feels like an obligatory surcharge I have to pay just to receive the service, good or bad. I usually don’t return to restaurants or bars that nag for tips. In those few places that I like and visit regularly, I don’t give tips. Me being a regular customer brings them more revenue than any tip I’d give otherwise.
Somehow, employers of these establishments convinced the staff that it's the customer’s fault that their wages are inadequate and that they should go after the customers to get the difference. I would much rather pay a higher price and not hear anything about the tips.
Neat game! Is this called monetary abuse?
fun idea but a bit repetitive and boring.
How well would an LLM score at this?
I understand that US has a weird tipping culture which results in such UI.
But these UI's are occasionally slipping into a countries where tipping is not expected.
This leads to a strange situations like "transaction isn't approved by me because instead of ApplePay and walk away, I need to solve some quiz on a payment terminal or payment will not pass".
Every time this happens, it annoys me a lot which affects my wish to visit this place again.
At this point it’s more profitable for companies to just enforce tipping everywhere using the UI as an excuse. It’s a total ripoff especially at already expensive places.
Even if a law was passed in the US to correct the minimum wage at restaurants etc. nothing will be resolved.
Restaurants managed to outsource their wage problems to customers without raising their prices. Even with an adjusted minimum wage, people will say that it’s not enough.
PB 34 skips!
Now do one where you have to withdraw your card from the machine before it starts beeping obnoxiously at you but the screen keeps trying to trick you into withdrawing too early.
I won hehe
Dark patterns are just polite robbery by corporations that realized psychological manipulation pays better than service. The grift is the product, not the bug.
Superb!
Secret slow mode for us boomers: https://skipthe.tips/?debug=1
"buy me a coffee"
lol, it got me to do 5% more on the first try.. i lost.
souls-like
[flagged]
Bot account. Last active with two posts in 2017, then started spamming today with the usual HN spambot formula. As usual, doing the weird thing that only the HN spambots do where it's almost always exactly three paragraphs of 1-2 sentences each. Not sure why they prompt for that formula but it makes it very easy to spot out. For me, I guess. This is voted to the top and the bot has over 50 karma so apparently most people are unable to detect LLM spam even when they make it as obvious as they possibly can.
As a master in commenting I would argue that this is quite smart. Indeed this might be a bot.
Or maybe it's not, who knows? It's sometimes hard to tell with comments.
It's just the times we live in, uncertainty is a given, most of the time we don't know. I guess we'll have to make do.
Gotta try harder than that. There's a certain length to their paragraphs as well, you can see from their post history the general shape of their messages that will cue you off that you're probably about to read spam before you've even read the first word. Also abundant LLMisms. Four "not X but Y" and three lists of three in only five sentences. The sheer density of LLMisms is absurd. Not to mention that vague sense of incoherency despite overall being a grammatically correct series of words. There are so many tells it's criminal people aren't catching it.
I wish I had a super-upvote.
"OP here" or "Author here" in posts is an obvious one when you see it. (In both cases, it's completely redundant!)
As for comments, regurgitating the input too closely and overusing abbreviations are highly indicative, yet many commenters don't notice.
See for instance (slop warning) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986273 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46965103.
I would suggest sending this as an email to the mods instead of a reply, what you're doing is practically a bug report to the bot owner right now. The resulting discussion isn't super interesting either (IMO).
I am not signing up to a mini-moderator who has to e-mail dang 5 times a day. I want to not see these messages in the first place, and for that to be possible, the community needs to learn and be able to recognise this for themselves so this spam can be flagged and killed on sight.
If the bot owner happens to waste their time reading the responses to the dozens of comments one of their many spambots made, and improves the bots as a result, so be it. They're already winning the war as it stands, not like things can get much worse. I'd like to at least try to make an effort to make things better.
Maybe the actual answer is that I just need to stop using HN, though, since the spambots are taking over the site and yet people are more concerned with the people pointing that out than the actual problem.
Thanks - this was a good catch, and it makes steam come out my ears to see any account abusing HN like that.
You don't have to email us, of course! But please understand that we're on the same side. We don't want to see HN overrun by generated comments (a form of spam) any more than you, or other users do. Remember that tomhow and I were avid users of HN for many years before we became mods.
All: generated comments and bots aren't allowed here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If you notice an account that appears to be consistently pattern-matching to this, and have a minute to let us know, we'd appreciate a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, but we do monitor the inbox closely (including fishing through the spam bin for real users) and we take these reports seriously.
As someone very engaged in reading HackerNews comments I observed that your comment and the comment you are replying to have that exact same format of three short paragraphs.
The people behind these bots most certainly found that many engaging, authentic comments follow this clever pattern. It is also worth noting that such comments are remarkably digestible – due to their brevity and decomposition into even smaller logical and lexical parts – and swiftly read, requiring only a very short attention span and little intellectual investment from the reader.
This makes me very curious about the statistics on how HackerNews comments are structured and how well different formats of comments perform in the community. I would be thrilled to dive into the data and might write a neat program to analyze this sharing the results with the community.
The data you'd need for that is all available through both the HN Firebase API (which is a bit antiquated) and Algolia's HN Search API. If you find anything interesting, definitely let us know!
Incidentally, both comments were edited after the fact. Neither my nor Dang's comment were originally of this length but we both made edits that ended up there. I did notice the irony :)
OK, I sent the email myself. You don't have to do it. Just once, not 5 times per day. Agree about community awareness, but I think emailing the mods is more effective than responding to one of the 1000 comments this account is making.
Thanks for doing that because I had no idea this was happening. I've banned the account now and flagkilled the 30+ comments they posted today.
you missed one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998241 ;-P
two actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46988519
Those were killed. What made you think they weren't?
i most certainly saw them as neither dead or flagged.
now i see three other comments as alive:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46997839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46996890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46992786
i know they were flagged and dead before.
i can make a screenshot.
could those comments be reactivated because people vouch for them? or is there some kind of bug?
That's right—some users vouched for those 3 after we'd killed them.
That makes sense, because if you look at individual posts in isolation you might think they were unfairly killed. One needs to look at the posting history of the account as a whole to understand what the issue was.
(Btw, thanks for explaining the context in those other threads.)
I've had repeated comment and email exchanges with you over the years over whether or not an explicit "killed" or "dead" indicator on accounts and their posts/comments should exist. I understand the reasons against this, and arguably they'd be more relevant in the case of detected bot accounts (the indicator would be yet more training data, assuming feedback training).
I've also been experimenting with my own indicators for specific accounts based on my own criteria and interactions which I've found useful (applied through my own HN tweaks). E.g., if I see an explicit mod note that an account has been banned, I can mark it as such myself, sparing confusion.
How HN can implement a Voight-Kampff test becomes an increasingly relevant question.... One of several HN needs to consider with increasing urgency.
(Three 'graph pattern ... is again noted...)
more important than an indicator it would probably be useful to somehow disable vouching for a killed account. i don't know if it is possible to set the flag counter to some high number so that vouching simply has no effect or to an invalid number like -1
That's antithetical to how HN has operated in the past. Vouching for deads is fair when the account is an actual human, and happens to post valid content. I do this occasionally myself (I read with "showdead" on), though not especially often.
See, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525284> also the FAQ: <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch>.
Accounts killed for spamming AI content seem to me to violate that premise, and an unvouchable kill does seem appropriate, especially where it's not immediately evident to the casual reader that an account was killed for posting AI content.
I'm thinking of how I'd like to indicate such accounts myself, and am leaning toward adding a robot emogi via an ":after" CSS rule.
i think we are actually agreeing. i am not talking about making kills unvouchable in general but i am suggesting how an unvouchable kill could be implemented without to much effort. the unvouchable kill should of course be only applied to appropriate cases, it's not meant to replace the regular kill.
Yes, we are in agreement here. I was simply noting what HN's past policy and rationale have been.
LLMs change the calculus somewhat in making automated bot-posting far more viable. It's clearly already a problem. I suspect that moderation policies will have to adapt to this. There's also the fact that such a change would make AI-banned discernable from normal bans, in that AI-banned accounts would not have vouchable comments. If explicitly noting AI banning isn't adopted on the basis that this would provide information to either the AI or its operator of the fact / nature of the banning, the absence of a vouch option would reveal the fact regardless.
(A relatively small example of changes we'll see induced by LLMs in the larger world as well. Interesting times....)
my suggestion would not remove the vouch option, it would just make it ineffective. people using it would not notice. the system would still indicate that you vouched for a message.
Fair enough. Email the mods! ;-)
I just wish they would use bigger models. These ones always write stuff that makes no sense. Like it says "the same principle applies to mobile games" then describes a different principle
There's some bots on HN who write much more coherently and get a decent # of upvotes. I was only able to catch one because the comment started with something along the lines of "Here's a smart response for a technical audience about _____"
lmao, got a link?
Sadly it was edited, but this comment used to be clearly responding to a prompt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805888
@dang what was the original comment?
I've lost the plot - what comment are you asking about?
(Btw, @dang usually doesn't work - it's better to email hn@ycombinator.com.)
Thanks. I upvoted one of its comments yesterday; i.e., it fooled me.
i saw a flagged comment and thought who the hell would flag that? it makes no sense. was going to vouch for it, but i always check the comment history which is where i noticed that all comments had a suspiciously similar pattern, and i found this thread.
some indicator that an account is banned would be nice for those who have showdead active.
one thing that is disturbing is that the comments of the bot are all lowercase. is that a bot feature now? are they doing that to appear less like a bot?
do i have to change my style to avoid looking like a bot? or is changing my style going to make me look like a bot?
i feel trapped.
No, most of the spambots use proper casing. Whoever is behind this does prompt different bots to generate output in different styles with the intent to appear more conversational/human, so each bot has its own "personality" and typing style. An example of another style here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885996
Any idea what the endgoal of such bots is?
Karmafarming and then astroturfing?
Astroturfing seems to be the goal. I notice sometimes there are threads in which numerous of these bots converge to promote some dubious product being shilled.
Do you check everyone's hn account history?
No, I check account history when the text is obviously LLM-generated. I mostly point it out because if I don't make it abundantly clear how obvious the spambot is by its behaviour, I will get people telling me that it could totally be a human and that I'm making a false accusation.
Might be because while it's not high quality, it is ultimately a constructive comment. So this might be a case of https://xkcd.com/810/
I suppose 15 years ago it would not have been possible to predict how fucking irritating these comments could be. I would rather have the old spambots back at this point. Please, spambots, go back to trying to sell me penis enlargement pills, I beg of you.
Now this is a definite human comment, shoehorned in xkcd links are a huge human tell.
Just doing my part
I've got a local cafe that pre-selects a $3 tip on a $5 purchase.
I try to 'punish' for these and tip less than I would normally.
At an airport once the coffee stand had a girl behind the counter that would just hand you an empty disposable cup. She didn’t even handle cash, it was card only using a self checkout POS system. And it still asked for a tip with the default of 20%.
There should be a way to specify a negative tip.
If you really want to make a deal out of it, you hand it back to the server and ask them to select 0 for you. Mention that you don't think the service deserves a tip, and that you resent being asked.
If enough of us start doing this, it has a chance of applying some back pressure, although unfortunately that force acts through the poorly-paid checkout operator who doesn't directly have the option to influence decisions.
The server isn't the one who configured the UI, and probably needs the money. You're punishing the wrong person.
> it's that calculating a custom amount requires more effort than just tapping accept.
0% is easy to calculate.
Exactly this. Why are you tipping if you’re standing up?
Why tip someone for a job I'm capable of doing myself? I can serve food, I can drive a taxi, I can and do cut my own hair. I did, however, tip my urologist.
Not many fans of The Office I see :)
You definitely get the spit-coffee at the diner.
> Every checkout screen has become a guilt machine.
Is bill-paying UI also a guilt machine? If you don't pay, you feel guilty! How about holding the door for elderly people? Going to your kid's event? Not running people over in the crosswalk? Saying please and thank you? Buying birthday presents? It's all so unfair - to me!
I assume that my tip benefits the people who provide the service (Starbucks employees, not Starbucks shareholders). I also assume that the employees' salaries are not “great.” I am satisfied with my income, so I have no problem tipping. I tip little when the service is not good and tip a lot when the service is excellent.
> I assume that my tip benefits the people who provide the service (Starbucks employees, not Starbucks shareholders).
> I also assume that the employees' salaries are not “great.”
The employees' salaries not being “great” benefits the shareholders. How the shareholders get away with paying such low salaries is left as an exercise to the reader.
yeah we all understand the basic premise. But it's applied completely unequally and you subsidizing their salary is keeping starbucks from paying them more. It creates unnecessary friction and decision fatigue for the consumer as well. Those farmworkers doing back breaking work to pick your berries? No tip.
Instead of assuming that - take the amount you wanted to to tip, and donate it to the Starbacks Workers' Union:
https://sbworkersunited.org
or buy their merch to support that worthy struggle.
On a separate but vaguely related note: if somebody comps all or part of your bill at a restaurant or bar then you should split the difference on the tip.
As a practical example let's say you take a date to your local trendy sushi place. You both get gold-leafed deep fried Wagyu fatback tuna rolls and some Yuzu duck fat-washed 50-year-old whiskey highballs. The final bill is $100 (I'll use round-ish numbers for this example). The bartender comps you 30% because you all are cool and discuss your shared experience bartending or jetskiing or whatever. Ordinarily your tip would have been 20% for a total of $120. In this case your bill is now $70 plus your newly selected gratuity. Take the difference between the original bill with tip and your current bill without tip and divide it in two. This is the floor for your new tip, in this case (120-70)/2 = $25. This is indeed something like a 35% gratuity but they hooked you up and made that custom drink for your charming new beau. As a matter of fact you should round up from this number because they have side work to do and you make pretty decent money as a software engineer/LLM tickler/product sorcerer. Just make it $30 for a nice round hundo.
If you're friends with the manager and they comp your dinner to do you a solid and impress your date then you should tip 50% of what the bill would have been minimum. This is why you should keep cash in your pocket - shake the waiter's hand on your way out and palm it to them. If that's not possible then go to use the restroom and talk to them on your way back so they can run your card through the POS on a blank check to give them said tip.
This is how you do things with class. This is what I wish somebody had explained to me when I was 20 and kinda broke (i.e. eager to save money that I would have spent anyway) before I embarrassed myself by failing to do such. If you are similarly unaware then now you know too :-)
As an addendum this also applies to coffee and pizza places but the numbers become coarser. Buying them the equivalent of a beer at your local dive ($3ish) is customary.
I'm really not trying to hate, I think you method is great and I love that you have rationalized it, but as someone whose mostly find this kind of social interactions natural, there's something "funny" about finding the algorithm for it. I never did the math and always naturally landed more or less there.
The way to do it with class would be the manager asks the price of the service, and pays the servers and tenders their due fair wage. The moment you bring money to a bunch of "ifs" surrounding a social interaction, you lost all class. Thinking of tips at all is actively detrimental to what you're trying to accomplish.
I've only been given 1 free meal (by the manager). I just gave the entire difference as my tip. I was already going to spend the money, so why not make a random waiter happy.
I've never been comped at any restaurant or bar.
I always thought that was a casino thing (to keep you drinking so that you gamble more) but I've never been to a casino. I live in Canada though, so we might have laws against that sort of thing.
Have you tried being really, really, ridiculously good looking?
Ahhh, I see. So the GP's whole spiel was just a humblebrag.
you don't have to be good looking. you just have to go to the same place frequently, and be friendly.
You don’t have to be, but it helps not to be bad looking.
i think it is truly irrelevant
like, a good looking person will get the occasional comp on the basis of that, but you'll never be friends with the staff on the basis of that. whereas anyone can be friends with the staff, if they are friendly and earnest about it.
I guess you missed the part where I talked about being friendly (or friends) with the waitstaff. Nice to know that you think I'm good looking though!
I recently had an entire meal at Chili’s comped by the manager, because I waited an hour for food. I guess their system flagged it, or they just noticed, because I didn’t complain. I was hanging with my grandson.
I tipped on the full amount but we had to get the manager again to figure out how. I was going to Venmo her but the manager just sent the $0.00 bill to the table.
if you had to wait an hour for the food, what was the tip for exactly?
Perhaps codazoda asked to delay an hour as an excuse to stay longer, so they did well with their part of the plan?
I tipped the waitress, who was perfectly attentive the whole time.
Just pointing out that in your example, the waiter gives themselves a $30 bonus by giving you the option not to pay a tip.
> As a practical example let's say you take a date to your local trendy sushi place. You both get gold-leafed deep fried Wagyu fatback tuna rolls and some Yuzu duck fat-washed 50-year-old whiskey highballs. The final bill is $100
Are you a time traveler from like 1980?
I guess I’m still similarly unaware, because nothing about palming people money on the way out like a magician or doing the restroom trick feels classy over everyone just being super upfront about the bill and tips.
> As a practical example let's say you take a date to your local trendy sushi place. You both get gold-leafed deep fried Wagyu fatback tuna rolls
"Practical example"
feels like this post was written by a robot trying to act like a cool dude
Yeah, this is too much nonsense for me.
If a waiter is comping something in exchange for a higher tip, that's not generosity or goodwill at all, it's a dishonest scam.
I will tip what I want to tip (often 0) without remorse and move on with my life.
Unfortunately this cancerous American system leeched into Canada, but we can still stop it, one $0 tip at a time.
I think the procedure is being misinterpreted. This isn't a scam, it's just a common social convention. It's not a scam by the waiter because they have a limited amount they can do this for and they have just chosen to do it for you.
... So pay your server for ripping off their employer?
Is this how comping actually works? I’ve never worked in a restaurant, but I assumed there was some system for it (if sometimes ill-defined) and not just employees stealing.
The receipt printer in the kitchen is tied to the POS. Anything rung in for prep is saved in the computer. The manager can run reports and see who comped what and if anything has been voided. This has been a thing since the 90s.
Creating a good guest experience is how you get repeat business. Comps are part of that. You are talking about theft and I mentioned nothing of the sort. If you choose to engage in such behavior then that's your business - don't accuse me of it.
Only person who MAYBE should be tipped is the COOK. Bringing plate to table is trivial - cooking is not.
Tipping is a scam in the age of wages and pensions
As someone who's worked in restaurant kitchens but did one single day as a waiter for training, I'd basically never work as a server, even for tips and the extra money.
Cooking was way easier.
I agree the whole tipping system in the US is a mess, though.
A guy with short hair should not have to pay more than $20 for a basic haircut, inclusive of tip. If you can't find someone that does it for less than that in your area, invest about $100 in professional grade clippers and cut your own hair. It's easier than it sounds and you will get better at it over time.
Learn to make your own coffee. You shouldn't have to pay more than a couple of bucks for coffee with perhaps some milk in it. An espresso machine and a grinder will quickly pay for themselves.
While you are at it, cancel all those streaming subscriptions, and stream for free in the high seas or YT ad-free with uBlock.
The above "tips" will save your thousands of dollars each year, and most likely also save you time. There are also things like DIY car maintenance that can be fun to learn and save you a lot of money, but you need space (a house) and some tools to get started.
> While you are at it, cancel all those streaming subscriptions, and stream for free in the high seas
Setting up jellyfin+plex (some devices support one but not the other) and most of the arr suite (radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, tunarr) has really been the best choice I've made this year. I have every TV show or movie I ever want to watch, all my favorites, all the classics. And all in one place. And I made sure to keep it local-first so I still have access at home if we lose internet. Started sharing with family and friends and I get a few requests a week to add content, so its being used.
Just removing the "what streaming service is this show on that im watching?" has been a nice improvement.
I'm going to "third" this advice (though not the Plex part). Jellyfin is fantastic. Yes, you have to be careful which devices you use it on, because the client app isn't available for all smart TVs, but you can get around that by just buying a GoogleTV stick (like the $30 one from Onn) and plugging that into your TV; then you can install the JF app on it through the Play store (or even sideload it if you really want). I did this for my wife's parents, and it works great, and my own parents' Roku TV has the JF app in its store already.
> An espresso machine and a grinder will quickly pay for themselves.
Or a pour over filter (like Kalita Wave or Hario V60) plus a grinder. That's a cheaper setup to start, and an easy way to get a big mug of great coffee.
Does annybody worry about sabotage if you don’t tip? Eg the cashier does something to your food? “Nice muffin you got there, I’d hate for it to get accidentally sneezed on.”
I recently bought my mom flowers for her birthday. Despite the price showing no delivery fee, the final price included $15 delivery charge, $8 service charge, taxes, and then asked me for a tip.
I chose no tip, expecting the delivery and service charge should cover everything.
The flowers were left on her front porch in below-freezing weather, they didn’t even knock or ring the doorbell. Luckily my mom happened to open the door and saw them before they completely froze.
So was the delivery person incompetent, or acting out because I didn’t add additional tip?
I don't call those tips, they are bribes or bids. I avoid all delivery services personally as much as possible and I'm fortunate to have a car.
I would expect/hope that the deliver person does not know the tips for individual orders.