I have just released a map of median rents in Berlin [0]. Now I'm improving it. I want people to enter their search criteria, and get an idea of how rare and expensive their desired apartment would be.
This will help people set clear expectations for their apartment search.
Right, which works great if your daytime job is fighting in the trenches, but maybe less so if your only opportunity is software development or other mentally exhausting job.
ntfy.sh is great! But it requires:
- Setting up a topic/channel
- Installing their app on your phone
- Subscribing to topics
- Running a curl command or HTTP client
console.text() is:
npm install @holler2660/console-text
console.text('thing happened');
That said, ntfy.sh doesn't do SMS, so if you genuinely need to wake up at 3am for critical alerts, it's push notifications vs actual phone calls/texts.
The main thing I'm going for is ease of use
I disagree. It enables more people to build utility software without the pain of writing the boilerplate code for it. This should leave more room for their taste and expertise.
That's how it works for me. I'm currently turning a lot of raw data into a map of Berlin rents. I spend less time figuring out the map API, and more time polishing the interesting parts.
I don't care if a craftsman used hand tools or a CNC to build beautiful furniture. I pay for taste, not toil.
I got access to around 30,000 Berlin apartment listings from the last year. The end goal to help foreign apartment seekers rate a listing’s price, size and location, and to give people realistic expectations. For example if your search criteria returns two listings per month and the chance of getting the flat is 1:100, you might rethink your approach.
The first release will be a map of median rent per square meter. Simple stuff.
Certain purchases (like health insurance in my country) should be a conversation, because the options are fiendishly complex and the attributes people typically use for comparison are wrong. The consequences are lifelong.
Every time I go to a presentation about the health care options I have, it ends up just being the representative reading off a slide with the actual information. All the information I need is in print. I have never received a single piece of valuable information that wasn’t easier to get just reading the docs myself.
We might live in a different country and serve a different demographic.
My guy saved a lot of people from making dumb mistakes. Then again he's good at his job, and if he was not I would wipe his business. Aligning incentives was very important for me. Most brokers are just bad.
I thought thees things were complex on purpose to make it hard for people to easily understand and compare so you have to speak to a sales person who can do the upselling
Nope. I built a calculator for that last year and ooooh boy. Now I pipe half the requests to a human because of all the possible mistakes a person can make. It's crazy complicated.
Finding that human is also hard because of the perverse incentives to sell more lucrative products.
That's my point, you need to be a specialist to understand it, but the specialists are incentivised to upsell you.
A simpler product would be better for consumers, but won't happen because there are industries (and a lot of lobbying) built up around keeping the money train rolling.
This happened to me a few times for my reviews in Germany. My 1-star reviews were flagged by the business as "defamation" although it contained only facts and personal opinions. I provided additional proof like screenshot of their documents (one of them was a language school), but they deleted my review at the end.
I was so frustrated, I even considered deleting all of my two hundred something reviews from Google Maps.
You just made me check a business where I left a negative review and was threatened with a lawsuit. I didn't remove it, but Google did automatically. Looks like I'm still algo-banned from leaving a review there (I even tried a 5-star review with no text, and was told their AI found it a violation of content policy, lol) but now above most of the obviously bought 5-star reviews with generic test is a 6-month-old negative review with a lot of "likes", stating the owner files criminal complaints against negative reviewers, they appealed to Google twice, they defended themselves in court, and they saw other negative reviews had been reviewed. (possibly mine)
Of course, it also has a reply from the owner, stating this review that says he files criminal complaints against reviewers is a complete lie, and therefore, he's filing a criminal complaint against this reviewer.
I already deleted all my reviews from Google Maps. Spent all that money and effort installing a wheelchair elevator in a listed building, then when updating the info to say basically, "it's still not exactly wheelchair-friendly as a 120 year old building, but there is a wheelchair elevator and a HC toilet now", Google algorithmically accused me of lying.
I’ve almost moved on from online reviews. So many are fake, so many these days are slop. Half the time a 3.5 place is rated so low because people pick the most random ass reasons to slap it with 1 star.
Also I’ve decided I don’t want to live my life by following what Google says I should do as a default. Sometimes I go to a place that sucks. But that happened when I checked Google reviews anyway!!
I mostly ignore the ratings and spot-check some reviews with good and bad ratings. If the good reviews actually describe something concrete and the bad reviews are nonsense, I take both of those as a good sign. If the good reviews are vague and the bad reviews are actually justified, then the place is probably not so good.
Similar with online shopping. If all the one-star reviews are complaining about the shipment being lost in the mail or other irrelevant nonsense, the product is probably pretty good.
About the only reviews worth reading are 4-2 stars out of 5. 5s are overblown or fake. 1s quite often are about something dumb. A 3 for for example is apt to at least be thoughtful
I've had this happen to me, posted a factual restaurant review 12 months later threatened with defamation and it's auto removed by Google. It seems there are agencies that use legal framework to do bulk removal requests to Google for any low reviews no matter the content. The in-authentic Korean restaurant in Cologne went from a 1.9 to a 4.6. It's impossible to trust reviews in Germany due to these corrupt bully tactics.
Yeah, reviews are useless in Germany as a result. If anyone from Google is reading this, PLEASE add a tag to establishments that remove reviews by legal means!
I think that censorship grew because the internet did.
When the crowd grows bigger, it becomes a market. Then you get people who are only here out of self interest, and you need rules to deal with them.
When the crowd gets too big, the conversation is too loud and fast to be polite, and the loudmouths take over. Only hot takes anger people enough to speak above the miasma.
I don’t think it’s a red versus blue issue because there exist people outside of the United States. About 8 billion of them.
Not an intolerance of bad content, but an intolerance of bad behaviour.
Technical issues are often social issues: bad process, bad incentives, bad faith. Moderation is a social issue that people constantly fail to solve with technology, because there are rarely technological solutions to social problems. At best you can mitigate the issue with technology.
This will help people set clear expectations for their apartment search.
[0]: https://allaboutberlin.com/tools/rent-map
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