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The Botmakers Who Rule the Obsessive World of Streetware
- isubkhankulov 9y agoThese types of bots run rampant in the live event ticketing ecosystem. Ticketmaster and others constantly fight bots with turing tests and other defenses to prevent electronic scalping.
- linkregister 9y agoI'm surprised that Ticketmaster hasn't already captured the delta between what individuals will pay a scalper and what the scalper pays.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoIt's about saving face for the entertainer.
- isubkhankulov 9y agolouis ck has been vocal about this issue. if ticketmaster/artists sold tickets at the "market " value, then a significant percentage of fans would be locked out the market.
- ryandrake 9y ago...and what's the problem with that? I'm a big fan of Porsches, but I can tell you that Porsche doesn't lower the price of their cars below market value so that all of their fans can afford one. Is there any other industry that deliberately sells their products way below market value where the purpose is something other than undercutting competition?
- learc83 9y agoEvent tickets are just a small fraction of the money to be made. They want ordinary people to be able to go to events because that helps their brand. If Porsche made most of their money from branded apparel, they'd probably have a different pricing strategy.
- 95014_refugee 9y agoFerrari make lots/most of their money from branded <stuff>, and it certainly hasn't affected their pricing strategy. Quite the opposite, if anything; the exclusivity of the halo product increases the (perceived) value of the merch.
- learc83 9y agoThey don't make anywhere near most of their money from branded products. The last year I can find easily is 2014. They made less than $500 million in revenue from merchandise and sponsorship, and $2.2 billion in car and part sales. Margin is very high on their cars, so there is no way they're making anywhere close to most of their money through branded merchandise. Contrast that with the Music industry. They did about $15 billion in music sales, and only about $8 billion in concert revenue in 2015. Musicians do make a significant portion of their money from concert revenue, but musicians aren't the primary drivers of ticket prices.
- frandroid 9y agoSlowly but surely...
- thomasthomas 9y agoticketmaster is now really good at preventing and detecting bots. I think the guys in the article are clever by taking their customer's payment info and using that in the bot. that's another difficulty a bot runs into while auto purchasing. can't fake payment info / purchase limits.
- darksim905 9y agoBot Law can't come soon enough. It's a shame that law doesn't cover sneakerbots. It's completely ruined the essence of buying & collecting sneakers, when everything is 'limited edition'.
- Buge 9y agoStreetwear
- kelvin0 9y agoYeah, can someone TL;DR this? I can't read the content unless I disable my Ad-Blocker. Thanks,
- ihuman 9y agoThat's odd, it works fine with my adblocker (uBlock origin)
- Leynos 9y agoAh. The old "Ad Blocker Blocker Unblocker" trick. Gets 'em every time.
- epicide 9y agohttps://outline.com/82fMsx https://outline.com/82fMsx
- letsconsider 9y agoThis one requires javascript.
- gumby 9y agoI read in safari and though normal reading triggers the blocker, "reader mode" doesn't.
- mywittyname 9y agoA couple of guys write a bot to buy clothes from a "hip" NYC clothing company because people are apparently willing to pay $800 for a $150 black hoodie with a poorly sown on "patch" that says "supreme".
- Nullabillity 9y agos/$150/$15/
- 9y ago
- chrisallick 9y agoI was interviewed for a similar article. tldr; smart young people who happen to discover a very Luddite community and applied tech to buy up product and re-sell. Can't be shut down cause brands will lose face if they "care." Most scripts are either headless chrome instances using phantom is or selenium. The one I built years ago was just a chrome extension with some options. Some are iOS apps with a web view and objected JavaScript.
- figgis 9y ago> Most scripts are either headless chrome instances using phantom is or selenium. I would think that using regular HTTP requests is better/more popular then running a headless browser for this kind of work. cUrl, Python Requests, etc.
- mmcwilliams 9y agoThat is more desirable, but with more js rendering on the front end and anti-botting measures by retailers, it's not reliable anymore.
- mbrookes 9y agoJS rendering on the front end surely doesn't impact calls to the back-end that much (HTTP POST, REST API, GraphQL etc.)? These don't need a headless browser.
- xzel 9y agoWhen a store is selling 20 pairs of a shoe, they will literally look at how the person who bough the pair did their web execution. Using a something like python requests is faster sure, but most of the time looking more "real" is more important. I've written a few of these and do both depending on the company (size etc.), their website, their security etc. Some of these companies have gone as far as setting up a web game people play and the highest scores get a pair of the shoe (slamjamsocialism).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sahara 9y agoNot that any of these "peek into the subculture" style articles ever get all the details just right but this: Then, in the spring of 2014, the company announced a collaboration with Nike on a basketball sneaker called the Foamposite. Supreme had collaborated with sneaker companies for years, but Foamposites were especially prized by sneakerheads. All of a sudden, Supreme had a whole new audience—one already accustomed to limited releases and camping out to get them. is a glaring error. Supreme has never not been a favored brand of sneakerheads, and that relationship surely didn't start with Odd Future or some recent Nike collaboration. It goes all the way back to the 90s/early 00s when everybody on Niketalk was pairing box logo tees with their vintage Air Maxes and, contrary to the assertions in the article, all these brands (Supreme, Stussy, Freshjive, etc) were transitioning away from being purely skate/surf focused and starting down the streetwear path they've been on ever since.
- dmix 9y agoSupreme wasn't a sneaker brand though was it? Was this their first big collab with Nike which brought the full brunt of the sneakerhead culture into Supreme's streetwear one? Even though there is a lot of crossover between the two it may not be as 1-to-1 as it seems, and brought in a lot of new buyers to their niche.
- sahara 9y agoThere have been numerous Supreme x Nike collaborations, starting (I believe) with this Nike SB Dunk in 2002: https://www.flightclub.com/nike-dunk-low-pro-sb-black-black-cement-grey-080033 https://www.flightclub.com/nike-dunk-low-pro-sb-black-black-... which at the time were arguably the most sought after sneakers in the world, and still command over a thousand dollars a pair. And while Supreme never produced any shoes themselves, for many years neither did A Bathing Ape (and the BAPEsta's and their collabs with Adidas were hardly a core part of their business). Nevertheless BAPE is also a brand that utilized the same hype+scarcity model and has always been associated with sneakerhead culture. The fact remains that anyone who self-identifies as a sneakerhead has known about and most likely worn Supreme for a decade or two. This is not a new development. The new buyers (and the fact that you tend to see more and more Supreme out in the world and on social media) aren't a result of the subculture finding a new obsession. Rather, what was once a niche has gone way mainstream, and tons of people who were never associated with sneaker culture have become interested in the trend. To wit, by the time the Supreme Foamposites mentioned in the article were released in 2014, many dedicated sneakerheads would have argued that Supreme was completely played out, usurped by herbs, normals and—shudder—teenagers. (Then in 2015 they all went out and bought the camo Jordan 5 collab anyway.)
- technofiend 9y agoThese guys need to take it to the next level - defeat the bots by burning them and drop web presence entirely. This is a brand that would benefit from stealing the popup idea - random times and places only insiders know about, so dropping web sales despite being anathema on HN might actually build the exclusivity of their brand. That or take it back out of band in a way bots can't easily overcome like 2fa tied to a device the customer can't or won't give up. I.E. Sell a supreme watch that generates FIDO codes from an enclaved 2fa seed. I suppose you'll need to manually trigger inputs as well just to prevent someone parking a webcam on their watch. At some point you'll add enough delay the quoted 19 seconds for 38 orders will become impossible. You don't need to add too much complexity; just enough to make it impractical for the bots to compete with customers. You could also add randomness by making people accept one use codes for grab bags of items. They'd have to preregister for whatever items they might want but then it's accept or reject the offer in a timed window. Up the risk factor enough and perhaps a human will want to make a decision rather than leave it to a bot. And one more idea: co-opt and co-brand: sell a line of botmaker branded gear sold by the winner of a botting contest. Take input from botters on how to raise the bar.
- xzel 9y agoThey do have apps that reduce this stuff and tie it to a phone number: Nike has SNKRS, adidas has confirmed. All the physical stores do raffles in person and many of the websites do raffles online. Basically, all of your other ideas have been implemented by someone at sometime.
- stupidhn 9y ago>This is a brand that would benefit from stealing the popup idea The brand is already hyper-exclusive and doing extremely well, and I didn't get the impression from the article that there is any concern about the bots. Perhaps these people are fine doing what they're doing, and don't need to grow, grow, grow the brand. Perhaps it's Silicon Valley that should be learning some lessons here...
- mywittyname 9y agoReading about this stuff makes me wish I could trade my engineering ability in for business acumen. Maybe I could create a bot that actually buys from knockoffs from a site that I run.
- ge96 9y agoYeah sucks when you can build stuff but don't know what to build. "Delegate the rest" they say... to the entrepreneurs that hire developers to build the dream as a contractor/percentage. I think there is also the "following passion and money is an after thought"
- darksim905 9y agoMy problem is these bot creators & the people in this culture are so ... dumb, yet somehow still able to make so much money + be secretive. Some of them barely know how a VPS works & they're able to buy a sneaker pair or two & sell it for several hundred. Yeah it sucks & it's a pain but so frustrating. And then there's the work it takes to get into sneakers. If you aren't passionate about them, it's a lot harder to resell things in my book.
- Mathnerd314 9y agoI've never understood why this is so complicated. Just do a week-long auction, hide bids on the last day (blind auction) to prevent bid sniping, and charge around the 80th percentile of bids to prevent winner's curse and ensure resale value. No bots, no problems, pretty much completely transparent. The offline equivalent with e.g. Black Friday is similar, except you pay with time by waiting in line instead of with money.
- sahara 9y agoHypebeasts trying desperately to get the hot new whatever and coming up empty handed, thereby increasing anticipation for the next drop, is a feature not a bug.
- digi_owl 9y agoNothing makes a guy feel old as reading about fashion...
- jachee 9y agoGenXer checking in to confirm.
- QML 9y ago> If you have no idea why someone would pay $100 just to get a crack at spending another $200 on a pair of sneakers, that’s OK: Supreme isn’t meant for you anyway. Anyone know how stop yourself from mis-valuating companies and products just because you yourself doesn't find value in it?
- quotegenerator2 9y agoNo need to stop under-valuing companies. You shouldn't be investing in things you don't understand, anyways.
- pjc50 9y agoA bit Buddhist, but: teach yourself there is no such thing as value. At least in market economies, it's literally what someone will pay for a thing, which depends on a whole confluence of taste, feeling, circumstance, and Maslow's pyramid. In this case, unavailability is part of the pricing. Not only is it expensive, but it's difficult to buy at all! (The related question of "how do I find people who want to spend lots of money on shoes" is much harder)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 9y agoStreetwear, not ware; interesting typo there. The whole thing is extremely William Gibson: limited edition almost-secret branded products plus high-tech. Even the use of Futura is something Gibson would put in as a detail.
- chongli 9y agoYou're totally right. I had no idea this headline had anything to do with clothing. All I could picture was back alley merchants and the shady deckers coming and going beneath a gray sky.
- darksim905 9y agoI'm kind of pissed off to this see this article. I was working on something for DEFCON & my CFP got denied because it wasn't "technical" enough, yet here it's all everyone is talking about.