Benquo comments on Less Wrong Product & Service Recommendations - Less Wrong

24 Post author: lukeprog 02 July 2012 01:18PM

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Comment author: Benquo 20 September 2013 07:34:49PM *  1 point [-]

My experience was meh at best. Taskrabbit wasn't available in DC until pretty recently, so I only used it for research tasks. One of them gave me what I needed in a convenient way but was sloppy about it (looked up things in DC but not equally close ones in Maryland, and didn't account for time zones when sending me calendar invitations, which I found out by showing up an hour late for an appointment).

Others seemed like they didn't read the task description very closely, and looked for things satisfying their preferences, not my stated preferences (for example, I said I cared more about saving time than money, and they recommended a service done by students where the main draw is that it's cheap and supervised by experienced professionals).

And one used Yelp to look stuff up and made phone calls that weren't answered, and gave up instead of sending emails or trying again or trying a different search method.

So I spent some money, but didn't save much time or effort. Probably it's better for tasks like "Bring object X from point A to point B."

Comment author: Alicorn 21 September 2013 05:21:16AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, I've mostly used it for "bring groceries to my house" and "assemble my furniture".

Comment author: Benquo 21 September 2013 05:37:10AM 1 point [-]

Those seem like they'd be harder to misunderstand, and less tempting to cut corners on.

Comment author: Benquo 15 February 2015 01:48:01PM 1 point [-]

UPDATE: "bring groceries to my house" is now a specialty of Instacart. "Assemble my furniture" turned out okay, though "put privacy film on my windows" didn't, nor did "mail a bunch of books for me." Oddly, "make me a Superintelligence costume" turned out well.