That makes sense if the consumer is DoorDash's _only_ customer.

If Applebees is paying for some sort of marketing/relevance service, then all bets are off, and it's up to DoorDash's leadership to choose which of their opposing customers get screwed.

An alternate phrasing might be "it's up to DoorDash's leadership to choose which of their customers they optimize for." Giving preferred treatment to partners that are strategic or have higher margins is not screwing your other customers.

I do have issues with the misuse of the restaurant brands -- seems unethical to send me to Pizza Hut when I click on Dominoes.

I think it's what you're pinpointing in your last sentence that's the "screwing your other customers" part here. I don't have a problem with the concept of preferred treatment, but to me, that would be "if I search for a given category, put the preferred partners in that category first in the search results," but -- as you say -- a click for a specific restaurant should probably take you to the DoorDash page for that restaurant. At the very least it should take you to a search page that puts that result at the top.

> An alternate phrasing might be "it's up to DoorDash's leadership to choose which of their customers they optimize for." Giving preferred treatment to partners that are strategic or have higher margins is not screwing your other customers.

You're polishing a turd. Call it whatever you want, but if I'd prefer not to be a customer of a company who prioritizes competing interests over me.

Every business prioritizes competing interests over each other, at varying times. Amazon might be the closest to prioritizing customers uber alles, but that hasn't been a popular result on this board of late. Can you name a few companies you think do a good job of not prioritizing other interests over you?

Almost any local business.

Amazon is a terrible example of prioritizing customers--what part of selling counterfeits, putting sponsored products higher in search results, or retroactively deleting books off your Kindle serves users?

A hungry customer is going to get food from a restaurant anyway. For the platform, it doesn't matter from which one.

More friction will lead to dropoff. And, for the platform, it should matter -- they will have different margins depending on the deal, different levels of support, likelihood for the restaurant to churn, ad spend, all kinds of things to balance.

Pushing the user into the "find a restaurant" model, after they want a specific one, gives the platform an opportunity to optimize for their needs. This may or may not be a positive for the customer, and it may or may not be enough of a lift for the platform to overcome the dropoff because of a poor landing page experience.

One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable. Google's blue button test doesn't matter to any product except that exact one. None of us can say, without seeing the results; our previous experience is not relevant.

EG, maybe a 10% conversion to order dropoff is OK if we can direct X% of users to an expensive restaurant. The 10% drop cost is offset by a 50% increase in order cost.

"Pushing the user into the "find a restaurant" model, after they want a specific one, gives the platform an opportunity to optimize for their needs. This may or may not be a positive for the customer, and it may or may not be enough of a lift for the platform to overcome the dropoff because of a poor landing page experience."

First, a custom landing page can both provide you with the restaurant and an option to search for more restaurants.

Secondly, if the goal was an optimized experience, why wouldn't they want that on their restaurant pages, even the ones that don't come in from search? There's a reason.

> One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable. One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable.

YMMV of course, but this one stretches credibility.

I don't think it stretches anything. The opposite -- that different websites, with interfaces that all vary subtly in a billion different ways, with different traffic sources, with different market positions, with different primary outcome goals -- are able to be compared? I would need to see quite a bit of specific evidence to believe that.

I've worked with brilliant conversion optimizers, in a single vertical niche where we had > 30 websites, each doing between 200K-2M visits/month. We would have loved to test + copy, but every time we ran this experiment, we found huge differences.

One subtle nuance is that "generalizable" needs to be more specific than "this change increased conversions". The true goal of optimization is not the find the B that beats A; it's to find the global optimum.

The Conversion industry tends to similar language as the complementary/alternative medicine space. "I did this thing, it had this outcome. I believe this happened because XYZ. It worked for me, it will work for you!" (People telling stories which may or may not be true.)

That is also why clinical trials for interventions is so important.

> The true goal of optimization is not the find the B that beats A; it's to find the global optimum.

FWIW, that's the goal of global optimization, a particual type of optimization, and one that rarely anybody on the market cares about wrt. business. Local optimization, "B beats A", is more frequently used, as usually all the business cares/can afford to care about is to find a C that beats B, if their competitors found the B that beats A.

Just because there are a billion possibilities with a billion traffic sources, different marketing positions, and you can do clinical trials and doesn't mean that providing someone the answer they expected and the possibility to search for other things beats just searching for things... which was what they were doing on the previous page.

If it was such a brilliant idea, DoorDash & GrubHub should change their sites so that links from their search results only take you back to their search page.

If you googled "dominos delivery" and clicked a link and got pizza hut, would you order hut or go back and click the next link to get dominos?

Not the best example since Dominos and Pizza Hut are both of equally terrible quality. If I searched for my favorite local pizza place and was sent to Pizza Hut, I would definitely go back. If I was searching for Dominos and got Pizza Hut, I'd probably assume Pizza Hut bought them out. I've had stuff like that happen before.

Of course it does. The most basic reason would be that since they take a percentage, door dash would prefer you purchase from a more expensive restaurant. But there are all kinds of other reasons, such as some restaurants spending more on advertising with the platform.

Data says otherwise - plenty of e-commerce sites taking you to search, with the thing you saw just pinned at the top. I hate the pattern but it seems to result in higher engagement.

> Data says otherwise - plenty of e-commerce sites taking you to search, with the thing you saw just pinned at the top. I hate the pattern but it seems to result in higher engagement.

That's extremely different than the thing described here: "take you to a category page with something else entirely pinned at the top."

Folks are slowly noticing that this concept of "engagement" is a shallow, toxic one that encourages poor behavior that generally harms the end user.

[citation needed]

Maybe tech-savvy folks, or people otherwise paying close attention, but I don't think this describes the vast majority of people by any stretch.

I think the discussion around Facebook and Russia opened a lot of eyes to how ads-based businesses can be exploited, and how the infrastructure they built directly lends to this phenomenon.

And yet, people still continue to use Facebook/Google/etc en masse. These companies are in the news what seems like every week, but the number of people who have left those platforms is negligible.

Because we are not all using the same brain. Many people have many opinions, and some people even sometimes act counter to their preferences based on the context! Wild stuff.

Your original comment implies that folks "slowly noticing" dark patterns is going to make some sort of difference in the grand scheme of things. I am arguing, based on my experience with humans, that it will not—and even if it could, that not enough people are paying attention for it to matter.