alt Hacker NewsYou can see it another way: everyone wants to be the one that controls access to services; it is what search and news aggregators have in common.
Even if pizza hut wanted people to order pizza the most efficiently with no time wasted it would still want it to happen on their own platforms.
Because if people went to all-pizzas.com for their pizza need then each restaurant and chain would depend on them not to screw them up
Replies
DANmode • yesterday at 6:19 PM
What they want isn’t always what they get.
People were searching AOL keywords for things, and will again.
Only now: by asking OpenAI, Anthropic, or a competitor’s agent.
> Because if people went to all-pizzas.com for their pizza need then each restaurant and chain would depend on them not to screw them up
This is precisely what makes food delivery ordering services (GrubHub, UberEats, Deliveroo, etc.) so challenging to operate and maintain. Practically every restaurant accepts orders in a different way, and maintaining custom mechanisms for each one is costly. Restaurant front-of-house technology companies like Toast are helping make them operate alike, but adoption is slow and there are many, many restaurants to tackle.