
The wild world of sneaker buying bots (2017) - cjg
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d33vpq/inside-the-wild-world-of-sneaker-buying-bots
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sb8244
A lot of the major sites now use lottery systems. You have 10 minutes to enter
the lottery and your enter time doesn't affect outcome. You could fiddle with
% by having multiple entries, but you'd need a unique credit card per entry.

I'm pretty big into sneakers and have found the bot game to be really
interesting, and how companies are fighting it by removing "first-come first-
served" is a rational response.

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monochromatic
What’s the draw for being so into sneakers? Do you resell them to make money?
Wear them? Collect them like stamps?

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kfichter
I used to write sneaker bots “professionally” (was pretty much my full-time
job) back in college. Did it for a variety of reasons.

The money in reselling is decent but you can usually make more by selling the
software itself. I collected a few rare pairs and definitely found that fun.
Also highly ego driven and there’s an entire “sneaker Twitter” community where
people just want to show off.

I was mainly into it for the software engineering side of things. You end up
having to build really interesting/complex software. My infrastructure was
basically half a dozen servers with a coordinator that would scrape websites
all day long. Also had to learn how to exploit different features of websites
to speed things up.

Generally enjoyed it but the community is pretty toxic. Mostly driven by money
and ego, no room for collaboration because it’s more profitable to keep things
to yourself.

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b_tterc_p
Selling shovels to gold miners basically. Nice. Can you explain how you find
people to sell software too and how realistic your value prop is? It doesn’t
quite sound logical to me (and maybe it isn’t?).

Your software finds margins of x, but surely only so many people can make use
of it before it stops working for anyone.

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kfichter
Mmmm you typically limit releases of your software for exactly this reason.
Best model so far has been subscription based with a limited number of total
subscription. I’ve seen it generate a huge amount of revenue (upwards of 300k
annually).

It’s in everyone’s best interest to keep the total number of bots in
circulation relatively low. Helps that genuinely good software is difficult to
write and most people doing that work are young/inexperienced - huge advantage
to anyone with a strong softeng background.

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noelrock
I’ve worked on ticket touting legislation for my own Parliament for two years
now. It’s surprisingly complex and naturally has an unsurprisingly monied
lobby funding opposition.

I find the parallels here very interesting and the suggestion from the first
comment that a lottery could be deployed for all who purchase within the first
X minutes. Maybe that’s the way forward for tickets too.

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benj111
I agree with the parallels. I disagree with the solution.

It seems to me both markets have a producer retailing a product far below the
market clearing price. A 3rd party is thus stepping in and claiming that
unclaimed value.

It seems to me that the producers hold all the cards needed to put the 3rd
parties out of business. They can increase prices, or supply. Why don't they?

I've heard accusations that musicians are getting kick backs from touts, which
suggests that the touts are basically scapegoats. The question then becomes
why people don't think it's reasonable for these producers to raise prices.
That view is _kind_ of understandable for musicians, they are 'artists' not in
it for the money, although why their fans would begrudge them more money or
why the artists wouldn't want to perform more for their loyal fans I don't
know.

In short it's a strange market dynamic, where nobody actually seems to be
honest about their motivations.

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Firadeoclus
Musicians generally want to make money but, like most market participants,
they're not short-term income maximisers.

Musicians are concerned with their reputation. They want to tour (though some
don't) but not burn out and also need time to work on new material and
recording. They want to play the best possible gig. That means sell-out
performances with the most devoted fans, not the richest ones. It means venue
matched to the type of music.

Venues and promoters are in similar positions. Auctioning tickets to the
highest bidder could be short-term profitable but in the long term it's a
disaster.

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benj111
The parent is working on legislation.

If you want that long list of things, and can get it, good for you. Does it
then follow you can demand legislation to protect that?

Then there's the question of what a devoted fan is. Surely if they only wanted
devoted fans they'd site the concert somewhere out of the way. The South pole
perhaps? That would sort the touts.

Edit: And a final point, my experience as a fan would be much improved if I
could reliably go out and buy say 4 tickets for me and my friends, any friends
because i don't know which will be free, and if only 2 can make it, sell 1 to
someone else that would like to go.

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chomp
I have a friend that is all into this, mostly as a hobby. There's also a Funko
Pop market as well. Really, if there's high value behind it, there's an
arbitrage market that goes along with it.

It's pretty big, there's markets for residential IP lists, bots that mock
organic web traffic by browsing Google and watching YouTube so they can defeat
recaptcha, there's even escrow services so that you don't have to sell out of
your house.

There's groups that track potential high value product releases and coordinate
large buys. It's mutually beneficial for them to work together, because
unauthentic demand boosts the resell market.

I don't know if I approve of it, because groups work out large fandoms and
potential demand, and effectively price out segments of the population to take
a cut off of the top. But I do have to sit back and marvel at how much
technology and research goes into neutering antibot measures.

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orestes910
A friend of mine is making thousands per month simply selling notification bot
subscriptions to people who run private discords. His don't even buy, they
just send stock notifications to the rooms. Madness.

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kfichter
Yeah - I like to say that I did my time in the sneaker world. It’s
extraordinarily profitable but it’s also extraordinarily toxic. I’ll probably
end up writing something long-form about it.

Biggest thing that you wouldn’t know looking in from the outside is that bots
can only get you so far. Bots for well-known sites are basically at their
theoretical limits. Bad server-side software basically makes it random whether
you’ll actually get in at that point.

Information is what really determines whether sneakers are going to be
profitable or a complete waste of time. I ran with groups of people who had
relationships with employees of all the big sneaker manufacturers (primarily
Nike and Adidas). I’d know months in advance what was going to release and,
perhaps more importantly, what was going to re-release (causing the price of
existing pairs to crash).

People belonged to strong (and private) groups. Never too big, ~15 people was
the max for the really good ones. Usually you’d have a slack channel with a
ton of integrations, anywhere from simple in-stock notifications to full bot
integrations that would allow you to buy sneakers with a saved credit card by
tapping a button on the notification (so much for PCI compliance).

Those groups are difficult to access. You have to build up a reputation before
you have a chance, most of the good ones will literally interview you. You’d
pretty much be blacklisted if you leaked information. Overall it’s a lot like
cracking culture if it suddenly became 100% legal.

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usmannk
I used to make/sell these bots back when I was in high school in the early
2010s. It was a great way to learn programming and make some money flipping
sneakers on the side. The bot scene was in its reaaal early stages so I had a
lot of fun catching up as Nike (nobody cared about Adidas at all back then)
kept trying different types of lottery systems and captchas to figure out what
would stick. Learned early on that notification systems were the best way to
go.

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Chico11Kidlet
The strangest thing for me is that there are a lot of children in this market
who are interested in sneakers. Where did they get that amount of money?

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zbentley
My nephew (12) did about the closest thing I've ever seen to the "paperclip to
yacht" economic path. Some relative gave him $100 as a holiday gift a few
years ago. He used it on some silly collectible monkey T-Shirts, and sold some
of them to a classmate at a profit. The idea stuck, and he leveraged that to
buy some shoes (not limited release, just relatively rare/desirable), and
learned how to eBay them. Nowadays he has just under $10k US, and spends a lot
of time chasing weird hypebeast-esque fashion drops for immediate resale.

I'd be judgemental and go all "kids these days" on him if only it wasn't so
lucrative for him. Sure, it's not that much money relative to an adult's
earnings over a couple of years, but he's _12_. My sister (his mom) worries he
won't learn to appreciate savings and frugality as he never had an allowance
before doing this. Me, I think he'll do just fine.

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0x445442
Yeah, my son was kind of getting into this stuff a couple of years ago, he's
17 now. When it first came on my radar and I started to ask him about it I had
the same thought... kids these days.

Ironically, when I asked him some more questions about how the sales worked
and he explained things I then told him he should write a bot.

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burger_moon
At this point reps (fakes) get so close to the real thing I couldn't imagine
spending the money on the real thing unless you were collecting them. If you
want to wear the shoe, why not just buy a 1:1 rep instead and save hundreds.

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oliv__
Who wants to buy a fake?

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turtlegrids
are you supposed to wear these? or put them on a shelf? or seal them in a
plastic bag like magic cards?

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Cthulhu_
It's a collector's market, so the answer is, err, yes.

Some buy them to wear; some buy them to put them on a shelf; some buy them to
seal them and resell them down the line.

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crehn
Reminds me of when I wrote a bot to buy Supreme gear when I was still a
student. Got a fair bit of desirable stuff, most of which was sold at a nice
margin.

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nickpp
Why aren't producers auctioning those newly released sneakers?

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dalbasal
The dynamics that make sneakers valuable collectibles are not governable. A
lot of the "value" is probably generated by dealers, scarcity, sell-outs and
such.

If they tried to capture all the value by auctioning, they might sink the
whole thing.

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solotronics
Yeah I think it's more like a market of collectibles such as Magic cards. If
they auctioned off the best ones it would kill the surprise element to
acquiring them.

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dooglius
Why don't the manufacturers raise the price to meet demand?

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have_faith
If you raise prices until only the amount of people left wiling to buy matches
the limited supply of the shoes then sure you've married supply and demand in
a textbook sense, but you've removed the fever-pitch generated by everyone
clamouring for the shoes at a price point just attainable to a larger audience
that will rarely buy them. The pandemonium caused is a driver of the demand.

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moate
If you're running a shoe company, the hype helps build brand support as well.
Have a wide audience means that people are interested and engaged in the
brand, because hey you could get a lotto ticket pair and make yourself a bunch
of money. Sneaker culture is so strongly tied to hip hop culture, which has a
really strong DIY-attitude to it, so making it hyper-elitist from the outset
would short circuit the whole thing.

You're totally right, that part of the value of these shoes to the company is
the commotion they create in the market as everyone scrambles and pays
attention. Then if someone can't get the limiteds, they'll settle for the dope
looking regular release (which is still sold at insane margins for the
company).

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Halluxfboy009
This world is really wild. Some people stay in big lines to buy pair and then
resell it. Hope it's really worth it.

