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Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay
- 6nf 8y agoI think I missed the point because I don't understand what this article is trying to say exactly.
- thisisit 8y agoThe article is a meandering and muddles it point but here's the paragraph where the actual point is made: In 2001, an eBay user might have given an eBay seller a low rating for an unsatisfactory packaging job; in 2018, an Uber driver might be dinged if a rider doesn’t like his personality or choice of music. Facebook recently began ranking publishers by trustworthiness, based on feedback from users. Upon discovering a problem, a platform company’s first instinct is to find a way to expose it to the wisdom of a market, or at least the will of a crowd. It’s a transactional platform; the transaction is very clear to both sides,” Hagiu says. “By and large, buyers and sellers are aligned on eBay.” A seller banned for counterfeit sunglasses hasn’t lost any rights, just his ability to use eBay. Crucially, to most ears, a scammer’s claims to the contrary would sound ridiculous. The article's view on what ails the internet is the flawed idea of "wisdom of the crowd". The recommendation based systems where companies say - "others watched/read this so, you must like it too". But then the article presents Amazon as something better and conveniently forgets that Amazon too has a similar ratings system. Though only the product level reviews are front and center. Seller reviews do not take the limelight. And as evident by Amazon's glut of fake products this weakness of rating systems is being gamed too.
- mirimir 8y agoAlso this: > But quite often [Facebook is] managed like [a marketplace], because in many ways, that’s exactly what it is: a giant, multisided marketplace for buying and selling, in which the largest party — the users — doesn’t do the buying or the selling. A social network’s profitable transactions involve everyone but the users. Ad rates are even determined, in many cases, by auction. If eBay is a machine for finding the right price for a pair of shoes, Facebook — behind the veneer of enabling human connection — is a machine for discovering the right price for a pair of eyeballs. Your eyeballs.
- TACIXAT 8y agoThe other point was sites are often trying to address social issues with market solutions. Facebook's mission is social connection but its profit is attention bidding.
- mirimir 8y agoMaybe "stated mission"? Do you believe that Facebook's mission is actually social connection?
- unclebucknasty 8y ago>Do you believe that Facebook's mission is actually social connection? Exactly. I laughed out loud at how insanely cynical it is that they suggest that as their mission. After reading it, you can almost hear Zuckerberg laughing and sneering, "dumb f___s".
- mirimir 8y agoHe could have seen the light. Some sort of light. God. Landmark. Qigong. Some Hawaiian spiritual practice.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- DrScump 8y agoA seller banned for counterfeit sunglasses hasn’t lost any rights, just his ability to use eBay. That's a crock. eBay has defended the sale of all kinds of counterfeit fashion items. Even if they shut off an account, the seller can make another immediately... or hijack a dormant one with a feedback legacy.
- DrScump 8y agoThe article is a meandering and muddles I agree... so I was surprised to read at the bottom: "John Herrman is a technology reporter for The Times."
- Timpy 8y agoI noticed that when I finished the article I couldn't remember the title of it. It reads like a high school student's report who's still figuring out how write persuasive pieces.
- TACIXAT 8y ago>Peter Thiel — an early Facebook investor and board member — with his funding of lawsuits against media companies and his eclectic and severe right-wing politics. The take away of Thiel glaringly missed Palantir in favor of some digs.
- zaroth 8y agoEclectic and severe right-wing politics? Awfully colorful way to describe him in an article which isn’t an editorial. Would love to see the NYT describing a left winger as eclectic and severe. Even masked antifa don’t get that treatment. It’s frustrating to have to mentally guard against this political mudslinging. The article is worse for it, and IMO it’s just coddling their readership and narrowing their audience.
- antonvs 8y agoDo you think either characterization - eclectic, severe - is actually incorrect?
- TACIXAT 8y agoThere is a much more neutral way to write it. >Thiel who is known for funding a lawsuit against Gawker and his conservative politics. Still, I think those, while visible, are rather minor notes compared to starting a billion dollar defense contractor.
- rconti 8y agoAgreed, although when I read that I was trying to remember what he is doing these days, and failed to come up with Palantir even though I used to work right next door to them. Of course, that doesn't absolve a journalistic enterprise of their responsibility.
- jen729w 8y agoWhy do the style guides of these large organisations often insist on the ludicrous capitalisation of "EBay" when it appears at the start of a sentence?
- thomasfedb 8y agoAs a writer I will jump through linguistic hoops to move uncapitalised proper names away from the start of a sentence - for example, a medical device called "i-gel" which I wrote a paper on. Starting a sentence without a capital is just too jarring in formal writing I find.
- tonyarkles 8y agoYeah, doing a MSc in CS that references a bunch of companies and open source projects... there was definitely some mangling needed to keep the uncapitalized proper nouns away from the start of sentences.
- adrianratnapala 8y agoYep. For hundreds of years English has had a rule that proper nouns are capitalised; it is pretentious to imagine that "myThingy is soooo cool that you can't even use the rules of English on it." Now in some fields, like computer documentation, there's practical reason to change. It would be confusing to capitalise command-names if they are lower-case in their (case sensitive) native language. But newspapers aren't bound by that consideration, and it doesn't really apply to company names anyway.
- FearNotDaniel 8y agoActually, look in any book printed 18th/early 19th century and you'll see that the rules were quite different then: all nouns were capitalised, as in modern German, and the 'long s' was frequently used in the middle of words. Mass literacy, almost-universal schooling along with physical punishments for children not doing exactly what the textbook said have given us moderns the idea that the 'proper' English of our grandparents remained the same for centuries, but really the language has always been in flux and the rate of change just got significantly slowed by cultural pressures between approximately 1850s to 1950s.
- jancsika 8y agoOn the other hand, it's a drag that there isn't something like Yelp for FLOSS. I would have loved to see a rating and some reviews of several development processes before wasting my time posting patches.
- voltagex_ 8y agoI'm getting pretty good at working that out. Note that this isn't a dig at any particular project, I know FOSS is hard and free time is scarce (and so is funding). Quick ones: 1. Date of last commit to main repo 2. Number of issues open on Trac/Bugzilla/GitHub/Jira whatever (note, I'm taking a point off if you use Trac, only because there's still an instance from 10 years ago sending me emails that I can't unsubscribe from) Takes more time: 3. Number of open pull requests/mailing list patches and general discussion around them 4. Any kind of clear and updated roadmap. Edit: number one these days should be an up to date and working CI/CD system with published artifacts, including for Windows.
- saagarjha 8y agoI like to look at the reactions maintainers have to pull requests. Do they usually get merged, or do they end up being dragged through a bureaucratic nightmare and eventually closed?
- voltagex_ 8y agoI've never written anything popular enough to really get pull requests, but I can definitely understand not merging a pull request due to not being able to maintain that code or it taking the project in a different direction to what you want.
- konschubert 8y agoIt's one thing to say "no", it's another thing to say "later" forever.
- 8y ago
- fyfy18 8y agoI’m not exactly sure what point this article is trying to make, but as a regular eBay user, these are my biggest issues when using the platform. I’m based in the UK, so some of these may not apply for other locations. - Delivery times aren’t accurate. When I buy something from eBay I expect it will arrive within a week, but if I want something to arrive in a shorter time I buy it elsewhere. There is no way to filter listings to find which sellers will post an item today, and ship it via a method that will arrive tomorrow. A lot of listings are marked Fast&Free, but those have an estimate delivery date of Thursday. - Too many Chinese sellers. A lot of items are sold by Chinese sellers who list the item location as in the UK, but in the description say that there is a 20 day delivery time. If I want stuff from China I’ll buy it from AliExpress. - Too many duplicate listings. If I search for a common item where there are a few variations, I usually see the same item repeated a handful of times on the first page.
- djaychela 8y ago>Delivery times aren’t accurate.. {snip} A lot of listings are marked Fast&Free, but those have an estimate delivery date of Thursday. I think that's because if they don't give a pessimistic estimate of delivery time, they open themselves up to 'it didn't arrive next day' type negative feedback and DSR scores. I'm in the UK and am selling cars part time to earn extra money at the moment - most of which need things doing (hence my markup). Nearly everything I order from eBay arrives next day (if I order before 10am), even though it usually says 2-3 days minimum. But I totally agree, it's a PITA as you should be able to filter down to those who actually will put it in the post that day if you order before (say) midday. >- Too many Chinese sellers Totally. They are spottable for the most part, but it's a pain to have to read the listings for the giveaways, and occasionally I'll miss it and then have to wait a couple of weeks for something to arrive. This has happened in the past when I've paid for it, and then they've said 'sorry... just checked and the UK warehouse is out of stock, so we'll send it direct from our China warehouse' - as if there's actually a UK warehouse. These have ALL been listings claiming 2-3 days' delivery. >Too many duplicate listings. Yup. It's getting crazily difficult for car parts which I get a lot (see above) - slightly different listing, same seller, etc. Or different seller, identical listing with slightly different price.
- 8y ago
- steven2012 8y agoI use eBay frequently. I have only bought things, but I want to sell things, however I'm terrified of getting scammed. And eBay does nothing to ameliorate those fears. I got as close as taking pictures, writing a description, and stopped at the last step before putting my item for sale. Everything I've read suggests that it's simply not worth it to try to sell things because you have no protection from scammers. As a buyer, however, it's great so unless you have enough margins to protect you from scammers, and if you just want to sell one-off things like eBay from the 2000s, then don't bother. As a technology platform, eBay is an embarrassment. They released features like collections that didn't work on their production website and it looks like they got rid of it entirely now. They have a half-built API that has confusing documentation, and their APIs that do work aren't very useful. Nothing about their site has changed in 20 years, and they're waiting to die, like Yahoo. I'm surprised Amazon or even etsy hasn't been able to destroy them yet, since they're a stationary target that hasn't done anything meaningful in over a decade.
- DrScump 8y agoTheir UI is so bad, they have to use a phony mockup app in their TV commercials. Watch the commercials where a woman sees a fashion item on the street and then buys it on eBay. Just try doing anything like that on the actual site. Their entire query mechanism has had severe breakages for years. You couldn't possibly construct a search that could isolate a particular shoe or handbag or whatever without traversing thousands of dissimilar items. Tickets are a great example. I've done thousands of ticket buys and sales alike on eBay since the 1990s. But now, eBay actually sabotages ticket searches by polluting every event with hundreds of fake "classified ads" for StubHub (which they own) so that people give up and go to StubHub instead, more than tripling their cut (at the same price point). And you can't exclude those shell ads, which don't even represent actual tickets, from your searches anymore. And the fraud problem is very real.
- tim333 8y agoThere's good and bad in the UI. Some of the features like being able to search for items in a set price range are very handy and don't seem to be available on other sites.
- boxcardavin 8y agoI tried to Buy It Now an item off Ebay just now and Ebay responded, "Sorry, this seller is on vacation, so this item is unavailable." Sinking ship.
- analog31 8y agoI had the same experience, but just waited for my item, and it arrived. It was an obscure old bike part, quite rare and just what I needed, so I decided it was worth the wait.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIt's usually listed very prominently on the listing page when this is the case. That said, I have no idea why sellers would choose to use this instead of just scheduling things around their vacations.
- mlrtime 8y agoEbay tracks shipping statistics, if you deliver late they ding you.
- 1ericnyamu 8y agohttps://tinyurl.com/y9jojfk9 https://tinyurl.com/y9jojfk9
- waytogo 8y agoOT: What eBay is really good at: If you want to buy a notebook with a US keyboard (which some devs prefer) and when it's hard to get them in your home country. eBay.com offers a Global Shipping Program where the US seller just send their stuff to this shipping program and eBay takes care of everything else. Even customs will be paid by eBay and the buyer just pays once and benefits from fast processing. It's a buttersmooth way of international shipping. I got my last notebook within just one week and it was still cheaper than the local version in my home country. I know that some notebooks offer US keyboards in any country (ThinkPads and Macbooks) but then you usually wait also min 1-2 weeks because they are custom builds or they come directly from China. Don't know of any other entity than eBay offering this.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoThe Global Shipping Program is a really fantastic thing. I've used it both as a buyer and a seller (vintage computers) and now have all sorts of interesting stuff from all over the world. Also no problems at all shipping CRT monitors internationally despite couriers (probably perfectly understandably) refusing to provide insurance on them.
- sporkologist 8y agoSome day in the far future, eBay will invent a technology that lets people embed Youtube videos in their listings. I'm not holding my breath though.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoEbay is trash but it's where the buyers are. I've been buying and selling on eBay since they came to the UK but I have to hold my nose every time I visit the site.
- mkstowegnv 8y agoWhat happened to the future where all our transactions were secured by trust rated escrow agents?
- candiodari 8y agoWant to understand what ails the modern PSTN network ? Take into account that we have been trying to fix it politically for 40 years now.
- JansjoFromIkea 8y agoeBay really should allow you to filter out items with multiple price points. So many sellers abuse that system so heavily (e.g. the standard 99c memory card listings that have some crappy little microsd adapter included in the listings to drag the price range down). Basically everything else that's bad about ebay I can deal with, but that's the one thing that sends me racing to other sites.
- moepstar 8y agoYou can see the same on Amazon - just search for some 3D printing filament, you'll get listings that vary from 10 to 40€ all in one entry...
- pritishc 8y agoIt looks like I'm the only one in this thread who has the experience of being scammed, as a buyer, on eBay. Although admittedly, this happened on the Indian version of the platform (which is now owned by Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart). I wrote about the irony of them promoting the sale of refurbished items when it was a refurbished Xbox that I purchased last year that turned out to be a dud, on Medium (https://medium.com/@chakrabortypritish/ebay-india-a-cautionary-tale-of-pain-frustration-c3f55dfd821e https://medium.com/@chakrabortypritish/ebay-india-a-cautiona... - I had to incorporate a bit of sensationalism to try and fetch some views, which is why it's written the way it is, didn't work anyway). Turns out that the seller lied about the machine's warranty, and Microsoft support couldn't help me either. eBay support consistently told me that they couldn't do anything about this according to company policy. Never felt this helpless on an e-commerce platform, and I've never gone back on eBay. And yes, their platform UI/UX is horrible, I concur. The only way to show that the Xbox was stuck in a boot-and-crash loop was to record a video, and they did not permit video uploads on their (laughable) grievance redressal platform.
- unclebucknasty 8y agoFrom a senior management perspective, eBay is run like a private-equity backed portfolio company. No offense to PE firms, but eBay has the feel of being more worried about costs and makes very little investment in long-term growth--as if the owners just want to turn a profit and sell the company before the debt comes due. This is why the UI is horrible and, in general, the site feels stuck somewhere in the early 2000s. Perhaps this is also why the company culture is broken and somewhat dishonest. They have frequently engaged in dramatic policy shifts when someone got the idea that the bottom line could be enhanced. In these cases, they are capable of totally disregarding their ecosystem (especially sellers and affiliates). Worse, they would outright lie about their intentions, which I suppose they felt necessary for placation when completely screwing over their "partners". eBay has long had a certain toxic nature, including an almost uncanny ability to leave customers and partners feeling disappointed, if not outright cheated at some point. Whatever the shortcomings of the people who participate in their marketplace (including scammers), they are amplified by eBay, whose resolution policies essentially amount to doing as little as possible. This is what people are reporting as disappointment when they've needed an issue resolved. I am amazed that people still use eBay.
- pritishc 8y agoThis is in line with my horrid experience with them last year. I have experienced the fallout from each point that you made. I had no idea that an e-commerce platform as popular as theirs could be so incompetent, rigid and downright hostile since I've had the exact opposite experience with their competitors. Their resolution policies and guarantees are a joke.
- coldtea 8y agoThe article is incredibly meandering and non-committed to saying anything in particular.
- EADGBE 8y agoI've seen it fragment and specialize. And I'm okay with that. For instance with musicians - particularly guitarists (only because we tend to be gear enthusiasts) - Reverb.com has become our new Ebay.com. It's even replacing Craigslist for a lot of what we were doing previously (allows local deals, too). They essentially took all the good things that were working for Ebay and tailored it to musicians. It's a slam dunk.
- Shivetya 8y agoI just cannot compare Amazon to Ebay. While I can get similar items on both what I use Ebay for , collectibles, antiques, and hard to find items, is outside the scope of Amazon. I never expected Ebay to be the big retail spot, for many of us it is the world's largest garage sale. I use Ebay for many replacement parts for items not normally found in stores or worse jacked up on Amazon because they come bound with Prime shipping. Amazon might be top dog from name recognition but places like Wal Mart are trying and unless Amazon gets a grip on knock offs they are in danger of alienating a good number of buyers.
- kachurovskiy 8y agoHappy to share my experience with ebay.de in Germany as a seller and buyer. Started selling some old tech/appliances I don't need anymore on eBay: last month 4 items for 250 EUR total, before that a few more items for ~400 EUR total. Items went for 50-70% of the original price, and then eBay took their commission which at times was quite steep at ~15% of the selling price. It was still worth it since for most items I couldn't find any takers locally on Kleinanzeigen (Craigslist analog). eBay has annoying limits for new sellers so to sell my old Sony camera I had to wait a month after selling my old Canon DSLR. It's impossible to contact a human support for this issue. They raised my limits automatically recently though. Don't remember any problems with my buyers or when I bought something. Some of it I shouldn't have bought at all but that's a different story :-D Looking forward to clearing more of those storage boxes.
- j-c-hewitt 8y agoeBay is still one of the largest ecommerce marketplaces. It is actually bigger than Walmart.com. It's second only to Amazon. This article is just a goofy op-ed that does nothing to inform people and everything to stroke the egos of lefties and take some potshots at former executives who haven't worked at eBay for a decade or more. Why go to the trouble of going to www.nytimes.com to read this? Why did this guy get paid to write it? Why not just have a woke 8 year old write it instead?