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My wife participates in our local Buy Nothing group and it’s fantastic. They have a couple of rules that seem to help make it work: 1. Hyperlocal: your local g

• hirundo 6y ago
  > I don’t know why this makes a difference, but my wife says it does. Presumably because the joy of giving is the coin in which the transaction is paid, and the delay and interaction extend and amplify the joy.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• no_wizard 6y ago
  I’m extremely curious about Rule number two, so I have to ask if you would be willing to get the feedback on why there important and share it with us? I feel like there is a genuine insight with this rule that isn’t obvious to me and likely others
  • ip26 6y ago
    Probably helps items go to people who really need them instead of scalpers, vultures, and hoarders who make a business of being ready to pounce on free items.
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      And besides the vultures sniping everything, not everyone has enough free time to continuously monitor the group. Some people can spend their whole day with a Facebook tab open, others have one hour a day to catch up.
      • mc32 6y ago
        Can a small group establish a common post/publish window?
        • TeMPOraL 6y ago
          One thing I've learned from running a Hackerspace: no, it's not possible. There is no possible window that's relatively short (hours) and will fit everyone who wants to participate. For any day and hour you pick, someone will be permanently excluded (because of e.g. their job, studies), and other people will miss it regularly due to irregular life events. And ultimately, there's no point in doing that if the activity itself doesn't require for everyone to be doing something together. Such a posting isn't a team meeting; it can be done asynchronously.
        • alisonkisk 6y ago
          Why? That's more work than the obvious solution of just being chill about it.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      > scalpers, vultures, and hoarders But without the negative connotation, because the obligation to give the item away after waiting for an arbitrary period means that if you can't find anybody who wants it, at least somebody will get it who knows how to resell it better than you do, and will thereby deliver it to someone who will enjoy it. edit: the "I Haul Junk For Free" person serves a function.
  • jzwinck 6y ago
    I've seen a similar group without the second rule. It's a mess because the instant anyone posts anything there are many users who reflexively post "Q" (as in queue for item). Then when you reply to give them the item, they say they decided they don't want it. This can all happen within minutes. Time delay is more fair and less anxiety inducing.
  • BurningFrog 6y ago
    It disincentivizes looking at the site 24/7 to be the first claimer. You see similar proposals for stock markets to process all orders that come in within one second in arbitrary order, to disincentivize the insanely expensive chase for nanoseconds in high speed trading.
  • bombcar 6y ago
    Part of it may be the “offer what you have mention what you want” - more time allows for more efficient allocation. It also allows you to select the most “deserving” though I’m more interested in how hard feelings are avoided.
    • alisonkisk 6y ago
      Also, one wonders how racism and other biases are managed.
    • lazyasciiart 6y ago
      I often see people saying they will use a random number generator to choose from commenters.
  • stopping 6y ago
    My local group encourages a 24-hour waiting period to equalize the opportunity for group members to claim items. Generally, the people who really need a certain item don't have enough free time to constantly check the group, or are working the sorts of jobs where they're offline for long periods of time.
  • jayofdoom 6y ago
    My wife has probably given away 50+ items of ours on buy nothing. Usually she appreciates being able to choose because some people develop a reputation for being unreliable to pick them up, so she can exclude them.
  • barnaclejive 6y ago
    People have different schedules, the goal of giving away most items is to make sure it gets to the person who needs it most. Letting a post sit for 24hrs gives everyone a chance to see it. People comment about why they need it or will use it for in that time, then the poster can decide who to give it to after a fair amount of time.
  • huckleberries 6y ago
    It is designed to be more inclusive that way -- otherwise, some people grab everything and others are discouraged and become disengaged. Also, a big mission of the Buy Nothing Project is to build a sense of community among the members and a lot of that plays out in the comment thread interactions. It's better for the community-building if people take the time to type out thoughtful comments and share a little about themselves, as opposed to race to be the first to type "Interested" or "me!"
    • jonahx 6y ago
      Personally, the whole thing feels oppressive to me. I'd rather pay $30 on Amazon than explain to my "community" why I should be chosen to get X or Y. It reminds me Charlie Sheen's quip about prostitutes: "I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave." Likewise, one of the primary benefits of ordinary money/stuff transactions is that it's not all tangled up with obligation or any other social baggage.
      • alanbernstein 6y ago
        Oppressive is kind of an absurd word to describe this. It's a friendly neighborhood organization that allows you to get and give junk for free. - Sometimes multiple people are interested in a give. - The giver needs to choose one somehow. - Random selection is as common as anything else in my group. - Some people like to give details, some people like to hear them, and some people like to use them to prioritize, because it fosters relationships with their close neighbors. It is by no means required. If you ever decide that perhaps buying another new plastic thing from China via Amazon is not the best solution to a problem in your life, consider trying it.
      • pessimizer 6y ago
        > Personally, the whole thing feels oppressive to me. To me, too. It reads like "In order to be considered for a gift, explain how you suck and can't provide, and how good you are at feeling generalized gratitude and appreciation. All of you will be judged, the least capable and most thankful will be chosen."
      • 6y ago
• mulmen 6y ago
  > Not bartering, not first-come-first-serve. This reminds me of a personal policy I have with friends and acquaintances. Nobody ever “owes” me a beer. If I buy them one that’s the end of it. We are always “even”. I don’t assume others work the same way so I also attempt to return favors. I think it’s a healthier frame of mind to not keep track of all the ways people potentially owe me something. Especially when it is trivial. If I am keeping track I think it’s worth reevaluating the relationship entirely. Or said another way I can see this policy working for Buy Nothing because it requires a healthy community. If the community is unhealthy the system breaks down. This reverts to any number of other perfectly good money/barter based alternatives like Craigslist and clones.
  • ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    My friends and I more or less trade off on paying for food at restaurants. It's not calculated, but over the long term of switching off paying for various meals of various costs, it should mostly shake out to be about even, and mostly just reduces hassle when we get the check. I think there's a lot of value in even just taking turns in giving and taking, even if you aren't tracking the exact dollars and cents.
  • grenoire 6y ago
    >If you are keeping track I think it’s worth reevaluating the relationship entirely. This is a tough one, I've met many different cultures (although, in particular Slavic ones, sometimes Dutchies too) who really cannot stand not having the balances settled. Few of my friends who I'm very close with will still just want common things to be evened out as soon as possible. I don't think you can make a rule out of it.
    • mulmen 6y ago
      Fair point. I will clarify I am an American who was raised in a Christian household. My comment was based purely on my own worldview and is in no way meant to imply other people should emulate me. I edited that line to say I re-evaluate the relationship instead of you, which sounded prescriptive. Fair callout that I could be excluding others but I never refuse being “paid back” and I never expect others to forgive a favor or debt. I thjnk my philosophy would still be compatible with making Slavic friends :)
• TulliusCicero 6y ago
  > the person offering is supposed to wait a while, then decide who to give it to. Some people may be more needy or deserving? Or, if you strictly followed first come/first serve, some people might abuse the platform by constantly being "first!!!" on everything. Having a delay makes that harder to get away with.
• mynameisvlad 6y ago
  Honestly, I hate rule #1. The divisions are fairly arbitrary, there's no real way to figure out what group you belong to, and sometimes the splits completely destroy the community that was built up. Belltown, in Seattle, got split into 3 (4? I can't remember) communities and there's still questions about which group people belong to because they're not sure if they're covered by one or another along the boundaries. Some of the resulting communities are far more active than others, too. I moved from there to Greenwood in North Seattle and I quite literally have no idea what my new group is because there doesn't seem to be a map and all of the Greenwood groups end 2 blocks south of me.
  • madhadron 6y ago
    We were part of the original group on Bainbridge Island. It became vastly less useful when it was split into subsets of the island. It's not like the island is that big...
  • lazyasciiart 6y ago
    Ha Capitol Hill was split into a bunch of tiny groups and half the group just migrated into a new "Don't Buy Things Capitol Hill" group someone created instead of going down to their new 3-block setup.
  • zacharycohn 6y ago
    Greenwood had a fantastic community, then it got big enough the moderators wanted to split it. The community revolted, the moderators backed down for a while. Eventually they forced it to split despite universal resistance. A ton of people left, moderators stepped down in frustration, and some people started an alternative https://www.facebook.com/groups/sharedeconomyphinneyridgenorth https://www.facebook.com/groups/sharedeconomyphinneyridgenor....
• scotty79 6y ago
  > not first-come-first-serve. Since getter is chosen then there might be small incentive to be in a good standing with everybody so you get the stuff when others are interested too.
• thrusong 6y ago
  I'd also like to chime in that I hate the "sprout" system where they split the group into smaller groups when they get to an arbitrary size, as others have mentioned. We live in a middle-class neighbourhood. It is desirable: there are big mansions by the river, several blocks of turn-of-the-century character homes, and then cookie cutter boxes from the 50's for the last couple of blocks. We live in a cookie-cutter box. It was a wonderful community and then once it hit 1,000 people, they divided it into six smaller groups. Suddenly, we were in this tiny "sprout" with no activity. A lot of the complaints that spurred the split was that there was too much kids stuff clogging people's news feeds. I don't know why they couldn't have just made a group for kid items and a group for the other stuff. We ended up dropping out and it hasn't really affected us. Now we just leave stuff we don't want behind our garage (or on the boulevard for city-wide giveaway weekends on long weekends throughout the summer) and the stuff disappears in a few hours.
• esperent 6y ago
  > not first-come-first-serve. I participate in a similar group (freecycle), and this is very important. Otherwise a few people who are always on the group get everything, and I'm pretty sure some of them just resell anything valuable.