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A small feedback. If I was a seller, I would be extremely uncomfortable with Tinytrunk showing my full-name in all of the items that I am trying to sell. I ca
by chlee 15y ago
A small feedback.
If I was a seller, I would be extremely uncomfortable with Tinytrunk showing my full-name in all of the items that I am trying to sell. I can foresee some privacy issues with this problem. For example, People can easily find information about me via google or some deep search engine.
Instead, you can perhaps go with the Yelp route -- show the the user's first name and initial of his or her last name, e.g. Bill G. instead of Bill Gates.
- fookyong 15y agothat's good feedback! The original reason for this was accountability - I don't want to build a marketplace where any random username can just put up a photo of a product and collect money into a paypal account. That seems like it's asking for trouble. But I also see what you are saying. First name + initial is a decent compromise.
- chlee 15y agoI glad this feedback is useful. To show how potentially creepy this is, I googled your users. I was able to find the user's linkedin and twitter in the 1st page of the search results. Anyways, good luck. I love the idea, and your design is fantastic. Best of luck going forward.
- fookyong 15y agoWell as I said, that is kind of the idea. There needs to be some form of accountability so anonymous people don't just sell fake things. But yes, full disclosure might not be appropriate.
- coderdude 15y agoI don't know why you think that's creepy. They put that information out there to begin with and for a reason (to be read by humans). Some things online require an identity. Things that involve money also involve real-life consequences and responsibilities to different parties. It would be an overwhelmingly bad idea to start letting sellers hide behind usernames if those sellers are responsible for accepting money and shipping products. (This would be somewhat solved by Tinytrunk handling payments, but that goes against one of his stated goals of not charging processing fees.)
- trotsky 15y agoI'm not sure I feel strongly about either side of the discussion, but just to be clear you're saying you think it would be "an overwhelmingly bad idea to [create ebay]"?
- coderdude 15y agoDoes eBay not handle payments? Edit: I actually didn't know, so I looked it up. Turns out that eBay does not handle payments. Though I suppose they're relying on the reputation system. So it's not an overwhelmingly bad idea to allow sellers to hide behind usernames when they're handling payments and shipping as long as there is a good reputation system in place. Which makes sense since that's why you would want your name there anyway, to lend or gain reputation.
- trotsky 15y agoebay started in 1994 and bought paypal in 2002
- fookyong 15y agoexactly. that's actually one of the reasons I don't use eBay to sell things, I have no reputation on eBay. but selling to my locality, I'm happy to give away my identity in exchange for an instant boost of reputation / buyer peace-of-mind.
- chlee 15y agoDon't take me wrong. I am not arguing that the Tinytrunk should allow arbitrary pseudonyms. I fully understand the point that Fookyoung made. That he want to make sure real, accountable users are selling things on Tinytrunk. Obviously, Fookyoung is trying to balance between preventing seller fraud and Tinytrunk's user experience. However, I think the balance is tipped towards preventing seller fraud at the expense of user experience. However, there potentially harmful and/or unintended consequences that can result from publicly disclosing the user's full name on the internet, e.g. privacy related issues. For example, a malicious user can easily obtain sensitive and private information about a certain seller ala 4chan style either directly or indirectly. Also, we've seen how users reactive negatively to potential privacy issues nowadays [cite various user discontent towards facebook, google plus, and various social networks here]. Also, this is not a binary issue, e.g. either disclose the user's full-name or use nothing but pseudonyms. There are other alternatives and compromises, like the yelp method that I described above (which task rabbit also uses). We can argue further on the issue of real names vs pseudonyms on preventing seller fraud. Like someone above me pointed out, ebay is a great example of a buying/selling market that thrived despite its users hiding behind pseudonyms. Etsy is also another example. Let's not forget various online forums that have thriving for-sale and for-trade sub-forums w/ its sellers and buyers using pseudonyms, e.g. AnandTech and Hard[OC].