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I made $100K from a dick joke

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Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#122
post #104
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant believe ebay hasnt been disrupted yet...

they actually were disrupted -- craigslist

Is Craigslist still a thing? In my area, was the vice city classifieds. The hookers are gone, but so much obviously stolen stuff was posted there.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#123

I sold a laptop on eBay once long, long ago. Someone did the "Buy it now" option but never paid. I'm trying to remember the exact situation (probably more than 10 years ago), but I had exchanged messages with him several times and he always had an excuse to not pay. Then I noticed he was selling the exact same model of laptop so it was easy for me to realize that he had just "bought" my laptop to remove the listing s…

Just remember eBay has almost no way to report scam listings, hacked seller accounts, obviously fraudulent buyers, etc. They don’t want to clean up their act. Caveat emptor. Two executives were recently imprisoned over harassing a journalist, to give you an idea of the corporate culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

There must be at least some minimal way scam listings are handled. I stumbled across an RTX 4090 going for $600 the other day (actual selling price is $1-2k), seller claiming to have 10+ of them with 90+ watchers/in cart, but no reputation. Account was gone the next morning.

Curiously on Mercari, which seems to be more pro-seller, I've seen some GPU listings with "this is a scam" type comments attached to them. Very different way of handling the transactions over there it seems.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I ordered from amazon, I repeatedly declined prime. My bank called me the next day about a suspicious charge for a year of prime. I had to cancel my card and get a new one. The banker told me they'd had dozens of similar problems where amazon was charging people for stuff they never ordered. When I got the package a few days later, the $150+ set of cello strings I ordered, sold and shipped by amazon, were c…

Please be understanding. Bezos needs the money!

If there was ever someone worthy of getting a bag of glittery dicks, it's Bezos.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#125
post #31

I sold a laptop on eBay once long, long ago. Someone did the "Buy it now" option but never paid. I'm trying to remember the exact situation (probably more than 10 years ago), but I had exchanged messages with him several times and he always had an excuse to not pay. Then I noticed he was selling the exact same model of laptop so it was easy for me to realize that he had just "bought" my laptop to remove the listing s…

I wonder if he was trying to resell your laptop and wasn't going to pay until he got an order for your laptop

ebay charges something like a 12.5% commission. It's easily over $100 in fees to sell a decent laptop on ebay. So, the seller would have to be charging quite a bit more for that to work out.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#126
post #10

A guy I worked with was fired for sending this to a woman we worked with that he had a grudge against for some reason or another. Apparently he sent it from his work computer, which wasn’t the brightest idea. He sat in the next cube over from me and I wasn’t surprised in the slightest when I heard about it.

> sending this to a woman we worked with that he had a grudge against for some reason or another Sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on in people's head.

I've had to let a few reports go for inappropriate statements. Without exception, whatever they got in trouble for saying they prefaced with "I probably shouldn't say this, but..."

For the love of God if you can put that into words just don't say whatever the thing in question was

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#127
I really hate Imgur these days. It's yet another site that treats landscape mode as some alien thing that no one uses.

More importantly, whoever bought them is so focused on "showing the next thing" that the wrong swipe in the wrong area just obliterated whatever you're looking at or trying to read. It's just a giant bag of dicks in terms of poor interface programming and testing.

Seriously wish the author published this story as a GitHub readme or Wordpress blog. At least it would be readable without fighting the website to view the current damned content I'm trying to look at.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember eBay has almost no way to report scam listings, hacked seller accounts, obviously fraudulent buyers, etc. They don’t want to clean up their act. Caveat emptor. Two executives were recently imprisoned over harassing a journalist, to give you an idea of the corporate culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

EBay doesn't care about fraud unless they think you're going to file a charge back with your card issuer, then they're pretty quickto protect their bottom line. I do know for a fact that eBay can kick a seller off very quickly though. I bought a NES shaped raspberry pi a few years back as a gift. The day I got the item, I went to leave the seller glowing feedback, only to find his account was axed (he included NES ro…

I'm banned from eBay since about 2010. Sold a cellphone which my sister shipped without requiring signature, guy just said he never received it.

My sister was working at a Telco so we just confirmed that he had actually received it because he put a SIM card into it, proof and everything eBay didn't care.

I withdrew the money from my PayPal account before they could claw it back. PayPal still works for me but eBay is amazingly impressive at immediately banning any new account I tried created since then.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#129

I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market". Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it bec…

Seems like a no harm no foul sort of situation. If people on an entertainment site and entertained by the viral marketing, and they order a product knowing what it is and get the product they ordered, then what is the problem exactly?

If you go by youtube, the problem is that the entertaining marketing wasn't labeled "sponsored post".

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#130
Every couple of months I cycle back to a similar but digital-only idea I have for prank service but always worried about being sued for causing some kind of mental or psychological stress, especially from an anonymous source. I see now that with enough sugar, you can get all up in any one's mandibular pocket and just chill til you're done with it
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