Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

valueaddedresource.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 363 posts

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#241

Post by faefox »

MarginalGainz wrote: post #180

This ban isn't about 'fairness' or bot protection; it's about protecting the Impression Funnel. Marketplaces like eBay are designed to monetize 'Wandering Attention'—sponsored listings, 'customers also bought', and sidebar ads. An AI Agent represents 'Laser Focused Attention'. It executes a transaction with zero wandering. It effectively turns the marketplace into a commoditized backend database / dumb pipe. From a G…

Why not share your own thoughts rather than this LLM slop? Or maybe this is just a bot account. Either way, disappointing to see on HN.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#242

Post by mort96 »

imtringued wrote: post #228
mort96 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you set a max price at $5000 and would be happy to get the item at $5000.02 (for some reason other than satisfaction from sniping), then you set your max price wrong, or at least differently from how economists expect you to set it. I think this is the problem. When most sciences observe reality diverge from the model, they see that as a flaw in the model. When economists (at least you HN "economists") obser…

According to you, a bidder should always be willing to extend the bid to infinity since each increment is only one cent more.

No, I am willing to pay $0.01 more but not infinity more, there's a difference

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#243

Post by mort96 »

retsibsi wrote: post #240
mort96 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before I have made that initial decision, and before I have invested resources into evaluating what I think the value of a product is, I do not have a price in mind. Deciding on a price I think is fair for a product takes effort. The more accurately I want to determine it, the more effort it is. Could there exist some hypothetical subjective value? I mean maybe. But not one that I have knowledge of, so it's not somet…

So what is the problem? You've done the research, and your best estimate for the value is $X. And if you had to put a dollar value on avoiding doing the research again, it would be $Y. You put in a maximum bid of $X+Y, walk away from the auction, and come back to see that you won at a lower price (great!), won at your max price (fine), or lost (also fine; $X+Y was right at the threshold of what you considered worth p…

Neither $X nor $Y are going to be hard dollar values. If I semi-arbitrarily pick some $X and some $Y, put in $X+$Y as my max bid, and lost the item due to $0.01, I would be annoyed not due to some irrationality but because $X and $Y were never cent-accurate in the first place.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#244

Post by jsphweid »

malfist wrote: post #215
MarginalGainz wrote: post #180

This ban isn't about 'fairness' or bot protection; it's about protecting the Impression Funnel. Marketplaces like eBay are designed to monetize 'Wandering Attention'—sponsored listings, 'customers also bought', and sidebar ads. An AI Agent represents 'Laser Focused Attention'. It executes a transaction with zero wandering. It effectively turns the marketplace into a commoditized backend database / dumb pipe. From a G…

This reply has hallmarks of AI slop. Green name, 2x its not X its Y, em dashes. If you want to be a productive member try commenting what you put into your prompt instead of the slop that comes out. Also classic ai drivel: This is about protecting the business model, not their inventory. My brother in AI, eBay doesn't have inventory. They're a platform.

Hallmarks of AI or AI slop? Or are you suggesting that AI is slop by definition?

Let's assume it's a bot. Is the point it's making unreasonable? Is it really unreasonable to refer to eBay's listings as inventory?

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#245

Post by burnte »

cheschire wrote: post #182
MarginalGainz wrote: post #180

This ban isn't about 'fairness' or bot protection; it's about protecting the Impression Funnel. Marketplaces like eBay are designed to monetize 'Wandering Attention'—sponsored listings, 'customers also bought', and sidebar ads. An AI Agent represents 'Laser Focused Attention'. It executes a transaction with zero wandering. It effectively turns the marketplace into a commoditized backend database / dumb pipe. From a G…

I suspect they might lose money on returns too, which are probably more likely if an AI misunderstands what the buyer wants or misjudges quality or can’t detect fake listings etc

"Mint condition MacBook Pro M5, 64GB RAM, 2TB storage, midnight black, box only" and it sells for $1800 because someone didn't see "box only".

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#246

Post by retsibsi »

mort96 wrote: post #243
retsibsi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the problem? You've done the research, and your best estimate for the value is $X. And if you had to put a dollar value on avoiding doing the research again, it would be $Y. You put in a maximum bid of $X+Y, walk away from the auction, and come back to see that you won at a lower price (great!), won at your max price (fine), or lost (also fine; $X+Y was right at the threshold of what you considered worth p…

Neither $X nor $Y are going to be hard dollar values. If I semi-arbitrarily pick some $X and some $Y, put in $X+$Y as my max bid, and lost the item due to $0.01, I would be annoyed not due to some irrationality but because $X and $Y were never cent-accurate in the first place.

They'll never be cent-accurate, but if you've done a decent job then they should be in your zone of rough indifference. Then you can simply avoid that annoyance by not looking at the final price, safe in the knowledge that at worst you may have missed out on a marginally worthwhile purchase by marginally underestimating its value. If that's not the case, you didn't bid enough in the first place.

(But also, how is the annoyance not irrational? Your estimates weren't cent-accurate, but they were just as likely to be slightly too high as slightly too low. And you haven't learned anything new about the true values -- unless you take your emotional reaction to be new evidence. For your emotional reaction to be new evidence, it has to be somewhat unpredictable, otherwise you could have fully factored it in in advance. But you seem to be saying that you're predictably going to be annoyed by a 1c loss.)

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#247

Post by schnitzelstoat »

faefox wrote: post #241
MarginalGainz wrote: post #180

This ban isn't about 'fairness' or bot protection; it's about protecting the Impression Funnel. Marketplaces like eBay are designed to monetize 'Wandering Attention'—sponsored listings, 'customers also bought', and sidebar ads. An AI Agent represents 'Laser Focused Attention'. It executes a transaction with zero wandering. It effectively turns the marketplace into a commoditized backend database / dumb pipe. From a G…

Why not share your own thoughts rather than this LLM slop? Or maybe this is just a bot account. Either way, disappointing to see on HN.

The bots are learning to defend themselves on social media

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#248

Post by freedomben »

DangitBobby wrote: post #208
dspillett wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping. I've seen studies on auction method that suggest the difference in the final price (between explicit end time and the more traditional extend-until-bidding-stops method) is negligible for online auctions except in a few special cases. This is a marked difference from the expectation that, like a real-world in-person auction, the extending deadline might e…

> being able to snipe so favoured eBay with more of their attention and this brought more sellers to the platform Did they measure the impact of people who stopped using the platform due to their bids being sniped?

I would bet that they have. Personally I stopped using eBay because of sniping. I'm a particularly devastating case for them, because had the system not felt rigged to me then I likely would have continued on the site making many purchases. However it immediately made me lose confidence in the system and bail.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#249

Post by Dylan16807 »

gond wrote: post #160
Dylan16807 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price, when between the seller's minimum and the buyer's maximum, is a zero sum game. So while this is definitely screwing with people , the seller gets paid more and the amount of suffering in the world shouldn't really change.

You are falling for the zero-sum fallacy and mixing categories on top of it. Globally, wealth gets created, which leads to a positive-sum game, not a zero sum game. On the other hand, if one quadrillionaire in a city owns all the money available in that said system except 100 currency units, the remaining 100 humans are in possession of exactly 1 currency unit. The suffering for the 100 humans is significantly higher…

I am not having zero sun fallacy. Please read what I said again. I said the exact price is zero sum within the bounds of the deal happening. The wealth creation is caused by the deal happening at all.

> if one quadrillionaire in a city owns all the money

That's a valid risk factor but on a random eBay purchase I think it's fair to say we have no idea if the purchaser or the seller gets more utility out of each dollar.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#250

Post by imtringued »

mort96 wrote: post #172
thornewolf wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's because this argument of "what is $0.01 more?" can be extended forever, implying you are willing to pay an infinite amount of money for anything. since we know this is silly, we try to understand what our "real" maximum is. this is difficult to do for exactly the reasons you mention in your comment! surely $0.01 is negligible! there is a tension here. and so, absolute max price is not a fantasy - the world would…

It can be extended forever in theory, and sure, that is an interesting philosophical discussion, but it isn't in practice. We're discussing sniping. That means you make the choice once : do I send in a last-second bid that's $.01 more than my "max price", or do I not?

You're just trolling at this point.

Imagine someone wanting to pay $3.50 on an auction and them rounding up to $4 to account for cent sniping. You're saying they should bid $4.01, but the bid is already including half a hundred one cent increments beyond the price to avoid cent sniping.

You're saying it's only one cent out of 50 cents. Then you're saying it's only one cent out of 51 cents so you should keep bidding more.

The infinite budget of one cent increments that you're dreaming of is actually finite and probably easier to quantify than the absolute price itself, so you're taking a problem where the hard part has been solved and are now obsessed with the easy part that almost nobody bothers paying attention to.

Edit:

Maybe the context isn't obvious but eBay has an automated bidding system with coarse grained increments for automatic bidding like 25 cents. This means there is a finite number of increments that can be meaningfully cent sniped before getting into the next coarse grain increment. You can't actually win an auction by placing a one cent higher bid at the last minute in an unfair way. Sniping on eBay isn't about winning the item, it's about doing a sealed bid auction where others can't see your price to nibble it up since the automated bidding systems performs a snipe for you at the last nanosecond if you entered a higher bid. There is no meaningful situation where a cent or two is standing between you and the item.

Post reply on HN