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'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

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Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#71

Scott Adams [0], who recently passed away, had a great line on human behavior (paraphrased): Whenever people are unsupervised and there is a chance for fraud or bad behavior and, due to the lack of supervision, they believe they won't be caught, you should ALWAYS assume that people will behave badly. For another example, the Google case where it was exposed how many nefarious activities they were up to around auction…

In one of my college courses, 100% of my fellow students cheated, including me. This is when I learned that virtually every person is deep down a liar and a cheat if they think they won't face consequences and it's in their benefit, and any public facade of virtue that people put up, common in this industry, is a manipulation strategy that is just more cheating, although of a different kind.

At my federal job, there was a student intern position that was available. The only requirement was a 3.0 gpa or better. Unofficial transcripts were submitted each semester. One day they asked for official ones and eight people immediately quit.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cush consulting jobs after the fact. You don’t burn your social network unless the alternate is serious jail time. Given the slaps on the wrists described, clearly the after conviction pay day is more valuable.

> Cush consulting jobs after Do you have evidence any of these folks got these?

These specific people? No. This happening in general? Yes - observed this first hand in the cybersecurity space.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#73

Side note but did anyone here tried to sell stuff on eBay ? Their pricing are insane, they take a cut on your product price, but also on the delivery method and even on the taxes ! It amounts to about 13% of total price, including delivery and taxes. It looks absolutely insane to me, but some people seem to defend it. To put some perspective, here in France we have an extremely profitable competitor called Leboncoin,…

Ebay sucks but I'm not sure there are any better options in the states

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#76
I was working at eBay as a Director of Engineering (the startup I work for was unfortunately acquired by eBay a few years earlier) at this time (none of us new any of this was going on of course), and I emailed the CEO about my concerns about the performance review process causing people to keep 'donkeys' on their team so they would have someone to give the Needs-Improvement review to (due to stack ranking) and an HR Sr. Director was literally sent to my desk to find me and "discuss my concerns" and she told me "a lot of people in this industry are paid more than they could get at another company and if they lost their job they might not be able to find another job as good". Luckily due to autism I just agreed with her and didn't realize it was a threat until years later or I likely would have said something unfortunate.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#77
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It looks absolutely insane to me, but some people seem to defend it. Before that policy, you had a bunch of items listed for $1 + $60 "shipping" to dodge fees. I'll take the current structure over that.

Stuff is still getting listed like that on ebay.

I use ebay heavily and I don't see it anymore, except for things that look like typos or people who clearly just don't know how to use ebay. There's no advantage to doing so because sorting/filtering includes shipping.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#78

Scott Adams [0], who recently passed away, had a great line on human behavior (paraphrased): Whenever people are unsupervised and there is a chance for fraud or bad behavior and, due to the lack of supervision, they believe they won't be caught, you should ALWAYS assume that people will behave badly. For another example, the Google case where it was exposed how many nefarious activities they were up to around auction…

In one of my college courses, 100% of my fellow students cheated, including me. This is when I learned that virtually every person is deep down a liar and a cheat if they think they won't face consequences and it's in their benefit, and any public facade of virtue that people put up, common in this industry, is a manipulation strategy that is just more cheating, although of a different kind.

I don't think that's the lesson. What I take from that is that people adapt to norms and incentives they have.

Despite all the talk about "academic integrity" and whatnot, very rarely were there punishments for people who cheated. For every professor that wrote FRAUD in the grade sheet and escalated to the Disciplinary Committee, there were 100 that turned a blind eye or at most confiscated a paper being passed around when the exam was being administered. This hypocrisy irked me much more than the cheating itself, in which I didn't partake mostly because 1) I thought it was kind of beneath me, something only mediocre students did (which I came to realize was not really true) and 2) I didn't care that much about the grade.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#79

I was working at eBay as a Director of Engineering (the startup I work for was unfortunately acquired by eBay a few years earlier) at this time (none of us new any of this was going on of course), and I emailed the CEO about my concerns about the performance review process causing people to keep 'donkeys' on their team so they would have someone to give the Needs-Improvement review to (due to stack ranking) and an HR…

That is a threat?
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