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Introducing Marketplace: Buy and Sell with Your Local Community

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Re: Introducing Marketplace: Buy and Sell with Your Local Community

#71

Post by gnicholas »

I used to buy/sell on Craigslist a lot but now use NextDoor (neighborhood-based, address-verified social network). I never had any safety issues with CL, but ND definitely feels safer/friendlier. Most of the people I meet are local housewives getting rid of stuff. There tends to be less haggling, and because it's neighborhood/town based, you don't have to drive as far to meet (huge plus). I think the reason that people behave better (e.g., don't lowball) is because they know they'll see you in discussion forums on the network, and it's not worth pissing someone off and getting a bad reputation.

I'll try out FB's new feature, but ND sets the bar pretty high.

Re: Introducing Marketplace: Buy and Sell with Your Local Community

#72

Post by maerF0x0 »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #66
vlucas wrote: post #29

Good for Facebook. My wife has been buying and selling things on individual Facebook groups for years before this official marketplace. Selling on Facebook is hands down a vastly better experience than selling things on Craigslist in every way - especially if you live in a market that is too small for a designated Craigslist area. Our real world experience: 1) Hyperlocal - Our city of 40k-50k is 40 miles from the nea…

> 5) Built-in messaging allows you an easier way to communicate meeting details privately without having to give your phone number or email address. Your notion of "private" is a little strange. Facebook offers the illusion of private transactions by effectively robbing everyone of their privacy - in other words, that is how they established themselves as the pre-eminent and now possibly only two sided marketplace fo…

The real conflict of interest i see is that FB ads will have a chance to convince you to buy something else whilst viewing the local item. Eg: I'm buying a used bicycle and local bike vendor puts up ads like "DONT BUY USED, NEW SCAM FLOODING THE USA" ...

Re: Introducing Marketplace: Buy and Sell with Your Local Community

#73

Post by jaredklewis »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #66
vlucas wrote: post #29

Good for Facebook. My wife has been buying and selling things on individual Facebook groups for years before this official marketplace. Selling on Facebook is hands down a vastly better experience than selling things on Craigslist in every way - especially if you live in a market that is too small for a designated Craigslist area. Our real world experience: 1) Hyperlocal - Our city of 40k-50k is 40 miles from the nea…

> 5) Built-in messaging allows you an easier way to communicate meeting details privately without having to give your phone number or email address. Your notion of "private" is a little strange. Facebook offers the illusion of private transactions by effectively robbing everyone of their privacy - in other words, that is how they established themselves as the pre-eminent and now possibly only two sided marketplace fo…

Private here just means not out in the open, not absolutely private. This doesn't seem like a very "strange" way to use the word to me.

I think the OP does a good job of outlining why this is preferable to Craigslist for your run of the mill buying and selling, namely that buying from a known entity is generally preferable than buying from an unknown one.

Facebook makes a set of tradeoffs regarding privacy and monetization, and they seem to be very popular. You assign a lot of agency to Facebook for orchestrating all of this, when really they are just providing to what the market wants: a free (as in beer) social network.

/counter-rant

Re: Introducing Marketplace: Buy and Sell with Your Local Community

#74

Post by Kluny »

bluedino wrote: post #70
vlucas wrote: post #29

Good for Facebook. My wife has been buying and selling things on individual Facebook groups for years before this official marketplace. Selling on Facebook is hands down a vastly better experience than selling things on Craigslist in every way - especially if you live in a market that is too small for a designated Craigslist area. Our real world experience: 1) Hyperlocal - Our city of 40k-50k is 40 miles from the nea…

3) Way fewer scammers and spammers since you have to use your real name. 4) You know who you are meeting and what they look like (again - real name, single account requirement). 5) Built-in messaging This also means someone can harrass the crap out of you for whatever reason they want regarding the item.

Facebook has pretty good blocking controls built in already. Better, I'd say, than email and phone providers have.

Re: Introducing Marketplace: Buy and Sell with Your Local Community

#75

Post by Karunamon »

bluedino wrote: post #70
vlucas wrote: post #29

Good for Facebook. My wife has been buying and selling things on individual Facebook groups for years before this official marketplace. Selling on Facebook is hands down a vastly better experience than selling things on Craigslist in every way - especially if you live in a market that is too small for a designated Craigslist area. Our real world experience: 1) Hyperlocal - Our city of 40k-50k is 40 miles from the nea…

3) Way fewer scammers and spammers since you have to use your real name. 4) You know who you are meeting and what they look like (again - real name, single account requirement). 5) Built-in messaging This also means someone can harrass the crap out of you for whatever reason they want regarding the item.

Not really. Dismissing someone from your attention on Facebook is trivial.

Re: Introducing Marketplace: Buy and Sell with Your Local Community

#78

Post by backtoyoujim »

daxorid wrote: post #64
bjacobel wrote: post #36

Facebook's come under a lot of heat for refusing to moderate the buying and selling of firearms in Groups, often in violation of local laws[1]. Hopefully their moderation standards will be higher on Marketplace. [1]: https://medium.com/@monteiro/this-article-first-appeared-in-...

This is exactly the opposite of my experience. FB has been extremely successful in shutting down any and all local firearms sales groups. It was the impetus behind my own decision to boycott Facebook permanently.

My guess is that Facebook is responding to locals in a community that use the tools to report firearm sales.

Using a person to purchase firearms for a person who can't get them is called a straw purchase.

Maybe advertising something other than a gun to sell a gun should be covered under straw purchase.

Re: Introducing Marketplace: Buy and Sell with Your Local Community

#80

Post by cheeze »

I'm happy they are introducing it, but IMO the execution has been quite poor. Some random complaints as someone who uses it:

They added a tab to the facebook app that you can't remove. It's inconveniently placed between two tabs that most people do care about (newsfeed and notifications). Furthermore, I randomly get a red number over the marketplace, similar to the number shown for notifications. This is very frustrating to me and it never seems to go away. I've mistaken this little notification bubble for a legitimate notification multiple times, when it was actually just a new post in the marketplace that I don't care about.

The 'newsfeed' of marketplace is littered with complete crap. 50+% of it is fake shoes, fake purses, used womens clothing, and people looking to trade their piece of garbage cars for another one (sorry, I don't want to trade for your civic that is worth Selling something was a pretty poor experience for me. I got a ton of messages from people who had no interest in what I was selling, and instead spammed me like crazy with stuff I didn't care about at all. For me this was more excusable on a platform like craigslist because it is easy enough to filter email, but there is no real way to filter FB messages. Now I have personal messages and spammers mixed together.

Overall I'm happy to see this become a thing, but IMO execution has been poor. Well, annoying at the least, but I assume that is their goal. Much better than the terrible interface of the buy/sell groups, especially with how broken Facebooks group search is (I often can't find posts that were posted within the past month or so in a group. I'm searching correct terms, they just aren't indexed.)

I am part of a bunch of secondary beer market groups (raffles and straight up sales) on Facebook, and it's a pretty terrible platform, but it has the user base :(

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