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Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

nytimes.com

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Re: Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

#71

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

waytogo wrote: post #47

OT: What eBay is really good at: If you want to buy a notebook with a US keyboard (which some devs prefer) and when it's hard to get them in your home country. eBay.com offers a Global Shipping Program where the US seller just send their stuff to this shipping program and eBay takes care of everything else. Even customs will be paid by eBay and the buyer just pays once and benefits from fast processing. It's a butter…

The Global Shipping Program is a really fantastic thing. I've used it both as a buyer and a seller (vintage computers) and now have all sorts of interesting stuff from all over the world. Also no problems at all shipping CRT monitors internationally despite couriers (probably perfectly understandably) refusing to provide insurance on them.

Re: Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

#72

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

boxcardavin wrote: post #26

I tried to Buy It Now an item off Ebay just now and Ebay responded, "Sorry, this seller is on vacation, so this item is unavailable." Sinking ship.

It's usually listed very prominently on the listing page when this is the case. That said, I have no idea why sellers would choose to use this instead of just scheduling things around their vacations.

Re: Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

#73

Post by rusk »

steven2012 wrote: post #21

I use eBay frequently. I have only bought things, but I want to sell things, however I'm terrified of getting scammed. And eBay does nothing to ameliorate those fears. I got as close as taking pictures, writing a description, and stopped at the last step before putting my item for sale. Everything I've read suggests that it's simply not worth it to try to sell things because you have no protection from scammers. As a…

> I'm surprised Amazon or even etsy hasn't been able to destroy them yet

Amazon's site is quite flawed as well. It's a lot better but not by much.

Etsy seems a better proposition but for whatever reason they limit the types of stuff that they sell.

Facebook seems to be coming on the scene now though their offering is more like classifieds than auction.

Re: Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

#74

Post by imgabe »

steven2012 wrote: post #21

I use eBay frequently. I have only bought things, but I want to sell things, however I'm terrified of getting scammed. And eBay does nothing to ameliorate those fears. I got as close as taking pictures, writing a description, and stopped at the last step before putting my item for sale. Everything I've read suggests that it's simply not worth it to try to sell things because you have no protection from scammers. As a…

I've sold a few things on eBay and never gotten scammed. Maybe it's just random luck, but it's nowhere near the 100% scam-rate that posts like this lead you to believe.

Re: Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

#76

Post by thomasfedb »

FearNotDaniel wrote: post #62
adrianratnapala wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For hundreds of years English has had a rule that proper nouns are capitalised; it is pretentious to imagine that "myThingy is soooo cool that you can't even use the rules of English on it." Now in some fields, like computer documentation, there's practical reason to change. It would be confusing to capitalise command-names if they are lower-case in their (case sensitive) native language. But newspapers aren't b…

Actually, look in any book printed 18th/early 19th century and you'll see that the rules were quite different then: all nouns were capitalised, as in modern German, and the 'long s' was frequently used in the middle of words. Mass literacy, almost-universal schooling along with physical punishments for children not doing exactly what the textbook said have given us moderns the idea that the 'proper' English of our gr…

I don't think of myself as a total sheep - case in point I put the comma outside of the quotation mark because otherwise it parses weird.

Re: Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

#77

Post by musage »

YouAreGreat wrote: post #24
Stratoscope wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is no doubt the reason, and it seems like a reasonable rule on the face of it. But there ought to be another rule that takes priority over that one: when you use the name of a person or company, capitalize and spell it as they spell it. They are the ones who get to decide. It's not the prerogative of a third-party publisher or newswriter to override that. It seems like a simple matter of humbleness and deference…

> They are the ones who get to decide Once upon a time, the late musician Prince decided to change his name. Turns out that no, you don't always "get to decide" and even fans don't follow your every whim: Most ignored his choice and without much "humbleness and deference" started referring to him as TAFKAP—"The Artist Formerly Known As Prince."

He just changed the name to fuck with Warner Bros, and then changed it back when that was done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)

> In 1993, while in a contractual dispute with Warner Bros., he changed his stage name to an unpronounceable symbol (Hollow circle above downward arrow crossed with a curlicued horn-shaped symbol and then a short bar), also known as the "Love Symbol", and began releasing new albums at a faster rate to remove himself from contractual obligations. He released five records between 1994 and 1996 before signing with Arista Records in 1998. In 2000, he began referring to himself as "Prince" again. He released 16 albums after that

Also interesting:

> In 2015, he conceived and launched YesWeCode, paying for many hackathons outright and performing at some of them.

Re: Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

#79

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

eBay really should allow you to filter out items with multiple price points. So many sellers abuse that system so heavily (e.g. the standard 99c memory card listings that have some crappy little microsd adapter included in the listings to drag the price range down).

Basically everything else that's bad about ebay I can deal with, but that's the one thing that sends me racing to other sites.

Re: Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

#80

Post by pritishc »

It looks like I'm the only one in this thread who has the experience of being scammed, as a buyer, on eBay. Although admittedly, this happened on the Indian version of the platform (which is now owned by Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart).

I wrote about the irony of them promoting the sale of refurbished items when it was a refurbished Xbox that I purchased last year that turned out to be a dud, on Medium (https://medium.com/@chakrabortypritish/ebay-india-a-cautiona... - I had to incorporate a bit of sensationalism to try and fetch some views, which is why it's written the way it is, didn't work anyway). Turns out that the seller lied about the machine's warranty, and Microsoft support couldn't help me either. eBay support consistently told me that they couldn't do anything about this according to company policy. Never felt this helpless on an e-commerce platform, and I've never gone back on eBay.

And yes, their platform UI/UX is horrible, I concur. The only way to show that the Xbox was stuck in a boot-and-crash loop was to record a video, and they did not permit video uploads on their (laughable) grievance redressal platform.

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