0. https://blog.nem.ec/2020/05/24/ebay-port-scanning/

Here's a handy list of valid uses for IP addresses:

1. Packet routing.

edit: typo corrected, thanks.

Alas, watching Gilliam's other films gets more and more difficult, even though he tries to make the same movie again and again, for almost forty years now. But ‘Brazil’ was a home run on the first attempt.

Besides, you might be unfamiliar with the fact that Gilliam referred to ‘Bandits’, ‘Brazil’ and ‘Munchausen’ as a trilogy about the same thing. Which trilogy evidently ended up having at least nine films in it, excepting ‘F&L’ and me having not watched ‘Quixote’ yet (the latter's theme obviously follows the rest, though).

Perhaps Tom Stoppard is the missing ingredient.

I don't think I fully appreciate the assignments to read Kafka in college until these algorithmic bans, ousting from app stores, automated support, etc came along. Before that I figured the human element could, in most cases even if it required extreme difficulty, sort things out eventually. Then came these heuristic algorithms that have practically become the platonic ideal if Kafka-esque systems.

Edit: While Amazon is very far from perfect and has dropped several notches in customer service, I will say that they are still very good compared to others. I can still get ahold of a real person that has some leeway for professional judgement when addressing a problem.

For standard run of the mill customer support they're still pretty great. I was shopping for new wireless earbuds last fall and tried out a few different ones. 2 of the 3 were defective and I didn't like the third-- they hurt my ears to wear them.

For the two defective ones, I'm not sure why but the normal return button wasn't available and I had to go through chat support. I explained they were defective and I wanted to return them. They told me they'd issue the refund, no need to actually mail them back, so I didn't have to go through that hassle. And these were high end ear buds, a total of $400 worth of tech.

Amazon sucks. It should be broken up.

[1] https://artofelectronics.net/the-book/counterfeit-editions/

I expect them to at least collect the information that I received, or suspect I have, a counterfeit item, when I go for a return. They don't even bother to do that.

You're asked to comment on so many things that you haven't heard of. 19th century English class anxiety, extreme poverty in London, slavery and race relations in America, midcentury dystopias (global) and unreasonable justice systems in central Europe (?). All things an ordinary Scandinavian teenager at the end of the 21st century is not going to have a whole lot of perspective on until they've lived a little bit longer.

But then when you have lived that little bit longer it makes sense, and Kafka is probably the one that will come closest, having travelled quite nicely into the modern world and having a corporate version that most people will run into. Next is the dystopias that we see on the news but don't recognise when living in.

Offering a false dichotomy between "be forced to allow those malicious actors an[d, sic] account" and "take actions to protect myself and my other paying customers" that have adverse impacts (many times with severe monetary damages) is externalizing the cost of poor gating control in the first place in the pursuit of pumping up subscriber numbers chasing the next funding round or quarterly call to brag upon. This is similar to financial services institutions flailing around "identity theft" to cover for gating control of their transactions implemented in pursuit of transaction liquidity over security.

Both take the externalized costs out of customer hides as both uncompensated time and monies spent to make good on unwinding transactions, and in making the aggregate customers pay for the direct costs of fixing the problematic transactions on the way, way back end. Both are a result of implementing poor security practices.

Both also will not scale to the coming era of hyper-converged global financial services. First mover advantage accrues to the one who fixes this challenge at the front end where they gate the transactions, cutting out the majority of the costs of fixing this on the back end after the transaction has been compiled and deployed into production so to speak, not coincidentally speeding up settlement, increasing liquidity, and grab the significant network effects that come with establishing such an infrastructure.

It's important, though, to not listen to the introduction for too long, because it gives away the ending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnbDNv3uAl0

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYaXy5mmA8

On the consumer side it would be hard to market the advantage though because everyone thinks it won't won't happen to them (and as long as they are average enough, it probably won't), and the cost of being banned from eBay is not that big if you're just a casual user.

>> so it’s possible that eBay has been scanning customers’ computers for almost seven years without too many people noticing.

Can't one check the archive.org for signup.ebay.com & verify this? Saying ebay has been port-scanning for 7 years and proving so, would be a much stronger point. Surprised the OP did not check.

I was banned the same way as the OP, few months ago. They(humans)collected my Id, bank details, personal address, original invoice of the items I was selling, some calls, to finally ban my 15+ year user.

In effect, it lets you revoke your consent for the company to store and process your data. But it also provides for cases where your data can be processed without your consent. It's not an unlimited carte blanche, but fraud prevention is explicitly given as an example of a legitimate purpose.

Businesses are allowed to retain information necessary to operate. Which would include things like names, email addresses, IP addresses, etc of people who are banned (to prevent them from returning).

If GDPR required a company to delete everything, it would be impractical. (E.g. imagine you request a company delete your info, and then you immediately sue them for something that happened while using their product/service… the company wouldn’t be able to defend themselves unless they retained a record/logs of your usage.

You can submit a deletion request, but in most cases much of your data won’t actually be deleted.

I'm not sure about that. The company might reason it needs this data to operate, but you should be able to contest that with a data protection authority.

The data that you can not request to delete is for example money transaction data, which the company has to retain for 10 years or so due to other laws.

The spam stopped.

A bit over 10% (and probably somewhat higher than 10% on HN) of Americans do have something like GDPR. California Consumer Privacy Act. I'm not including Colorado, Virginia, or Utah because I'm not sure how equivalent their laws are.

https://www.cookiebot.com/en/uk-gdpr/

GDPR applies to all individuals in the EU, not just citizens.

At the very least, I'm sure eBay lawyers would be happy to argue the point.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

Mind you, there's nothing to stop eBay from having someone now look at your data and go 'nope'.

GDPR specifically carves out keeping data for "legitimate business needs" including fraud prevention and so on. Whatever data Ebay (thinks it) has about this person that they are using to enforce the ban would be data that they would argue falls under this clause.

You might have a chance to successfully challenge the termination by legal means, if you actually did not violate Ebay's terms and conditions.

In this context the more relevant aspect of GDPR, which I think receives too little attention and more so enforcement, is article 22 (Automated individual decision-making, including profiling)

But when you see it again you have personally identified the individual have you not? Doesn’t that by definition mean it is identifiable if you are able to determine the identity later?

This is something that advertisers/supermarket points schemes etc used to do when they didn’t have consent to share personal data, hash it and align it with what they already had so effectively they shared the subsets of interest anyway. I remember at university when some guys from yahoo sponsored a hack event, they literally gave a guest lecture boasting about doing this with Sainsbury’s to squeeze through a legal loophole back in 2013.

If your original delete request was followed so that everything they knew about you was deleted, they would not be able to relink everything that GUID linked to. It should be gone now. However, if that hashed value lives in a BANNED_ACCOUNTS table, then all they have to do is create the hash, check the table, disallow new account. You can even do it in good faith by not storing any of the new info rather than storing it and forcing a new delete request.

In a large entity such as Google, you almost need to outsource ID verification to ensure it's not abused by other (advertising/marketing) parts of Google. Of course all of this requires good faith on the part of the implementing entity, which is certainly not guaranteed.

They banned me and no recourse/way to appeal.

I even sent them a physical letter without much luck.

Pitty, I loved the app, but stopped using it due to their unnecessary/strict no-VPN rule.

Furthermore, even when they get it right, people who were banned correctly come on to the internet to complain.

But sometimes they get it wrong. And the only recourse seems to be a public shaming online.

I realize it’s not entirely the same thing, but it’s also not entirely different.

That exists and it’s just as prone to abuse as you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial

After I grieved for some time and taken sentimental items, her house had fallen into disrepair, so I sold it at a loss to an investor, and I was mostly ready to start moving on with my life. Somehow, the death certificate provided to me by the government about a year prior to this did not indicate that the government was aware of her death, and I needed send them back a copy of that very certificate in order to make the government officially aware of what happened.

Then I was told that I would need to wait six months for the estate process to end. During that time, I was given random tasks to do at no set interval, usually with deadlines of only a couple days. Then literally one day before the six month time period was over, I was told that the government would be taking the money in the estate due to unpaid medical bills from some years before her death (the same trips to the hospital that had failed to diagnose her illness in the first place). After getting more lawyers to investigate whether this was possible and correct (it was, private creditors' time limit starts at the time of death, but government's time limit starts whenever the aforementioned paperwork is filed (also this only took me a day or so to figure out, because I do not enjoy long drawn out bureaucratic processes unlike the state government I was interacting with)), I resigned to give up and give them the money.

However, that was not an option either. It took ANOTHER six months of random tasks to actually give them the money. I honestly don't remember what most of the tasks were, because none of it made any sense, but the final task really summed up the whole process. I received a call on a Thursday afternoon: I had to mail a physical check to my lawyer to then hand-deliver to a department within seven days, but that department was only open on Mondays 10AM to noon.

All for the terrible crime of having a family member die without having memorized estate law ahead of time. I do consider what they did some unnecessary abstract form of violence/coercion, because otherwise I obviously would not have voluntarily signed up to do any of that shit. At least if they had been honest enough to tell me at the start they were planning to just take everything, I would've just declined to be the executor and let the government do what it wanted with the property. They could have had that money (probably more money, since I wouldn't have paid a third of it to an estate lawyer and the house would've been in better condition) close to two years earlier and left me alone at the same time.

No idea how any of this works, just 2am shower thoughts.

However when a monopoly starts to take over, what is a private entity starts to have governmental powers.

In the US, there has been a century long politics effort to reduce anti-monopoly protections, to the point that the standard is now "are consumers being actively harmed in pricing" and what you experience would likely never be considered something that could now result in anti-monopoly action.

And without those anti-monopoly protections, eBay gets to collect economic rents—pure economic waste that profits eBay and hurts everyone else.

We need a return to Georgism to help fight some really bad politics that have developed over the past century.

To live up to that statement, society pays. Through the nose - letting criminals walk free is annoying, we do pay the cost of trying to find them, and we pay a large cost gathering evidence to make it stick in court even when e.g. the cops are 80% sure. Courts are very expensive; judges have a salary. As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'.

eBay could choose to pay these costs. It will mean:

* Paying for a tribunal of sorts, paying to have them set up procedures and checking that they live up to them.

* Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'.

* Accepting that fraudsters who do get 'caught', still spend a lot of time 'free' whilst the laborious process runs its course.

* To manage fraudsters, rules are created and publicised which interfere with legitimate business to some extent; everybody on the platform will have to deal with the fact they can no longer do this. (Laws that oversimplify - in society parlance: Walking through a red light even when there are clearly no cars at all is still illegal; that anybody can clearly see it was safe to do this doesn't change either the fact that you could be ticketed for this offense, or that police should just arbitrarily let this go).

In this case, 'society' becomes 'ebay users'. Do ebay users want to carry the burden of this cost? In any case, ebay users carry the burden of paying for the salaries of eBay's board which may well be excessive.

Why isn't there an ebay alternative? One that is more expensive for buyers and sellers but has all this? In large part, network effect makes it infeasible to have many ebay-esques out there. None of them would be any good at that point, and/or you get services that make it easy to post to all of them.

But already go free, there is staggering ammount of fraud, counterfeit, stolen and illegal goods on Ebay.

Their system is more like "10,000 criminals who go free, 15 random people get banned and the person who wrote the algorythm get a raise and no-one measures the amount of crime or gives a shit"

I suspect most of these companies have no real idea what their false positive rate is.

As someone with almost a decade of experience in the criminal justice system in the USA, it is pretty much the exact opposite. Of the dozens of prosecutors I know, I can't think of a single one that would care if someone is innocent of the crime for which they are charged.

People go to court for murder yes but they also go for smaller things like a neighbour's tree causing property damage. The cost are different.

Companies that force users to give up the ability to sue need to provide an alt system.

"Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person behind bars"

This is not how things work outside of tv and talk radio. 1/3 of people in jail are innocent. Cops being sure doesn't make a fact true. Everyone has different priorities and cops are extremely good at jumping to simple answers because this is in their collective interest.

Selling things where you need the perfect partner are not things that sell well through an auction. An auction is 7 days where you hope to get many people interested in your unique product. An obsolete computer is better on a shelf with a price tag available all year until it sells.

If you want something old school web 1.0, https://www.car-part.com/ for junk yard parts.

> To live up to that statement, society pays. … As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'.

Aren't you describing a cost that is alleviated by (allegedly) making sure that the innocent aren't imprisoned, or, rather, a cost that would be borne if the legal system made sure to imprison those whom "the cops are 80% sure" were guilty?

I think part of the problem is that even if eBay is willing to spend a lot more money on this process, everyday buyers will blame them whenever something goes wrong and just stop using it altogether. Basically, they want to be seen as an alternative to Amazon and don't want buyers to ever think about risk. The sophisticated users are already aware of it and are very skeptical, but the newer users who never read or leave reviews make them money too.

eBay can try to make people whole who claim to be defrauded. But in addition to being expensive that creates its own perverse incentives.

In the past few years, EBay has gotten very good at being pro-buyer (which is good for me). I can think of 2 transactions in the last 3 years that were “enough not as described” for me to bother to complain. In both instances, the sellers immediately offered something reasonable and we all moved on with our lives. (I think both sellers were clueless as to the defects, being high-volume churners of resold tech.)

It might be the case that EBay is more buyer friendly than Amazon at this point.

I dislike Paypal as a company and they do a lot of shitty things but the benefit to me using their services is tangible.

Honestly even sites like Aliexpress and Banggood have always resolved issues to my satisfaction once a dispute has been filed.

Imagine if our justice system had to operate at a profit.

eBay isn't operating as a democratically endowed, taxpayer-funded operation for the public commonwealth. They're just a company trying to make a buck. It turns out, if you want to make a buck by providing market-making services to third parties, you become a huge magnet for scams and fraud. And you need to deal with that. This is how it works.

If you really got what you seem to want, it would be a government-regulated online market. And... let's be honest, that would probably be much worse for the buyers (who are the targets of fraud, remember) than eBay ever has been.

It is absolutely the same thing.

Except instead of saying "Access Denied" which immediately makes you suspicious and comment on the internet, they construct an alternative evidence chain so you waste your effort defending against the wrong thing, and the true techniques never come into question.

And where I am in Illinois, until a couple of years ago, if you were held in a county jail awaiting trial you were prohibited by law from having a copy of any of the evidence against you.

eBay does not have a monopoly on violence.

So it returns back to the evidence being hidden and parallel construction being used to present the court case.

If you're permabanned because of a google/ebay AI bug, you can't even get that far.

[admittedly that challenge happened in a different state than the guesstimation state. I don't even bother to challenge in the guesstimation state because you're basically fucked no matter what.]

The judge's explanation to me was that any offense without possible jail time are held to preponderance of the evidence and constitutional rights such as 5th amendment are revoked.

I've also been called to show up in a 'Mayors court' for speeding where the mayor who is the cousin of the cop oversees your case. Good luck with that; the ACLU has actually done a pretty extensive documentation on Mayor's courts and the corruption involved there.

As is probably intuitive, the process that is "due" for taking property, which is less than is "due" for taking liberty, which is still somewhat less than is "due" for taking life. (This latter hasn't always been the case, but read Brennan's concurrence in Furman v. Georgia and progeny cases establishing the death-is-different axiom of American criminal jurisprudence.)

A property interest that doesn't implicate any liberty interest may be taken with a bare minimum of due process, often just notice and an opportunity to be heard. If a hearing is granted, the standard is a preponderance (not beyond a reasonable doubt).

I assume the penalty for your speeding ticket was a fine only, yes?

Personally I disagree that property doesn't implicate liberty. I toiled for hours, perhaps days to pay these fines. I was deprived of liberty for however long I was forced to labor to pay the fine. Also it's worth noting the citation itself was filed against me specifically, not my property. This is in contrast to something like 'US vs $500 on a dashboard.'

But yes I do understand the legal system treats these cases distinctly.

So just think of the fine as a forced liquidation, so it's back to property again.

Companies can give the exact reason for a ban at least, without disclosing the methods of deduction. There is absolutely no reason to hide this information.

Such a behavior of companies is a big "f*ck you" to democracy and justice, not to criminals. It's exactly how totalitarianism looks like.

Ofcourse it does, a corporation is a totalitarian organisation by design - I don't understand why anyone is surprised to learn this. Any disobedience or herecy and you are removed with prejudice.

Anti-fraud is basically all smoke and mirrors; if you reveal the methods it doesn't work any more.

If Ebay gave a credit report-style summary saying "you're banned because you're associated with this IP range" or something, then indeed this becomes information that would be exploited by fraudsters. If OP is actually innocent then their being banned is considered an acceptable risk.... one can only hope that in future model training though that this ban would be considered a false positive.

> Yep. OP's only real recourse is to just try again in 6 months or a year or whatever and hope that their ML algorithm evaluates their data differently.

And what change their identity? They already have their PII and banned them for life.

I would like to dispute this. Of course, there is a cat-and-mouse game between popular online services and fraudsters, but the argument "if we show you the methods we use to spot them, they won't become effective" is a flawed argument. Sure, it helps a little, but after some time many of these just become public knowledge anyway.

I know if I like too many photos on Instagram, they will block me temporarily, and if I repeat it within certain period, they can ban me for a few days and so on. Having these thresholds and other rules spelled out would be helpful to users. They would know what to avoid, and if they misbehave, they can be rightfully punished. Giving blows out of the thin air is simply unfair.

At least in your IG example the ban is finite. I don't want the law to be used so bluntly but I'd really prefer if all bans had to be time limited, even if only technically where due to exponential scaling for repeat offenses the time exceeds expected human lifespans.

It would be far more helpful to spammers, who could then set all their bots to send threshold - 1 likes and invitations than the average user who rarely ever considers liking enough stuff to trigger it (and is able to take the hint and just not like stuff as much if they do get a warning). Plus in practice it's probably not just a simple threshold, but a function weighted by timing and topics and relatedness of accounts and which is completely unintelligible to the average person (but potentially informative to more advanced spambot developers).

Before bug bounty programs this was the reason given for not disclosing security issues. All it did was keep the issues underground not fixed and allowed security bugs to exist forever.

Doesn't this argument apply to the criminal justice system?

What your proposing is to screw consumers overall in order to provide fairer treatment for the unlucky few due to ebay having to charge much higher fees in order to cover the cost of fraudsters.

Since buying and selling goods and services online is not a constitutional right, or any right anywhere as far as I know, a proposal to force such a change does not seem like it will pass muster in a serious court of law.

I'm not a lawyer but even to my untrained eye you will need far better arguments to get any traction.

1) It's a private company, they can refuse service to anyone for any reason - this is spelled out in the TOS:

> If we believe you are abusing eBay and/or our Services in any way, we may, in our sole discretion and without limiting other remedies, limit, suspend, or terminate your user account(s) and access to our Services, delay or remove hosted content, remove any special status associated with your account(s), remove, not display, and/or demote listings, reduce or eliminate any discounts, and take technical and/or legal steps to prevent you from using our Services.

> Additionally, we reserve the right to refuse, modify, or terminate all or part of our Services to anyone for any reason at our discretion.

2) There is a mandatory arbitration clause in the TOS so you can't take them to court.

> You and eBay each agree that any and all disputes or claims that have arisen, or may arise, between you and eBay (or any related third parties) that relate in any way to or arise out of this or previous versions of the User Agreement, your use of or access to our Services, the actions of eBay or its agents, or any products or services sold, offered, or purchased through our Services shall be resolved exclusively through final and binding arbitration, rather than in court.

I don't like it but that's how it is. For some reason no one - right, left or center - seems interested in regulating these things.

https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/your-right-to-get-copie...

I collected the evidence and submitted a report to eBay's fraud department. After the required waiting time I submitted a nonpayment report and got a credit on my eBay account about a week later. It took another 2 months to get a check because they told me that they were having operational issues because of the pandemic. A year later I checked to see if the scam account was still active, and sure enough it was.

Not sure how blatantly obvious scammers who get detailed reports of faudulent activity reported to eBay's fraud department manage to keep their accounts active, but it seems kind of impressive.

I have no idea where to go next time I need something. AliExpress would probably be even worse when it comes to counterfeits.

The only thing that matters is money and this is why these bans are a thing - it's cheaper to screw some customers over than to have a competent human analyze the situation. Hitting them in the wallet is the only place they'd actually feel it.

The URL structures on the website are scary and indeed suggest the backend is a horrible dumpster fire.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070104021557/http://www.addsim...

They built a new API but are probably never going to be able to get rid if the old one.

Now there's two companies I'll never do more business with.

Years later, my only thesis is it was due to having HTML in my product description, I linked to the vendor website. Maybe that's against the rules or something.

Maybe you should read the rules for the service you are using?

You can submit a claim which the seller responds to. If the seller doesn't respond fast enough, AE steps in and suggests a couple resolutions (usually something like a partial refund with no product return, or a full refund if you send the product back). You can then negotiate or just accept one of the suggestions. Absolutely 0 hassle or talking to a person. You click a few buttons and get your money back.

eBay and Amazon Marketplace put the burden of proof of delivery on the seller instead of the buyer when the shipment is not protected with signature confirmation. Many AliExpress-style items are also listed on eBay and Amazon at similar prices, and I've mostly switched over after my bad experiences with AliExpress. AliExpress still has a different selection of items, so I haven't stopped using it completely.

E.g. I had obviously fake EEPROM chips delivered, they weren't even new (they contained data from the previous use!). I have opened a dispute, posted the evidence that the chips are relabeled fakes - and promptly got it rejected both first time and on appeal. The grunt handling it had absolutely no idea what my complaint was about, I have received my goods, so what more do I want?

Fortunately it was only a few euros worth so not big deal - I have opened the dispute mostly to point out that the seller is a fraudster, not to recover my 15€ or so back. Tough luck ...

Over the years I had more luck sorting complaints out on AliExpress directly with the sellers because they are afraid of losing their ratings and thus a large portion of business (people usually sort by price and then by ratings). The support staff is hopeless in these cases.

...which are made in China, probably in the same factories contracted by the original manufacturer. Aliexpress just lets you cut out the middleman.

Back when I was selling a lot of electronics there they just had restrictions where you couldn't increase your volume much until after some successful purchases had gone through. I guess that was too easy to game and they've taken a harder stance?

If you do want to sell there eventually (sounds like you don't) you just need a new address, new IP, new cookies, new phone, new bank, .... As long as you're not actually scamming people and don't need true anonymity there are cheap/free services for all of those things that usually require some kind of personal information (so that if you do use them with nefarious intent the courts can find your real identity), and you'd just be violating eBay's terms and conditions. As you've seen though, adhering to their terms doesn't give any better personal outcomes, so I dunno that I'd give a flip about breaking them (not legal advice, please don't sue).

The first time eBay flagged it automatically and reversed the sale, the second I cancelled as buyer request since they told me they couldn’t pay.

The annoying thing is I had to manually restart the listing and ask eBay to override the selling cap so I could do so. It’s really annoying because they tie up the listing while waiting to see if you are that gullible or not.

My girlfriend got scammed out of over $1000 on Ebay recently (seller is within the country). Here was the dastardly scam: she ordered something, and the seller never sent it. Ebay would do nothing; the police would do nothing.

Why can you just take people's money like this?

It's extremely disheartening that it's now 2022 and we haven't figured out a way to replace eBay.

It's the most basic form of commerce. Select a product from the listings, check the seller's reputation based on how active the seller is, ask a few questions, finalize a transaction. On rare occasion, in some markets, adjudicate a dispute.

Everyone in the world should be able to have access to this service for essentially free.

eBay is such a basic thing that it was started as a hobby because of course people should be able to buy and sell online with minimal friction. It's obvious.

Why don't we make new things like this anymore?

I hear all this hype about the fediverse and web3 and crypto, but the reality is that the public cannot even reliably send messages to each other without invoking a big tech company.

Crypto barely works and there have been billions of dollars made and lost just trying to keep track of account balances.

It feels like we're forever away from having a well run public global market.

Uber and Twitter and Netflix and eBay and the rest of the "essential" services seem so basic, but we can't seem to get enough nerds together to start replacing them.

We're each individually globally connected with more bandwidth than I ever thought would fit in my pocket.

But I can't hail a ride without involving Uber.

I can't deliver a 140 character message to a lot of people without involving Twitter.

We can't crowdfund the creation of great art, unless we all pay Netflix to do it for us.

> Don’t use eBay.

And, as OP is soon to notice, it's very hard to sell used electronics without using eBay.

What can we actually do, today, as hackers, to replace eBay?

If I was actually going to do it, where would I start? Would replacing eBay be a government project, a web3 project, a federated network?

Is there actual hacktivism to be done here by simply replacing services with p2p equivalents without engaging in the current corporate system?

I've had enough of relying on companies for what should be human to human services.

nobody has any inherent rights to selling on ebay. they do their analisys, and determine if you're a fraud risk worth taking on or not. and if they don't want to take on the risk of allowing you to use their platform, they ban you. just like they did to the OP here. it's not evil, it's just the only responsible behaviour for a global platform that allows anybody to sell anything to anybody else. Any other platform reaching eBay's scale will have to do the same thing.

Facebook marketplace can do a bit better, because facebook has an absolutely absurd amount of your personal information that they can mine to determine your fraud risk. Some other small-scale indie services can pretend to do better, but the only thing that allows them to do better is their small scale. Online classifieds like ebay's Kijiji subsidiary can do better because they don't handle the transaction, and you take on your own fraud risk and only deal in-person.

at some level, every service that does this has to answer the question of "how do we deal with fraud risk" and the answer to that always has to be forbidding some set of people from using the platform. better to do that by initially limiting the scope of the marketplace to something small, rather than kicking people out based on some criteria.

small communities of people who trust each other can sell things to each other without any VC-backed platforms getting involved. "scaling it" is the problem, but nobody needs that. all you need is a messageboard, either digital or a literal bulletin board. trying to force marketplaces to grow bigger causes problems.

Yes, that would have been difficult to scale, but then you'd not need a fraud department at all as both sides would be able to verify the transaction.

Seems like a business opportunity here.

Scammers are already tricking PayPal's dispute system by sending real tracking numbers and sometimes even real packages but filled with bricks or other junk.

Imagine a situation where the buyer is malicious and claims they have received a brick. If you settle in favour of the buyer, sellers lose out, but if you settle in favour of the seller, buyers would lose out from scam sellers sending bricks instead of the promised goods.

A neutral party such as the shipping courier would have to act as a witness and unpack the goods on delivery to mitigate that, and even then it's not bulletproof if the goods have a defect that isn't immediately obvious.

Good point about subtle defects. Hmm. That I do not have an answer for, especially if the seller is not aware.

Maybe it's just not possible to trust the Ferengixxx humans...

But something similar to a notary, could validate items if a certain value. I think they are doing this with sneakers and certain luxury goods.

I wonder if there is a market for this as a third-party service outside of eBay that works on their Market. It would double shipping cost and add time but that could be worth it for a class of goods

Good to know, nonetheless

It's not a technical problem, it's a legal one.

If you come to a small town and try and defraud the locals, you'll rapidly find yourself in jail, or worse. Small towns have local concepts of trust. Alice says you defrauded her, I trust Alice, that means I believe her. So I tell my friends, who trust me, and now we're coming for you. Just like that.

But online, there's no propagation of trust, I only have one source, and that's Ebay. Ebay's just not as good at trust as all of us working together.

So long as this dynamic is at play, as long as we can not propagate trust, then massive companies will dysfunctionally dominate.

I’ve got a bunch of extra hardware I’ve been trying to offload. 15 year old account and I log in to try and sell something and I can only sell 1 thing a month. If I had I’d created a new account I could sell 10, my past selling history is irrelevant.

Oh, and the ‘user’ who has won/bought my old iPhone X has now twice been someone with no sale history who hasn’t paid. Are they waiting for me to maybe ship it to them by accident? Insane