Comment on flohmarkt a federated alternative to ebay and facebook marketplace
skisnow@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
What mechanisms are there to limit bad actors?
The strict location specificity at least strongly limits the usefulness for spamming the network with commercial ads, but apparently people here in this comment thread think this is bad design 🙄
Otherwise, could you be more specific about what kind of bad actor you mean? Obviously you can’t really prevent someone from posting fake ads for what ever nefarious purpose.
Come on.
but apparently people here in this comment thread think this is bad design 🙄
And on top of it, you are becoming belligerent to users insisting they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Because people are asking for things that are explicit anti-features from centralized commercial platforms that aim for platform feudalism like Amazon and Alibaba. Flohmarkt explicitly doesn’t want to replicate these and aims to be a decentralized network of location specific classified pages. Obviously there can’t be an agreement when people ask of the anti-facebook to be more like Facebook 🙄
Again, for the nth time, NO ONE IS ASKING FOR THAT. They are asking how flohmarkt works. YOU are (for some reason) insisting that we all want a centralized market.
One thing I would find valuable is mechanisms to dissuade the listings with obviously false prices. So many things on CL that aren’t really free or $1.
Solution “payments process through the system only at the price you posted. If this isn’t done, the ad pointing to you doesn’t come down and new ones don’t go up. You only get X number of posts simultaneously.”
But then we’ve have another app to juggle all the account created to circumvent this so fuck it.
I think that would be up to the mods, when people then ask for more then the price or list a higher price in the description
How does location specificity limit spam? Surely the nature of spam is it costs nothing to produce and is done en masse.
And I mean any kind of bad actor really. Spammer, scammer, or even just a griefer deciding the gum up the system for lulz.
To be clear these are genuine questions, I’m not here to shit on the project or anything. I’d love more than anything for there to be good answers to them.
Spam is about reach, as 99.9% of the recipients will not buy anything from a spammer. Obviously the location specificity of Flohmarkt doesn’t prevent other forms of abuse, but it makes Flohmarkt instances very unattractive for commercial spammers as you can’t reach a sufficiently broad user-base with your relatively generic ads.
Either I’ve not understood your point, or you’re suggesting that spammers would limit themselves to one instance?
Spam is about volume, and a 0.1% takeup rate would be a dream for a spammer.
What mechanisms are there to limit bad actors on ebay and other commercial marketplaces?
Very little.
I’m not here to cheerlead for eBay, but I don’t think that’s entirely true.
EBay is an exception here, its also not a classified ads site.
EBay is an auction house. Auction houses have stricter rules.
Classified ads is you grandma posting her VCR for sale, or selling your used boat locally. Its a parallel to a newspaper classified section. There has never been any control on sites like this other than “buyer beware”. Craigslist, Kijiji and Facebunk Marketplace are all classified ad equivalents and have zero guarantee or protections usually.
Given these are meant to be local ads, the onus is on the buyer to go to the sellers house and verify what they are buying.
My use of eBay is closer to my use of Craigslist instead of being like an auction. I don’t like to wait for the long bidding windows used online. I also don’t like haggling on prices. In this case, people post what they’re selling, and if I decide to buy it a third party payment platform is used to transfer funds.
The differences are that CL is usually items I pick up personally instead of being shipped (but not always), and some CL sellers only accept cash.
That’s fair, and people will use things different than the intention of the thing if it suits them. My point was more to highlight that you cannot group all things where buying and selling happen as “marketplaces” and expect the same protections/moderation etc.
This new tool is to replace the local ads/garage sale like equivalents with something self hosted. EBay is not one of these, regardless of how people choose to use it. As an auction site it is on a different level in both functional and legal experience. You cannot expect that from Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace Kijiji, or you local newspaper ads or garage sales.
Reputation via buyer/seller history on eBay. Not so much on craigslist.
On reddit, you’d have a bot that tracked purchases and sales and their successes, which would automatically post reputation on new posts/comments in each thread.
The various local options -like FB marketplace - don’t have anything. When shipping things, yes Ebay has a really decent dispute process (leaning in favor of purchasers). Something like this would be best to aim for the local market first rather than shipped items that are harder to manage.
huh? any serious marketplace has cheap or free basic insurance for purchases.
But a classified ad site is not a marketplace, and that’s where we need to be mindful of the distinction.
The flea market I go to has none of that.
The same mechanisms that limit it on Kijiji and Craigslist, plus community labour by mods I imagine.
HubertManne@piefed.social 1 day ago
I doubt there is any. With craiglist you did in person cash in a public setting. I only did exchanges in the police station parking lot and they had cameras for that purpose.
blave@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Starbucks always worked for me. plenty public and plenty of cameras