When I started selling on n ebay over 20 years ago I would list CDs and other items with stock images because I didn’t have a camera, people would physically mail me checks or money orders, I would deposit those and wait for them to clear, then mail them their items.
I found a ln old piece of software in box that had a printed exchange between the buyer and seller off of a bbs from the early nineties.
I used to buy and sell car parts on a vehicle specific forum, but you could see the person’s forum activity.
The board game geeks website seems to do ok with math trades. I’m not really sure how trust gets established there. Reddit does or used to to the secret Santa thing.
There’s discogs for buying and selling media.
Of course everything is a scam now, even from “legitimate” companies.
People using marketplace to have things shipped is completely wild to me. Even local sellers are dishonest about the quality of their shit. At least on ebay you can get your money back if there’s a problem. I’m not sure if you could build some kind of token of trust that doesn’t require a central place that stores sensitive information. Maybe a way to verify yourself through a trusted platform like eBay, but those accounts can be stolen as well.
Whatever happened to people using craigslist is beyond me. Maybe the scams and lack of user accounts became a problem. They did implement an email system and you have to pay to list cars due to dealership spam. Of course a bunch of other platforms tried to take off and some alternatives became popular in other countries.
The benefit of decentralization is better moderation and specialization. It’s much harder to scam a small community. eBay does absorb a lot of losses by just refunding buyers when there’s a problem.
When I started selling on n ebay over 20 years ago I would list CDs and other items with stock images because I didn’t have a camera, people would physically mail me checks or money orders, I would deposit those and wait for them to clear, then mail them their items. I found a ln old piece of software in box that had a printed exchange between the buyer and seller off of a bbs from the early nineties.
I used to buy and sell car parts on a vehicle specific forum, but you could see the person’s forum activity.
The board game geeks website seems to do ok with math trades. I’m not really sure how trust gets established there. Reddit does or used to to the secret Santa thing.
There’s discogs for buying and selling media.
Of course everything is a scam now, even from “legitimate” companies.
People using marketplace to have things shipped is completely wild to me. Even local sellers are dishonest about the quality of their shit. At least on ebay you can get your money back if there’s a problem. I’m not sure if you could build some kind of token of trust that doesn’t require a central place that stores sensitive information. Maybe a way to verify yourself through a trusted platform like eBay, but those accounts can be stolen as well.
Whatever happened to people using craigslist is beyond me. Maybe the scams and lack of user accounts became a problem. They did implement an email system and you have to pay to list cars due to dealership spam. Of course a bunch of other platforms tried to take off and some alternatives became popular in other countries.
The benefit of decentralization is better moderation and specialization. It’s much harder to scam a small community. eBay does absorb a lot of losses by just refunding buyers when there’s a problem.