I thought the guy built it for his wife to sell pez dispensers? I seem to remember hearing that 20 years ago.
The reality is that eBay (that is AuctionWeb) got its initial traction from spamming Usenet as the story correctly states.
Very quickly they moved from spamming themselves to letting their users spam Usenet.
This is the "growth hacking" model still followed today by many. The question is there any moral middle ground?
If you can search Usenet archives you can find remnants of that AuctionWeb spam and people complaining. Soon others tried to copy them but it was too late.
This was in mid 90s after the first mass spam from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... .
However:
- You can sign up for a store newsletter
- in the past few months, ebay is sending auction time notifications, and pinging sellers to offer discounts to viewers. That's the only thing that has the spam smell, but the discount offers do help distinguish who wants to make a deal :)
I'm sure folks who use the platform consistently either know how to avoid that content or are much more efficient at sifting through it (or my anecdata of its frequency is way off!). I agree in my limited experience there isn't much in the way of "true spam" itself.
The reality is always much messier, more diffuse, and too much of a long story.