The Buy Nothing Project
buynothingproject.org
buynothingproject.org
Our little English town had an amazing Freecycle group running for a while that got us through the "baby clothes" issues that people are discussing here. But the next town over had a "Sell & Seek" group that was essentially the same, but for small cash payments instead of goodwill.
One woman saw the arbitrage opportunity and started accepting pretty much everything that came up on the Freecycle, only to re-list it on the Sell & Seek. My wife gave away a big basket of washable diaper stuff and watched as it all popped back up, one item at a time, for $5-$10 each on that Sell & Seek. Think about the emotional ride that puts you on, from thinking you'd single handedly sorted some new young mom, to realizing you'd been suckered by this... well, not nice person. Then multiply it by every member of that group that gave anything away in good faith.
The Freecycle just sort of went away inside of a month, and now all that's left is that paid version from the next town over.
All it takes for one person to do this and your community dies. Notice that she didn't ever do anything illegal or even "wrong" from her viewpoint. Just the same sort of "disrupting" and arbitrage that we see praised here all the time.
But it completely ruined a nice thing.
I've noticed this in Berlin as well. There was the famous Free-your-stuff group which then spawned into different splinter groups, The last time I checked Sell-your-suff groups are trend du-jour, and people would repurpose the goods they found for free on FB/Ebay Kleinanzeigen and sell them.
I haven't used my local freecycle group much, because it was stuck on the Yahoo groups platform for so long, but that group seemed much more free-for-all, and not connected to an organized, nationwide project like BN is.
I get the sense that the people getting rid of the stuff are as happy to have it taken off their hands and not taking up space in the house.
As you are getting it for free it's implied that it is your responsibility to collect it and that it is as is, like no guarantees about quality etc.
It would be bad form if someone put something up on donedeal.ie or adverts.ie but at the same time I couldn't be bothered doing that so I don't mind too much.
The stuff we've given I usually get the sense that the person has a need for it and is really happy to get it and it's the same when I take something.
I guess it just takes one person to ruin things, but maybe they could have banned that person for abuse.
But what can you do?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=baltimore+book+thing+stamp&iar=ima...
Your mitigation strategy would work though too, I think. If it's a raffle kind of thing, then the resellers wouldn't have such an easy time, so it makes this thing less desirable for them.
Of course my friends went with an 80L backpack full of cloths, so they were told to just pick whatever they wanted, they didn't pick much though.
One could say it's the same as money, but I don't think so. There's no use in hoarding those credits and it's not as strict as real money. As long as it stops abuse it works as intended.
The downside is you now need someone to organize and keep track all of this.
Known as Scrip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
There was a good article in Cracked or similar about the White Bikes in Amsterdam (Free public bikes). The article sadly seems like it was taken down and I've never seen it replicated.
Basically all the White Bikes ended up in the canals, and the theory is simply, 1% of the population is 'bad' all the time and good people are 'bad' 1% of the time (for instance drunk), and you should design for this.
Even if your society is near perfect you still have to engineer around that 1% catastrophic failure. Bikes will be thrown in canals, and that woman possibly is a good person in a 1% bad spot or an outsider who is 'bad' for the group.
I routinely see items at the curb that are worth $20 or more used (like espresso makers or exercise equipment or furniture) with a sign FREE. I assume whoever picks it up just sells it.
So what? If you want to spend your days selling used junk for a few bucks, and I don’t, more power to you. My time is more valuable than that.
I understand why you’re upset and it does seem like this person took advantage of your good will. I guess I would not get too upset about it; you don’t know how much work that person put into selling these things. Could have been a lot more time than made it worthwhile.
Kid stuff.
My partner and I have young kids, so it is a revolving door of stuff in our house.
Buy Nothing solves a major problem in that if we need to get rid of something, someone wants it. And on the other side of that coin, if we need something, someone probably has it and is looking to part with it.
As an added bonus, we have built a much stronger connection with many of those who live in our neighborhood, people we might not otherwise have crossed paths with.
In the words of your average Ebay review, *A++++ Would Buy Nothing again*
> The Buy Nothing Project is about setting the scarcity model of our cash economy aside in favor of creatively and collaboratively sharing the abundance around us
Anarchism.. in my definition, is the lack of a singular authority. Not to be confused with "chaos".
I see this example (Buy Nothing Project) breaking the linear-ness of economy. Harvest, Build, Sell, Consume/Use, Discard. No re-use, no re-cycle. This is not sustainable, especially with population growing. We need to re-use. I don't think that anyone is doing (donating/giving away) to hurt the profits of XYZ company, I strongly believe that we all got so much 'garbage' in our home, things that we haven't touched/used for a looooong time, that as the Minimalists said (the first 120 podcast episodes - after Patreon I dropped them) "find this thing a new home".
> "I don't think that anyone is doing (donating/giving away) to hurt the profits of XYZ company, I strongly believe that we all got so much 'garbage' in our home, things that we haven't touched/used for a looooong time"
Both motivations are true for my girlfriend and me. We both want to make sure we don't get bogged down with superfluous stuff, so we give them to people who will appreciate and use them, but we also see it as an opportunity to not support corporations that do not have our (societal) best interests in mind.
The less stuff we buy, the less our money is used for purposes we disagree with or even abhor, in many cases. By buying the few things we do buy from small companies with responsible profiles, that's another step towards our money going to better purposes.
I don't really believe in the "power of the consumer" or "voting with your wallet" (both of which just lead to unnecessary consumption), hence why we try to buy as little new stuff as possible and prefer buying second hand whenever possible, but at least the little money we do spend won't be going (directly) to the exploiter's pockets.
I will also say that their kitchen cabinets are significantly higher quality than their other lines of shelves and cabinets. Better fasteners, hinges and so on. Yet again, they are significantly more expensive than most of the other furniture they carry.
Still, the amount of proper hardwood furniture in second hand stores is baffling to me, when you see people lugging home glorified cardboard disguised as furniture.
I don't think it's possible to view this as a free market solution unless you want the term "free market" to lose all meaning. The free market does not have a monopoly on rational decision making. Any market is based around exchange, which this project expressedly rejects.
Mutual aid is pretty far away from abolishing the state or abolishing the private ownership of the means of production, which were the bigger ideas of Bakunin and Kropotkin.
Matching markets are another example that is not based around exchange
A "free market" is literally defined as - "a system in which the *prices* for goods and services are self-regulated by the open market and by consumers" - all goods and services have a monetary price in such a system.
It is both inappropriate and in bad taste to call this a free market solution when it is clearly not.
This is inappropriate and in bad taste, and you missed the point of my comment.
Once you see cash as a broad p2p communication method it’s hard to imagine an Anarchist seeking to undo it as it allows people to collaborate over space and time in so many more ways than barter or physical gift economies.
Just because economic systems are politicized in our society doesn't mean it is inherently political to change your own personal economic system.
Right now they are studying at Stanford (started at age thirteen) and we hope that both of them will be posting on HN before the age of sixteen.
We have rarely bought our kids clothes.
On the flip side, we had bought a new crib when my first one was born. It lasted through our 2 kids and now with a family who uses it for her grandchild.
Some pairs of shoes see much more wear than others, and unlike adults, when kids don't wear a pair for a while because the weather is more suitable for other things (sandals or wellies) they'll often hit the next size up by the time they can wear them. So sometimes shoes will hardly be worn at all.
And a pair of kids wellies must see at least twenty pairs of feet before retiring. I don't think these actually ever get to the stage that they are worn out: they just get lost somewhere on the way long before that.
If we get used shoes we
At least that's my experience and interpretation of my kids, but YMMV.
1. Hyperlocal: your local group will he made up people near your house. You’ll get to know them. When the group gets too large, it’s split into two smaller groups.
2. Not bartering, not first-come-first-serve. When something is posted, the person offering is supposed to wait a while, then decide who to give it to. I don’t participate in the group, so I don’t know why this makes a difference, but my wife says it does.
Presumably because the joy of giving is the coin in which the transaction is paid, and the delay and interaction extend and amplify the joy.
There is no possible window that's relatively short (hours) and will fit everyone who wants to participate. For any day and hour you pick, someone will be permanently excluded (because of e.g. their job, studies), and other people will miss it regularly due to irregular life events.
And ultimately, there's no point in doing that if the activity itself doesn't require for everyone to be doing something together. Such a posting isn't a team meeting; it can be done asynchronously.
But without the negative connotation, because the obligation to give the item away after waiting for an arbitrary period means that if you can't find anybody who wants it, at least somebody will get it who knows how to resell it better than you do, and will thereby deliver it to someone who will enjoy it.
edit: the "I Haul Junk For Free" person serves a function.
Time delay is more fair and less anxiety inducing.
You see similar proposals for stock markets to process all orders that come in within one second in arbitrary order, to disincentivize the insanely expensive chase for nanoseconds in high speed trading.
It also allows you to select the most “deserving” though I’m more interested in how hard feelings are avoided.
People comment about why they need it or will use it for in that time, then the poster can decide who to give it to after a fair amount of time.
It reminds me Charlie Sheen's quip about prostitutes: "I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave." Likewise, one of the primary benefits of ordinary money/stuff transactions is that it's not all tangled up with obligation or any other social baggage.
- Sometimes multiple people are interested in a give.
- The giver needs to choose one somehow.
- Random selection is as common as anything else in my group.
- Some people like to give details, some people like to hear them, and some people like to use them to prioritize, because it fosters relationships with their close neighbors. It is by no means required.
If you ever decide that perhaps buying another new plastic thing from China via Amazon is not the best solution to a problem in your life, consider trying it.
To me, too. It reads like "In order to be considered for a gift, explain how you suck and can't provide, and how good you are at feeling generalized gratitude and appreciation. All of you will be judged, the least capable and most thankful will be chosen."
This reminds me of a personal policy I have with friends and acquaintances. Nobody ever “owes” me a beer. If I buy them one that’s the end of it. We are always “even”.
I don’t assume others work the same way so I also attempt to return favors. I think it’s a healthier frame of mind to not keep track of all the ways people potentially owe me something. Especially when it is trivial.
If I am keeping track I think it’s worth reevaluating the relationship entirely.
Or said another way I can see this policy working for Buy Nothing because it requires a healthy community. If the community is unhealthy the system breaks down. This reverts to any number of other perfectly good money/barter based alternatives like Craigslist and clones.
I think there's a lot of value in even just taking turns in giving and taking, even if you aren't tracking the exact dollars and cents.
This is a tough one, I've met many different cultures (although, in particular Slavic ones, sometimes Dutchies too) who really cannot stand not having the balances settled. Few of my friends who I'm very close with will still just want common things to be evened out as soon as possible. I don't think you can make a rule out of it.
My comment was based purely on my own worldview and is in no way meant to imply other people should emulate me. I edited that line to say I re-evaluate the relationship instead of you, which sounded prescriptive.
Fair callout that I could be excluding others but I never refuse being “paid back” and I never expect others to forgive a favor or debt.
I thjnk my philosophy would still be compatible with making Slavic friends :)
Money? Yes must be settled.
Drinks? Preferably settled the same night (more rounds). If not settled the same night, it goes into the infinite pool of “drinks on you next time we meet” where nobody keeps track.
Favors? "Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me."
This IMO is the ideal situation. :)
In the Netherlands, your table will run a tab and someone pays, and then later sends a tikkie (it's an app that makes paying the person back very easy) to the group. They get kinda weirded out if you violate this model, e.g. recently I was going to the shop, and a friend asked for something - €6 or so, small enough that I don't mind not being paid back for a one-off thing, and then a few weeks later sent me a message "I remembered you never sent me a tikkie for that, please do!"
There's a standard joke screenshot that goes around here of a whatsapp message after a date, translated, "Please pay €0.25 for mayo on your fries." It's probably not a joke.
When rounds are not expected, it feels really nice when someone unexpectedly buys everyone a round. Similarly, it feels delightfully magnanimous to buy a round; makes you feel like a King.
I can see how it quickly loses its charm once it’s an expected transaction to honor.
It’s a much more intimate experience and we formed relationships with people without even being able to speak at a conversational level.
This means that every time you want to sip your drink you have to entertain this needless protocol: identify someone around the table - preferably someone you have yet to drink with - say cheers (translation required), and sometimes drink all of the 60 mL cup at once. You should also keep a checklist of who you have and haven't drunk with. The more political, the greater the need to move around the table at random intervals, shake hands, and drink. This is a demonstration often devoid of meaning.
If it's a real party it can be fun to bottoms-up all the drinks. For a more relaxed meal & conversation setting (my preference), as an outsider this is uncomfortable. It ruins the slow enjoyment of expensive alcohol. Why can't I sip my own damn drink with my meal?!
Also as someone who drinks a lot less as I get older, I lately find myself not drinking at all at these events, because there is no middle ground.
It was totally acceptable to sip a drink. If I was empty and needed a refill I would simply take the shared container (650ml beer bottle, tea pot, etc.) and first refill someone or everyone’s drink, empty or not. Essentially the personal containers were bottomless.
I never felt an obligation to refill a specific person’s drink. But that situation never really came up because everyone eventually is the person initiating the refills.
It’s possible I was offending a lot of people. In fact it is likely. They were certainly generous enough to not say so however.
When I used to go to the pub with my cricket team the person who scored the highest that day would shout the group. Or if you'd won big on the poker machines etc then it would be your shout.
1. I never lend money because I have found the obligation upon the person receiving the money leads to negative consequences for me as a lender (whether friend or acquaintance). Instead I decide whether or not to gift the amount (or part of it), and I tell the person to “pay it back to someone else in need when they are well off in the future” or similar reason. Saying no is hard, but saying no is easier than dealing with the consequences of a friend that can’t easily pay money back (or even worse someone needs reminding which completely sucks, or they just don’t pay it backf).
2. I try to share costs approximately based upon ratios of disposable income, where possible. Some friends have $20 disposable after a week’s work, when I might have orders of magnitude more. Socially, this is a complicated manoeuvre, but it means I can pay for things we might like to do together, even though a friend might have radically different levels of income (or spare time). When that scheme won’t work for some tit-for-tat people, missing out on some things is the only option left (either we do something cheap, or they can’t be involved).
3. I don’ t get started with rounds of drinks - the social pressures are unfair on some and I dislike the obligation to drink to excess.
4. I sometimes offer drinks or dinner or whatever if someone can accept a freebie - I never do this when I would feel unwillingly obliged. I hardly ever buy someone a drink if they ask for it, as I don’t want to encourage that dynamic.
I do 1) differently. I was more generous in the past, but some people took advantage of that. I've also come to feel that simply giving money jeopardizes the peer relationship. instead, I now give any friend who asks a 0% interest loan with no due date. no questions asked, but I do keep track (roughly) of how much I've lent out to each person. I never say anything about it, but if they hit $1000 or so, I start saying no to further requests. I guess this probably violates the spirit of your policy, but I prefer this approach over having to decide yes or no for each individual request.
The idea that you accumulate wealth in order to give more away than anybody else, and through that gaining power, proving your superiority to the people you help e.g. "potlatch" culture, is completely left out of the capitalist theory of mind.
I've been reading Bataille lately, who was onto something like that with "The Accursed Share." His ideas surrounded by a lot of mystical trappings, though - he seemed to see himself as a sort of anarchist neocon - intentionally creating myths and rituals to get people to follow material goals.
edit: It's the gift that creates resentment, whether or not there's the boilerplate of a loan. Even repayment doesn't eliminate the resentment. Capitalists try to solve that with interest and an abstract time-value of money. Outside of capitalism it's solved through the person receiving the gift either 1) accumulating resources that could help the gift-giver, and watching them carefully to find the time when they could offer an equally effective reciprocal gift, or 2) helping others even weaker to show that they still have the ability to dominate.
I have personally adopted a "never loan, only give" policy since I was a teenager, which has often been a "I understand that you're definitely going to pay me back, so if you need to consider it a 0% loan with a balloon payment due at the heat death of the Universe, consider it that" or a "do a nice thing for someone else" (similar to you both.) I don't know that all of the verbiage made a difference.
edit2: I'm pretty sure we recognize the most dominant person as the person who has no possessions, but who everyone feels obligated and honored to host and to help. It's the fantasy of what people think the Dalai Lama is (rather than the title of the former heads of state of Tibet.)
Sometimes when I know someone has spent say their weeks disposable income when doing something together, I spend a weeks disposable income on something they need: the price discrepancy means they can’t repay it equally so they have to come up with another mental model. That can only be done nicely to some people (no one wants to feel in debt or obligated).
It is very dependant on each person and each situation, and there is no generic tidy way to deal with the discrepancy.
Sustained relationships have to be two-way to flourish. So, while one should not keep track of what favors to call, one should consider taking favors from the folks we have given favors to.
It boosts their self-esteem as well, that they have the ability to give, and have exercised it.
... yep 100% glad I upvoted! This is exactly my mindset on this.
I am the same, with the addition that if someone says something like "your shout I think?" they might be having trouble so I will usually go along with it. Better to potentially help a friend in need than be petty.
It goes along with a mindset that I have always had, which is that it shows more strength to give than it does to take. I think most decent people have that internalized in various ways.
Some people may be more needy or deserving?
Or, if you strictly followed first come/first serve, some people might abuse the platform by constantly being "first!!!" on everything. Having a delay makes that harder to get away with.
Belltown, in Seattle, got split into 3 (4? I can't remember) communities and there's still questions about which group people belong to because they're not sure if they're covered by one or another along the boundaries. Some of the resulting communities are far more active than others, too.
I moved from there to Greenwood in North Seattle and I quite literally have no idea what my new group is because there doesn't seem to be a map and all of the Greenwood groups end 2 blocks south of me.
A ton of people left, moderators stepped down in frustration, and some people started an alternative https://www.facebook.com/groups/sharedeconomyphinneyridgenor....
Since getter is chosen then there might be small incentive to be in a good standing with everybody so you get the stuff when others are interested too.
We live in a middle-class neighbourhood. It is desirable: there are big mansions by the river, several blocks of turn-of-the-century character homes, and then cookie cutter boxes from the 50's for the last couple of blocks. We live in a cookie-cutter box.
It was a wonderful community and then once it hit 1,000 people, they divided it into six smaller groups. Suddenly, we were in this tiny "sprout" with no activity.
A lot of the complaints that spurred the split was that there was too much kids stuff clogging people's news feeds. I don't know why they couldn't have just made a group for kid items and a group for the other stuff.
We ended up dropping out and it hasn't really affected us. Now we just leave stuff we don't want behind our garage (or on the boulevard for city-wide giveaway weekends on long weekends throughout the summer) and the stuff disappears in a few hours.
I participate in a similar group (freecycle), and this is very important. Otherwise a few people who are always on the group get everything, and I'm pretty sure some of them just resell anything valuable.
Sometimes I miss Facebook for these kinds of things, I wish there was a super popular open-source social network that all my friends would use. Or a free social network without all the nasty practices.
I tried again with a neighboring zip, but this time I hesitated for a moment to make sure I entered it right, and the search box did a weird thing where it popped down an expanded city name along with the zip code. I clicked this and THEN smacked enter, and I got a search results page!
Of course there are no results in my area (and no way to tell how large a radius it considers "my area"; should I try again with a zip a few miles away? a few dozen miles away?), but now I know there's a secret-knock to get into the site.
Yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath.
The OP also talks about "open source", you can launch an off-FB group and tell your friends to advertise it on Facebook.
Does anyone else notice this or have this issue?
Personally, it hadn't even occurred to me that this is any of my business.
If you’re just giving it away as a free disposal service, then sure it doesn’t matter.
For my wife and me it's not just free disposal (I can handle my free disposal by going downstairs and dumping it by the side of the trash container). It's about ensuring a working item doesn't get trashed, but will continue being useful for someone else.
In all my wife's giveaways, there's one or two people out there who are regular, repeat "customers". But we can't tell whether they're hoarders, or whether they just happen to need all the stuff they get from us, or whether they pass that stuff on to their family and friends. Or hell, maybe they resell it. Doesn't matter, as long as we're somewhat confident someone will make use of it - because that's someone who saved their money, and that's one less item being bought.
I guess we could debate it either way. It comes down to personal preference.
We've got a hoarder couple 3 doors down who have been running a yard sale for about 5 years straight now.
I can't say I particularly care who gets the stuff we're giving away, but my wife and I definitely roll our eyes at each other when they see the hoarders attempting to sell something we left out for free.
(Smaller items I give to Goodwill as it can be hard to see what they are on a drive by)
I also ask directly in the listing that people let me know approximately where they are without me having to ask, and I ignore anyone who doesn't - this weeds out the people who just mash "can I have this" or "is this still available" without actually reading the listing, who are most likely to be time wasters in my experience.
For higher value items in the current C19 climate, insisting I deliver locally also stops people taking unnecessary journies between risk areas, and puts me in more control of my risk profile.
Are you sure these people aren't collecting all the free stuff in the neighbourhood, then selling anything of value and hoarding the rest?
Those hoarded items are usually unsellable in their current form, but with a bit of restoration could become sellable. Some items are faulty, but are still hoarded for parts to help repair other items.
Overall this behaviour is probably very good for the planet - many items end up seeing far more use than they would otherwise.
It's questionable if its good economic use of these people's time though. Is it worth them spending all day collecting and repairing a $150 TV, when they could have gone to work in a factory that can turn out a new TV every 30 seconds for far fewer dollars?
It may not be, but the problem usually is that the market can't make a better use of those people's time. I don't think many people would work such high effort, low pay tasks if they could actually get a better job.
The collection continues, however. I have to catch myself in some areas doing the same thing.
It's also a good way of introducing them to tech that they wouldn't normally get for themselves. The best example is mechanical keyboards; most people don't think they want one until they've used it regularly. And kindles.
Making people who need your stuff pay you in stories or "gratitude" does not appeal to me anyway. Even if I have a $5 item to give away and someone just flips it for profit, that is time they spent and I did not, so the item is still gone from my home and someone who actually wants it gets it. The fact that one other person also benefitted doesn't bother me.
Not that there is anything wrong with people that are of course. Different folks have different priorities.
So I'll give it away and if anyone thinks it's worth the time and effort to sell it, that's not for me to decide. Once it is out of my hands, it is no longer mine.
It seems that the human neocortex has evolved mostly for social group formation, and the theory of money is that an economic actor can be nearly basal in their pursuit of it and still produce a functional society. This is a remarkable starting point toward higher levels of organization, but fundamentally proven incorrect. Money does not produce positive results when introduced to cultures without pre-existing large-scale social cooperation based on things like morality. Even in these groups money creates prosperity but makes them vulnerable to extremely profitable forms of parasitism, which ultimately lead to collapse.
Money is a good thing, but it has failure modes that exploit the human emotions it was meant to replace, and we haven’t evolved past that point. When I look at the economy, I don’t see hard-nosed rationality maximizing progress toward human achievement. I see 99.99% irrational human emotions or rational exploit of the same, with maybe a few people out there spending a bit of their time on progress.
We've gotten a ton of stuff from the group as well. A big thing is, as someone else mentioned, stuff for children. For example in our group there's been a package of accessories going around for a 1 year old's birthday party. When our daughter turned 1 we got the package, threw her a birthday party, then passed it along to the next person. We've gotten lots of toys from the group, and when we find that our daughter doesn't care for a toy anymore we pass it back to the group.
The only problem with it of course is that it requires Facebook. I deleted my account a long time ago and have Facebook blocked from all my devices but my wife keeps it around largely for the Buy Nothing group. I wish there was a way to participate without Facebook.
- Most Americans provide services, rather than producing goods.
- We're so so far from stopping consuming stuff; even an optimist should only hope that we'll buy somewhat less stuff.
At an individual level, you could pay businesses/people to do useful work like picking up litter or charity/NGO projects
But ultimately I’d say no; the value of a web site or an economic system is in its efficiency, not the stickiness of its inefficiency. Imagine an alien comparing Wikipedia to Twitter. Both are information services sourced from user contributions. Twitter is just designed to be massively inefficient, and that is how it derives its equity value. Google has also been downranking the most efficient websites for years now due to this valuation convention.
But it’s really only a convention. Wall St, or the Fed could come up with a different measure of value and it would change everything. A more sustainability-oriented web measure might be ratio of information access to creation, implying robust value. You only need to look at AOL instant messenger or MySpace to realize why this would be important. Wikipedia’s total value is probably greater on a long enough timeline.
A more sustainable measure of a economy might be something like exports per natural resource consumed, including human time. A good example is an IP creator like Charlie Chaplin or Antione de Saint-Expury or any of a host of scientists. I’m not sure that consumptive GDP has much relevance to the competitiveness and sustainability of an economy.
(The reality is it’s likely not their book to give away - it’s the publisher’s.)
Is there any irony in that the women who started this project are in an area that is the home of Amazon corporate HQ (the company that wants to "sell everything"), and businesses that service/rely on Amazon, living on an commuter island where many Amazon executive level staff, and businesspeople working for firms that service Amazon, are likely to live. If not irony, at least a stark contrast.
Later, I realized that it has a different audience. There are people who genuinely have too many things in their home. I have visited people who had three full shelves of dishes (it was not a big family). Those things take up their space, give them no joy nor practical value, and are better given away. Bird feeders without a bird. Piles of ropes, for absolutely no usage.
But Nothing (because you have too much already and anything you do need you can probably get from someone else who has too much)
The current system is incredibly clunky and ripe for abuse. Here's what it looks like for me:
1. Post the item I want to give away
2. Check back in a few hours to see if anyone has commented to say they want it (I'd do first-come, first serve, but it gets abused by people who watch all day and claim everything)
3. Go through the replies to see which are actual requests and not "my friend Steve would probably be interested!"
4. Generate a random number generator and take the result mod number of legitimate requests
5. Notify the winner and give them pickup instructions
6. Put the item out for them
About half the time, there are issues. They don't see the PM I sent them, they forget to pick it up, they realize they have no means to pick it up because they have no car, etc.
Issues with this system:
* Many parts to the process where I have to do something, wait, then come back and do the next step hours later.
* No reputation system. Recipients who are flakey or unreliable can continue being flakey to lots of people, wasting the time of givers, making the whole process less appealing.
* The gift givers are expected to choose a winner at their own discretion, but people are likely choosing recipients based on unfair biases.
Here's how I want it to work:
1. I put the item on my porch
2. I post an item I want to give away. At the time I post, I specify the parameters of how to pick the winner automatically (e.g., they have a rating >= X, they have a verified address within Y miles, randomly select after Z hours).
3. The system automatically notifies the winner and sends them pickup instructions.
4. The winner comes and picks up the item.
5. We both leave feedback to say the transaction went smoothly.
There are 3489502983450896 open source forum/groups software packages for every platform, every language, every database. Same with authentication. Hell, they could even drop in OAuth so people could still use their FB credentials without giving all their users' data up.
Hosting their own groups is a less than a one day job. There is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for this decision. None.
I don't know if this is actually a novel idea in the US, but in my country every city has multiple "trade X", "buy/sell X", "free X" groups. Where X is the city name and people give away free stuff or sell it for a small price.
And this is on top of sites like our local eBay and thrift shops where you can give away or get stuff for (almost) free, too.
I'm having a hard time thinking what this 'project' actually does.
For this reason I just give anything of remote value to charity shops instead - they have the geographic distribution to spread donations around, and it means a charity gets direct monetary value as well.
“LETS allow people to negotiate the value of their own hours or services, and to keep wealth in the locality where it is created.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system
Basically LETS are similar to the system described in the OP article, but in LETS you cannot take without having given, and value is assigned to transactions so that in order to get something of a certain value you must have previously provided at least that much value to someone else.
LETS are basically like a money based system except that they don’t use money, and the points can only be spent in your local LETS community.
Freecycle on the other hand has broader distribution in one sense in that they don't force you to limit your audience. And no reliance on Facebook.
They said they've been looking for a volunteer to run another group where I'm at (neighboring towns). They said you have to do a training. To run a facebook group? It makes me unsurprised they haven't found anyone.
There's a group for my county, as well, with only 2 members (I live in a pretty rural area), which I didn't try to join.
On the food front, there are freegan groups. Interesting place to look if you want to see the degree of food waste happening daily. When I saw some photos just how much perfectly good, high-quality foodstuffs people can find in dumpsters by grocery stores, my jaw fell to the floor. We're talking "feed a family of 4 for a week from one garbage-spelunking trip" levels.
Further on the food front, I was happy to discover public food fridges are becoming popular in Poland. We have one ~5 minutes from where we live, so now whenever we miscalculate our cooking and end up with a bunch of food that we don't feel like eating, or some ingredients that we're sure we won't make use of before they expire, we just pack them, label with date and list of ingredients, and put them in the public fridge. Less food thrown away, somebody gets a meal for free, and it's much less awkward for everyone involved.
I’ve also been able to get rid of a bunch of stuff I don’t use, and we’ve received all kinds of things, including a Laptop and power tools.
I’ve found one of the most empowering things about giving stuff away is I’m free from trying to figure out if I’m getting a fair price for selling something, or if it’s going to “the right person”. No strings giving is really nice.
Probably trying to foster tighter built communities instead of some guy that drove 20+ miles away to pick up your old monitor that you’ll never see again.
I am surprised no startup (AFAIK) has tried to replicate and monetize the success of the Buy Nothing Project.
I fear it will happen eventually.
I once commented as such in their fB page and I was crucified #LOL.
I am all for try to buy used if you can first. Recycle, freecycle, upcycle.
Even better: try and do without. #MINIMALIST
What did you think your comment was adding to the conversation?
On the one hand, some people have reduced income during the pandemic, so they don't buy less brand-new first-hand stuff.
On the other hand, some people might become more wary of second-hand items as disease vector.
I mean why else do I work and make money? Ultimately my answer is to spend it on things. I hate traveling so the idea of buying “experiences” has never appealed to me.
Environmental benefits don’t matter to me either. I have never driven a car, don’t fly, eat a plant-based diet, live in a tiny apartment, and will never have kids. My impact is low enough as it is.
Works like a charm for me.
But the really rich can't get by so easily, so some of them practice charitable giving of various sorts, the ultimate anti-buying experience.
Is it sarcasm or how you really think?
You seen to have solid logic centres and a steady income. You’ve also put thought in to your impact on the planet as a whole. But the part that confuses me is that it seems you’ve not questioned the “work for money, spend money” script.
Billions of people alive today continue to work for things besides money, and optimize for all sorts of goals that are rewarding to them: positive impacts on the world that are magnitudes larger than they could do alone, the happiness of loved ones, refinement of technologies that people can use to help themselves, self-knowledge, and so-on.
There are so many different ways to live that I can fill my brain with them and still have no view of the end of the list.
That resonates; I find "buying experiences" philosophy to be a scam - a thinly veiled attempt to extract recurring revenue from people.
> I have never driven a car, don’t fly, eat a plant-based diet, live in a tiny apartment, and will never have kids. My impact is low enough as it is.
Could be lower. That stuff you spend your money on, it has a lot of embodied energy in it. Shame to have it manufactured when you could reuse it from someone who doesn't need it anymore. Shame to throw it away if someone else could make use of it.
Out of ways to be more environmentally friendly, this is one of the most low-effort, high-impact ones.
It depends how you look at it but do guess you do spend some time going somewhere on vacation. When I go camping or hiking I sort of still consider it an experienece to be bought and even if it is close to little it nevertheless costs something to travel, the cost of time off, etc.