Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

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> and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help

I've found the same thing from people. But not in support, just in dealing with them.

I move a lot, and inevitably end up giving a lot of things away. What I've found is that when I post offers for things for free, it attracted the absolute worst of people. People who would claim it and never show up, or claim it and tell me they could come get it in two weeks. And -tons- of people who say they'll take it and ask when I can deliver it. Then get offended when I tell them I'm not delivering it.

I still remember vividly a dresser I was offering for free. A person said they'll take it, and asked when I could bring it over. When I told them no, they replied in all caps something along the lines of 'I HAVE A COROLLA HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO FIT IT IN THERE', like I was the dumb one.

So now I just list everything for a pretty low price, then just tell them it's free when they arrive. It cut down on the amount of riffraff by about 90%.

Good idea. I gave away a large copy machine - industrial strength, large size - the kind where you can feed it in 400 pages and it will do loads of double sided copies and staple things in minutes. Nice, but it was old, and I had no need any longer.

Put it on facebook market and had probably 40 messages in the first 2 minutes. I hadn't realized how easy/automated FB makes it to respond. And I felt like I was letting people down because I wasn't responding fast enough. Eventually one person came to my place to get it, but... they thought it was a printer, and they were looking for a printer, so they left.

I kept getting loads of the same "still available?" messages, then "when can you deliver?" and "you want me to come pick it up?!" messages. Like... it's a $1500 (used today) copier. It was probably $7000 new. It has extensions to hold 10000 sheets at a time. It's serious. No, I'm not driving to your house with this this to see if you might want it. WTF is wrong with people?

Many days later, someone connected. And... it was great, but I was so wary/tired of dealing with freeloaders and tirekickers that I was suspect with him too at first. But this guy ran a boys club a few towns away, and their last copier had broken, and they didn't have funds to repair it. This was such a windfall for them. He happily came over with a big enough truck, loaded it up, kept offering to pay me ("are you sure? this is a lot!") and was just so damn grateful that I hadn't given it away yet. I'm glad I waited a bit longer vs just paying a company to come and take it away.

I discovered that setting boundaries early is very helpful for these kind of transactions. Sentences where I highlight that clarity, punctuality and reliability is important to me usually dramatically increase the quality of contacts.

When I freecycle things I always ask a question in the listing, often "where are you coming from". People who don't answer get rejected. It seems to cut a lot of the time wasters.

I had a similar experience advertising for flatmates. "Room available immediately" was a terrible idea, and I had to have something like 20 people come view to find 2 suitable. Many disorganised people no one else wanted to live with (e.g. 40 minute viewing and conversation before bringing up the fact that they had a dog, when it said "no pets" in the listing). "Available next month" was much better.

I've tried the same thing, adding a low price just as a filter. It works, but it's kind of a shocking lesson in human nature. Offer a $100 item for free and you will never sleep again thanks to all the responses, but try to sell it for $5 and you may not get a response for days.

Well, yes. If I see a $100 item posted for $5, I'm going to be extremely suspicious. That's probably going to be $5 wasted on something that's broken and worth $0.

If I see a $100 item posted for $0, then it doesn't matter if it's broken and worth $0 because I didn't spend any money.

/r/choosingBeggars is a non-stop stream of outrageous examples like this. Really crazy stuff.

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