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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Quite lucky that that ended up on the street where someone could discover it instead of in a dumpster where it'd almost certainly never be seen again.

As the old saying goes, "one man's trash is another man's treasure." The problem seems to be uniting those two people.

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I think Craigslist or Ebay was supposed to solve that problem, but:

- Craigslist is full of tire kickers who just annoy the crap out of you with stupid questions (for free things!!!)

- Ebay is full of scam artists and hucksters

So... the problem persists.

> - Craigslist is full of tire kickers who just annoy the crap out of you with stupid questions (for free things!!!)

In my experience listing your stuff for even a couple of dollars greatly reduces this problem. If I want to get rid of something on craigslist for free I just put it on the curb and post the address.

The equivalent of craigslist here I find that: free = gone by end if day and $0.01 or more means languishing forever.

I avoided eBay for years due to horror stories online. Then I had some junk I wanted to sell for a token amount where I didn’t mind a chance of losing some of the money.

A couple hundred sales later and I’ve only had one problem. eBay sided with me on it, to my surprise.

Maybe don’t list one-off priceless family heirlooms on eBay, but it’s actually quite good for moving a lot of random products in my experience.

Did you make decent money-per-hour on it? My experience is you can sell stuff, but you're talking hours of effort photographing, listing, communicating with sellers, packing, and shipping for a couple bucks-per-hour reward, even accounting for the big-ticket items. It's just not worth it compared to the dumpster. Sucks.

Facebook Marketplace is great for this type of thing. I know many HN'ers hate FB, but it's really easy to move stuff there. You definitely still get tire kickers, but like CL it's local, so you're not shipping.

I just moved cross country and was downsizing, so we put a bunch of stuff up on Marketplace, some free, some for money. The hardest part was communicating dimensions despite listing them specifically. People would show up with a compact SUV (CR-V/RAV4/etc.) to pick up a couch. I just shook my head. I would take about 3 pictures, no editing, write a 2 sentence description, put in the dimensions (if appropriate for the item) and generally within a day have it gone.

Note that I wasn't trying to make money, I just wanted to get rid of things, but that's probably not much different than CL, but could be different than listing things on ebay.

It's still probably not worth it time wise, but the stuff I was getting rid of was still in good shape and could be useful to somebody, so I'd prefer to have somebody get some use out of it instead of just throwing it away.

Our town and some neighboring towns (all suburbs of Boston) have "free lists" on Facebook for this purpose. Membership is nominally restricted to town residents, and picky/annoying takers and resellers become "known" fairly quickly and ignored. Very effective for rehoming stuff that isn't trash but not worth selling.

There's a house down the street from me who had a "free stuff" pile sitting outside for a month or two. Just a few things, but they got replenished over time, and I'm sure the ones that were never picked up went to the trash, so overall it seemed like it worked. We got some nice still-packaged outlets and dimmer switches from it.

When giving away a bunch of stuff while emptying my late parents’ home, we had much better luck on Facebook Marketplace than Craigslist. Way higher percentage of people who showed up when they said they would. Once we switched to listing things there, it went way faster. No idea why there was such a difference.

Paypal is an enabler for eBay scam artists. Try reporting something, it's hilarious, completely byzantine and it will only end when they have wasted enough time to say the case is too old and will be closed.

There are so many people in things for a quick buck that people that truly care keep their treasures hidden.

Some meth head probably took the shelves to the scrap yard for a couple bucks after dumping the slides illegally by the side of the road somewhere.

Yeah. I have a bunch of stuff I'm sure others would treasure--at least for a few days. But I have zero interest in uniting the pile with them if it takes more than a super-token effort.

There’s an interesting album/book that was put together out of a dumpster find: https://www.metafilter.com/145686/Margaret-A-scrapbook-found... Apparently “Chicken John” had taken money to take a vanload of junk to the dump, found a dumpster with some furniture that he thought he could sell, so he swapped out the furniture and junk, and found a scrapbook and candle in the bottom of the dumpster and sat there looking through the photos and poems, etc. I’m not sure if the album is still available, but it’s a great listen (I have the deluxe package from when it was first released).

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