I made $100K from a dick joke
imgur.com
imgur.com
Then I noticed he was selling the exact same model of laptop so it was easy for me to realize that he had just "bought" my laptop to remove the listing so it wouldn't compete against his. I messaged ebay support to accuse him but they didn't do anything about it.
Since he had made the order, eBay did show me his shipping information so I ordered a "glitter bomb" which was basically glitter in a tube with a spring. I got a very nasty accusatory email from him, but it was very vague. He wouldn't specify what he received, but that he was smart enough to not open it. That's how I knew he got the full effect.
I just replied something to the effect of "You never paid me. Why would I send something to you?"
Like grocery stores? Department stores? Costco? Buying in bulk and selling smaller lots to consumers over time is the definition of retail sales.
If you want to eliminate middlemen and buy only from manufacturers, you better first know/learn chinese, japanese, french, german and spanish. And get a forklift. Most only ship product by the pallet.
I think they're saying that is the value added work, which they don't do.
scalping is entirely rational, there is an item that you can acquire cheap and sell for a lot, that's the basis of every business that exists.
yes, at your family home you can expect that people will leave you "your" cookie (actually, not my siblings) but bringing that ethos to the marketplace will lead to disappointment.
No, it's really not. Someone who buys up all of the new PS5s with a script and then re-sells them on Ebay for 2x retails is providing no positive service. Same shit is happening even to publicly reservable campsites lately. I don't believe in Hell, but if there is one then there's definitely a spot reserved in the 7th layer for people who scalp.
I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.
Your average normie has no interest in the hassle of selling their used stuff (which has, if anything, got harder in my 25ish years using eBay), nor of buying random used staff from anonymous individual sellers.
Etsy covers the arts & crafts coded goods (though much is now China dropship).
Amazon allows the big merchants to sell to normies who just want to click "buy" without thinking about seller rating risk, when something will arrive, etc. Basically most people have no idea they are buying from not-Amazon, because it says amazon.com and that's good enough. eBay never had the smarts to create that user experience.
Do they even do it nowadays? I was under impression it turned into an ordinary marketplace, probably with a bit more focus towards small/private sellers.
Recently I bought a chainsaw tool on eBay from China as I didn't want to buy a 6-pack for $10. I was able to buy a couple for about $0.20 more per unit. Sure, higher unit price and they'll be here slower but it's several $6ish saved.
The eBay search function isn't great, but it's vastly better than Amazon, where search results are polluted by large numbers of garbage sponsored results - this may be related to its success in these niches. (although in my case it's partly because I can avoid paying for Amazon Prime, and still choose things based on prices that include shipping)
(I ordered a bunch of stuff, maybe 800 USD. They decided the order is fraudulent, and canceled it, without ever telling me. When I moved into my new place, there was nothing. No sheets, no nothing from Amazon. That this order was "canceled" without any email seemed to puzzle Amazon support. They told me in the chat to reorder with fasted shipping, and that they would reimburse the shipping. Of course, they did not. And the chat protocols clearly stating Amazon would reimburse the express shipping were a "misunderstanding".
When I got the package a few days later, the $150+ set of cello strings I ordered, sold and shipped by amazon, were counterfeits (and damaged due to improper packing, not that it mattered). I had to do a charge back to get my money back.
Mr. Jeff Bezos, CEO
Amazon dot com, Inc.
410 Terry Avenue North
Seattle, Washington 98109-5210
(206) 266-1000
The strings were guitar strings rather than cello strings. They're too short for a cello. The winding metal is different too. A bow doesn't grip guitar strings as well.
Most counterfeiters send super cheap cello strings with a fake label. In those cases, the best way to tell is that the silk windings on the strings will be the wrong colors.
There's a huge difference in sound. Cheap/fake strings tend to sound metallic and harsh. They also tend to break quickly, while a proper set of strings can last over a year.
In a case like this,there's not even the need for small claims - if you just contacted the better business bureau, you'd have gotten reimbursed the shipping and then something reasonable on top as 'an apology for the misunderstanding.'
Next time you have a straightforward 'they're wrong' issue with a company where you're getting outsourced flowcharts for support, try out the bbb. They're great.
Small claims would obviously also work, but that's a major investment in time/bureaucrazy, while a bbb complaint can be completed online in 10 minutes with maybe one or two brief follow-ups, but usually all it is, is them getting in contact with a human who can do things - and for cases like this, they obviously try to make it right.
I think you don't need even an oral agreement for a contract to be valid. Conclusive action is enough. Take a newspaper, but 2 USD on the table, leave. No words exchanged but valid sales contract established.
But if I am looking for something specific, it is an incredible failure. It’s so bad I suspect they intentionally don’t want it to work well. That is, I think they only want to optimize for low-effort social buying, not picky people who know exactly what they want.
For this reason I have bought way more stuff off eBay than FB Marketplace recently.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories usually, but I’m pretty sure the state of Marketplace search is, if not ‘deliberate’, at least a result of metrics-driven development. The search results are _just_ useful enough to keep you scrolling and tapping, so the vagueness increases engagement :-(
If I wanted to sell a Dewalt angle grinder, I would go to Facebook first.
If I wanted to sell a Sony E-mount camera lens, I would go to eBay first.
Most used things I buy make more sense on Facebook. Most people I know use Facebook because they are usually looking for regular things.
"Is this still available?" Yes it is - never heard from again.
I stopped giving out my address. I will give a general area where we can meet so they can gauge how far it is for them. When they are on their way, I give them the public location to meet. Only serious people will meet me. On some occasions, I still get ghosted. But ghosting has become more and more common. I don't recall it being this bad when Craigslist was huge.
Rather go back to yard sales.
I usually just give folks my home address and a time I'm going to be home anyways, and ask them to send me a message once they're on their way. Then I generally forget about it until I get a message from them. If they ghost me, oh well.
I don't take the ad down, and if anyone else asks, I just tell them to ask me again after the scheduled time.
For a lot of stuff, as a seller, I'll just trade-in or use random hobbyist forum buy&sell sections which ad-hoc reputation systems.
I opened a seller account in about 2020 to unload some server gear and almost got scammed, but I googled the buyers name and saw he was accused of fraud by several other people. I re-routed the package and although I didn't get reimbursed for that fee, ebay made me right and paypal (I think) gave me a small credit. They even had a phone call with me which seemed like they actually investigated it (I dont remember many details, it was 1 transaction 5 years ago).
There's just no way that any online auction can control fraud. I was on ebay yesterday as a buyer, looking for a tape backup drive. The seller clearly had been burned and (bitterly) warned that the sale was final, because previously he had sold a working drive which was parted out, replaced with broken parts (heads) and returned as defective. there's no way a third party can protect against it because either way the fraudster wins. 1) sell a bad drive, claim it was good, but accuse the buyer of fraud. Or 2) buy a good drive, swap it out with bad parts and return it. how could anyone (like ebay) solve this problem?
Remember losing it a few years ago when an obvious scammer tried to bully me into a partial refund for an item he had already resold at a 50% markup.
In a way I like the more conversational forum buy & sell system where I have feedback, but also each purchase starts with a DM. I usually can suss out from a few DMs if a buyer is going to be a tire kicker wasting my time, or a perfectionist who will be a pain to sell to. In either case I let those buyers pass and wait for someone worth doing business with.
On eBay you have no choice in who your buyer is.
1: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/craigslist-revenue-...
that said, general consensus at least where I am in WA and Canada is FB Marketplace is the new CL. which is a same because FB sucks
Each of those three claims to be the largest one in some metric.
I wonder at times whether this is their game, hoping people will just tell them not to bother sending it back and they get a refund anyway.
As for ebay, I stopped selling anything on there years ago, well over a decade, when someone tried to scam me out of a laptop but failed. If something is valuable enough for me to sell, I sure as shit am not selling it on eBay.
More often than not, I give away my valuable tech that I'm done with, because I'd rather get nothing for it, and give it to someone who'll appreciate it than risk being scammed by some scumbag.
This way, friends and family get my hand-me-down PCs, laptops, phones, etc for nothing and they're still, by the time I'm done with them far better than something they'd buy with their budgets. When I buy something, I factor its lifetime in my possession into it's cost, I effectively expect £0 value left in it when I'm done or I don't buy it; everybody wins.
For old computer stuff, I gave away quite some stuff to people driving to Ukraine. This then goes to kids or their cause.
Probably indicative of not having a very good business brain. However, it always seems strange to me when when people buy things and keep track of their used values the whole time they own it - expecting at some point to trade it in.
A couple of days later I saw the same item relisted. I wouldn't be surprised if the person I was bidding against was just there to pump the price for the seller, or was an alt account of the seller. Obviously against eBay's TOS but I'd be surprised if it didn't happen.
As far as I remember ebay hand waved at everything, especially scam.
Allegro is getting enshitiffied nowadays since it was bought by VC.
I deleted my account and sold it on Amazon instead. How anyone puts up with eBay I have no idea.
This situation may still occur if you are taking offers on an item. In that case the buyer has to pay within 48 hours of the offer being accepted or the listing will become eligible for re-posting.
Long story short, don't expect Amazon to be more reasonable than Ebay these days.
Two executives were recently imprisoned over harassing a journalist, to give you an idea of the corporate culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
I do know for a fact that eBay can kick a seller off very quickly though. I bought a NES shaped raspberry pi a few years back as a gift. The day I got the item, I went to leave the seller glowing feedback, only to find his account was axed (he included NES roms on the SD card).
My sister was working at a Telco so we just confirmed that he had actually received it because he put a SIM card into it, proof and everything eBay didn't care.
I withdrew the money from my PayPal account before they could claw it back. PayPal still works for me but eBay is amazingly impressive at immediately banning any new account I tried created since then.
the incredulity was that everybody imagined that there would be more scammers out there than honest people, but there weren't.
but what is ebay supposed to do about people who claim they sent things vs people who claim they didn't receive things?
Accountability and reputation is the missing secret sauce in this world it seems.
But when the lookup reveals that they did activate the device, now maybe you've inappropriately accessed someone else's PII and you did believe beforehand that the results would show that it was no longer registered to you.
Curiously on Mercari, which seems to be more pro-seller, I've seen some GPU listings with "this is a scam" type comments attached to them. Very different way of handling the transactions over there it seems.
Wow, what disgusting human beings..
https://investors.etsy.com/press-releases/press-release-deta...
If he got the laptop but didn’t pay, then he is probably selling it.
If he didn’t get the laptop, then he was trying to sell it on (for a profit) before he even got it from you?
Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it became the top post of the day."
Remember, kids: lying is only wrong when it's unprofitable.
That's why Merlin says honesty is the most important virtue.
You need to follow that chain of thought a little further. The unfortunate weak spot in a capitalist economy is that it's basically a Darwinistic system where the fittest survive, and "fit" means willing to do anything to make a dollar. Morals therefore become a weakness, and those who are guided by morals will be stomped out by those who don't really care. The guardrails are made of laws, not morals, and those who make the laws are often benefiting from the status quo. Like it or not, this is the jungle we find ourselves in.
damn.
The guardrails that work are made of brand awareness and reputation.
Laws are there to stop the company from harms that are too severe for waiting for people to suffer them and from harms to third parties that don't get a say on the decision.
Both of those kinds seem to be completely broken nowadays, everywhere. Getting the law back into working form seems easier, but it's not a viable alternative for most of the things you'll want companies to have morals about.
Only anecdotes from outside the medium can inform us to be less naive. Or doing an analysis which takes effort, skill, and time per-person
I mean, on some level, everything is marketing. People don't like marketing when it's fraudulent and morally suspect, which of course makes sense - I don't like tech when it's morally suspect, either!
But literally everything you know about, every product you use on any kind of basis, every service you use, every creator you follow, is something you know about because of some marketing, directly or indirectly.
And I'm certainly happy about a lot of new products/services/etc that I use, and think my life is richer for it.
That’s a broad and vague truth. Parent critics direct marketing. Also as exceptions makes the rules: the best item I ever bought was a second hand bike on the local Craigslist. Super cheap (repair included) and commuted +10000km with it. The « marketing » was the descriptive pictures and honest description, I guess.
It's not unusual to do this. Especially when they're trying to get a retailer to carry their items. They'll create fake buzz. Stuff like getting all your friends to go to a store asking "Do you carry X?" soon after you've pitched X to the store is a method that's worked for over a century.
I think this culture of normalizing lying means that more and more humans are just garbage. Because being able to trust someone is telling the truth is just a fundamental part of integrity. Without integrity we have.. well I guess the world we live in.. dangerous, full of trash. Everything is bullshit.
I hope the machines take over soon.
You're right that trust matters - that's why we created rules and systems to encourage honesty. But lying is as old as humanity itself.
Just like the world we grew up in...?
This type of lying-marketing has been around well over a century. There are documented cases of the tactic I described going back a century.
Unlike back then we at least regulate false advertising now. Overall the space is more honest than it historically has been.
If people on an entertainment site and entertained by the viral marketing, and they order a product knowing what it is and get the product they ordered, then what is the problem exactly?
This product is actually an ideal case for marketing, because most people weren't aware that a product like this existed. The best ads notify you about something you genuinely want to buy.
What you're really complaining about is astroturfing, not marketing.
The more dubious sort of marketing is Coca-Cola style marketing, where people already know that the product exists, and the ad just makes them feel vaguely good about it. But I suspect even this sort of marketing is surprisingly beneficial, because it incentivizes companies to make quality products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578277
My argument for Coca-Cola style brand marketing would go something like:
It's very silly to invest $billions in brand awareness and building market share, if your product is junk and customers will eventually find out. Marketing spend could be seen as the "peacock's tail" of the business world -- a credible signal that the company stands by their product.
If I see an ad for Acme Corp, it's statistical evidence that Acme won an auction for that slot against other players in its industry. Acme won the auction because it was able to bid more. It was able to bid more because it has better lifetime value per customer, i.e. it does a better job of satisfying customer needs.
There are a lot of old consumer brands, and there are a lot of brands known for junk, but there aren't a lot of old consumer brands that are known for junk.
Coke advertises so that when you're in the store or a gas station and you think "maybe I'll get a soda" you think of Coke before Pepsi. They advertise so that someone starting a restaurant thinks to buy the Coke syrup before they think to buy the Pepsi syrup.
And yet somehow we still reflexively choose it, because something in our brain associates it with big smiles, success, happiness, being fit, etc., almost as if we've been fed imagery every day of our lives to try to convince us of that fact.
Plenty of people are entirely capable of knowing that drinking a thing is not an objectively healthy act - soda and alcohol are the two big ones that come to mind - without pathologizing the act or pretending that the people making money off of it are Mr. Burns-level caricatures or mustache-twirling super-villain billionaires.
This is obviously not true. What if they are backed by investors? And there are a gazillion other reasons why they could spend more on that ad ...
I agree that could nix the argument about better lifetime value per customer. I think the overall argument ends up going through anyways, because investors want to invest in companies that make good products. Paul Graham is constantly emphasizing the importance of pleasing your customers.
>And there are a gazillion other reasons why they could spend more on that ad ...
I think ads are still statistical evidence though.
In this situation it's mostly harmless, but we see terrible examples of this in the health/supplements space.
This is why repeatedly buying old consumer brands and then turning them to junk is so insanely profitable. It takes years or decades for consumers to realize that a trusted brand is junk. The consumer never knows that the corporation that turned their brand to junk is currently looking for more brands to acquire.
I wonder if such acquirers tend to reduce marketing spend? This could make sense, if they're operating on a shorter time horizon. Seems a little silly to try to both accumulate and spend down brand equity at the same time.
If so, lack of advertising could be a handy indicator of dropping product quality ;-)
Interesting, never thought about it that way. I often find that obviously expensive advertising lowers my expectations in the product and especially in the price performance ratio, since I can't stop thinking about having to pay for the advertising too, not just the actual product/service I want. Which I don't want to.
He put up a site in about half an hour and it ended up getting coverage on TV which led to ~10 million visitors and it making $5,000 a day in ads for a while. The core logic of the app is 6 lines of JavaScript to take a few inputs and do basic math on them.
I ended up chatting with the creator on how he built and hosted it back in 2020: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-yo...
Sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on in people's head.
For the love of God if you can put that into words just don't say whatever the thing in question was
So I’d say it’s actually not limited, although being the one they happen to cover this week would need some luck for sure.
I think the real lesson is they "just started".
It's one of the reasons I've stuck around Imgur so long - there's an extremely diverse, and supportive community.
I had no idea that there was this kind of community on Imgur.
Because of that one single rule, most of the vain attention seekers don't stay on imgur.
It's so much better without them.
So Imgur made itself a social network like Reddit and which then started removing the ability to direct-link to images. The link you clicked than redirected to their own platform of image and comment discussion.
Reddit then caught on and shunned Imgur out of Reddit and Imgur expanded to it own social media thing.
Some History: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212
The enshittification was inevitable. Being an image host, especially one that allows direct linking, is expensive.
Side note: RIP Gfycat. They join the ranks of ImageShack and Photobucket of causing millions of links on the Internet to suddenly become dead. Imgur did a purge of porn, which now means a whole bunch of images on the porn subreddits are now dead.
He felt terrible for the timing, but it wasn't his fault. He placed the order, and the next day I announced that my dad was in the hospital after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. A couple days later, he passed, and then a couple days after that, I got the bag of dicks.
I still appreciated it. I thought it was funny.
Maybe I could ship these to people with "Someone thinks you're full of crap."
https://chocolate-shop.co.uk/products/novelty-chocolate-stin...
If I received one of those I would definitely give serious consideration to finding the nearest bathroom and having a good cry.
When it’s impossible to know whether you’re exacting glitter justice or amplifying a bully, why not just take a neutral stance? (For all I know though, send your enemies glitter is running an arbitration service and only sends glitter to the truly awful?)
this is why we need better societal guardrails in place against lies... people will just do this kind of crap otherwise. I mean look at politics right now, it's a complete disaster in terms of information accuracy.
lies are too powerful to be (un)regulated by the free market.
The perfect treat to storm a building surrounded by ducks . . .
There was a lot of up/down votes on that comment .. clearly some laughed and others cried.
Found this: https://prankpackage.com/collections/all
Pieter Levels is a one-person show that has started multiple businesses with just a single page & a Stripe Checkout earning millions per year and I don’t believe he’s incorporated.
This can be a "physical person" (eg a freelance activity), depending on the country, but that still requires registration -- and if it's millions per year, it's usually a terrible idea to do it as a freelancer.
The money has to go somewhere. That somewhere needs to be banked. That banked entity needs to be incorporated, or treatable as a corporation.
Not necessarily. Many countries do not require sole proprietors to be registered.
> if it's millions per year, it's usually a terrible idea to do it as a freelancer.
In the US with its liability lawsuit culture yes. Elsewhere operating as a sole proprietor is not always such a terrible idea.
> That banked entity needs to be incorporated, or treatable as a corporation.
It really doesn't.
It's a terrible idea because as a non-American you can easily hire a firm like Appleby to evade nearly all taxes if you're rolling in millions.
It's not even "hiring a firm like Appleby". It's "hiring an accountant". Paying $1-2k a year to save yourself hundreds of thousands in difference.
And yes if you're hoping to process payments on Stripe, you need to be banked, and the banked entity will undergo KYB. I have no idea why you're denying this. Is this some sort of gaslighting nonsense?
Maybe. I've found people in my country tend to assume a corporation has stuff to spend on and/or be doing expenses fraud, and actually if you're doing things properly the all-in tax rate is potentially worse for a corporation by the time you actually have the money in your personal account.
> if you're hoping to process payments on Stripe, you need to be banked, and the banked entity will undergo KYB.
Perhaps, but you absolutely don't need to be a corporation for that. You give them your name and (personal) tax number and maybe a one-line description of what business you're in and that's that.
Why would you believe that? He was incorporated in Singapore last I spoke to him. Looking back 8 years ago, to last time I bought something from him, it's from an NL company with a VAT number.
Lots of small companies (hairdressers, small shops) were not really incorporated.
You might be putting more thought into this than the average person looking to anonymously send someone a bag of penis candy.
More seriously though, setting up an LLC cost me well under $1000 each in two different states. No, I don't have some elaborate tax dodge going; I moved.
not everywhere - in Poland it is fine to run a tiny-scale business without registration
https://www.biznes.gov.pl/pl/portal/00115 - among requirements, scale must be less than 75% of a minimum wage. Enough to test it.
> otherwise how do people know you are a legit business? For example, I’m not giving my credit card details to any random website to buy silly stuff unless they are properly identified
I do not care so much, as long of amounts are tiny - in case of fraud it is bank's problem
But at least "I want to test run a business idea at tiny scale, without violating law" is solved.
They've increased it to (a still reasonable) £50, I assume to help fund the new legal obligations that Companies House has been given.
Setting up an LLC is not a big deal either, even if the process could be quicker. People who think that too complicated aren't competent to run a lasting business anyways. If that is hard, how are you not gonna fuck up accounting and your other legal obligations?
I know it's sort of a difficult shift in mentality especially for anyone with a programming background, but not doing anything at all for fear of doing it incorrectly, or delaying doing the thing because of all the setup seem much higher risks to me.
In my experience, you can just start doing the thing. It probably won't make any money anyway, in which case you can just stop. If you make some money, then you give some (say ~$1k) of that money to a bookkeeper who will then figure out how to declare it properly.
I get your fear though, as I used to have it. But this world is not like an API call that completely fails if you have one thing wrong. Instead it's people, who talk with you and figure things out with you.
Used a well known Escrow site. Took a couple days to settle. Quickest $2,000 I ever made. I found out later they were some crypto company with a similar name. They bought it from me just to squat. They still squat it.
I probably could have made way more if I had pushed the issue, oh well.
Never really built much more than a proof of concept for my business idea and never found another domain I liked enough to buy for it.
More importantly, whoever bought them is so focused on "showing the next thing" that the wrong swipe in the wrong area just obliterated whatever you're looking at or trying to read. It's just a giant bag of dicks in terms of poor interface programming and testing.
Seriously wish the author published this story as a GitHub readme or Wordpress blog. At least it would be readable without fighting the website to view the current damned content I'm trying to look at.
This is the first time I've seen a blog-type entry there. I understand the appeal, though, as it doesn't even require an account to create it.
I'm not sure how they made money though. And I think there was some drama between Imgur and Reddit, with Reddit going off doing their own thing in terms of image hosting. I think they went as far as breaking Imgur links in Reddit as well?
This left Imgur in the lurch a bit, scrambling to find a reason to exist. It's like asking the pass-the-butter-robot from Rick&Morty to find something else to justify it's existence with. They just tried to become another social media site a-la 9gag et al and the weird part for me is there are people that actually use it non ironically.
But if we stop with trolling yeah I have some ideas that could benefit from instant $10k and I don't have a rich dad or credit and I gotta live with it as one does!