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Comment by repiret | Hacker News Reader

I always thought the right solution to this problem was to wait for both parties to submit feedback before revealing the feedback.

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A bad seller (or buyer) could avoid negative feedback just by never leaving feedback, meaning the buyer (or seller) would never be able to publish theirs.

oDesk gets around this by having a time limit on when feedback can be left. If one party fails to enter feedback, then it posts the other's feedback anyway.

Parties can lobby to have the other person change the feedback, but only if they lobbied party wants to. Seems like a workable system to me and allows each to be honest without consequences like eBay's original system.

That's genius. eBay could really learn from that. Removing buyer feedback entirely is a really big hammer.

Then you place a time limit on submitting feedback. Say you have 1 week-1 month. Still not perfect since it sounds like in the posted scam he didn't find out for over a month, but it might help in many cases.

E: Also just had another idea. You could have a way to edit your feedback after the original deadline in case of fraud. If you open up a dispute like the one posted then Ebay could review the edit's on a case-by-case basis.

Online sites like eBay, always want to reduce their personnel costs. Dispute resolution should be a last ditch effort that exists to identify loopholes in a system that should ideally NEVER need dispute resolution.

They need to balance that cost reduction with lost revenues from the perceived worse service.

Interesting idea, but it still wouldn't have helped in the case of the post-transaction chargeback, as described in the article. The scammer would likely still get a positive review (because the seller had been paid) only to discover the scam weeks after the fact.

If you made public details of things like chargebacks and other conflicts after the event that might help.

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