[nicksiscoe]

"Ebay's buyer feedback rating is absolutely useless now, ever since it was made impossible to give negative feedback to a buyer for any reason, including outright fraud."

I do agree with your point. Craigslist's lack of report system has made us feel strongly about including the ability to report negative interactions with buyers, so our dependability rating should include those as well.

"But nothing in the Pradl model prevents lowballer/flake "buyers" either."

I could have made this connection better within the blog post, but the feature we believe can help minimize the damages of lowballers is the screening questions. Before buyers are allowed to ever ask the seller to contact them, they must agree to a number of conditions that the seller sets, such as "Is your offer above X price"? The idea here is that the buyer can be as annoying as they want and be set on making a lowball offer, but that communication should occur with Pradl without the seller having to deal with it. The seller only comes into contact with the buyer when they feel they aren't going to waste their time doing so. We think that even just double checking that the buyer is on the same page about some of these things before contacting the seller is enough of a deterrent to keep the bad ones, like the potential flakers, away. You might have a different opinion on that though, and I'd be happy to hear it.