[Fantosism]

I know many people that follow limited/exclusive releases for things like Yeezy/Air Jordan sneakers as well as PS5's and graphics cards.

They pay $500/mo for access to a bot that will allow them to make these purchases.

Most of the community lives on discord.

[mymllnthaccount]

It would be relatively easy to solve this problem if the original supplier wanted the problem to be solved. Instead of releasing a batch of inventory at a certain time, run a raffle over a week or two and then randomly select folks to allow to purchase the item.

[bluedays]

Wouldn’t a queuing system be more fair?

[mymllnthaccount]

By queuing, do you mean first come first serve?

No, that causes the problem. That encourages people to use bots to be the first one to purchase the moment the inventory is released.

I don't understand how a random raffle would ever not be fair (with the assumption that one person gets only one entry)

[Arnavion]

That assumption doesn't seem like it'd hold. You'd just replace bot services with package forwarding services that can generate unique PO Box numbers or whatever.

[mschuster91]

I understand people using bots to snipe PS5s and GPUs, these have real economic value and actual usage.

But what other than artificial scarcity drives people to spend hundreds of dollars on bots to snipe sneakers?!

[giantrobot]

> But what other than artificial scarcity drives people to spend hundreds of dollars on bots to snipe sneakers?!

There's a whole sneaker collecting subculture. Some buy and wear while others just collect. The big names in sneakers do release limited production models or limited runs of certain color combinations.

Similar to any other collecting subculture.

[pjc50]

Same as NFTs: hype and resale value. At least you can wear the sneakers once you've stopped flipping them.

[nichch]

Economic value and actual usage.

[mschuster91]

What economic value (other than hoping for the value to increase, aka tulip mania) can I derive out of ultra-rare sneakers? What usage that goes above "it looks cooler than an unbranded, otherwise identical sneaker"?

For me, this kind of product is part of the "bullshit economy" - similar to "bullshit jobs", this kind of product has no reason to exist other than vanity, as almost all of these "collectibles" won't ever be used. We are using up valuable, finite resources to create and distribute this kind of useless "bullshit product", we are using up valuable human time and IT resources on developing websites capable to resist (D)DoS attacks and on developing snipers to bypass the anti-bot technologies employed by the shops, and we are creating a lot of demand for all kinds of sneaker-related crime - and there's a lot of that: theft and robberies from stores, theft and robberies in the supply chain, ebay/classifieds scams, credit card fraud, robberies on broad daylight [1].

Seriously, fuck all that shit. No one needs hundreds of dollars worth of sneakers that only incentivize crime and bullshit.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=man+robbed+because+of+sneake...