[anon9001]

Serious question for HN: How do we replace eBay with a reliable, sensibly run public service?

It's extremely disheartening that it's now 2022 and we haven't figured out a way to replace eBay.

It's the most basic form of commerce. Select a product from the listings, check the seller's reputation based on how active the seller is, ask a few questions, finalize a transaction. On rare occasion, in some markets, adjudicate a dispute.

Everyone in the world should be able to have access to this service for essentially free.

eBay is such a basic thing that it was started as a hobby because of course people should be able to buy and sell online with minimal friction. It's obvious.

Why don't we make new things like this anymore?

I hear all this hype about the fediverse and web3 and crypto, but the reality is that the public cannot even reliably send messages to each other without invoking a big tech company.

Crypto barely works and there have been billions of dollars made and lost just trying to keep track of account balances.

It feels like we're forever away from having a well run public global market.

Uber and Twitter and Netflix and eBay and the rest of the "essential" services seem so basic, but we can't seem to get enough nerds together to start replacing them.

We're each individually globally connected with more bandwidth than I ever thought would fit in my pocket.

But I can't hail a ride without involving Uber.

I can't deliver a 140 character message to a lot of people without involving Twitter.

We can't crowdfund the creation of great art, unless we all pay Netflix to do it for us.

> Don’t use eBay.

And, as OP is soon to notice, it's very hard to sell used electronics without using eBay.

What can we actually do, today, as hackers, to replace eBay?

If I was actually going to do it, where would I start? Would replacing eBay be a government project, a web3 project, a federated network?

Is there actual hacktivism to be done here by simply replacing services with p2p equivalents without engaging in the current corporate system?

I've had enough of relying on companies for what should be human to human services.

[notatoad]

serious answer: you don't. the idea that anybody should be able to sell to anybody else is fundamentally invalid. global-scale marketplaces are a bad idea, because as soon as money starts changing hands, then fraud becomes a risk and the sort of impersonal, evil-seeming anti-fraud actions that ebay takes become a necessity.

nobody has any inherent rights to selling on ebay. they do their analisys, and determine if you're a fraud risk worth taking on or not. and if they don't want to take on the risk of allowing you to use their platform, they ban you. just like they did to the OP here. it's not evil, it's just the only responsible behaviour for a global platform that allows anybody to sell anything to anybody else. Any other platform reaching eBay's scale will have to do the same thing.

Facebook marketplace can do a bit better, because facebook has an absolutely absurd amount of your personal information that they can mine to determine your fraud risk. Some other small-scale indie services can pretend to do better, but the only thing that allows them to do better is their small scale. Online classifieds like ebay's Kijiji subsidiary can do better because they don't handle the transaction, and you take on your own fraud risk and only deal in-person.

at some level, every service that does this has to answer the question of "how do we deal with fraud risk" and the answer to that always has to be forbidding some set of people from using the platform. better to do that by initially limiting the scope of the marketplace to something small, rather than kicking people out based on some criteria.

[caf]

Right. The root cause is that Internet is a Dark Ocean, and any honest little fish that pipes up saying it would like to buy or sell a used iPhone is likely to be swiftly eaten by a shark.

[ajb]

So, how do we scale the creation of small market places?

[notatoad]

again: just don't.

small communities of people who trust each other can sell things to each other without any VC-backed platforms getting involved. "scaling it" is the problem, but nobody needs that. all you need is a messageboard, either digital or a literal bulletin board. trying to force marketplaces to grow bigger causes problems.

[Blammar]

I always thought Ebay's fundamental design error was that it did not serve as a true escrow agent.

Yes, that would have been difficult to scale, but then you'd not need a fraud department at all as both sides would be able to verify the transaction.

Seems like a business opportunity here.

[Nextgrid]

Out of curiosity, how would an escrow agent work against malicious actors (without the law serving as a deterrent, since enforcement against online fraud is near non-existent)?

Scammers are already tricking PayPal's dispute system by sending real tracking numbers and sometimes even real packages but filled with bricks or other junk.

Imagine a situation where the buyer is malicious and claims they have received a brick. If you settle in favour of the buyer, sellers lose out, but if you settle in favour of the seller, buyers would lose out from scam sellers sending bricks instead of the promised goods.

A neutral party such as the shipping courier would have to act as a witness and unpack the goods on delivery to mitigate that, and even then it's not bulletproof if the goods have a defect that isn't immediately obvious.

[Blammar]

Yeah, the neutral party needs to verify both ends of the transaction.

Good point about subtle defects. Hmm. That I do not have an answer for, especially if the seller is not aware.

Maybe it's just not possible to trust the Ferengixxx humans...

[hattmall]

They had some eBay agents type thing a while back. I think they called it eBay concierge.

But something similar to a notary, could validate items if a certain value. I think they are doing this with sneakers and certain luxury goods.

[s1artibartfast]

An escrow service that would photograph the goods before shipping either party would go a long way automated mitigating the empty packages and Bricks. Certainly makes sense for a add-on for high price items.

I wonder if there is a market for this as a third-party service outside of eBay that works on their Market. It would double shipping cost and add time but that could be worth it for a class of goods

[nicolas_t]

Stockx basically does that iirc, seller sends items to Stockx, stockx verifies the goods, puts it for sale and charge a relatively high commission once it's sold.

[s1artibartfast]

Sounds similar, but more like consignment than an escrow service.

Good to know, nonetheless

[superkuh]

No. eBay is very friendly and integrated with the US feds. Any market competitor that did not provide such a friendly and long established relationship would be regulated out of existence when it started to become a viable alternative.

It's not a technical problem, it's a legal one.

[oehpr]

Because we have still not fixed "trust" on the internet. We're perpetually at the mercy of Sybil.

If you come to a small town and try and defraud the locals, you'll rapidly find yourself in jail, or worse. Small towns have local concepts of trust. Alice says you defrauded her, I trust Alice, that means I believe her. So I tell my friends, who trust me, and now we're coming for you. Just like that.

But online, there's no propagation of trust, I only have one source, and that's Ebay. Ebay's just not as good at trust as all of us working together.

So long as this dynamic is at play, as long as we can not propagate trust, then massive companies will dysfunctionally dominate.

[c1u31355]

Check out OpenBazaar, it's more or less the idea you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar

[the_cat_kittles]

if your account is established enough not to trip whatever crude fraud algorithm they have, ebay is an extremely convenient and efficient way of buying and selling stuff. maybe its because ive done it for a while so im used to it, but im always suprised when people complain about ebay. i think you get into real trouble if you expect it to be 100% perfect, but if you just accept that every now you might get screwed and dont put all your eggs in one basket, it works very well.

[Nextgrid]

I'm not sure account lifetime is a factor - on an old account I remember getting (very obvious) scam messages sent to me from long-established accounts that have presumably been compromised. If anything, account lifetime might work against you if you log in with an IP address or browser fingerprint that's too different from the account's history.

[ranger_danger]

the problem is it can happen to anyone for just about any reason, you've just gotten lucky. meanwhile people who don't even use the platform as much as you get banned much quicker.

[photon-torpedo]

P2P market places already exists, I guess. The tricky part is how parties can trust each other, and I think this might actually be solvable by blockchain / smart contract tech. Basically a smart contract takes the role of the trusted intermediary / escrow account. I believe this is being worked on (e.g. Nexus ASA on the Algorand blockchain).