Possibly a dumb question, but is there, or could one of the extra smart people here build, a federated marketplace to allow for direct buying and selling without the middle-man enshittification of ebay, reverb, and the like?
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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eBay ran for a long time with a ‘buyer beware’ philosophy, requiring you to pay the seller directly, and leaving feedback being the only recourse. The de-facto payment became PayPal, but I remember mailing checks back in the day!
Wow I'm glad I missed out on that... Although there was certainly a period where if you were a seller you literally could not trust paypal not to just freeze (and take) your entire account if you had more than about $2000. I think that's what started ebay's whole policy of being a black hole where there was literally no way you could contact them to dispute anything. I'm really not sure if that has gotten any better, but there were entire websites dedicated to discussing how much money paypal had robbed them of with no reason ever given.