Re:The untold origin story of eBay that I lived (2018)
by XaspR8d on Friday March 20, 2020 @03:22PM
(#22640690)
Being "born from spam" really explains a lot about how most eBay sellers communicate to this day.
Re:The untold origin story of eBay that I lived (2018)
by redis_mlc on Saturday March 21, 2020 @01:43AM
(#22644788)
Never seen that over the past 20 years (I have 3,000 feedback, so I would know.)
However:
- You can sign up for a store newsletter
- in the past few months, ebay is sending auction time notifications, and pinging sellers to offer discounts to viewers. That's the only thing that has the spam smell, but the discount offers do help distinguish who wants to make a deal :)
Re:The untold origin story of eBay that I lived (2018)
by XaspR8d on Sunday March 22, 2020 @01:42PM
(#22656831)
To be clear, I didn't really mean "spam proper", moreso the flea market / carnival barker language, eg "REAL 100% HD VIDEO BRAND-NEW CANON REBEL 5T QUICK SHIP WITH ORIGINAL LENS KIT", that often obstruct the info I'm actually searching for.
I'm sure folks who use the platform consistently either know how to avoid that content or are much more efficient at sifting through it (or my anecdata of its frequency is way off!). I agree in my limited experience there isn't much in the way of "true spam" itself.
The reality is that eBay (that is AuctionWeb) got its initial traction from spamming Usenet as the story correctly states.
Very quickly they moved from spamming themselves to letting their users spam Usenet.
This is the "growth hacking" model still followed today by many. The question is there any moral middle ground?
If you can search Usenet archives you can find remnants of that AuctionWeb spam and people complaining. Soon others tried to copy them but it was too late.
This was in mid 90s after the first mass spam from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... .