(OT) Re: Is This A Shill?

[Chuck Guzis]

On 05/02/2018 08:42 AM, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote:

> Yes. It drives more traffic to the site. It's really gamification of the
> process, which sucks for the bidders (they bid more than they should). In
> the ideal world, you set a price you're willing to pay, pay a trusted third
> party to place that bid in the closing minutes of an auction. It limits the
> amount of information that you give to ebay and/or the seller. The only
> time there's an issue is if there's another bidder whose top bit is exactly
> the same as yours and they bid first. It's a pretty small benefit from
> bidding first vs the tendency for others to bid if they see your bid
> early.... Last second bids also limit the window in which someone else can
> game your vote, and wondering if someone is shilling you or not...

As much as I've heard against the eBay system, there were many worse.

Consider that if all bidders (and this seems to be true on certain eBay
areas) snipe, it's little different from a standard sealed-bid auction.
You bid your maximum and go away.

Although eBay in the past has tried to kill off sniping because it
reduces the number of visits an individual might pay to their site, I
think they've given up with trying to kill the sniping system.

Yahoo! auctions were terrible--absolutely rife with outright shilling.
Probably one of the reasons that they no longer exist.

OnSale was my favorite site for computer gear, but it didn't survive the
eBay onslaught.

For musical gear, one of the lesser-known sites was DigiBid (I still
have a t-shirt from them).  Because it didn't see much traffic, you
could get some very decent deals on used items.

Ubid and RedTag are still around, mostly offering marked-down overstock.
 I haven't bought anything from them in years.

--Chuck