#33

I don’t see a problem with the trade category. Nor would miss it much, but the problem lies somewhere else than the existence of a trade category.
Reverb takes a percentage iirc? :wink:

I tend to agree I’m afraid… With a lot more mods, more funky mod actions happened. IMO even merging threads becomes very strange quickly and hard to follow (i.e. less great place to stop by).

And now again, after the Dev thread issue, the person affected didn’t seem to get informed about the reason of the mod action, which is pretty rude IMO.

I’ve been unaware of a trade rule myself and got a friendly reminder to change it. Way it should be. And also has been for me, so I want to end my rant with acknowledging the great work many mods do here!

#34

Seems like a fair price to pay for arbitration of disputes, which are an inevitability when trading with strangers.

#35

Sorry, I’m not going along with the idea that companies like Reverb, eBay etc. are sufficient or even necessary for that matter.

They exist, I guess, but that doesn’t mean that communities can’t and shouldn’t support alternatives. In fact, I argue there is somewhat of a moral imperative to do so.

In other words, there is, and always will be a need for informal, community-based trade categories. With any community there is the occasional dispute, drama or bad-faith actor, but healthy communities will address this and emerge stronger as a result. Sadly, we have drunk the Kool-aid, we have lost sight of the fact that for the most part people are inherently kind, generous, and trustworthy. We realize we have limited resources and that we are all in this together. But we need to recover the frame in which we can truly show up to each other as such, and this is exactly what these corporations don’t want anyone to do.

Reverb, eBay, and PayPal create and prey upon a condition and worldview in which we are all led to distrust one another, in which “community” as such simply ceases to exist. Instead of being a foundation for a community, trust is re-interpreted as a scarce resource, to be allocated like food and shelter. In this way they’ve re-framed the entire problem, they position themselves as necessary so they always skim off the top. Their entire business model is based on framing everyone as a potential criminal and sowing this distrust, so there is really no incentive for them to afford trustworthy practices. In other words, they are the ones who put the idea in everyone’s minds that people are by default to be distrusted. This becomes the default mode of thinking even at the community level and become thus a key factor in escalating disputes (if every person begins to show up as a potential scammer, then trustworthy people will start to get at each other’s throats rather than giving each other the benefit of the doubt and work through issues which are mostly the inevitable ones of miscommunication).

Over 25 years of trading gear I’ve seen the level of distrust and drama only increase, in direct proportion to the extent eBay, PayPal and now Reverb have become popular. I think thus that it’s worthwhile to cultivate different approaches, as it will actually increase the extent to which people begin to trust one another again, and by the same token begin to act again in trustworthy ways.

Anyway, just a thought, or an invitation to rethink the conditions under which these services (Reverb etc.) show up as necessary.

18 Likes
#36

OK, to the degree I am able to ignore trade on this site, I’ll agree to disagree. Mostly it’s possible. Hiding the category certainly helped.

And to be fair, I do have a trade post here. I’ve bought and sold things here. It’s just that I don’t see it as a necessary part of the lines experience.

#37

this is so offtopic, I shouldn’t have picked up your sideswipe. but while we’re at it…

I guess I’m just happy enough with free alternatives for trading (modulargrid, facebook, small ads pages. edit: well, you pay with your data I guess).

#38

I think we’ve made it publicly clear that we admit it was an error on our side and that this should not happen. It’s not the first time a trade post is getting taken down and usually the people involved are immediately notified.
But really, we are working on improving this. Moderating a forum is not easy, and errors happen. I think the important thing is to take errors as a change for improvement and always strive to do better. And I think I can talk for all mods when I say that this is definitely what we are trying to do.
Also it’s great to get feedback on it. It’s very important to know how all of you feel about these things.

Again just to be very clear about what happened. The user you reference above, posted a ton of items for sale, some of them were currently unavailable items (eg. Norns) priced higher than the regular new retail price.
The user asked for “Paypal Friends&Family” payments, which is not allowed by the forum rules, and also is against Paypal’s policies. It’s also very bad for the buyer since payments done that way are not covered by any buyer protection.

Many trades are being done daily here on the forum, and very rarely we see something go wrong, so I don’t think we need to be alarmed by it.

8 Likes
#39

This is potentially just an indicator that even after several years I am still not able to properly navigate thru lines…anyway, when I read today’s post about why moderators locked a thread, I wanted to reply by referencing to the trade rules, as I dimly remembered I read them a long time ago, but alas I was not able to find them.

Even now, I was only able to link to them because I found them in said thread.

I did not find them in About llllllll, neither in the FAQ, nor did I find them as a pinned post in the Trade category. Please, what am I doing wrong?

Or in short: Should the trade rules be easier to find, perhaps by also showing them in the FAQ?

#40

“About the Trade Category” appears to be pinned for me!

#41

Thanks for checking, here’s what I see when I go to the trade category – no pinned post. What am I doing wrong?

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no pinned trade post.png2252×762 110 KB

#42

Mods have an unusually “complete” view of what goes on here on lines, and I think it can be easy to lose sight of how different the experience is for less frequent users. If you don’t eat, sleep, breathe this site, it’s likely you’re not seeing 80% of what goes on.

So assumptions about what has and hasn’t been made clear, are very likely to be incorrect.

1 Like
#43

I’m also uncomfortable with airing the dirty laundry about details of moderation events. Does it matter to most of us what “the person in question” did? Is this a jury? Is someone on trial?

Let’s keep private things private and make an effort to avoid causing or contributing to public humiliation.

1 Like
#44

UI could be better. The pinned “About” post is there, but only if you explicitly click on the entire Trade category. If you just go to the categories overview then click on one of the four most recent Trade posts, you’ll miss the rules. As this is probably the most common way people access Trade items, they’ll likely miss the “About” altogether.

Tricky problem, given the limitations of Discourse. It’s not immediately obvious how this could be improved, except maybe to show zero posts in the categories overview which would force everyone to click through.

1 Like
#45

for what it’s worth, said person was the one making it public, not @papernoise :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes
#46

Seems like it would be trivial to create header links to static web pages.

1 Like
#47

Initially. No need to continue on with the pattern.

#48

From my point of view this is not “airing the dirty laundry” but being transparent. The issue was brought to the public attention by the user and the community has the right to be informed.

But hey let’s not make this a bigger issue than it really is. Incidents happen, it’s been dealt with.
Instead let’s talk about how we can improve things further and make the trade rules more obvious to people.
Discourse really doesn’t make it easy. Posts are pinned to the top just once, and for some reason the search does not always work correctly.
There’s some things we can try though… but we’ll have to do some trial and error. Let me see if I can find out more about it.

update: we could set it to “banner”, which would make it more prominent. But maybe that’s too invasive.

7 Likes
#49

Rules should be posted prominently. I’d love to see something similar for the code of conduct (perhaps minus the surrounding discussion).

1 Like
#50

This is really odd. Regardless of how I enter to the entire Trade category, I do not see the pinned post. I do see the pinned post in the monome category, for example.

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pinned monome post.png2246×650 89.1 KB

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no pinned trade post.png2252×762 110 KB

#51

is it possible you unpinned it at some point?

#52

I might have done that, but to be honest I didn’t even know that it is possible to unpin a pinned post. In my understanding, a pinned post is pinned because moderators/owner want this post to be visible everytime users visit this category.

So if it is possible for every user to accidentially unpin a post containing rules, it’s an indicator to me that we need a different method to really pin a post.