Jim, Good timing for me as i just sold a bunch of things. Part of what makes selling things on this group different is that most people are selling things that they genuinely like but no longer use or were not quite right for them. Its pretty curated when you compare to other groups as a lot of the parts actually come from Rivish places or from the list itself. At least in my case i would say that 90% of what i've recently sold either came from the list or a list-adjacent dealer. I do have a few thoughts:
- The FS posts do have content value, i've asked and have been asked about my impressions of a given item FS. It does generate discussion/feedback about an item. - Sales interactions are generally very good and much better than craigslist, for the most part people here are cordial and i think that carries over in FS posts. Of course there are the occasional person that low-balls or does not respond but i can spot those pretty quick and move on or not respond. It can be frustrating to have someone say i take an item, than back out days later, but it's still not as bad as other places, so theres that! - This hobby is expensive, the FS posts allow folks to test certain items and then re-sell them for a much smaller loss than buying new. I've tested out a lot of things that i would not have been able to do if i could only get it new. That said, i'm not making money selling parts on the list! but it is a way to take a little bit of the pain out of it. - The way threads are organized on the group does encourage multiple posts and then it looks like we're flooded with FS posts. For this round i tried using just 1 post and then deleting/updating the post which did work to move it back up to the top but the post did feel stale. Because the sorting of threads is by newest i think it does encourage people to post items for sale in separate threads for max exposure, if we could get people to post everything to a single post and then require them to only update that post--no new posts for the same sale, would that lower the number of FS posts? This still requires the honor system because people would claim that they started a new 'sale' and people would need to click on a previosuly read post to see if new items were added but it might compress the number of posts in total - I don't see anyway to add any more 'rules' the system, there aren't any mechanisms built into google groups (that i'm aware of) to limit posts, or number of posts--that would all create more work for the moderators (Jim!) which is unfair. The same with requiring a certain amount of activity, requiring non-FS posts, before FS posts, while i agree with the idea, the enforcement will be too difficult to be practical. - - And my last point, no matter how friendly, cordial we all think of this group, ultimately it's still a semi-anonymous list on the internet. So we really need to keep that in mind, you can still get scammed, still get deadbeats, etc. At the same time sellers are also not professional sellers so we also need to understand that some times things get lost, things are damaged in transit and be ready (on both sides) to work things out agreeably---it's still buyer beware / seller beware! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
