Originally published at: Scams are completely out of control on Facebook Markeplace | Boing Boing
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Sigh. EBay is all dealers, Craigslist is all ads, and FB Marketplace is all scams. We can’t have nice things.
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And Kijiji is all Ontario.
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So true. 
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Wait, people buy shit on Facebook?!
Man, I’ve been away for a loooong time… (thank dog!)
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I’ve never really used Craigslist, so I’m a bit confused here. Wasn’t that the point? I thought it was supposed to be a replacement for classified ads.
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I know it’s difficult to moderate at scale
That isn’t true when it come to sales. When they decided to not allow firearms sales, they were able to crack down on it quickly.
but the pasted-in scam content is mechanically blatant and it seems Facebook simply does not care.
Yep.
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I think they all were supposed to be that. Craigslist kinda accidentally filled the role, eBay was basically the flea market auction model, and Facebook, well, Facebook just thought they could make a buck after everyone else was in on the game.
I feel they all are shit now, mainly because all too many bad actors have figured out how to game the system, and the owners can’t justify the cost needed to keep fighting the arms race. Well, in the case of Facebook Marketplace, they never really cared to begin with, as all they wanted was money, and skimming off the grifters is still money.
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My mother, in her seeming quest to be the victim of every possible scam, bought something off Facebook Marketplace. That’s another cancelled credit card…
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the weird thing is, it seems to be pretty popular with the kids these days. i know of multiple people who only use facebook for marketplace, and lots seem to have dumped craigslist for it
i don’t understand what meta stands to gain by letting it rot. they’ve been winning, but they haven’t won. so they don’t have lockin. but maybe if everything else is equally bad, and they can’t achieve user or vendor lockin, then they’ve decided not to care?
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Yep, Fb Marketplace is what my kids scroll through when looking for something. They’re pretty adept at spotting scams. I’d imagine it’s a skill many/most kids have acquired.
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That’s all I needed to convince me to stick to reverb.com for all my online purchases.
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Facebook in general seems to be getting overrun with spam and scams. Half my feed these days is shitty, probably AI generated, content designed to generate outrage and engagement to feed the algorithm. And because it works, this shit is just getting worse and worse. After the American Idol win by Iam Tongi, I just started seeing tons of links to articles about how outraged everyone is about that and how it was obviously rigged. And then you look in the comments and it’s just people saying, “What? Who’s outraged? The kid is awesome.” Most of my actual friend’s posts these days get buried and I don’t see them until 3 days after they posted them, if at all. Facebook is going the same way Twitter is going, they’re just quieter about it.
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It brings enough money in.
Developers cost money.
Zuckerberg doesn’t want to hear about it and is bored by it.
That is how Meta thinks.
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Less classified ads these days of the general public selling stuff, and more newspaper insert ads from established businesses. You end up with car dealership and appliance stores putting their entire inventory up, crowding out everyone else. I stopped browsing years ago, but we had local dealers here that would drive used cars into random neighborhoods to take pictures, so you thought you were dealing with a sale by owner situation, but once interested, they’d just have you come to the lot…
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Craigslist still works. I just sold both my Vespa and Malaguti on CL. Yes, there are lots of scams.
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Except they just jacked up their fee again
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F_c_book seems good for giving stuff away as my wife seems to have success with getting rid of a lot of our outgrown kid stuff using “Buy Nothing”.
In general tho, f_c_ f_c_book.
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I wish that it still worked for me. Last time I was selling something I only got one flakey response from CL so after a few days I gave up and put the exact same ad on Facebook Marketplace and quickly received over 50 responses. Many of them turned out to be flakey as well, not showing up as promised, but the majority at least appeared to be real people.
Maybe it depends on what you’re selling. I was getting rid of a somewhat unusual item that’s hard to categorize, but that definitely had a strong appeal for a niche group of people so maybe the algorithm helped focus the ad towards people with that interest.
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Plus reverb is owned by Etsy, so I feel like it’s just a matter of time before it’s 90% garbage.
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