4. I still don't appreciate people who come around here for the sole purpose of fleecing our membership. I will continue to try and protect others from intentional price gouging, when I see it happening.
Ellipse showed up here and made a bunch of posts in the 'media' section showing off some great IBM keyboards. Over at Deskthority, he bought components and soldered together a bunch of capsense controllers, which have helped a bunch of people (including a bunch of geekhackers) to bring old
Model F and
beam spring keyboards back to life. He sold them for an entirely reasonable price.
He put up a post in the classifieds section at geekhack after meeting the requirements to do so. If you think that was too soon, or if you think he’s too aggressive in marketing stuff for sale, maybe lobby for those classifieds requirements to be changed, or send him a private message asking that he engage with the community in some more complete way, or at the very least stick to calling him out for things he actually did. If you just said “this guy sure aggressively markets his stuff, and he doesn’t seem to be interested in becoming a member of the community” then we can probably manage some semblance of a reasonable discussion about that.
This particular “great finds” post wasn’t made by Ellipse; I hardly think any public auction on eBay that then gets linked by a different member here can be interpreted as an attempt to take advantage specifically of geekhack members.
Anyhow, I don’t think it’s at all fair to say that his “sole purpose” (or indeed his purpose at all) is to fleece anyone. Who are you to judge that this particular auction is “price gouging” or “fleecing”?
To “fleece” someone is to defraud/cheat/swindle them, usually someone with more information/experience getting the best of someone clueless. Absolutely no one is going to accidentally buy this keyboard for $2000 because they’re clueless. The only people interested at all are serious collectors. If you want to define “fleece” down to just mean “overcharge”, then who is deciding the proper price? There are basically none of these for sale anywhere, so there’s no clearly established market price. I suspect if you wanted to buy Parak’s, you’d need to pay more than $2000, but I’m not Parak so I couldn’t tell you for sure.
If you want to get technical, “price gouging” is what happens sellers price basic necessities at outrageously high prices after extreme shocks (like natural disasters, etc.), and people who can’t afford it end up starving or suffering serious harms. No homeless dudes are going to starve because they couldn’t get a 25 year old IBM keyboard.
As far as I can tell, Ellipse’s auction and all of his posts have been entirely straight-forward and devoid of any kind of trickery. His ebay pages are very clear and explicit, with good pictures, and thorough text.
Charging higher for a very rare computer keyboard than your personal concept of what it’s worth is not “price gouging”, or “fleecing”. It’s just a routine pricing decision in an uncertain market. If nobody wants the keyboard for $2000, then it’ll either stay on the market for a long time unsold, or the price will drop until someone is willing to pay. This is exactly what every seller should do in my opinion. There’s no good reason for a seller to charge a tiny fraction of market price just to appease a handful of angry dudes somewhere on the internet who think the price is too high.
* * *
If you (you generically, this goes for everyone here) want to warn buyers away from paying too much, then some reasonable things to say might be “I don’t think this is worth that much; you should get X keyboard for $Y instead” or “I just saw one of these clear in a contested auction for the much cheaper price $Z” or “I have a lead that 10 more of these keyboards are going to hit the market next week, so you should wait for the price to fall”, or “damn I’m jealous but I would never spend that much on a single keyboard”, or I’ll even take “I hope this comes with Mandolin crystals”.
If you’re going to instead make claims like “wow this seller is probably a fraudster/scammer/profiteer/*******/...” then you’d better have some damn good evidence to back it up; these kind of character attacks without anything to back them up give our whole community a bad name, especially when the one libelous attack turns into a whole dog pile without anyone stopping to look for proof.
