I’d prefer to keep this conversation productive and not so harsh. It’s okay to have differing opinions; it’s not okay to disparage others comments because you don’t agree with them. I’ve made several valid comments and don’t need these to be distracted by disparaging comments
I do actually appreciate the feedback and your thoughts. At the same time, while I certainly wouldn't want to invalidate your feelings, that doesn't mean that I believe your points to be valid, and some of the points you made have already been addressed earlier in this thread.
Two recent posts with miss advertised items that could have led to the buyers purchasing items not correctly listed by new members with no track records. I’m assuming both posts were paid for with the $5 listing fee? Is there no one from the website admin checking or authenticating these posts before they go live? It’s just a $5 fee and you can still post a false or misleading item?
It would be helpful if you actually made mention of such posts, or sent them to me via DM. Your comment is not very helpful without such references.
Yes, such posts were most likely paid for. And yes, I do for the most part monitor all new listings going up on TMC, but I do tend to focus my attention not on the validity of the listing itself, but on the legitimacy of the account of the creator. I am not an expert in terms of determining if the product description is correct or not, however many on here are and will gladly point out such issues in the comments when that happens. The whole point of a forum is that it is a community effort.
A $5 listing fee that doesn’t provide buyer and seller protection is not helping in anyway. A simple ‘are you a robot’ feature would work better. Or implement a ‘can’t list a for sale posting until you have 25 messages’ would help. Charging $5 fee is pointless. Especially on a format (website forum) that is losing popularity due to changing times and better alternatives.
As I have explained earlier in this thread, of course a $5 listing fee isn't going to provide buyer/seller protection, especially for items being sold for thousands of dollars in many cases. We would have to charge substantially more in order to do that, as we would have to bring in a 3rd party to help us with that. Would you prefer a $30 listing fee that comes with buyer/seller protection, over a $5 listing fee without? I'm guessing no. Also, we would need to charge everyone that fee in order to pay for such a service, and currently we don't charge most users posting in the marketplace, as our fees are primarily for users without a track record, or for users who are trying to post lots of listings and make a business out of it.
We could of developed our system to charge a post-sale commission percentage fee, but there are a few issues with that:
1. The lack of upfront fee would mean one less deterrent to spammers and scammers.
2. You would end up paying much more to us than $5.
3. We would have to collect sales tax for your sale as US law would consider us to be a marketplace due our involvement in the transaction itself.
So if we did that, if for example you sold an item for $1,000, with 3% commission fee, 7.25% sales tax, and a 3% credit card processing fee, you would be losing $75 to tax, $30 to commission, and another $30 to credit card processing fees.
Unlike many of the social media sites which you seem so positive about, bots aren't really much of an issue on TMC. We already have plenty of bot protection measures in place, particularly around account creation, and when it comes to the marketplace, bots haven't been an issue.
Charging a $5 is not pointless. The vast majority of scammers and spammers on the internet use a shotgun approach, and a $5 fee makes that completely unfeasible for them. Of course a scammer could decide to invest the $5 hoping to later steal a lot more, but the point of the $5 is to increase the deterrents to such actions. Also, to pay the $5 fee, you have to use a Credit Card and a PayPal account, and that leaves a trail, which again acts as another deterrent.
Forums would be dead already if the alternatives were better. The alternatives are simply different. Forums are better for some things, and such alternatives are better for other things. What is a bigger threat to forums is not so much the format, but rather that the alternatives are owned by massive corporations which have the ability to use their power and influence to crush competitors via anti-competitive means.
For the person who made the comment about selling or buying a car on here and being happy about only paying $5 for the listing as a good ROI; for such a big purchase I’d recommend buying or selling on a format that has buyer/seller protection.
This is why we recommend using PayPal and other such services for making payments, as they come with buyer and seller protection. It would be completely redundant for us to offer buyer/seller protection, when most want to use PayPal and similar services for their payments in any case, which already offer that. Also, many purchases (especially for vehicles) happen offline, as such we couldn't provide such protection for a $60,000 vehicle purchase made via a cashiers check at the sellers local bank.
Google, twitter, Facebook, instagram, reddit, YouTube, etc…
For sure there is still huge value in forums, but not like it used to be 10-20 years ago. I enjoy TMC as well, just making note of the changes as time goes on in regards to forums AND adding an expense to using the classified section.
The only site that you mention which overlaps with TMC in a meaningful way is Reddit, but even Reddit is quite different in the type of content and interactions that it encourages due to the type of community that already exists on there, and the way its software works. The quality of the conversations happening on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram about Tesla, or really almost anything, is pretty low. YouTube would be an exception there, but YouTube is a video platform. I use Twitter, it's good for some things, like following news headlines, but it serves a different function than a forum.
Forums still exist because they do certain things better than the type of social media sites to which you have alluded. The reason forums were bigger in the past, isn't because they were better back then, but it was because they were fulfilling a purpose larger than what they excel at. Forums are not designed for ephemeral casual interactions like most social media website, rather forums are designed for community building and for long-form conversations that are well organized. On TMC, we are essentially documenting the history of Tesla and EVs, largely from a client perspective.
The users can see engagement down across the forums anyway. So it actually makes more sense now.
