Sellers are customers, eBay.

Go with the force. The community is your power. Don’t silence market participants … empower them to manage and govern themselves with better tools than words and thumbs (up or down).

eBay plans to cut sellers out of their feedback system in the mid-May timeframe … allowing only buyers to participate in the feedback system. OK, so maybe I am missing something here. eBay is a marketplace. Buyers and sellers come together to make the market. Economics 101 … However, let’s assume the seller has no voice – what will the impact be?

eBay is taking the stance that they will crackdown on problem market participants directly. However, why side with the buyer? Does eBay now want to take on the role of it’s own market regulator? Will they govern their own community? How will disputes be managed and settled?

Unless I am missing something here, they’re about to divide their community. They rely on sellers for their income … however, in the very near future, their feedback is not welcome. Did someone miss their morning jolt of java?

The answer is to let the community govern itself. The response is not to take matters into your own hands. The answer is to innovate and provide tools for the community to better manage and govern themselves. You built the business on community … innovate to make the community with everyone having an equal voice.

As reported by Rob Pegoraro, Personal Technology Columnist at the Washington Post in an article entitled On eBay, A Little Less Conversation:

“The site will change one of its core features, the feedback system allowing buyers and sellers to judge one another, by cutting sellers out of part of that back-and-forth. Buyers will still be able to give a thumbs-down to a seller, in the form of a negative (or neutral) feedback rating -- but the new rules will block sellers from returning the favor.

EBay says it's doing this because the old system had become a retaliatory feedback loop, silencing buyers afraid that sellers would ding them if they posted bad ratings.”

The real culprit here is the reputation and ratings system. The system is extremely valuable and underpins trust on eBay. The identity associated with the seller is also very valuable as a result of the trust. eBay, however, is now tweaking the trust model ... at the potential expense of market participants.

The challenge when you go to a community model is that you have to live with the good behaviors as well as the bad behaviors. The real trick is to let the community develop their own social norms. Over-simplistic feedback systems such as simple feedback and thumbs up and thumbs down don’t get to the heart of the matter. The web needs to grow up and move through adolescence. Service providers need to provide tools for vital, productive communities.

Pegoraro further explains in the article … “On social-networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, the trust system is built on validation by other friends. On social news sites like Slashdot and Digg, it's other users voting stories up or down.

As these communities get bigger, these systems can break down. Spammers try to exploit them, and even well-meaning people can strain rules by overstepping their bounds. The overflow of comments on popular blogs can be tedious to monitor.”

Privacy Policies (protection, service-provider centric) and Terms of Service (rules) will help. Taking control, “policing” and service-provider led governance is another approach. The real issue here is that massive scale virtual communities need social norms ... The community will evolve such social norms over time. The community will evolve quicker if it has the tools and framework to manage the disruptive and negative behaviors.

The answer lay in developing tools for communities to manage and govern themselves.

Good luck, eBay. Hope you don’t divide your community.

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