Crowd Control at eBay

If over the last decade you’ve read any of the many books and articles promoting the Net as a means for forming self-regulating, super-democratic communities, you have no doubt come across glowing descriptions of eBay’s feedback system. By providing buyers and sellers with a simple means for rating one another, eBay has been able, we’ve been told, to avoid lots of rules and regulations and other top-down controls. The community, built on trust and fellow-feeling, essentially managed itself. Tom Friedman, in his book “The World Is Flat,” voiced the common opinion when he called eBay a “self-governing nation-state.” Nice story. Too bad it didn’t work out.

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