I think of the the big reasons I’ve used eBay less and less over the years is because of how much noise there is now in the service.

In the early days when Yahoo Auctions and eBay were both fighting for the online auction market, online auctions were great in that it was easy to find something that another person was personally putting up for sale.

Nowadays, eBay is teeming with online retailers and people who build businesses around selling things on the service. Instead of nice, orderly listings from human sellers, every page I look at is mostly filled with duplicate listings of imitation products. There’s just too much noise.

Craigslist is much more useful (in my opinion) in that the noise is dealt with by the community. Imagine if you could mark auctions in eBay as spam or duplicates.

I have no idea if there’s any way for eBay to regain its reputation in my eyes. Unless it figures out a way to, I don’t think I’m going to be visiting very often.