These groups are awesome, but they're also fragile.
Our little English town had an amazing Freecycle group running for a while that got us through the "baby clothes" issues that people are discussing here. But the next town over had a "Sell & Seek" group that was essentially the same, but for small cash payments instead of goodwill.
One woman saw the arbitrage opportunity and started accepting pretty much everything that came up on the Freecycle, only to re-list it on the Sell & Seek. My wife gave away a big basket of washable diaper stuff and watched as it all popped back up, one item at a time, for $5-$10 each on that Sell & Seek. Think about the emotional ride that puts you on, from thinking you'd single handedly sorted some new young mom, to realizing you'd been suckered by this... well, not nice person. Then multiply it by every member of that group that gave anything away in good faith.
The Freecycle just sort of went away inside of a month, and now all that's left is that paid version from the next town over.
All it takes for one person to do this and your community dies. Notice that she didn't ever do anything illegal or even "wrong" from her viewpoint. Just the same sort of "disrupting" and arbitrage that we see praised here all the time.
Buy Nothing is specifically distinct from freecycle, it includes some relatively strict rules, "hyperlocal" groups, and moderators. In my experience, I am confident that this sort of behavior would not be tolerated, assuming it was noticed.
I haven't used my local freecycle group much, because it was stuck on the Yahoo groups platform for so long, but that group seemed much more free-for-all, and not connected to an organized, nationwide project like BN is.
I get the sense that the people getting rid of the stuff are as happy to have it taken off their hands and not taking up space in the house.
As you are getting it for free it's implied that it is your responsibility to collect it and that it is as is, like no guarantees about quality etc.
It would be bad form if someone put something up on donedeal.ie or adverts.ie but at the same time I couldn't be bothered doing that so I don't mind too much.
The stuff we've given I usually get the sense that the person has a need for it and is really happy to get it and it's the same when I take something.
I guess it just takes one person to ruin things, but maybe they could have banned that person for abuse.
Yeah, happens a bit with our Freecycle group. As long as they pick it up promptly I don't mind, I'm using it because I want rid. If they started listing it on e.g. gumtree before they've picked it up or worse, not picking it up if it didn't sell, it would cross the line for me.
If you don’t have the time or energy to list something for sale, take photos of the items, deal with the headache of meeting people (perhaps 5 people just to sell a piece of baby clothing), what is the harm in someone else spending their time that way?
I routinely see items at the curb that are worth $20 or more used (like espresso makers or exercise equipment or furniture) with a sign FREE. I assume whoever picks it up just sells it.
So what? If you want to spend your days selling used junk for a few bucks, and I don’t, more power to you. My time is more valuable than that.
I understand why you’re upset and it does seem like this person took advantage of your good will. I guess I would not get too upset about it; you don’t know how much work that person put into selling these things. Could have been a lot more time than made it worthwhile.
The project needs a copyleft licence. That means the things are given away with a contract that states that they have to remain free and selling is forbidden.
How about adding a easy to add but hard to remove tag to stuff like clothes. Or a stamp to books. That way the buyer would at least realise that they bought stuff the seller received for free (and possibly give appropriate feedback/ratings). Of course the seller could remove the mark, but that just needs to be difficult enough to make it not worth their time.
That goes explicitly against the code of buy nothing which is to reduce consumption and give freely with no strings attached. Obviously it's still a problem if someone is monopolizing donations as that discourages participation by a lot of people and hurts the community aspect of BN. As some other commenters have mentioned, a good mitigating strategy is to encourage giving to a random commenter after a couple hours have passed rather than first-come-first-serve.
I think this just shows that unregulated, no strings attached, anarchy style, etc is low hanging fruit for exploitation. Exploitation happens, and we need to deal with it, in my opinion, with attaching some strings. Like with the difference of the AGPL and the MIT license.
Your mitigation strategy would work though too, I think. If it's a raffle kind of thing, then the resellers wouldn't have such an easy time, so it makes this thing less desirable for them.
I've had that with stuff I've Freecycled. In the end I decided not to worry about it. These people aren't getting rich off my castoffs. If they can earn a little bit of extra cash then that's fine by me.
I have some friends here in the Amsterdam which exchanged cloths in a clothing-swap event, and basically you bring N items, you can take up to N items.
Of course my friends went with an 80L backpack full of cloths, so they were told to just pick whatever they wanted, they didn't pick much though.
I don't think this is really such a bad thing. You wouldn't have bothered selling these things because its too much work for too little reward. Now someone has dedicated themselves to redistributing these things to others who want them and taking a tiny fee for the work.
There are groups that try to combat this abuse by introducing some kind of transfer. Everyone gets credits and by giving away stuff/helping people you can earn them.
One could say it's the same as money, but I don't think so. There's no use in hoarding those credits and it's not as strict as real money. As long as it stops abuse it works as intended.
The downside is you now need someone to organize and keep track all of this.
Commerce is not a bad thing and it's an interesting example how incentives work in a dynamic society.
I've noticed this in Berlin as well. There was the famous Free-your-stuff group which then spawned into different splinter groups, The last time I checked Sell-your-suff groups are trend du-jour, and people would repurpose the goods they found for free on FB/Ebay Kleinanzeigen and sell them.
Yeah, this is annoying, I even have one couple in our group of friends who I suspect of happily joining the circle and then selling after they used it instead if gifting as everyone else. It takes all motivation out.
There was a good article in Cracked or similar about the White Bikes in Amsterdam (Free public bikes). The article sadly seems like it was taken down and I've never seen it replicated.
Basically all the White Bikes ended up in the canals, and the theory is simply, 1% of the population is 'bad' all the time and good people are 'bad' 1% of the time (for instance drunk), and you should design for this.
Even if your society is near perfect you still have to engineer around that 1% catastrophic failure. Bikes will be thrown in canals, and that woman possibly is a good person in a 1% bad spot or an outsider who is 'bad' for the group.
Our little English town had an amazing Freecycle group running for a while that got us through the "baby clothes" issues that people are discussing here. But the next town over had a "Sell & Seek" group that was essentially the same, but for small cash payments instead of goodwill.
One woman saw the arbitrage opportunity and started accepting pretty much everything that came up on the Freecycle, only to re-list it on the Sell & Seek. My wife gave away a big basket of washable diaper stuff and watched as it all popped back up, one item at a time, for $5-$10 each on that Sell & Seek. Think about the emotional ride that puts you on, from thinking you'd single handedly sorted some new young mom, to realizing you'd been suckered by this... well, not nice person. Then multiply it by every member of that group that gave anything away in good faith.
The Freecycle just sort of went away inside of a month, and now all that's left is that paid version from the next town over.
All it takes for one person to do this and your community dies. Notice that she didn't ever do anything illegal or even "wrong" from her viewpoint. Just the same sort of "disrupting" and arbitrage that we see praised here all the time.
But it completely ruined a nice thing.