So... I swore off Facebook about 2-3 years ago and that has been a Good Thing. It has helped with phone addiction. However, it seems to have become the place for selling vehicles older than 10 years or so. Is there any way to interact with FB Marketplace exclusively? I want to look at listings and communicate with sellers and possibly sell things, but that's it. There's cars on there that are worth investigating.
Suggestions?
Open a Facebook account and work on your self control so it doesn't become a problem again.
My coworker opened a FB account under a fake name and has no friends. He uses it exclusively for marketplace.
Is there a strictly MP app?
I have been avoiding facebook until very recently and, like you, I'm primarily interested in marketplace. I also want to keep up with the rallyx schedule and be in some specific "for sale" groups. In order to try to keep the data hoovering down to a minimum, I have a virtual machine that I spun up that does nothing but run a web browser which talks to facebook. I don't click on any links there and I don't use that machine for anything else. No app on my phone, no clicking on links in my regular browser on my regular computers or anything like that. That has the side-effect of keeping me off of that stuff when I'm not sitting at my computer. I heard that people can be reluctant to deal with folks on marketplace if they don't have any friends or anything so I have a couple folks that I know with whom I established that connection, but I guess you can "unfollow" so that you're not seeing posts? There was a friend of my wife that found me and they post a lot of political stuff. I happen to agree with it, for the most part, but it gets in the way of new posts from the neons.org for sale/trade feed, so it's gotta go. From there, I exclusively use the "most recent" link on the left menu bar as well as the marketplace link. That gives me a time-ordered list of posts from the groups and people that I'm following but it seems to eliminate the bullcrap "suggested" stuff that I don't care about.
I berkeleying hate that FB Marketplace has completely replaced Craigslist as the place to buy and sell cheap stuff. Setting aside the privacy/data gathering aspect of FB itself, the search engine is crap, and you can only save a very basic text search. CL certainly had it's problems, the unmoderated nature let a lot of scammers in, but at least you could find stuff on there and you didn't have to be sucked into the Zuckerverse to do it. Hell, you didn't even need an account.
wae said:I heard that people can be reluctant to deal with folks on marketplace if they don't have any friends or anything
I buy and sell quite a bit through Marketplace and this is a real thing to me. I want to deal with established people. I'm old and tired and don't have the patience to deal with knuckleheads and fakes. A glance at someone's profile before I send them a message can give me an idea of what kind of person I'm about to be dealing with and whether I want to proceed.
I went through this same thing, and discovered the following "hack" that has worked well for me.
1) Start FB account. Use real name, so no issues with FB's stupid "no psuednyms" policy
2) lock down your new FB account as hard as possible. Friend NO ONE. Not even your spouse/ SO/ bestie. This is because FB has a setting that allows only friends of your friends to send you friend requests. If you have no friends, then no one can send you friend requests. Provide only your geographical area, so that Marketplace can locate you and people know roughly where you are. One profile pic. Mine is this:
3) Join groups you want to be a part of. For me, this is strictly automotive-related groups, like for specific car makes, car shows in my area, and low-buck endurance racing.
Now you have a FB account, no friends, interaction with groups for stuff you want to interact with, and the ability to sell and buy stuff on FB MP. Minimal distraction, maximum benefit. You can also use FB messenger to communicate with other people, even if they aren't "friends" of yours on the 'Book.
Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) said:I berkeleying hate that FB Marketplace has completely replaced Craigslist as the place to buy and sell cheap stuff. Setting aside the privacy/data gathering aspect of FB itself, the search engine is crap, and you can only save a very basic text search. CL certainly had it's problems, the unmoderated nature let a lot of scammers in, but at least you could find stuff on there and you didn't have to be sucked into the Zuckerverse to do it. Hell, you didn't even need an account.
Yes to all of that. I hate that I had to get a facebook account, but craigslist is basically dead, at least around here. I can only assume that FBM killed it the same way CL killed newspaper classifieds. Free beats five bucks every day.
volvoclearinghouse said:I went through this same thing, and discovered the following "hack" that has worked well for me.
1) Start FB account. Use real name, so no issues with FB's stupid "no psuednyms" policy
2) lock down your new FB account as hard as possible. Friend NO ONE. Not even your spouse/ SO/ bestie. This is because FB has a setting that allows only friends of your friends to send you friend requests. If you have no friends, then no one can send you friend requests. Provide only your geographical area, so that Marketplace can locate you and people know roughly where you are. One profile pic. Mine is this:
3) Join groups you want to be a part of. For me, this is strictly automotive-related groups, like for specific car makes, car shows in my area, and low-buck endurance racing.
Now you have a FB account, no friends, interaction with groups for stuff you want to interact with, and the ability to sell and buy stuff on FB MP. Minimal distraction, maximum benefit. You can also use FB messenger to communicate with other people, even if they aren't "friends" of yours on the 'Book.
I never had a FB account, but begrudgingly created one solely to look for deals in Marketplace. I created an account exactly like VCH did. It seems to work well for me.
In reply to wae :
It's a bit extreme, but I like the idea. But the real questions are:
Ugh Marketplace, I can rant all day about it, sometimes searching works, sometimes it doesn't. Its annoying.
Selling car parts has been a total pain on there, so many tire kickers. I can't believe I had problems selling a 20 dollar replica WRX lip on there. I had over 20 messages inquiring interest, and not one came to buy. Who knew selling something for 20 bucks could be so difficult
Yet buying/selling film camera gear has been a total breeze and a great experience vs car parts
In reply to scardeal :
I'm using Oracle VirtualBox with an Ubuntu guest with Firefox and Facebook Containers. No firefox account connected to that session.
Oh, and I sort of lied. I also installed a freecell game and use that on the VM because I'm kind of addicted to that and I seem to recall that the version with Windows 10 is garbage for some reason.... But that's all that VM does!
Oh, and are people using throwaway email addresses for it?
FB search and category choices suck. Cars and parts can show up in the strangest places. Results wise I have found a mix between Cl and FB. Listed cars on both, sometimes response is better on one but sells on the other. The best feature of FB is getting some info on the buyer. But in the last year so many have gone with the zero info profile. But I do look at FB more, the descriptions are often more interesting.
In reply to scardeal :
Pretty much all my email addresses are throw-away. I create a forwarder for every time I need to give out an email address so I can easily sort incoming mail to folders, know where you got my email address, and be able to shut off an address if it is given out or if I just don't want to get mail from that sender anymore.
I did, however, give them my actual phone number as part of the "we don't think you're really a person" game they wanted to play with me.... Or maybe I gave them my google voice number... I don't remember.
porschenut said:FB search and category choices suck.
They also don't work right. Good luck searching by transmission type, almost every car is listed as an automatic, whether it is or not. And don't get me started on the missing models in their pulldown menus. When I sold my 944 on there a few years back, I had to list it as a 968, because 944 wasn't listed as a Porsche model. So the first line of my ad was "This is a 944, not a 968". So stupid....
I do not understand all the hate for FB.....yes it's a data gathering engine, but so what? What are they going to learn about me? That I have friends and family members and like old cars? So what?
I use the groups to best effect when selling parts. I join a group then post ads, stuff is usually gone in a couple of days and no one seems to need to haggle - although I do tend to price aggressively low - my goal is to get rid of stuff, not get rich. Most of the stuff I sell is useful and I'm happy to see it go to someone who can use it for their car. It's also been an interesting way to meet fellow Mini enthusiasts.....
You do you, but I don't car if Mark figures out what kind of underwear I have (he'd be wrong, but let's not go there 
) it's a means to an end for me. I keep in touch with friends and family and it's a quick and easy (and free!) way to clear my shelves of old stuff I don't need.
I admin a group. The number of fake profile spammers I decline daily is as incredible as it is annoying. I've become really good at spotting the fake t-shirt sellers and vendors of non-existent car parts. But that's more of a Groups problem than a Marketplace problem.
I just delete the "Is it still available?" replies without a response. Most of those are from bots anyway.
I'd say I've had about the same success rate selling stuff on MP as I did on CL back in the day. I still try putting stuff on CL but it seems nobody is even browsing there anymore, including the time wasters. Lots of time wasters on MP.
At least with Ebay you get feedback ratings to go by.
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