Comment by ghaff
12 days ago
At some point, you have boxes and boxes of stuff that may contain something that might be useful someday on the off-chance that you can actually find that thing when you need it. I'd love to connect everything to the person--including future me--who would find it useful (or thinks they would in the moment) but it's often not practical.
> I'd love to connect everything to the person--including future me--who would find it useful (or thinks they would in the moment) but it's often not practical.
It actually amazes me that this isn't a well-solved problem by now. We've got various marketplaces for used items (eBay, CL, FB Marketplace, etc.) and we've got various rental/sharing platforms for niche things (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) and those are decent for what they are, yet somehow the inherent inefficiencies (effort to list an item, effort to discover an item, platform fees, etc.) suggest that there is a lot of room for improvement.
It's kind of like how scheduling assistant features/products, such as Calendly, offer a massive improvement over writing messages back and forth along the lines of "send me your availability," yet a verbal/synchronous discussion isn't nearly as bad as written/async, since it gets you across the finish line quickly despite many round trips, so lots of people are fine doing that instead of using efficient tools, so there's no mass adoption/demand.
It's just hard to get away from the transaction costs associated with exchanging low-value physical goods over distance. A swap meet with a local electronics club? Sure. But selling individual items on eBay? Not so much.
There were a bunch of ideas associated with the early Web like sharing tools and so forth that just don't make sense outside an informal neighborhood "economy" (and often not even there).
Indeed.
I'd give anyone stuff from my cabling and computer parts collection as long as they had a use for it. I'd do this without cost if I could.
Except: It isn't usually free to get things from my empire of dirt to anyone else's empire of dirt.
By the time I boxed up a widget and sent it on its way, it is likely that more money has been spent than just procuring a new widget to begin with.