Some nasty stuff is exposed here about reverb. I would say they should be more respectful to people on their platform who sell there as they provide their main source of income.
Reading private messages between sellers and buyers without some explicit notice of this feels very wrong. While they do mention that they are very strict about avoiding fee’s, they do not mention anything regarding reading private messages in their policies.
Sorry Reverb, I have to leave you now.
I’m honestly amazed that anyone thinks these messages would be private - it makes no sense that they would be (and why would you need them to be?). The platform is providing that messaging system for you to organise a transaction - and have both parties interests in mind when they maintain access to that conversation.
If a seller sends me a message telling me that the item works and there are no issues, and I receive it and it’s broken - I would surely expect to be able to highlight this message to the platform. Imagine the inconvenience of them not being able to access that history - think of the complaints people would post about it on Elektronauts.
It’s a vocal minority - and why I personally find the need to defend them - because it’s an excellent platform, run well and blows the competition out of the water.
People are just never happy.
Ok seeya
They give reverb a bad name.
This private messaging thing. If most sites have control and can look, does it apply here on Elektronauts as well? Or is it just retail sites.?
Discord DM’s are private, mods can’t read them. But this is a communications platform, not a marketplace - it just sometimes gets used as one 
unless a platform specifies that it stores messages encrypted in any way, always assume that the messages are visible in plain text to the platform owners, from there it’s a permission thing to grant visibility to mods / managers etc. I don’t think many platforms offer encrypted messages, so assume everything is visible to someone on some level, unless it’s Signal or similar things.
This bit is a grey area? So the owners of the site can grant permission for visibility of private messaging? But who regulates the owners decision?
Sorry I need to correct myself, I Google’d quickly but as you can see I said ‘Discord’, this is using the ‘Discourse’ platform (doh)
Looks like mods can access DM’s on Discourse - it’s a safety feature and is a part of moderation.
it’s the wild wild west, everyone’s doing what they want pretty much until they get a lawsuit or something. there’s usually TOS and Privacy Policy that you sign when you create your account that allows them (the platform) to do that and usually no one cares so they pretty much can do whatever they want.
unless they sell your private info to 3rd party vendors no one really cares.
option 3: it is not your f business to ask me what I do with my property.
Well it is when you use their platform to market that property and agree to pay them a fee when it leads to a successful sale
I’ve never tried to sell anything on Reverb, I tend to use eBay when they’ve got the old 70% off selling fees or I sell on here. I’ve bought a couple of things off Reverb though.
My wife got a warning off eBay for selling something outside the site, but it was pretty friendly and basically just highlighted the policy to her and asked her not to do it again or her account would be suspended for a month of whatever.
The important thing was that they made the policy very clear, both in terms of their expectations and their ability to monitor behaviour.
It sounds like the biggest problem here isn’t the policy, or Reverb reading messages, it’s that people probably aren’t reading the terms and conditions and then reverb aren’t being particularly professional about dealing with breaches of those terms and conditions when they occur.
How much does it hurt to give people a friendly reminder of the rules before going nuclear on them?
I think if Reverb and eBay want to remain relevant, they need to prioritize dealing with the scammers, partly by offering more help and advice to buyers and sellers about how to protect themselves, but mostly by actually dealing with the fucking scammers that are everywhere on both sites.
All fair points.
I kinda feel like they normally would - it’s not like they want to lose good sellers - I’m loading on assumption here though, maybe they are heavy handed.
Only OP can say for sure but based on this paragraph I’m going to assume that someone at Reverb uncovered a fair amount of policy transgression.
Yeah, but it also seems like the OP was allowed to keep making these transgressions without being warned or temporarily suspended.
It’s kind of a trap, where people feel like they’re getting away with it, so it starts to seem like normal behaviour, but then suddenly there’s a crackdown and you’ve done it enough times that they just outright ban you.
They should be dealing with it on first offence.
I don’t suspect they were aware of them whilst they were happening - my assumption is that something led to a review of the account and this has been discovered.
Again I can only go by assumption but it seems in everyones interest for them to have soft warnings where appropriate (I think I’ve seen a warning before when sharing certain details in a chat, which would have required me to intentionally bypass)
Maybe they need to use eBay’s message scanning bots.
Someone on Elektronauts would still find a reason to complain about it
yes, i agreed to pay them fee, and i do. If i sell gear over there. But if i decide to take my gear of the site, it is nobody’s business why i did it. They can deserve the right to investigate me and spy on me if they like . Thet will look great to public and users .
Well they’re not going to spy on you - they’re just asking if you achieved the sale through use of their service.
It’s really not an unusual question to ask it’s a comission based business model.
This thing of private messaging being ‘ogled ‘ at is a bit like Big Brother yes?
Thats why we need to go back to ‘meeting people’ and buying in real ‘shops’ made of bricks and mortar. The internet has lulled us into a false sense of security.