eBay
Article
eBay is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 14, 2023 and March 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “advertised really heavily within the small community of eBay power users, who often buy and sell to other eBay power users”; “Amazon and eBay have made it trivial to exchange money”; “the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar”. It most often appears alongside Amazon, Manifold, ACLU.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: February 14, 2023
- Last seen: March 13, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Amazon (2 shared issues)
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- Manifold (2 shared issues)
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- ACLU (1 shared issues)
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- Aella (1 shared issues)
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- AI Lab Watch (1 shared issues)
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- Altman (1 shared issues)
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- Altman Skulduggery, Inc. (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (1 shared issues)
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- Attorney General of California (1 shared issues)
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- Attorneys General of California (1 shared issues)
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- Austin (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Thiel describes how PayPal solved this: they advertised really heavily within the small community of eBay power users, who often buy and sell to other eBay power users. Eventually many of these people started using PayPal, and then other people who might want to transact with eBay power users started using it, and so on to the rest of society. Mark Zuckerberg solved this by starting with Harvard students, then other college students, and then the rest of the world.
Also, what was up with stamp and coin collectors? This seems like a different phenomenon: surely nobody wanted to identify with the US Postal Service. I have a better hypothesis for why this pastime has died out: collectors enjoyed the thrill of hunting for a rare piece, but Amazon and eBay have made it trivial to exchange money for whatever coins/stamps you want. I’m not sure this works; when I was young in the 90s, there was a store in my hometown that sold rare coins; even then I could have gone to the store and walked out with a pretty good collection. But maybe the fact that I would need multiple books to know which coins were “rare”, and that the store could have been out of one or two valuable pieces, was enough cover to make it still seem interesting and impressive. Now there’s no sense that you have to really care about stamps or coins to have a great stamp/coin collection: you just need a higher budget than whoever else typed “stamps and coins” into the eBay search function.
In late January, a group of 25 charities, including one started by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, piled on. The coalition urged Bonta "to take prompt legal action to ensure that OpenAI's assets are not illegally diverted for private gain."
Inline links: urged Bonta