Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: Dread Pirate Roberts on March 07, 2012, 04:53 am
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Hey gang,
You may have noticed some small changes to the user and item pages as well as some of the identifiers in the URLs on the site. All of these changes are part of an effort to hide the size of any given vendor's business as well as the size of Silk Road as a whole from the prying eyes of law enforcement agencies.
Instead of displaying a vendor's rank out of the total number of vendors, we'll now show their standing as a percent. Top 10% means they are ranked higher than 90% of vendors on Silk Road. Top 85% means they are ranked higher than the bottom 15% of vendors. Also, instead of showing all feedback in chronological order on the user and item pages for all to see and count, we display a representative assortment of 10 recent reviews.
Also, instead of referencing users, items, transactions, feedback, messages, etc. with ids that count up by one for each new entry, making it trivial to see how many new users, new transactions, etc. there are on the site, we are identifying each by a random unique string.
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I noticed the feedback changes earlier and was wondering what was going on. I like these changes.
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good change, random good
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Well...
LONG LIVE SR.
Whatever it takes.
Thanks for explaining and keeping us all in the loop.
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I like the idea of decoupling feedback from specific orders. However I would keep the timestamp on feedback - the more recent the feedback is, the more relevant it is.
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Randomizing the feedback is a terrible idea. Heres why: The most recent feedback reflects the current state of a vendors affairs in terms of batch quality and other current factors such as packaging and timeliness in delivery. Showing me some random feedback from a listing is completely worthless in terms of knowing what a vendor is sending out right then and what their current state of conducting business is. Stuff changes as each new batch is acquired and the feedback should reflect the current situation, not something that happened 3 months ago. At least if your gonna randomize it put the time stamp so people know if its relevant information or completely worthless information about a batch that is long gone.
Hiding transaction numbers is practically ineffective as well for hiding the scope of an operation because your telling people straight out that so and so is in the top whatever percent... it does hide the scope of Silk Roads operation to some degree, however estimated growth based on previous known values is easy to determine at this point... Ive been doing it since before I became a vendor.. its basic market research you know...
Also, my account page only goes back for a few pages... what is that about? Hard to do accounting if your ledger is missing... and by the way, hiding the ledger from your business partners is not cool...
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Regardless of the reasoning for the percentiles, I think it's nice because different vendors have different wares so they may not be the top vendor on the site but the best in their category. With percentiles this becomes less of an issue because the top vendors in a cateogry will probably be high over all.
I also think that either the newest reviews of transactions should be displayed, or a time reference for random selection.
On another note, loving the domestic only option!
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These really are not small changes at all. Access to extensive feedback for given items and vendors is the single largest factor I have in determining risk assessment. If I can determine neither the age, volume or geographic particulars of feedback (Have people brought it into Australia? what timelines are they seeing? what loss rates? etc) I am in no real position to make educated decisions with regard to my own safety. Messaging particular vendors is both time consuming and less reliable than user feedback, since it is in the vendors' interest to say 'yeah I have nearly 100% success rate to Aus', or alternatively if market conditions encourage, possibly to use an overinflated risk model to lower refund rates or outright selective scam as some users have postulated.
I also agree with Paperchasing that this will not significantly mask the overall size or patterns of SR operations to any competent and longstanding LE surveillance and profiling operations. I see this as a modest improvement to overall security at great cost to the individual.
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These really are not small changes at all. Access to extensive feedback for given items and vendors is the single largest factor I have in determining risk assessment. If I can determine neither the age, volume or geographic particulars of feedback (Have people brought it into Australia? what timelines are they seeing? what loss rates? etc) I am in no real position to make educated decisions with regard to my own safety. Messaging particular vendors is both time consuming and less reliable than user feedback, since it is in the vendors' interest to say 'yeah I have nearly 100% success rate to Aus', or alternatively if market conditions encourage, possibly to use an overinflated risk model to lower refund rates or outright selective scam as some users have postulated.
I also agree with Paperchasing that this will not significantly mask the overall size or patterns of SR operations to any competent and longstanding LE surveillance and profiling operations. I see this as a modest improvement to overall security at great cost to the individual.
One hundred percent agreed.
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The changes in general are positive, except for the feedback! I am of the opinion that these changes to feedback dramatically reduce the buyers ability to accurately determine the vendors reliability.
I agree that the recent transactions are more relative to the reputation and the time stamp is extremely important. A prime example is LTTM who quit selling a few months ago, and has had no reliable feedback since returning to sell. Now the vendor page just shows all positive feedback and it completely masks the fact NONE of those feedbacks are actually from recent transactions! The feedback system is practically worthless now and I personally do not support the changes. Recently SR has completely focused on protecting the vendor but SR need not forget without the buyers, this community certainly would not be here either. Something needs to be done about this to protect us as well.
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I also would rather prefer timestamps on the feedback. Without it how can one know how a vendor is running their business today?
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I like the idea of protecting the vendors. No one wants anyone here to get busted. In that sense, some of these changes are for the better. The percentage thing is fine, and I don't necessarily need to see ALL of the feedback (hasn't it been capped at the last few months anyway?).
However, I do want to see the most RECENT feedback, preferably in chronological order. As others have detailed above, it is of the utmost importance that we know when feedback was given so as to judge the most recent dealings of the vendor and the quality of their product. I honestly can't see how removing the time stamp protects a vendor. If it must be randomized and not have a time stamp, then perhaps the feedback could be selected only from the last ~10 days? Without knowing when it happened, feedback is almost worthless.
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Randomizing the feedback is a terrible idea. Heres why: The most recent feedback reflects the current state of a vendors affairs in terms of batch quality and other current factors such as packaging and timeliness in delivery. Showing me some random feedback from a listing is completely worthless in terms of knowing what a vendor is sending out right then and what their current state of conducting business is. Stuff changes as each new batch is acquired and the feedback should reflect the current situation, not something that happened 3 months ago. At least if your gonna randomize it put the time stamp so people know if its relevant information or completely worthless information about a batch that is long gone.
This is a good point. How can we display feedback without revealing every transaction that happens for each vendor? And more generally, where do these measures fall short still. If you were trying to find out how big a vendor is, or how big the site is, how would you do it?
Hiding transaction numbers is practically ineffective as well for hiding the scope of an operation because your telling people straight out that so and so is in the top whatever percent... it does hide the scope of Silk Roads operation to some degree, however estimated growth based on previous known values is easy to determine at this point... Ive been doing it since before I became a vendor.. its basic market research you know...
Not sure I agree here. If you only know the percent, then you don't know the total number of vendors. I know we just made the switch, so you can make a good guess now, but if the vendor base grows or shrinks by a factor of 2 or 3 in the next 6 months, you won't be able to tell.
Also, my account page only goes back for a few pages... what is that about? Hard to do accounting if your ledger is missing... and by the way, hiding the ledger from your business partners is not cool...
It has always been this way.
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i think that if you keep the last 3 pages of buyer feedback then it will be a representative enough for a buyer to go from. maybe less but you have to keep newest transactions available. appa, i think the 10 days is a bit much for really high volume vendors if the idea is to keep business #'s secret.
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Randomizing the feedback is a terrible idea. Heres why: The most recent feedback reflects the current state of a vendors affairs in terms of batch quality and other current factors such as packaging and timeliness in delivery. Showing me some random feedback from a listing is completely worthless in terms of knowing what a vendor is sending out right then and what their current state of conducting business is. Stuff changes as each new batch is acquired and the feedback should reflect the current situation, not something that happened 3 months ago. At least if your gonna randomize it put the time stamp so people know if its relevant information or completely worthless information about a batch that is long gone.
This is a good point. How can we display feedback without revealing every transaction that happens for each vendor? And more generally, where do these measures fall short still. If you were trying to find out how big a vendor is, or how big the site is, how would you do it?
Hiding transaction numbers is practically ineffective as well for hiding the scope of an operation because your telling people straight out that so and so is in the top whatever percent... it does hide the scope of Silk Roads operation to some degree, however estimated growth based on previous known values is easy to determine at this point... Ive been doing it since before I became a vendor.. its basic market research you know...
Not sure I agree here. If you only know the percent, then you don't know the total number of vendors. I know we just made the switch, so you can make a good guess now, but if the vendor base grows or shrinks by a factor of 2 or 3 in the next 6 months, you won't be able to tell.
Also, my account page only goes back for a few pages... what is that about? Hard to do accounting if your ledger is missing... and by the way, hiding the ledger from your business partners is not cool...
It has always been this way.
DPR, just put hard-number caps on the amount of feedback displayed. Limit the general feedback you can see on a vendor's page to 50 or so, and cap the feedback one can see on a particular item to 10, but leave the most recent feedback up and drop off anything older than 30 or 60 days, or if the hard-number cap is hit, whichever comes first.
It's very important that buyers get the most recent snapshot possible because if a vendor is getting sloppy, lazy, or he is attempting to scam people after establishing a rep on small orders, it's a lot easier to nip a scammer in the bud. It paints the most current, accurate picture possible of a vendor's practices. This way a vendor's operation is well hidden because there are only 50 or 100 visible feedbacks on the site, so you have a very hard time gauging the size of his business, but buyers don't lose the safety that recent feedback provides.
I do like the percentile change and I think that one should stick.
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Well, I dont know how you would go about that however more importantly what does it matter how big a vendor is really because if your here and you somehow have your ass exposed by revealing critical personal information your very likely gonna get busted whether your #1 or #100 in terms of ranking... Its up to the vendors to not reveal anything stupid about themselves, you cannot protect them from self incriminating stupidity. Now, recognize that if your a vendor then you know the risk your taking... now you can pass on getting paid here or get muscled up and handle it. Hiding user feedback is not going to save the vendors... effectively hiding their true identity will. Simple.
Humm... SR has had fairly consistent growth, the only "special" growth periods have been during media exposure and that has a degree of predictability to it. Media exposure can be factored into growth.. its no matter either way as the scope of this operation rivals most DTO's worldwide and you can bet the DEA already is aware of this so the idea that hiding the size and scope of Silk Road is really quite laughable at this point. And what about the forums here? Like people cant figure out who's who by clicking around here for a bit... like it or not this decision was made a long time ago when "the die has been cast" so that horse has already left the barn. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a slide rule to figure out who the biggest pill or coke dealers here are, really. And further to contemplate that the feds have not already made purchases from all the top vendors is beyond ludicrous... so they have us all in their purchasing history anyways.
With regard to the accounting page only going back 3 pages all along: It has not been that way for me at all till now. Perhaps you may recall us having discussions on the forums here about vendors should have a way to delete the accounting logs once we are satisfied with it for security purposes (http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=1667.0) The reason we had this discussion was because the accounting log ran all the way back and vendors had no way to delete it if we so chose to do so. It needs to be returned to full access and the individual vendors should choose when to delete their logs.
Once again I find myself having to ask: Why in the world was these changes not discussed in open format prior to implementation with the higher ranked vendors and/or buyers after such unpleasantness with when the commission change went into effect? Really and truly an open dialogue would do wonders for progress and make changes silky smooth.
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i think that if you keep the last 3 pages of buyer feedback then it will be a representative enough for a buyer to go from. maybe less but you have to keep newest transactions available. appa, i think the 10 days is a bit much for really high volume vendors if the idea is to keep business #'s secret.
Yes, the whole 10 days could easily be too much for large vendors. I meant that if there are to be no time stamps and feedback will be randomly-selected, a specific number of feedbacks could be randomly chosen from the last ~10 days (could easily be less or more, of course). This would probably do a fine job of letting us know if a vendor has gone sour or has lately been doing bad business or whatever.
It's very important that buyers get the most recent snapshot possible because if a vendor is getting sloppy, lazy, or he is attempting to scam people after establishing a rep on small orders, it's a lot easier to nip a scammer in the bud. It paints the most current, accurate picture possible of a vendor's practices. This way a vendor's operation is well hidden because there are only 50 or 100 visible feedbacks on the site, so you have a very hard time gauging the size of his business, but buyers don't lose the safety that recent feedback provides.
Exactly. It's not very important to read old feedback, compared to more recent news. If a vendor already checks out by having a high percentage of positive feedback, their business is easier to judge further if consumers can see most recent feedback, compared to feedback from an unknown time.
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PROPOSAL: new vendor section of the forum (differing from Rumor Mill). Read on to see how.
What we'll need then is a vendor section of the forum. A section with its own heading where each vendor will have their own thread created by the Vendor (in alphabetical order, preferably but not sure the forum software can keep it this way. I believe new posts bump the thread to the top). Buyers can NOT create threads in this section but can only post to existing vendor threads. (Which would mean that a new class of poster called Vendor or Seller would have to be made which grants thread starting privilege in this section.
Every vendor's profile page and perhaps even product page on Silk Road market should encourage buyers to review/discuss the product in the vendor's thread with a link to it.
The purpose of this section is to facilitate seller announcements in the opening post, for sellers to address concerns, for buyer to ask questions, for buyers to discuss current product quality and general discourse and advice about product use.
The Vendor get's the first post of the thread where they can describe their business and offerings, policies, announcements, URL link to seller page on SR, or whatever else they want to discuss or reveal. The vendor must title their thread with their vendor name. But they can add after their vendor name, what they sell.
For instance, let's take Pharmville as an example. They can name their thread:
Pharmville - [Opiates, Benzos, Fast shipping - professional service "the drugs you want at the prices you'll love]
Also, this could be the one place a seller can list their seller page URL instead of in their signature. When they want to go into stealth mode, they can remove their seller page URL from the opening post. They can even announce that they're about to or have gone stealth and when they anticipate de-activating stealth. Having the seller page URL here would reduce the likelihood of causally defeating stealth mode.
Doing this would serve the purpose of allowing buyers to gauge the present state of the vendor - quality of product, shipping times, current issues. It would also serve as a meeting place for buyers who share a vendor in common.
Lastly, when a vendor's thread gets too big, an admin or mod can send the vendor a PM that the thread will be closed and that the Vendor must start a new one with a link to the old thread in the opening post of the new thread. Vendors will also have to update their SR seller's page to reflect the change. And for those who might have bookmarked the old thread, admins should make the last post of the old thread, link to the new thread.
With this vendor only section, instead of mixing in all manner of threads that the rumor mill does, you'll have a centralized area for vendor specific dialogue.
Thanks in advance for your consideration.
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I like it... will make researching vendors a lot easier.
Good idea!
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Just wanted to add that I agree that placing a cap on the number of feedbacks makes a lot more sense than doing random feedbacks. If you don't display the last X number of feedbacks about a vendor or item, the feedback system becomes essentially worthless. This isn't Amazon, where the product is the same from 2008 to 2012, and so reviews from months/years ago still hold relevance. On Silk Road, any reviews older than a week are worthless compared to the reviews from the last week.
Perhaps if you don't want to display exact age of the review, you could simply say "Within the last 7 days", "Within the last month", "More than a month ago", something like that. Look, trying to disguise vendor volume to this degree is harmful to buyers, since we need sufficient information to enable us to judge those vendors. I agree some amount of obfuscation would be appropriate, but the amount that has been introduced is too much: I can still come up with techniques to determine rough approximates of vendor volume (with decent accuracy), so you really haven't done much for the vendors there, all you've done is make life more difficult for buyers.
A more useful modification to the ordering/feedback system would be to introduce a way for users to finalize early but delay issuing feedback until the product arrives. With some vendors, all you see is "Finalizing Early, will update" or blank bars. And if you ordered from one of those vendors, the only way you could really figure out if things were going smoothly was to go back and see if people changed their reviews to indicate that everything went well. It would be immensely more useful if their feedback didn't enter the system until they received their product (even if the vendor already has their funds).
In fact, the whole order process needs another step. This has been brought up over and over. There needs to be a step in between processing and in transit. Allow vendors to respond to "Processing" with "Order Accepted", "Order Requires Early Finalize", "Order Declined" (and a spot where you can enter a reason). That way, "In transit" will truly mean that, without introducing the race condition that currently exists, where a vendor can get burned if they pack the product on the 4th day, go to ship it, and have the buyer cancel the order before they can mark "in transit" (I've had this happen to me twice, both times I paid the vendors, but maybe others aren't so honorable).
Vendors who require early finalization from a particular user will be able to communicate that (and receive it without getting to the 'feedback' stage prematurely), Vendors who want to decline an order can do so and send a reason without having to separately go and send a message, and Users who are often left wondering "my order has been stuck in processing for days...should I contact the vendor and ask what is up?" will no longer have to wonder so much, because they will see "Order Accepted", and they will happily know the order has been seen and processed (even if it hasn't left the building yet), which will cut down on the message load for some of the larger vendors.
It's a win-win-win...Vendors win, Customers win, Silk Road wins. Why can't this be done?
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Randomizing the feedback is a terrible idea. Heres why: The most recent feedback reflects the current state of a vendors affairs in terms of batch quality and other current factors such as packaging and timeliness in delivery. Showing me some random feedback from a listing is completely worthless in terms of knowing what a vendor is sending out right then and what their current state of conducting business is. Stuff changes as each new batch is acquired and the feedback should reflect the current situation, not something that happened 3 months ago. At least if your gonna randomize it put the time stamp so people know if its relevant information or completely worthless information about a batch that is long gone.
This is a good point. How can we display feedback without revealing every transaction that happens for each vendor? And more generally, where do these measures fall short still. If you were trying to find out how big a vendor is, or how big the site is, how would you do it?
Hiding transaction numbers is practically ineffective as well for hiding the scope of an operation because your telling people straight out that so and so is in the top whatever percent... it does hide the scope of Silk Roads operation to some degree, however estimated growth based on previous known values is easy to determine at this point... Ive been doing it since before I became a vendor.. its basic market research you know...
Not sure I agree here. If you only know the percent, then you don't know the total number of vendors. I know we just made the switch, so you can make a good guess now, but if the vendor base grows or shrinks by a factor of 2 or 3 in the next 6 months, you won't be able to tell.
Also, my account page only goes back for a few pages... what is that about? Hard to do accounting if your ledger is missing... and by the way, hiding the ledger from your business partners is not cool...
It has always been this way.
It's very important that buyers get the most recent snapshot possible because if a vendor is getting sloppy, lazy, or he is attempting to scam people after establishing a rep on small orders, it's a lot easier to nip a scammer in the bud. It paints the most current, accurate picture possible of a vendor's practices. This way a vendor's operation is well hidden because there are only 50 or 100 visible feedbacks on the site, so you have a very hard time gauging the size of his business, but buyers don't lose the safety that recent feedback provides.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
I have to strongly agree with this, as we have seen in the past good vendors can go bad and there is usually a hint in the feedback when things start to go wrong. Letting a seller hide this from his customers will just help him make a bigger cash grab at the end then if buyers could see problems starting to show up in the MOST RECENT feedback then would know to avoid buying from them. But with the way things are now the seller could be going bad and there is no way to know by looking at the feedback because it says "all is good" "great stuff" even though that was from 3 months ago but there is no way for the buyers to know that now.
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Agree with OldGuard - a big concern is you won't necessarily see the hint of trouble when you start seeing all the finalize early messages in the feedback. Other than that, I rely much more on the forum for general feedback on vendors, and sure highly recommend that to others. If you are going to stick with the randomized feedback, maybe it would be appropriate to include a warning message and recommendation to do your due diligence on the forum.
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Exactly, I mean unless you can see the most recent feedback you have no idea if the vendor has all of a sudden turned to shitty service since you may be seeing all feedback from beyond two months ago like I said previously. Also to just do the most recent ten wont work either because you need to be able to scan through and get an average sometimes or if all of them are finalize early. Also, there is already the option of finalizing early, but then you just dont enter anything into the box and you do not click leave feedback... just select the SR link and navigate page to SR home. This does not leave any feedback yet you can still FE! Click on orders once it arrives and THEN leave feedback.
Seriously why fuck with the feedback system so much? it wasnt perfect but needs to be completely re-worked now.
Just change it over to either POSITIVE, NEGATIVE, or NEUTRAL as it was already being used...
then you just need to show all the past 50 feedbacks MINIMIUM, probably more like 100 at least. other information that NEEDS to be there is the item and how long ago the feedback was left. this is extremely important and I cannot understand what security or other benefit it provides except hurting buyers
as I said currently the feedback system is practically worthless. users that do not utilize the forum are so much more likely to be scammed now. Feedback can be completely falsified and theres absolutely no way to tell if they do enough of it cause its all an average now...
I agree Paperchasing, ideas like this are great to try and further the community, always progressing, but radical changes to the fundamental structure of the site could be run by the community first which may save some re-working and hassles that werent originally foreseen. These werent just a few small changes!
Just my feelings on the situation,
- microRiboNucleicAcid
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I'm not real wild about these changes either. I like to see other people's review of recent products. Quality can shift at any time.
If you're going to limit reviews, I wish you include 5 low/mid ratings as well as 5 high. The low ratings mean as much to me, if not more than the high ones especially when I'm considering someone in the low 90s.
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I agree with Ben. We should have an "official" vendor review section.
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As from a seller view 10 ratings are not enough. Sometimes we have more than 20 feedback overnight and we have no idea about that. Was there one NOT 5/5 in it? Who was it and why? - Thats very important to have the best costumer relation ship - and that means as a seller you should see all your feedback.
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The idea of an official private vendors section has been put out by me from several times in the past but has been met with no response from Mr. SR... of course that's not to say that the professional vendors have been just standing around wringing their hands wondering what we're gonna do lol... survivors know that you have to lead, follow or get out of the way. Rome was not built in a day but Nero certainly burned it down in one.
You know, you can always count on me to deliver the straight up truth from my perspective, sometimes Im right and sometimes Im wrong... but at least you will always know that I'll never just pat you on the back while Im thinking "WTF is this dude doing..." see Im the kind of friend that if we were in a bar and for no reason known to me you all of a sudden you shouted "fuck the Outlaw bikers, bunch of fake ass bitches" I'd fight my way out the door WITH you and THEN ask you "so what the hell was you thinking bro" later.
I keep calling you Mr. SR because that name to me invokes the "fuck Senators Beavis and Butthead very much" sentiments I so fondly recall much more so than DPR... sorry but the name DPR just has no history or past value to me... you'll always be Mr. SR to me bro... no disrespect whatsoever of course, its just a more powerful name that carries with it the magic of the struggle we've shared. You know, I have friends that go by two names: one that the straight up OG's know and one that everyone else knows so that they can easily ascertain who's addressing them without even looking. I guess what I'm saying is "Mr. SR" is your OG name in my book playa...
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here's my devil's advocate theory:
the wheels start to fall off a scammer's operation when they get a long string of bad feedback in their most recent transactions. by obscuring this, scammers can operate for a little longer... which leads to more transacations... which leads to more vig for the admin.
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I like the idea of a vendors subforum, put all the feedback in one place. This would eliminate the need for a timestamp in feedback as people can just go to that page if they want. I know the rumor mill is supposed to be like this but it gets so convoluted that it gets hard to find the vendor you're looking for.
This would encourage more users to look at the forum when making a purchased which is smart anyway
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By the way, the DEA considers a DTO (Drug Trafficing Organization) "large" if it has around 1000 members worldwide... so we both know there is well over a 100x that here... and even if you excluded all the non-active accounts and went with the real figures of somewhere around 25,000 regular active members we make up one of the largest and most resilient DTO's in the world.
We waaayyyyyy past the point of hiding... besides hiding is for prey and Im more of a predator myself.
And since you have established no private place to discuss this, Im just going to talk to you about something a little different right here that's been on my mind for a while now: you should have two separate teams of legal counselors by now. How do I know you dont? Easy: You opened a separate website selling guns of all things thereby creating a major change in your status from "a lone website engaged primarily in drug trafficking" to a "continuing criminal enterprise with expanding vistas" better known as a CCE and now your the 'Mastermind' (yes, that's a major sentencing enhancement as well). Your lawyers would have dragged you kicking and screaming if necessary away from that idea... all to give the thin veil of not selling guns on SR? Ummm yeh right everyone really believes you don't have nothing to do with selling guns. Nothing wrong with selling guns at all but the way you went about it is legally far more treacherous and politically paper-thin. All of which was the result of a knee-jerk reaction to the free-fall outcome of SR's negative media exposure from the Gawker article and mounting pressure from people whom have nothing at all to lose by pressing you to move the sale of guns off-site so they "feel better about buying drugs." I sell and buy drugs all the time with guns around, it makes everyone more comfortable actually because everyone knows if someone starts some bullshit it could go really really wrong real fast... so nobody ever does. Mostly everyone I know that moves weight has guns as well for insurance so everyone is already supporting guns by proxy anyways whether they know it or not. Its kinda like Switzerland: Everyone has guns so crime rate is low.. why? Cause everyone knows everyone else defiantly has guns and knows how to use them.
So, one team for criminal indictment avoidance (yes, its their job to help guide you and keep you out of trouble or at least minimize your exposure if you hire them *before* you find yourself in trouble) and one that specializes in managing your media relations which I might be so frank as to say has been less than effective so far in terms of garnering favorable reports... hell, a recent one on Forbes.com directly links Silk Road to human trafficking and child p*orn which is something that does not even ever happen here to my knowledge (http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/30/how-technology-complicates-the-war-on-drugs-guns-and-drugs-for-sale-online/2/). One brick thru her window would have gotten that shit edited right out if pursuit of diplomatic solutions did not bear positive results or simply was not possible. Now how in the world did that shit happen? I'm guessing your advisers were too busy dreaming up hash algorithms for hiding transaction numbers and such from warweed while the media was boiling Silk Roads members alive, vendors and buyers alike, by painting us all as human traffickers and supporters of child p*rn. The media can make or break you and valuable opportunities have been squandered away to turn the game around on the jackbooted Law Enforcement baboons that insist on continuing the war on drugs.
I dont want to even get into the young kids on SR buying inappropriate things... or if anything is even being done about that?
I don't know whom your advisers are but I highly recommend that you begin to consider engaging in a private two way dialogue with your partners here on the ground doing the work from day to day... and as I have said several times before perhaps some matters such as these should more appropriately be discussed in a private venue setting.
Heres the quote from Forbes.com in qn article written specifically about Silk Road: "The internet, and especially dark sites that operate behind the veil of anonymity, give the sex slave trade a huge advantage. Frankly, I find that pretty terrifying. The cyber-libertarian or cyber-anarchist in us might be sympathetic to online marijuana sales. That enthusiasm withers on the vine rather quickly when the sale involves something like child pornography."
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These really are not small changes at all. Access to extensive feedback for given items and vendors is the single largest factor I have in determining risk assessment. If I can determine neither the age, volume or geographic particulars of feedback (Have people brought it into Australia? what timelines are they seeing? what loss rates? etc) I am in no real position to make educated decisions with regard to my own safety. Messaging particular vendors is both time consuming and less reliable than user feedback, since it is in the vendors' interest to say 'yeah I have nearly 100% success rate to Aus', or alternatively if market conditions encourage, possibly to use an overinflated risk model to lower refund rates or outright selective scam as some users have postulated.
I also agree with Paperchasing that this will not significantly mask the overall size or patterns of SR operations to any competent and longstanding LE surveillance and profiling operations. I see this as a modest improvement to overall security at great cost to the individual.
+1
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Also, my account page only goes back for a few pages... what is that about? Hard to do accounting if your ledger is missing... and by the way, hiding the ledger from your business partners is not cool...
It has always been this way.
[/quote]
I think that we need an option to download this data without having to do it manually, it is too time consuming for the vendors to do basic accounting. Can't we have an option for downloading the transaction data to excel.
thanks
fly
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I see a problem with using the forums for feedback.. you can make as many accounts as you want, you don't even really have to have proof that you bought something in order to leave feedback. At least on SR, you can ONLY leave feedback if you've bought something, and at no other time.
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I see a problem with using the forums for feedback.. you can make as many accounts as you want, you don't even really have to have proof that you bought something in order to leave feedback. At least on SR, you can ONLY leave feedback if you've bought something, and at no other time.
That's true, but it wouldn't be for the purpose of leaving feedback. It would be to discuss various things such as the current quality of the product, shipping issues, review of new or current products, offer of samples of new things to be reviewed and to build a relationship between buyer and seller like IRL.
That does occur in the Rumor mill but it's so fragmented. And that section can move quickly. A centralized location for sellers would better serve the community.
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The feedback changes seem to cause 2 major issues. First, recent reviews are important. Second, a lot of vendor's recent reviews are just "Finalizing early".
Other than that, not being able to see all the feedback for somebody with less than 100% becomes an issue. If somebody got a 10 4/5s for a shipping delay, I'm not too inclined to care. If somebody got 3 1/5s cause there was rat shit in their coke, then I care.
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The only thing that bothers me about this update is that vendors can't see their most recent feedback received. I think vendors should have the option to see feedback in chronological order for their products so that they know they're on track. The recent feedback received was definitely one of my favorite parts about being a vendor.
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There are so low feedback´s of them and I can´t find the best vendor if I want to find the right stuff for me!
That sucks so much, pls change it !!
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The only thing that bothers me about this update is that vendors can't see their most recent feedback received. I think vendors should have the option to see feedback in chronological order for their products so that they know they're on track. The recent feedback received was definitely one of my favorite parts about being a vendor.
try this: http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion/account/view_feedback
I do agree the percentage display is better, however the change from displaying "over 500 transactions" to over "300 transactions" is not.
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Then we need a euphemism for over 500 transactions if that number is cause for alarm.
How about...
This vendor has done a fuck ton of business and has their shit together. ;D
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I see a problem with using the forums for feedback.. you can make as many accounts as you want, you don't even really have to have proof that you bought something in order to leave feedback. At least on SR, you can ONLY leave feedback if you've bought something, and at no other time.
That's true, but it wouldn't be for the purpose of leaving feedback. It would be to discuss various things such as the current quality of the product, shipping issues, review of new or current products, offer of samples of new things to be reviewed and to build a relationship between buyer and seller like IRL.
That does occur in the Rumor mill but it's so fragmented. And that section can move quickly. A centralized location for sellers would better serve the community.
Ah, ok, I understand now.
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The only thing that bothers me about this update is that vendors can't see their most recent feedback received. I think vendors should have the option to see feedback in chronological order for their products so that they know they're on track. The recent feedback received was definitely one of my favorite parts about being a vendor.
try this: http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion/account/view_feedback
I do agree the percentage display is better, however the change from displaying "over 500 transactions" to over "300 transactions" is not.
Thanks a lot that's actually exactly what I wanted :)
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By the way, the DEA considers a DTO (Drug Trafficing Organization) "large" if it has around 1000 members worldwide... so we both know there is well over a 100x that here... and even if you excluded all the non-active accounts and went with the real figures of somewhere around 25,000 regular active members we make up one of the largest and most resilient DTO's in the world.
Customers are not counted in the size of a DTO, and volume is also considered. So, we have less than 300 people selling mostly personal use quantities of controlled substances, and a few people running the website. Though my actions are taken as though the DEA, FBI and NSA are each spending $1M a day to put my head on a platter, I honestly don't believe there is a well funded effort to take us down at the moment.
Also, we have a tremendous opportunity to hide the true volume of the site and stay off the radar for as long as possible. What if the site grows to have 3k vendors and 100x the current customer base? Wouldn't that be cool to appear just as fringe and underground as we are now?
Anyway, Paper Chasing, you made alot of assumptions in the rest of your post, and you know you can always pm me if you have something private to discuss. What we are doing is a big deal and is serious, but let's not forget to have fun too, ok?
So, right now you can see the most recent 20 feedback for items and users. Hopefully we can move away from this model of linking feedback with transactions and thereby obscure even more the size of the site.
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Good moves, except for the feedback. Please listen to the bulk of the posts in here that agree. Seeing the most recent feedback, and what product it is for lets everyone know if an otherwise legitimate vendor has gone bad and skipped town. It also alerts us quickly to a subpar product that might be new for the vendor.
I know it's tough because you want to anonymize and hide as much data as you can, but the feedback is the crux of the entire system, just like it is on ebay. Without it, vendors can break bad easier, steal a few $1000 and then start up shop again.
You're doing good work DPR, and you listen to your users, so I hope you'll reconsider.
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Thanks DPR. Last 20 feedbacks is much better than random feedbacks. If you're not willing to display the age of the feedback, maybe you could put something in place where no feedback older than a month is ever displayed then, something like that, to address the situation where a recently reactivated vendor can begin selling based on months-old feedback.
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Hi,
Like all the changes, as long as feedback can be seen chronologically I'm happy with that, not a fan of random assortment as some people never update the "finalise early" part or review a product that has been out of stock for a while.
regards
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That's why I'm thinking that in order to mitigate the loss of effective targeted feedback, a Vendor section of the forum be created with a thread for each vendor on SR. It should be made a requirement for every vendor. That's where the real info would be contained to make buying decisions. It's not a feedback thread. But an informational thread with buyers posting their experiences, requests, issues, etc.
For instance, HybridMike, something happened to him. That news was in the forum many days before it would start to be reflected in the feedback. Saved a number of people from placing orders and potentially losing money.
Granted, that thread was in the rumor mill. But since the rumor mill moves fast, it fell to to page 4 or 5 within a day.
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That's why I'm thinking that in order to mitigate the loss of effective targeted feedback, a Vendor section of the forum be created with a thread for each vendor on SR. It should be made a requirement for every vendor. That's where the real info would be contained to make buying decisions. It's not a feedback thread. But an informational thread with buyers posting their experiences, requests, issues, etc.
For instance, HybridMike, something happened to him. That news was in the forum many days before it would start to be reflected in the feedback. Saved a number of people from placing orders and potentially losing money.
Granted, that thread was in the rumor mill. But since the rumor mill moves fast, it fell to to page 4 or 5 within a day.
I gotta agree that by the time trouble hits the feedback it is too late, a vendor specific forum would mitigate a lot of this. A prudent shopper would peruse the vendor's forum page before making a purchase. Right now you can stumble on the right thread, wade through other vendor reviews, pissing contests, trolls, etc before you get to what you're looking for. I've used the search but it hasn't helped me too much. Maybe vendor threads that are stale would drop to the bottom or a dozen "hot" vendor threads would appear first and then alphabetical or whatever....
Just some thoughts to tack on to BenJesuit's ideas
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The Feedback system either needs to revert back to what it was, or else DPR needs to take Anarcho47's idea on board.
Feedback isn't just used by buyers to determine the legitimacy of vendors, its also used to get an idea of the quality of each product that the vendor offers. Randomizing the feedback on each listing so that none of it is listing-specific is, in my opinion, likely to put buyers off ordering - at the very least it makes it incredibly hard to determine the quality of the product from other buyer's previous experiences before purchase.
Just my ฿0.02
- grahamgreene
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The Feedback system either needs to revert back to what it was, or else DPR needs to take Anarcho47's idea on board.
Feedback isn't just used by buyers to determine the legitimacy of vendors, its also used to get an idea of the quality of each product that the vendor offers. Randomizing the feedback on each listing so that none of it is listing-specific is, in my opinion, likely to put buyers off ordering - at the very least it makes it incredibly hard to determine the quality of the product from other buyer's previous experiences before purchase.
Just my ฿0.02
- grahamgreene
I've just run across this right now, trying to determine quality of the USA M1 vendors that are selling at bargain prices, impossible now....
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It's a tough balancing act between protecting vendors, protecting Silk Road, and protecting DPR. All the while providing actionable information for buyers. We can't revert back to the old feedback system. DPR made it clear why not. So we have to move forward with ideas that address security concerns while also protecting buyers with real time and useful info.
I'd like tabbenoit's additions. We might even want to segregate vendor section by country. And for the undeclared, well, they'd have their section also. What is key though is that only a vendor can start their thread in that section. No one else, especially buyers. So the section would stay clean and free of off topic threads or buyer's angst threads.
I believe having a Vendor section of the forum wouldn't reveal the volume of transactions so long as basic rules about not discussing quantity, shipping methods, or any other indentifiable information are maintained.
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I think only the most recent 20 feedbacks isn't enough. There a lot of very trusted vendors that a lot of people finalize early for, so for popular vendors like that, every feedback is going to be "Finalizing early." I think 50 would be a better number. It wouldn't help the police figure out that they've been making hundreds of transactions, and it will also give us the buyers a good range of recent reviews to look at. Moving feedback to the forums is an interesting idea, but I think that the Rumor Mill already gives us that aspect.
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Moving feedback to the forums is an interesting idea, but I think that the Rumor Mill already gives us that aspect.
It does in some regard, but it's a hodgepodge of disorganization. The best aspect of the Rumor Mill is the sticky threads about certain products and who has the best.
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I'm sorry but this feedback change is absolutely retarded. I rely on the feedback page of items to give the most recent feedback and reviews of that product. I was staring at an ad about mushrooms and there was reviews about weed on it. This is a joke right? :-\
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Anyway, Paper Chasing, you made alot of assumptions in the rest of your post, and you know you can always pm me if you have something private to discuss. What we are doing is a big deal and is serious, but let's not forget to have fun too, ok?
Umm... those were not simply my assumptions, those were mostly points made to me by my counselors with regard to their perspective on the matter... they have been keeping up to date on Silk Road matters since about a month before I started vending here.
However, lets get back to the vendors transaction accounting records... access to those records should be restored.
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Feedback definitely needs to be fixed ASAP. It never should have been changed. To think that SR is still "off the radar" seems a big stretch. cat's been out of the bag awhile now.
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All of these changes are part of an effort to hide the size of any given vendor's business as well as the size of Silk Road as a whole from the prying eyes of law enforcement agencies.
ranked in the top x% of sellers with y% positive feedback from z transactions
z needs to go to protect the vendors, my suggestion would be to have two/three possibilities: either it says nothing about transactions for new vendors, it says "and has made some transactions" after 10 or so and perhaps (I don't think it is a good idea having any more info available) "and has made transactions" ......
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If you're showing the amount of transactions by a vendor, what's the point in hiding most of the feedback of those transactions? Up till 300 transactions I can see the size of the vendor, so please show the 300 most recent feedback.
Also, how does it help that the feedback isn't specific per product anymore? I'd like to see the quality of a certain product in the feedback, which is now obfuscated by feedback on other products sold by the same vendor.
On a more general note: vendors come and go and in a couple of months we'll have a lot of new vendors, while old ones have left. By that time I'm unable to judge the quality of the vendor and its product. Than what's the point of buying at premium here if I can buy with the same uncertainty in the street, but for a lower price? Maybe I'll keep using SR for those hard-to-get items, but for the regular stuff I won't see the point anymore.
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Feedback is the most recent 20 orders, in chronological order now. Its fixed, now please stop asking him to fix it.
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If you're showing the amount of transactions by a vendor, what's the point in hiding most of the feedback of those transactions? Up till 300 transactions I can see the size of the vendor, so please show the 300 most recent feedback.
That's some pretty rock solid logic, actually.
Especially if we're not going to be showing the age of the feedbacks.
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It is better showing the most recent feedback, now, but it would still be nice if it were item specific.
It's either that or, for all of my buyers, I request that you mention which product you purchased in your feedback (i.e. "I love this Jack", "this Lemon Drop is the best deal on SR", etc.) ;)
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If you're showing the amount of transactions by a vendor, what's the point in hiding most of the feedback of those transactions? Up till 300 transactions I can see the size of the vendor, so please show the 300 most recent feedback.
Also, how does it help that the feedback isn't specific per product anymore? I'd like to see the quality of a certain product in the feedback, which is now obfuscated by feedback on other products sold by the same vendor.
Definitely agree that we need item specific feedback as well. Doesn't make sense when I am looking to buy X and all the feedback listed below a product is for Y.
Perhaps something like 100-300 TOTAL feedback on the vendors page (since, as noted the transaction number goes up to 300 anyway), and something like 10-20 feedback on each specific product?? Would seem to eliminate security issues AND provide adequate information for fully-informed buying.
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It is simply ludicrous to get rid of item specific feedback. What good does the feedback do us anymore if we have no fucking clue what item it is for? Just because a vendor gets bad ass LSD does not mean he gets bad ass MDMA. Its apparent that we are just going to have to start prefixing our feedback.
"LSD Blue Ganesha Tabs 5x: Received bleh bleh bleh"
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This is a great example of changes that should have been discussed with the community before implementation.
These "small changes" have had more impact on buyer experience than just about all of the changes previously introduced.
I'm all for obscuring sales volume, but this was not done in the right way.
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Feeling very frustrated about this change to the feedback system right now.
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I'm a buyer and i do not like this feedback system one bit. This only obscures the true performance of a vendor. This also makes it easier for vendors to run scams. Before buyers were able to see if a vendor was finalizing early and when you see three or four pages of finalizing early, it was easy to see when something was up with the vendor. Now a vendor can easily run FE scam for much longer without being noticed. I now have to stick with vendors I am familiar with and will be very weary about trying out new fendors because it oscures the true perfomance of a vendor. I think this new feedback system stinks and needs to be changed back !
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Before this changes anybody could easy see how much vendor had transactions.
On the profile page go to last feedback page and multiply with 10 (there were 10 feedback per page).
Of course, that transaction are only counted for buyers who left an feedback.
Item should be next to feedback so buyer could estimate for which item particular feedback are.
I would like to feedback go back like it was.
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I'm a buyer and i do not like this feedback system one bit. This only obscures the true performance of a vendor. This also makes it easier for vendors to run scams. Before buyers were able to see if a vendor was finalizing early and when you see three or four pages of finalizing early, it was easy to see when something was up with the vendor. Now a vendor can easily run FE scam for much longer without being noticed. I now have to stick with vendors I am familiar with and will be very weary about trying out new fendors because it oscures the true perfomance of a vendor. I think this new feedback system stinks and needs to be changed back !
You're absolutely right. But at the same time, I get DPR's desire to increase security for himself and for vendors.
So now we have a vacuum of information that needs to be filled. Let's assume DPR hears you all but because of other concerns, the desire to protect outweighs the desire to please. That means, WE must come up with something that protects the buyers - fills the vacuum of information.
I'm with you. I'm not venturing out and looking for new vendors with this new system in place. I'm sticking with the tried and true. But what if we used the forums to discuss the reliability of vendors? Sure, there's some shilling that could occur. But if established members of SR can vouch for a vendor that is certainly going to carry significantly more weight than a noob who signs up to post how great a vendor is.
I think rather than bug DPR and complain, we need to appreciate his and the vendor's needs for increased security and let us get proactive and petition the mods to give us a vendor section of the forum with vendor specific threads where we can share experiences with a particular vendor's prices, shipping, and quality and service.
I mean after all, if there's no vendors, there's no SR. So what ever has to be done to protect them, so be it.
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I'm a buyer and i do not like this feedback system one bit. This only obscures the true performance of a vendor. This also makes it easier for vendors to run scams. Before buyers were able to see if a vendor was finalizing early and when you see three or four pages of finalizing early, it was easy to see when something was up with the vendor. Now a vendor can easily run FE scam for much longer without being noticed. I now have to stick with vendors I am familiar with and will be very weary about trying out new fendors because it oscures the true perfomance of a vendor. I think this new feedback system stinks and needs to be changed back !
You're absolutely right. But at the same time, I get DPR's desire to increase security for himself and for vendors.
So now we have a vacuum of information that needs to be filled. Let's assume DPR hears you all but because of other concerns, the desire to protect outweighs the desire to please. That means, WE must come up with something that protects the buyers - fills the vacuum of information.
I'm with you. I'm not venturing out and looking for new vendors with this new system in place. I'm sticking with the tried and true. But what if we used the forums to discuss the reliability of vendors? Sure, there's some shilling that could occur. But if established members of SR can vouch for a vendor that is certainly going to carry significantly more weight than a noob who signs up to post how great a vendor is.
I think rather than bug DPR and complain, we need to appreciate his and the vendor's needs for increased security and let us get proactive and petition the mods to give us a vendor section of the forum with vendor specific threads where we can share experiences with a particular vendor's prices, shipping, and quality and service.
I mean after all, if there's no vendors, there's no SR. So what ever has to be done to protect them, so be it.
Agreed. There is a happy medium somewhere and we as a community need to figure it out.
As a vendor, I don't support this because it hurts buyers. This is not out of some philanthropic desire in my massive, throbbing heart to help others. This is rooted in self-interest. There is now a higher chance you can be scammed, which means there are going to be less happy, regularly spending buyers perusing my listings. I've got your back, but it's because I want you to be high as fuck off of my product. (It's awesome how markets make my entrepreneurial drive for profit become a lauded attribute... ;) )
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I enjoyed the old feedback system much more than the one you currently use.
With the current system I m not able to tell if the vendor has been doing any business lately and the feedback are shown on other items in the vendors stock that may not be relevant for what a customer is looking for.
it's also a problem that a timeframe is not present. I does not need to be specific, but "within one week/month" or whatever would help a lot for the customers to determine the quality of a vendor.
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If only buyer with good orders in their history can see vendor information's we could change this shit system!
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I think rather than bug DPR and complain, we need to appreciate his and the vendor's needs for increased security and let us get proactive and petition the mods to give us a vendor section of the forum with vendor specific threads where we can share experiences with a particular vendor's prices, shipping, and quality and service.
I mean after all, if there's no vendors, there's no SR. So what ever has to be done to protect them, so be it.
Without buyers, there's no SR either.
But this change might be for the better. I'm all for more feedback in the forums instead of completely anonymous in the feedback system. It's far easier to check if a review has any value by checking out the 'background' of who posted the review. At the same time it's a lot harder to fake that background. If this change leads to a move to the forums, I'm all for it.
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It is better showing the most recent feedback, now, but it would still be nice if it were item specific.
It's either that or, for all of my buyers, I request that you mention which product you purchased in your feedback (i.e. "I love this Jack", "this Lemon Drop is the best deal on SR", etc.) ;)
Great idea, I will be doing this for now on, hope it catches on, doubt it though.
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Also, instead of referencing users, items, transactions, feedback, messages, etc. with ids that count up by one for each new entry, making it trivial to see how many new users, new transactions, etc. there are on the site, we are identifying each by a random unique string.
This means that if I view an item to read the feedback for that specific item, I may also see feedback for ALL the other items that seller is offering. That sucks. I want to know how well the seller handled the packaging, shipment, communication etc for that specific item, not how the seller is doing in general (which is what the seller's profile page is for).
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Also, instead of referencing users, items, transactions, feedback, messages, etc. with ids that count up by one for each new entry, making it trivial to see how many new users, new transactions, etc. there are on the site, we are identifying each by a random unique string.
This means that if I view an item to read the feedback for that specific item, I may also see feedback for ALL the other items that seller is offering. That sucks. I want to know how well the seller handled the packaging, shipment, communication etc for that specific item, not how the seller is doing in general (which is what the seller's profile page is for).
It is better showing the most recent feedback, now, but it would still be nice if it were item specific.
It's either that or, for all of my buyers, I request that you mention which product you purchased in your feedback (i.e. "I love this Jack", "this Lemon Drop is the best deal on SR", etc.) ;)
Great idea, I will be doing this for now on, hope it catches on, doubt it though.
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Small things that could help in a big way. Thanks for looking out!
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So let me get this straight...a lot of these measures are taken to obscure vendor transaction volume to avoid profiling...yet the most recent 20 feedbacks are posted? All you have to do is count the number of unique feedbacks per day or week and you have a very accurate picture of transaction volume. If you have few vendors from each segment of percentile ranking having their unique feedbacks counted, inferring total site volume is pretty trivial at that point. Moreover, this profiling tek could easily be automated and fed into a database, it probably already is... Are these changes totally self-defeating or am I missing something?
I also want to put my vote in that this feedback scheme suck in general. Any busy vendor's page is full of god damn FE feedback...
***Please at least place a small message on the page that loads after you click 'finalize', let people know that they don't have to leave feedback right then, and that they can simply navigate away form the page and fill it in later as well as edit it after that.***
I don't think very many people even know that they can do this!! It would cut back immensely on worthless FE feedbacks.
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I read a thread somewhere recently about this "you do not have to leave a feedback even if you do FE" I swear, I don't think most of the people who order from SR even go on the forums. In everyone's' defense that do leave feedback I don't think it is mentioned very much in the forums. Perhaps people will read this thread and note it, but how many? Doubt it will catch on unless it was sticked or something, but really isn't important enough to get stickied I guess.
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Feedback is an important tool buyers use to avoid scammers.
If a vendor has a good rating, but has decided to do a scam n' run on their way out, you aren't going to see chronologically that the last 10 sales failed, didn't get there or were finalized early.
The rest of the changes seem right on though!
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So let me get this straight...a lot of these measures are taken to obscure vendor transaction volume to avoid profiling...yet the most recent 20 feedbacks are posted? All you have to do is count the number of unique feedbacks per day or week and you have a very accurate picture of transaction volume. If you have few vendors from each segment of percentile ranking having their unique feedbacks counted, inferring total site volume is pretty trivial at that point. Moreover, this profiling tek could easily be automated and fed into a database, it probably already is... Are these changes totally self-defeating or am I missing something?
Thanks, I was gonna say it but I'm just really getting tired of explaining the obvious.
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Fuck the feedback changes. They make me uncomfortable. I guess that's what the reviews on the forum are for?
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I have a proposal in making this a more safe and secure place. Right now SR has open registration. Anybody can just come to SR and sign up. I think registration should be by invitation only. Only buyers/sellers which meet certain stats would be able to get an invitation code to invite a new users to register on SR. I think that would make LE prying eyes a little harder.
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I have a proposal in making this a more safe and secure place. Right now SR has open registration. Anybody can just come to SR and sign up. I think registration should be by invitation only. Only buyers/sellers which meet certain stats would be able to get an invitation code to invite a new users to register on SR. I think that would make LE prying eyes a little harder.
I have to cast my vote against that. Sorry bro. Had such a thing been in place before, I would have never been able to enjoy this place. and I certainly do not want to deny another the wonder that this place is.
But your idea is not without merit. A referral system can co-exist with an open registration system. Where established buyers can vouch for a new buyer. But for such a system to work, established buyers would need an incentive to vouch for a new buyer. After all, an established buyer is bringing in new business. So, say, for every new good buyer an established buyer brings, they get some free stuff or a voucher for free stuff on their next order. Something along those lines.
But even with a referral system, we need a buyer feedback system so vendors can rate buyers.
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I have a proposal in making this a more safe and secure place. Right now SR has open registration. Anybody can just come to SR and sign up. I think registration should be by invitation only. Only buyers/sellers which meet certain stats would be able to get an invitation code to invite a new users to register on SR. I think that would make LE prying eyes a little harder.
It's easy to say this once you're already in...
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So let me get this straight...a lot of these measures are taken to obscure vendor transaction volume to avoid profiling...yet the most recent 20 feedbacks are posted? All you have to do is count the number of unique feedbacks per day or week and you have a very accurate picture of transaction volume. If you have few vendors from each segment of percentile ranking having their unique feedbacks counted, inferring total site volume is pretty trivial at that point. Moreover, this profiling tek could easily be automated and fed into a database, it probably already is... Are these changes totally self-defeating or am I missing something?
Thanks, I was gonna say it but I'm just really getting tired of explaining the obvious.
So right, and I believe 'it' is staying very much in real time with each vendors stock, by keeping products in shopping cart.
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So let me get this straight...a lot of these measures are taken to obscure vendor transaction volume to avoid profiling...yet the most recent 20 feedbacks are posted? All you have to do is count the number of unique feedbacks per day or week and you have a very accurate picture of transaction volume. If you have few vendors from each segment of percentile ranking having their unique feedbacks counted, inferring total site volume is pretty trivial at that point. Moreover, this profiling tek could easily be automated and fed into a database, it probably already is... Are these changes totally self-defeating or am I missing something?
You're not missing anything; the changes will not make it impossible to build a profile of the site, but it makes it harder and more time-consuming.
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I have a proposal in making this a more safe and secure place. Right now SR has open registration. Anybody can just come to SR and sign up. I think registration should be by invitation only. Only buyers/sellers which meet certain stats would be able to get an invitation code to invite a new users to register on SR. I think that would make LE prying eyes a little harder.
It's easy to say this once you're already in...
Agreed, the "close the door, I'm here" attitude gets to me. It's hypocritical and short sighted. The accessibility of this place should remain. Of course there are drawbacks, but I think the overall benefit outweighs this. Moreover, the greatest benefits of running SR the way it's currently structured may not be realized until much later. Keeping it open will draw in people with the passion and skills to keep this project in motion, which is what we need more than anything else. I never knew anything like this existed until I came here, and it has opened my eyes to the true potential of anonymous commerce; the surface has barely been scratched. SR may or may not survive, and if it doesn't I'm confident that something even more robust will take its place, but that is contingent on having people that have seen the possibilities and been similarly inspired by what we have going here. There is a power in these technologies that have an unprecedented ability to bolster the personal freedoms The Man never had any business trying to take from us. Keeping SR open to everyone is the best thing we can do to fuel the future of these possibilities.
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I have a proposal in making this a more safe and secure place. Right now SR has open registration. Anybody can just come to SR and sign up. I think registration should be by invitation only. Only buyers/sellers which meet certain stats would be able to get an invitation code to invite a new users to register on SR. I think that would make LE prying eyes a little harder.
It's easy to say this once you're already in...
So very true. I also probably would never have been able to fanagle an invite to SR.
I'm a little long in the tooth (above retirement age). Be my age and try and go out on the streets and score drugs. It ain't fun and it ain't safe. I've done it and will do it again because I really enjoy smoking weed. If I lived in my home town I could score in less than an hour. Unfortunately I'm not, and my home town is across a very big ocean. I've been smoking weed for over 45 years. But, because I've moved around a lot and have only one close friend that gets high it's not so easy to refill my stock.
This place could very well turn out to be a godsend to me.
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From a buyer point of view the feedback changes are no good. You'd be making us rely too much on the forums. It's very important for us to be able to see how recent orders were made (slightly less so what was ordered). Why not just cap it at some arbitrary number to obscure the volume of business?
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The only vendors that this protects are those who are trying to lie to buyers about their past or are trying to pull a scam.
At the very least you should allow vendors to choose between the two schemes.
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PROPOSAL: new vendor section of the forum (differing from Rumor Mill). Read on to see how.
What we'll need then is a vendor section of the forum. A section with its own heading where each vendor will have their own thread created by the Vendor (in alphabetical order, preferably but not sure the forum software can keep it this way. I believe new posts bump the thread to the top). Buyers can NOT create threads in this section but can only post to existing vendor threads. (Which would mean that a new class of poster called Vendor or Seller would have to be made which grants thread starting privilege in this section.
Every vendor's profile page and perhaps even product page on Silk Road market should encourage buyers to review/discuss the product in the vendor's thread with a link to it.
The purpose of this section is to facilitate seller announcements in the opening post, for sellers to address concerns, for buyer to ask questions, for buyers to discuss current product quality and general discourse and advice about product use.
The Vendor get's the first post of the thread where they can describe their business and offerings, policies, announcements, URL link to seller page on SR, or whatever else they want to discuss or reveal. The vendor must title their thread with their vendor name. But they can add after their vendor name, what they sell.
For instance, let's take Pharmville as an example. They can name their thread:
Pharmville - [Opiates, Benzos, Fast shipping - professional service "the drugs you want at the prices you'll love]
Also, this could be the one place a seller can list their seller page URL instead of in their signature. When they want to go into stealth mode, they can remove their seller page URL from the opening post. They can even announce that they're about to or have gone stealth and when they anticipate de-activating stealth. Having the seller page URL here would reduce the likelihood of causally defeating stealth mode.
Doing this would serve the purpose of allowing buyers to gauge the present state of the vendor - quality of product, shipping times, current issues. It would also serve as a meeting place for buyers who share a vendor in common.
Lastly, when a vendor's thread gets too big, an admin or mod can send the vendor a PM that the thread will be closed and that the Vendor must start a new one with a link to the old thread in the opening post of the new thread. Vendors will also have to update their SR seller's page to reflect the change. And for those who might have bookmarked the old thread, admins should make the last post of the old thread, link to the new thread.
With this vendor only section, instead of mixing in all manner of threads that the rumor mill does, you'll have a centralized area for vendor specific dialogue.
Thanks in advance for your consideration.
+1
I agreed.
We need protection as buyers.
And yes thanks for the warning on all the changes, I guess we will get pass this.
You are doing the buyers a big disservice.
Give us something.......
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Thank you everyone for your input. We made a couple of changes in there, so to clear up any confusion, here's what has happened so far. Instead of displaying a seller's rank as 15 of 300, for example, it is displayed as top 5%. We stopped displaying the total transactions of a vendor after 300. Instead of showing all of a vendor's feedback along with it's age and the item it was left for, we started displaying the last 20 in chronological order with just the rating and feedback message. With the first change we were showing a semi-random assortment of feedback.
Some good points have been brought up about the effectiveness of these changes in obscuring a vendor's and the site's volume. After reviewing it, it is true that after switching from the semi-random display to the chronological display (which I agree was necessary) the whole purpose of the switch was defeated. This is going to take more careful review and possibly some fundamental changes to make it work for everyone. We'll work on a proposal and get feedback from the community before making any major changes. For now, please contribute your ideas on this thread. We've already had some great ones, such as the vendor's forum idea.
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Thanks for listening to the community DRP. We can't ask for more, especially now that new changes will be put in front of the community before being implemented.
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DPR, thank you so much for listening to the buyer and taking into consideration our necessities as well! I was slightly disappointed with the system for a while and thought we were just going to have to deal with it. I really appreciate your willingness to work everything out and listen to our suggestions. Hopefully we can work out a compromise to protect the vendors yet still enable buyers to have a clear idea of the vendor reliability and product quality.
If the feedback system is reworked, I would like to suggest again that a positive negative neutral system is employed, just because this is currently the way feedback ratings are utilized... in general we just need product specific feedback obviously as well
For feedback in general, I posted some ideas in other threads, and even with the revert to a more clear feedback system, I still think these ideas should be applied and could make the system even more helpful.
My recommendations and clarifications of the system are:
1) If you finalize early, after clicking on finalize, DO NOT click "leave feedback" please. Instead, click the SR link at top left to navigate back to the home page will will not leave an unnecessary feedback without a product review... then once your package arrives, click on "orders" and at that point you can enter a product review and leave your feedback.
2) Please be aware that you are able to update your feedback if you are not satisfied for some reason or if you did leave "finalized early." Just go to your acct page, then click on "view feedback" and you may edit each one from there. This may be especially important if someone begins to scam unexpectedly.
Thanks again DPR! Grateful for all you do and the community that exists because of you!
- microRNA
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I would first like to thank DPR for having listened to us buyers.
I believe one of the problems the buyers/vendors have is that so much of the feedback is just not updated. They finalize early, get their product and then never go back and update their feedback. So in reality much of the feedback is really worthless.
There should be a way that would prevent the buyer from an additional purchase if his feedback has not been updated in a certain period of time. For instance, if he has finalized early and has not updated it within 30 days, then attempts to make a purchase, the system would tell him that he first must update his feedback.
Of course this could be a real programming headache. I'm not really sure how the system is setup.
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Hey gang,
You may have noticed some small changes to the user and item pages as well as some of the identifiers in the URLs on the site. All of these changes are part of an effort to hide the size of any given vendor's business as well as the size of Silk Road as a whole from the prying eyes of law enforcement agencies.
Instead of displaying a vendor's rank out of the total number of vendors, we'll now show their standing as a percent. Top 10% means they are ranked higher than 90% of vendors on Silk Road. Top 85% means they are ranked higher than the bottom 15% of vendors. Also, instead of showing all feedback in chronological order on the user and item pages for all to see and count, we display a representative assortment of 10 recent reviews.
Also, instead of referencing users, items, transactions, feedback, messages, etc. with ids that count up by one for each new entry, making it trivial to see how many new users, new transactions, etc. there are on the site, we are identifying each by a random unique string.
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Thank you everyone for your input. We made a couple of changes in there, so to clear up any confusion, here's what has happened so far. Instead of displaying a seller's rank as 15 of 300, for example, it is displayed as top 5%. We stopped displaying the total transactions of a vendor after 300. Instead of showing all of a vendor's feedback along with it's age and the item it was left for, we started displaying the last 20 in chronological order with just the rating and feedback message. With the first change we were showing a semi-random assortment of feedback.
Some good points have been brought up about the effectiveness of these changes in obscuring a vendor's and the site's volume. After reviewing it, it is true that after switching from the semi-random display to the chronological display (which I agree was necessary) the whole purpose of the switch was defeated. This is going to take more careful review and possibly some fundamental changes to make it work for everyone. We'll work on a proposal and get feedback from the community before making any major changes. For now, please contribute your ideas on this thread. We've already had some great ones, such as the vendor's forum idea.
It's about time. Well done.