The Hobby Boards

A bit of an "old" topic since the hobby only seems to have a 3 day attention span.. However, it feels like i've seen more shill bidding justification this past year than i've seen in the past decade.

What do you all think? Are more and more people trying to shill their failed pandemic investments in an attempt to prop/sustain the market, looking to cash out, or is it something else?

Prepare for a diatribe.

I think that this was an inevitable point. A number of us have called it for over a decade. This trash really piled in when that snake oil salesman, GaryV opened his mouth about cards. The shilling stuff started to become mainstream when Jun and his cronies were fixing the Jordan market appealing to guys like Nat Turner. Don't forget Gonblott either, he's another one.

After a certain point it became a runaway train and I knew that scum bag GaryV was going to be the nail in the coffin and posted as such on the censorship forums. I can still remember a handful of sell outs / ass kissers / shills opining on GaryV doing great things for the hobby, bringing in new collectors and "growing the hobby," except the problem isn't new collectors, who were in the minority even then. The problem was and still is, the same sub-human, money-hungry trash that was going to pillage the sports card hobby...the guys ushering GaryV in like he was their prom date knew this would happen and they set themselves up to profit from it.

It's not YOUR hobby any more and it hasn't been for a while. PrizmGawd and Shaiway Vlogs being low life pieces of sh!t is not new to some of us, but it's new to a lot of people...the thing is, most of those people probably don't care either way. One thing I've learned over the past decade when it comes to these two legged dogs is that you'll have categories of people who will one of the following mindsets: Indifferent, Defensive, Angry. The indifferent ones may as well be bundled into the defense category because they're okay with corruption. The ones who get angry and try to shun the filth are usually outnumbered.

The whole thing is money-centric, if you want to see the hobby return and in good health, you have to get rid of the money, the money has to go away. Otherwise, it's the same ol' shtick. We would not have had absolutely stellar quality counterfeits, jersey swaps and the like if there was no financial incentive. They were faking cards and doing jersey swaps and doctoring cards even as far back as when Exquisite released and you'd find RPAs selling for five figures.

Just imagine how much is going on now. Although card doctoring is probably a lot cheaper for the ROI than counterfeiting is these days. The biggest names are just here to bleed your hobby for selfish financial gain and that includes some of the dick heads who used to post on the censorship forums, but who are now involved with various sports card related companies, whether they're consignors / auction houses, grading outfits, or price aggregation services. It's all a line of bull sh!t to get people to perceive prices and hype are real, dump the cards and then start all over again. They will never leave or stop until it is no longer profitable...so, basically, the hobby is about as dead as it's going to get right now and I cannot imagine a scenario in which it will ever change.

Do you guys think that Rubin gives two sh!ts about hobbyists? Absolutely not. He's more likely to be off on a yacht somewhere with other multi-billionaires doing lines off a escort's butt cheeks. These imperialistic turds want the fastest route to their favorite thing in the world: money. Streamlining everything for that purpose doesn't have your best interests in mind, but they will parade their clowns in front of you so you'll buy into it and the process repeats.

What's the National about now anyway? Hype, hype, hype and a bunch of old dudes getting together to spend money on alcohol and take pictures.

Sure, people can still enjoy their hobby, as there are small pockets of hobbyists still remaining...and more power to any one who can still enjoy it.

This isn't new practice and there hasn't been any solution to prevent it from happening. I remember eBay trying to crack down on it during the early to mid 2000's by banning people with multiple accounts. Nowadays, with many different auction houses and consignors, it's impossible for these companies to do anything without concrete evidence.

The one thing that I am a bit uneasy about is the fact that I am seeing many cards on my watchlist being relisted. I look for cards that doesn't show up often so it's surprising to see them being relisted. This goes for modern as well as MJ and even early basketball cards that I follow/collect.

So has it become the norm? For me, it's always been around and something that will probably never go away. I just have to do a bit more detective work for cards that are of higher value. With the growing number of ways people try to cheat the system, there are now more tools at your disposal to counter those bad actors.

You can never be sure if you've won an auction that was involved in shilling, but as long as you bid accordingly and don't get carried away, you don't have to worry about it nearly as much.

I would agree that while auction shilling and fake sales have been around a long time, it does seem like it went to a new level during the pandemic. That being said, while it looks like a lot of the "hobby participants" from the pandemic have either left or are taking an extended break, the amount of shilling (percentage of listings that seem to have some at least some degree of manipulation) seems as rampant as ever.

This definitely affects my buying habits, as I'm rarely willing to pay what I believe to be an above market price on a card that I'm interested in. Unless and until eBay resumes allowing sellers to leave negative feedback for non-paying bidders, as well as unregister the repeat offenders, it's going to continue. I don't know enough in the network/security realm of things to know if it would be possible to crack down on users at the IP level (is it possible to recognize and then block users that might try to use VPN services to always use a "new" IP address?), but eBay doesn't seem the least bit concerned with shilling and manipulation, even as buyers smarten up to the games, and sellers have a harder time actually selling things.

Prizm Gawd is an absolute clown. Dug his heels in DEEP a while back.

In general I’ve just accepted it as the new normal. It’s hard to avoid altogether even in more niche pockets of the hobby where you’d think it would be more of a safe haven.

I also think it’s snowballed from the pandemic recoupers. You have to imagine there’s a bit of a “Hey, I should be doing that, too” mantra going on.

Prizm Gawd's defense is so odd.
If you value the card more than its worth, why put it in an auction?
We have Buy it now for people to set their own value for cards.

The sad part we're going to see more and more of this as prices will never get back to what these fools bought at. It's the justification of it that's the worst though. Just accept that you bought at the top, sell for what you can then move on with your life. Some of these guys are so entrenched in the hobby at this point they seem to make decisions based more around ego than common sense.

I've gone back to buying 95% Gallinari and Gary Harris. At least the vast majority of the time those cards aren't going to be shilled, lol. ..Although I have seen a couple 1/1's get shilled for sure.