The new rules of Facebook Marketplace
“When I agree to purchase a heavy item from you, my boyfriend and I are about to pull up and have just the worst night of our lives.”
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
My 27-year-old sister Julia has some of the more bizarre internet habits I’ve come across. When she sends me a Reel on Instagram, I literally delete the DM rather than open the message and risk exposing my algorithm to whatever yoni-egg-raw-carrot MLM content she wants me to laugh with her at.
When she’s not poisoning her brain on Instagram, Julia scrolls Facebook Marketplace. For fun. She frequently interrupts our group chats by sending links to weird items or bizarrely-constructed posts she’s come across, like a photo of a couch for sale that also just, like, has a guy sitting on it.
Since it’s hard to find anyone who feels strongly about anything involving Facebook these days, I asked Julia if she’d be interested in writing about it for Embedded for a crisp $100. She countered instead with my dogsitting for her in August. Deal. —Kate
In 2023, there’s only one reason you’ll find me logging into Facebook: Facebook Marketplace. The platform’s answer to Craigslist is a beautiful world of seemingly accessible furniture curated by the like-minded weirdos living in your surrounding neighborhoods. There’s a sweet satisfaction in searching for the perfect item, putting in the hours of energy to collect your haul, and gazing upon it triumphantly in its new space amongst the other items in your sad little home. For that, Facebook Marketplace has become a routine stopover for me while perusing the various applications available to me on my phone. It is also, unfortunately, the most annoying place I’ve ever been.
Like any typical business transaction, exchanges on Facebook Marketplace require a buyer and a seller. Unlike a typical business transaction, the buyers and sellers are your immediate neighbors and simply deluded about the value of their objects and what constitutes normal social behavior. After six years of using Marketplace, watching the platform become more and more saturated with West Elm coffee tables and IKEA armchairs, I’d like to call a time out, and offer a series of rules that, going forward, will make the experience, if not pleasant, at least not so frequently unsettling.
Post real images.
Let’s start off with something easy, something I think we can all agree on: Do not just slap some Amazon stock images on your listing and think I’m going to buy it. We all deserve honest and up-front communication here, and honestly this type of marketing is a waste of everyone’s time. If you’re going to post a listing, do us all a favor and get your ass up and work.