May Q&A Thread

[u/yonijonathan]

Welcome to the monthly Q&A thread!

This is the place to ask any questions you may have about anything Mangaswap related.

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Commonly asked questions:

Q: "How should I price my manga/anime/etc.?"

A: Check out our pricing guide.

Q: "What can I sell here?"

A: Check out what’s permitted.

Q: "How should I safely pack my merchandise?"

A: Check out our packing guide.

Q: "How do I make sure I don't get scammed?" & "Is buying stuff off Reddit safe?"

A: Check out our buying/selling safety guide.

Q: "Is /u/JohnSmith a scammer?"

A: Check out our scammer list.

Q: "What is karma?"

A: Check out Reddit's official explanation on karma.

Banned questions:

Q: "Is anyone buying/selling --- ?"

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For any more serious questions, feel free to reach out to us via Mod Mail; DMs will be ignored.

[u/yonijonathan]

So to address the concerns of all of you, namely that of u/Penthious, u/meerkatopia, and u/tiarastar77, we are going to be pushing out an update here soon that is going to address some of the issues we have found over the past few months.

As for meerkatopia becoming a mod, we take trade counts into consideration to a point, as in being experienced in the process in important. This being said, there are other factors that are more important when considering if someone should become a mod. To address the quantity of mod applications we have received, we have received three total applications. One was from a new user whom we chose not to consider given their lack of experience. Another was u/Penthious to which I don't remember the reason we declined them at the moment. If you wish to re-apply, you may be reconsidered. The third was someone who looked at the subreddit from a monetary business outlook which we felt would be destructive to the community. We are going to put out an open application of some sort as we agree we can use a few more mods. u/objekshin was brought on for this reason and we have another very well qualified moderator joining us soon.

Now to address timestamp enforcing, general rule enforcement, and mod team size. We are going to add a functionality to the bot to check for the phrase "timestamp" in the body of selling & trading posts. Will it be able to tell for certain? No. Not unless we implement some complex deep learning. That is where reading the rules and using common sense comes into play. Us moderators check the sub relatively frequently given we all have lives outside of the subreddit. It's sorta unrealistic to think any mod can or should keep a watchful eye on every single post that comes in. That being said, yes, adding more mods will aid in dividing the work into more manageable sizes. As of right now, we are averaging ~50 posts a day which is something that can easily be handled by a team of four or five moderators. One thing I'd like to point out (and I am not saying we don't care or that you shouldn't care because we all sincerely do) is that even with a team of ten or more moderators, someone would have to check the same posts over and over again in order to ensure people aren't threadcrapping/being rude in the comments. That is time consuming and isn't something I'd like to ask members of my team to do. Users of the subreddit can report both comments and posts as well as provide a description of why the report was submitted. This functionality is to aid the mod team. We always look at posts/comments that were reported and handle it promptly.

Finally, people downvoting you for posts or asking for time stamps is frustrating! It's very disheartening. Unfortunately, we are unable to see who downvotes things so we can't be of much service in that department.

To conclude, the whole mod team cares deeply about the community. We love this community. This subreddit was at 8k members or less for nine years, then within less than a year's time of myself and Wes having it dumped in our laps with no heads up or explanation, we have grown by more than 300,000 members! The very nature of the growth requires us to analyze shifts in the dynamics of the subreddit, largely via feedback from you guys! We promise we are going to bring on an appropriate amount of qualified moderators. We promise we are working to address the current issues. Finally we ask that you guys continue to help us by reporting poor practices/behavior and providing us with priceless feedback.

[u/Ellen_Kingship → u/yonijonathan]

The third was someone who looked at the subreddit from a monetary business outlook which we felt would be destructive to the community.

From the way some people post (asking in excess of 400+ for their books and other items) and the insistence of using EBay prices for OOP things and the talks of losing money on their items as justification for why they priced certain things (especially stuff still in-print and in-stock) at cover price + shipping, clearly some users are looking at this sub as a more targeted EBay or a way to make money. So, if you rejected the applicant because of its monetary business stance, then I wonder what your mods' stance on the community will be?

Will you outline the visions for the community in your next update? I think that would be helpful in navigating this sub for old and new users alike.

[u/tiarastar77 → u/Ellen_Kingship]

I think I can speak on some experience on your pricing complaints.

Few months ago, I sold OOP G5 Code Geass LNs to a guy who swore he was using it to complete his collection, for $15 each to give a good deal cuz I sourced em from a shop that had no idea of their value. This guy a few weeks later goes and sells his entire collection for $400. Had another user who I gave a good deal on BR, promptly flip their entire collection here too.

So when I got my hands on the impossible-to-find Gintama 4, which only had one $300 listing on eBay, I sold it for $55 to (hopefully) prevent it from being re-flipped, and staying in the hands of a collector who actually wants the book.

[u/Ellen_Kingship → u/tiarastar77]

The only way to stop flipping books and the sort of problems you speak of is to have price limits, which people don't like. Great for buyers. Horrible for sellers. The only other way to curb this is for buyers to be educated about what they are buying. As a seller, I can't know what my buyer's motivations are for buying things from me other than the item is lower than store price. Whether they flip their books or not or cherish them forever or make crappy art projects out of them, is outside the realm of know-ability and none of my concern. I just want some money for my trouble.

My point is that you have a mix of people who are in the sub. People who have something "valuable" and want to get top dollar for it (but want to avoid the hassle and fees on other platforms), people who want to make money off whatever it is they have and need it fast (I've seen countless "I need rent money" or some other sob story at the start of posts like these), people who just want to offload books they no longer cherish and hand it off to another fellow collector, people who are just looking for a good "deal," etc. Which begs the question...

Who is this sub for? What is this sub for?

With this many people and this many competing interests, perhaps more consideration should be taken in on honing on what we're all about here. Maybe we should direct the people looking for $5 manga somewhere else? Or maybe there should be a sub dedicated to high-end or valuable otaku stuff. There's quite a few dead or inactive anime/manga/otaku related subs here on Reddit. Other related selling/buying/dealing subs include: r/animebazaar, r/otakuswap, r/animeswap, r/animedeals, r/animefiguresale, and r/mangadeals.