Over these past few months, I've been going through my personal belongings to reduce them to the bare essentials – more-or-less following the rule "If I cannot remember that I had it, I probably don't need it" – with an explicit goal to make it easier for me to relocate in the near future.
Part of that iterative process has involved selling surplus items via Facebook groups. While I initially rejoiced at the invention of the new Selling Something feature, the more I use it, the more I end up cursing at the lack of thought that went into designing that feature:
For instance, in the feature's most recent implementation, it has become possible to post the same ad in several groups. Great idea, right? Actually, no. What this option does is post individual copies of that exact same ad in each group. Managed to sell a particular item? You'll have to sort through each and every duplicate post in each group to mark the item as sold. Need to edit the ad to lower the price or add requested information about the item? Same thing: go through each individual copy of the ad in each group. Seriously, Facebook? Who the fuck designed that senseless implementation?!
Here's a better implementation: centrally manage all items via the user's account preferences, and let the user tick checkboxes besides each item to decide which groups will see that particular item. Ditto whenever editing the ad's content or marking an item as sold; do everything via the user's account preferences. Rather than making the content group-centric, make it user-centric.
You're welcome.
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