He was making fun of the folks who'll bid an auction up incrementally before it ever gets anywhere near what it'll go for at the end. You'll sometimes see three or four clowns have done that to each other. That's a no-win situation if you get involved.
Last auction I did bid in was for a DEC LA-120 on a government auction site. Set my bid an hour after the listing was up (was in touch with my university so they could tell me when it went up) and watched for four days as one guy kept stuffing bids and eventually gave up at $52.60 and three days before closing. After taxes it was $75 which was over $300 less than any similar LA-120 on ebay.
A chuckle is permitted because the money I saved pays my car insurance for three months or gives me eight tanks of gas or a small stack of university course books and supplies.
Then people can't believe I got it for so cheap. Remember how I mentioned how my Absolutely Apple IIfx system was less than $100 to build? People still can't believe it.
If someone else bids more in the snipe window, so be it, you won't have a time to try to bid a second time so there's no temptation to go overboard/over-budget.
Yeah, that's not how an auction works. That's being an asshole.
No really. It's like budging in line at the box office to buy tickets. You going to stand for that s***? No, you want your Beiber tickets, dammit!
Unlike my government auction site ebay has no incentive to push forward auction times when bids are placed in the last ten seconds. If they did they would miss out on hundreds or thousands of dollars more in item value which they can tax back in fees.
Sniping exists simply because of capitalist greed.
I stopped bidding on ebay years ago.
Eventually you get fed up on bidding $35 on an ED floppy drive, watching the bid sit for days and in the closing seconds a half dozen others blast the price up to $102.51. I've been using the Make an Offer and Buy it Now options since 2008 and between major PC and Mac hauls while living in Vancouver I've run out of reasons to buy more gear on ebay. All you are doing when you go over your budget and snipe is help inflate and bias the value of hardware which can hit very close to home when small chains of second hand stores are looking up hardware prices on ebay (and we've ALL had someone tell us "it was
this much on ebay!").
I bet anyone here $1000 that if ebay ran like a REAL auction house (bid in the closing seconds and the listing time is extended ten more seconds, thus defeating snipers) the value of some of our most prized hardware would fall through the floor.
Now now. What was the forum rule about going after other members?