Quote:
Originally Posted by Vintagedeputy
That is very true, and I have accepted that fact. I still only buy at values that I’m comfortable with.
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this is a noble point -- and it actually really deeply connects back to the issue that was raised in the other thread about shill bidding. markets are regularly inflated by people who are actively manipulating them with false signals; distorting data and driving untrue price inflation -- or deflation -- for perceived personal gain. and a lot of what that thread ended up discussing is what happened to people who thought that this was a viable or ethical or practical way of engaging with the community. these conversations going on seem to be about is how that impacts us as collectors; people who genuinely love baseball cards; seek to act with integrity and consciously; participate in community surrounding our passions -- not merely ruthlessly conquer piles and piles of photos or cards -- regardless of what it does to us or others, what have you. many people in this hobby seem to have met their demise by descending into a total greed to possess what really is nothing more than pieces of cardboard (really cool pieces of cardboard, mind you) at all costs. it reminds me of reading about what happened with type 1 photography in some of those early auction days in jim chapman's book.
there are people who both buy and sell in this hobby with deep reverence for our community and baseball history as a whole; there are people who do the same with the idea to extract every single possible dollar out of a card, meaning be damned. to me its a sort of illness or disease -- the people who do that and live that way. we are here for meaning and the love of the cards. there is another faction which is here to extract monetary value from them. there is no real love there; thus, no real community built around genuine passion and connection with/for them.
our community, which was i think at one point in history more resembled a small group of passionate kids -- has been in many ways 'hijacked' by people leveraging cards as tokens and assets; we've seen the way the hobby as a whole, particularly in modern, has adopted this hyper modern method of pumping and dumping '1/1 super gold supreme' cards like shells. its like the introduction of a stock market to a sandlot -- a cold calculating hand; as you mentioned earlier jim, the juxtaposition of trading with your friends back in the day. there's a warmth to that; a commonality. its much more human. its ultimately a big part of the reason that, for me, baseball cards are such an important thing.
there's so much to be said here, but it ultimately comes back to the integrity and the passion that i think we all have here on the forum for cards and the game and history. and how our community has been turned into a market for stock turnover and pumping inflated values into something which was always about something far deeper than that. however, i think there are still plenty of us out here who still reside at that level of care. and i often see that reflected in the right kind of relationships where i'm buying, trading, selling, communicating -- all of the above.