The principal that makes ebay just “work” is the trust sellers and buyers develop. Ebay gives us a nice little tool called the “feedback rating” to help distinguish between a good seller/buyer, and a bad one. This principle of trust works, and it works great. All of this, however, is negated when feedback comments become private. A seller can set an option to have the comments he receives from his transactions with other users.

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This is fine if the user has a 100% positive rating, but what if he has 98%. Was his negative rating due to fraud? Or was the buyer just giving him negative feedback out of spite? With the comments being private, we would never know why he was given negative feedback. We cant determine if hes a worthy seller, or just a lousy buyer. See my point?

So Ebay, make everyones feedback comments public because its giving me a headache!