It’s not quite so effective if you are trying to acquire stuff. The appropriate descriptor is ‘lottery’. There’s also an enormous bad will towards recipients suspected of being professional traders. It gives the site an underlying hypocrisy: it’s fine to give, but not to receive.

This could be fixed by using a different infrastructure. Ditch the Yahoo, make a bespoke website with more safety features and better methods of organising and sharing information. Such a thing was rumoured to be in the works, but two years on nothing’s appeared. Given the inertia of an existing service it seems unlikely that anything will change. So it goes. Rant over. For now.