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Comment by dpritchett | Hacker News Reader

Please don't be taken in by this masterfully crafted story without thinking it through carefully. The OP on reddit plays on many of our collective sympathies, but he unfortunately omits any semblance of objectivity from his story.

== Things that make us sympathetic to the OP ==

- He's a redditor, just like many of us

- He just wanted the money she promised him, nothing more

- He couldn't attend the game - this presumes he wanted to

- He used Google Voice - cool

- She was mean to him (and most of us are men, aren't we?)

- He has just added a cancer-stricken relative to the story along with a donation button

- She writes poorly, he does not

== Context this story sorely needs but is unlikely to ever get ==

- Face value of the tickets

- What his sunk cost is for the tickets ($0? $50? $600?)

- How he found himself with only 24 hours to unload the tickets

- Any sort of verification of the cancer-donation story

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I'd say all of those are irrelevant to the central moral/legal premise which is: did she enter into a contract to purchase the tickets? If she entered a bid on ebay she is obligated to go through with the transaction.

That said the cancer thing is sketchy as hell in context, thanks for mentioning it.

Actually on Ebay she is not, she could have stated that she entered a wrong bid : http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/questions/retract-bid.html

I agree that the details are irrelevant to the legality of backing out on an auction. This story is compelling (and thus upvoted) precisely because of the emotional levers it pulls. The thread can't be solely about eBay policy.

What's sketchy about trying to leverage unexpected popularity for the benefit of the American Cancer Society?

It appears that the cancer relative donation isn't actually to the relative, but to a charity. I don't know if that makes much difference to your point, but I think it is the right move if you're going to put up a donate button.

You make an excellent point. I clearly got carried away in my zeal to undermine the guy.

I don't really understand why the story sorely needs those details. It seems like I would come to the same conclusion given any likely combination of answers to those questions. Even if his sunk cost was zero, it would not change my feelings about it at all. Also, if he's misrepresenting the truth in order to get people to donate to the American Cancer Society, that kind of sucks, but it's not that big of a deal to me.

When you hear what anyone says do you always look at every single point that makes that makes that person look good and assume they made it up?

I mean, how paranoid do you have to be to think that fact that he is a reddit user is him "masterfully crafting a story" that "omits any semblance of objectivity". Even if the rest of your list had made sense (sorry, it doesn't), that first point would have made me ignore the rest.

It's quite possible that one or more aspects are exaggerated or made up, as with anything you ever get told, but none of your points are "well that seems unlikely to the point that we must assume it's not actually true", so I don't see why you'd question any of it.

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