They pay $500/mo for access to a bot that will allow them to make these purchases.
Most of the community lives on discord.
No, that causes the problem. That encourages people to use bots to be the first one to purchase the moment the inventory is released.
I don't understand how a random raffle would ever not be fair (with the assumption that one person gets only one entry)
But what other than artificial scarcity drives people to spend hundreds of dollars on bots to snipe sneakers?!
There's a whole sneaker collecting subculture. Some buy and wear while others just collect. The big names in sneakers do release limited production models or limited runs of certain color combinations.
Similar to any other collecting subculture.
For me, this kind of product is part of the "bullshit economy" - similar to "bullshit jobs", this kind of product has no reason to exist other than vanity, as almost all of these "collectibles" won't ever be used. We are using up valuable, finite resources to create and distribute this kind of useless "bullshit product", we are using up valuable human time and IT resources on developing websites capable to resist (D)DoS attacks and on developing snipers to bypass the anti-bot technologies employed by the shops, and we are creating a lot of demand for all kinds of sneaker-related crime - and there's a lot of that: theft and robberies from stores, theft and robberies in the supply chain, ebay/classifieds scams, credit card fraud, robberies on broad daylight [1].
Seriously, fuck all that shit. No one needs hundreds of dollars worth of sneakers that only incentivize crime and bullshit.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=man+robbed+because+of+sneake...