katfreikh_0 wrote:It was a little frustrating to read through the fawning interpersonal fluff just to see the one question I would’ve loved to see an official response to completely and totally ignored.
Honestly I think the numerous “hi! OMG! Nice to see you!” posts should be prohibited as the time frame is so short.
I had similar thoughts, though perhaps for different reasons, as I read that transcript just now.
The "fawning interpersonal fluff" (Heh... 
) was a bit much, I agree (and doesn't anyone there know how to trim quoted replies?), although in printed form, it's a lot easier to skip past than, say, a live Q&A event where someone gets up and hogs the microphone for ages over some trivial point.
Where I think all that fluff does the most damage is that it, and the equally vapid replies that follow it (not to mention all the photos) let legitimate questions and gripes get buried amongst irrelevant posts, where it's easy to ignore them (or forget that they were ever posted, several pages back).
I sensed that there was some shying away from replies to awkward topics, but really, if you're going to have a live chat with eBay buyers and sellers, you're going to have to expect some tough areas of discussion. Whenever someone posted a fluffy comment or minor point of praise, it seemed like the eBay employee responders all lunged towards it like a lifeboat from the Titanic, giving only cursory answers to those who actually wanted to have a business conversation.
For example, notice the posting from tenbigdogs, which was roundly ignored (even after he posted a followup ping about it), and was instead followed by an interminable series of posts (and more duplicated photos) involving eBay sneakers and where to get them.
Those chat sessions are in desperate need of a moderator who'll actually jump in as needed to get the conversation back on track, and maybe even quietly nuke the umpteenth repetition of some photo or 5th-level re-quoted reply that didn't need that much screen space in the first place. Reading on a mobile device in particular can be agony. It might be worth preserving that particular chat session, to serve as a good example of how not to do it, and to show what happens (or doesn't happen) when things just wander out of control.
