The people I see railing the hardest against the system are the members who've been tagged by DT members for their untrustworthy behavior.
Of course. The people affected by the wrongdoing are the loudest about it, naturally. See e.g. banks, politics or whatever subject. On the other hand, the people being most supportive of current DT list are the people on it.
And Anduck, you can argue that self-bidding in auctions is allowed by certain auctioneers, but it is not a commonly-accepted practice and I think you learned the hard way what the bitcointalk community thinks about it here.
Indeed. It is not a commonly accepted practice
here but e.g. in my country it
is. Nonetheless, it's a practice which is common in some communities/countries. In any case, arguing that vendor bidding is untrustworthy, unethical or scamming is simply ridiculous.
The bitcointalk auction standard is not defined anywhere, and is very vague and only learned by watching what others are doing. It simply didn't even cross my mind that vendor bid may be not cool, as it's common in my country. Of course after seeing how community reacted to it, I learned that it's not part of the auction standard here, and I've kept numerous successful auctions since, for 2-3 years already.
The only thing you have going in your favor as far as that goes is that there wasn't a rule against it here, but Vod wasn't alone in thinking it was very shady of you to do it. I do recall some sort of attempt at bargaining that Vod did about feedback removal (I don't know where that thread is now), and I do recall thinking that it wasn't something he should have engaged in and isn't the behavior he typically displays.
It doesn't surprise me one bit that people are incompetent regarding auctions. Auctions are not simple at all. There are loads of assumptions etc.
Vod told me that he doesn't see anything untrustworthy in what I did in that auction. Later on that same day his opinion changed 100% to the opposite, because I provoked him by telling him that I don't specifically trust him. He also threatened to red-rate me unless I removed my rating to him. I didn't remove my rating, so he proceeded in red-rating me. It's incredibly stupid for people to think that Vod rates me because of the auction, even after he himself told me that he will rate me (for completely other reason). Obviously he will not state e.g. "he pissed me off, this is me wrecking his account" in his rating. All the sources are public and verifiable, so go see yourself how it went. The PM conversation is the thing in there, and shows very poor conduct by Vod, conduct enabled by him being on DT.
Even if he was wrong in doing that, I think his feedback on you about the self-bidding is absolutely correct. If I wasn't familiar with the situation, I would definitely want a visible warning that you might be bidding on your own auctions.
It was a single case ~3 years ago. Why would I bid on my auctions here now that I know it's not part of the auction standard here? That's ludicrous.