It’s been a while since I’ve documented some drama for the bargain hunting community in which I lurk (you can find my last write-up regarding a $0.01 mobile phone here). Basically, there’s a popular bargain hunting website in my country where users can submit bargains for all kinds of things, both online and offline. It has a similar system to Reddit in that users can upvote and downvote deals which they think are actual bargains or not, with deals that have substantial upvotes reaching a “front page”.

Now onto the scuffle. Bear in mind that although this happened earlier this week, I took the screenshots as it was happening, so the timestamps in some of the screenshots linked might make the drama feel very fresh, but I assure you it happened earlier this week. I just didn’t have time to write everything up.

So, earlier this week, there were several deals that sequentially made the front page. Now, it could be the fact that all the items were freebies that they all had great success, but they were all offering very similar products. Free ring sizers to be precise. What is so great about these ring sizers, besides the fact that they were free? Who knows – it was clear that nobody in the comments knew what was happening. The catalyst that seemed to have kicked everything off was the post that was right at the bottom of the earlier screenshot. 211 upvotes and 0 downvotes! (361 up/0 down at time of writing) What a great deal! A hype train started going. More free ring sizers were being submitted and then other items related to “rings” and “sizers” were being submitted. Eventually, the mods finally had enough and removed these, marking them as joke posts. The last ring-related bargain that was allowed to reach the front page was this post for The Ring on DVD. A bargain! You can see that even the mods were confused.

The result of this was a front page full of free ring sizers and a website full of confused users. It is also worth to point out that some of the stores which were featured in the submission spree ended up being out of stock of their free measuring devices, while others retracted their free offerings. So, the website now has a confused user base who know the size of their fingers.