Same here...I buy COLLECTIBLES and antiques...not new mass produced junk. My entire house is decorated with old stuff...why? because the quality is hands down 100% over modern crap. But as Countess says, if they stop listing the items I collect, then I stop looking and stop bidding.
only a few years ago, I could have my choice of the particular types of collectibles I go for and there were always many pages of listings...now it's one or two every so often and over priced because there are so few being listed.
I've gone back to garage sale collecting...i.e. one item I collect is art glass....I have found more art glass items at local g/sales than I have on ebay in the past year or so.....these days there are so many fakes and the prices are over the top. I recently bought a massive murano bowl at a garage sale for 25.00....wasn't I chuffed....everybody else must have thought it was overpriced, but I didn't even argue because I recognised it immediately from my research over many years..... it was Seguso...just got the money out and ran......
I bought a Fratelli Toso bowl the same way at a garage sale for 50 cents...what a bargain that was.....Today I got three art glass bowls for $1.00 each from the local church shop and they are ground bottoms, so not cheapies.....now I have the fun of finding out who made them.......That's the point really Collecting is a hobby, involving research of the items you collect, and knowing what is valuable and what isn't. Half the fun of collecting on Ebay, was being able to spot that rare find that nobody else recognises......these days it's all the same junk....so....this tells us that Ebay does not wish to cater to the collectible marketplace anymore, it's not as lucrative as imported Chinese garbage with 1000's of the same identical listings in each category.............boring *yawn*
