I'll join the strike since I don't use ebay anyway

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And I think it's called a boycott, not a strike

No ebay for me for a while.

I usually sell stuff locally on Craigs List anyway.

Yup, I do all of my selling on Craigslist. I could never get into ebay all that much.
Those changes do look pretty horrible though. I'm sure most of the people who have used ebay for awhile are pretty mad.

I do understand the fear of retaliation thing.
When someone sends you something crappy, you don't want to give bad feedback. You know he will retaliate with negative feedback of his own, saying "BUYER WAS A JERK". When you have like 4 feedback and he has 212000+ feedback, this retaliation hurts you a whole lot more than your initial feedback hurt him. So you just don't give any, or you leave a good feedback and just never deal with him again... which makes the whole feedback system completely moot.

I do understand the fear of retaliation thing.
When someone sends you something crappy, you don't want to give bad feedback. You know he will retaliate with negative feedback of his own, saying "BUYER WAS A JERK". When you have like 4 feedback and he has 212000+ feedback, this retaliation hurts you a whole lot more than your initial feedback hurt him. So you just don't give any, or you leave a good feedback and just never deal with him again... which makes the whole feedback system completely moot.

Yeah, when I first started out, I would leave negative feedback if I was dissatisfied with a seller...then I'd wonder how I received negative feedback in return, even if I paid promptly and was polite.  This is pretty devastating for "newbies", because I wasn't able to purchase a few items on eBay because of my negative feedback score.  Right now, I'm only at 75%.

I had one seller recently force me to leave good feedback before he would even give me a refund for a broken product.  eBay in general is just fucking wack, and I have the worst luck with sellers because I'm always sold falsely advertised products that are clearly not in the described condition.

Sellers also seem to be overcompensating for fees and gouging on shipping prices, too...it doesn't cost 12 dollars to ship a fucking CD from New Jersey to Delaware.

Wait, sellers can't give feedback to buyers like that, but can they still do the little replies to buyer feedback on their own pages?  I think it's perfectly fine for them to not be able to feedback buyers (or just negative or whatever it is), but I think it would be absolutely terrible if they can't still do the comments, for those cases when the buyer is in the wrong.  I mean yeah, they're still getting negative feedback, but that doesn't mean much if prospective buyers see the sellers point of view on it, like when a buyer complains about not getting their item and they hadn't paid for it.  As long as they can still leave those responses, I don't think this is a huge deal.

Also I think a HUGE BOYCOTT OF EBAY is pretty ridiculous.  Yeah, a lot of those policies are really fucking dumb, but if you have that kind of problem, find your stuff elsewhere instead of trying to get other people to stop using it too.  If you don't think it's worth it to use eBay with these policies then don't use it, but it's not worth turning it into a big issue.

Ok, I just 'scabbed' on the strike.

But come on, a $350 D1X with all the accessories is worth my digital dignity.

What are some other decent auction sites that might become bigger because of this?

I use Ebay a fair bit, but mainly just to import DS games (a few Aussie Ebay stores get US games as soon as they come out in the US so I don't need to wait, hooray for region free) but barring that I wouldn't miss it, and this does seem like bullcrap as far as sellers are concerned.

I know people who are 'power sellers' and make a lot of their income off Ebay, and the fees just seem ridiculous.