Devil's advocate here
" A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. " - Steve Jobs (1955-2011), circa. 1998
When was the last time you've bought an item you were actually looking for a long time, rather than buying an item you found on the fly because it was interesting.
Most of my currently owned items (especially more rare/expensive ones, like my unusuals or my Eye-catcher) I have bought without even realizing I want them.
I mean, I would never in my entire life think that the Bot Dogger isn't ugly as hell, but I saw a classified listing promoted on bp.tf's front page and I was intrigued.
Same with unusual weapons, never would've thought I would buy some expensive weapon that wasn't an australium.
And the Eye-catcher. Oh boy the Eye-catcher. Some high tier trader was quickselling it for 22 ref, and since I use one for my Scout, I decided to buy it... Now I use it on all of my loadouts.
My point being, not a lot of people go on this website for auctions, and the auctioneers know it, which is why they make advertisements in raffles. And honestly, why do people care so much?
If you are here for just the free stuff and all you see is a bunch items worth a craft weapon-scrap, of course you're going to be annoyed, but the number of raffles with valuable items doesn't change, unless the rafflers themselves to stop doing them.
If you are here for the personality in raffles, then it's still there, you just have to scroll down a little bit more, which I admit might be a problem for someone with bad internet or someone lazy.
And free advertisement is bad in what way? People already advertise their youtube channels and SFM artwork, why not auctions? One could argue that one takes effort and other ones are just them trying to profit, but at the end of the day, all of this is made for advantage of the raffler.
Okay, that's actually hypocritical and I agree with you
Depends on the auctionee and whether or not they are bright and actually auction stuff that might be interesting to certain groups of people but not others (i.e.: collector's, rare craft numbers, unusuals, painted items, items with parts, items with halloween spells and so on and so forth) or if they think they're being funny by auctioning a craft hat for 1.66 ref.
Agree, the format might need to be changed around.
