eBay’s latest move, some of the auction site’s devotees say, is straight out of the Ministry of Truth’s playbook.

The company made an announcement on Tuesday announcement about lowering the listing fees for items–even though, in many cases, final value fees will be raised. The company’s discussion forums simmered with outrage over the executive decision, and frustration over the lack of other options for auction-style e-commerce.

“What a joke,” commented one person on the eBay Seller Central forum, asking for advice about transferring the items from an eBay “store” to another auction site. Another suggested putting together an April Fool’s Day protest.

eBay representatives say that these opinions come from the minority. “A lot of the sellers that we’re talking to are very, very happy with these changes,” said Todd Lutwak, eBay’s senior director of seller experience. He said it gives a better array of options for different kinds of sellers. “What we’ve done with these price changes is, we’ve segmented the seller population and then we’ve provided those segments with what we feel are better options to meet their needs.”

Here’s the math: Individual eBay items with a starting price of 99 cents or less no longer have a listing fee, and if they don’t sell, the seller pays nothing; but if they do sell, the final value fee is 9 percent with a maximum of $50. Previously, it had been 8.75 percent for the first $25, and 3.75 percent after that. For more serious eBay sellers who purchase subscriptions to run “stores,” final value fees have been altered so that they start at a lower threshold, but in some cases can ultimately get higher. eBay piloted these changes in some European markets starting in 2008 (with success, representatives say), and later added some U.S.-based beta testers whom it’s showcased in a new promotional site explaining it all, called “The Best Place To Sell.”

“People who have store subscriptions, who sell thousands of items a month, are being advantaged,” explained Alan Lewis, who worked at eBay as a product manager for five years and now serves as the platform manager for Auctiva, a site that makes tools for eBay sellers. “(This) continues the direction that they’ve been going for the past couple years, which is catering more and more to large sellers…It’s something that makes sense for eBay. They just have to deal with the consequences. If they are bringing on larger sellers, there will be consequences for smaller sellers.”

An eBay pundit who goes by the handle “AuctionWally” wrote a blog post in which he speculated that the fee changes “will benefit the savvy consumer of collectibles, antique and unique items as this plan brings a lot more product to the marketplace with low starting bids,” and that “this stuff can be more like reading tea leaves than a flow chart, but it looks pretty good from an auction seller’s perspective, and just as nice for most store sellers.” Still, many of Wally’s own commenters disagreed with him–some with extremely strong language.

Granted, when a company makes a product change announcement, it’s the ticked-off ones who are the most vocal. But those dissatisfied sellers sure want to be heard.

“The lower announced listing fee decreases are absurdly trivial to the extreme, and will cause eBay to become more cluttered than ever with overpriced, worthless stuff that people will put purely on speculation that some fool will bite,” an Alexandria, Virginia-based antiques dealer related to CNET in an e-mail. “I have been selling on eBay since 1997 and I know eBay like the back of my hand. It is a true love-hate relationship.”

Any community site–particularly one where members may be making a profit by participating in that community–is sure to experience some dissent when changes are made. For eBay, however, the uproar from some sellers about this week’s fee changes was more vociferous than usual. It amounted to Orwellian doublespeak, some claimed; and the “Best Place To Sell” microsite was little more than propaganda.

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