clarification on "paperclip trades"

[alolan vulpix]

hiya, this might be an incredibly dumb question but I've looked up a bunch of different help posts in the past about "paperclip trades" - and wanted to be aware of them since a lot of users have "no paperclips" and similar in their trade rules. to my understanding the definition is trading pets 1:1 for a slightly rarer or slightly higher rarity pet (or sometimes you start with a group of pets?), sometimes to end up with the end goal of a dreamie.

is this not just... trading? isn't the value of pets incredibly subjective? not trying to argue or anything! i just don't know what i'm missing - is "no paperclips" just a really roundabout way of saying "no lowballs"?

[Keir;]

when done like a regular trade, for example trading an uncommon cat from march 2020 for an uncommon dog from january 2020 for example, yes that is just a regular trade. if you're doing the challenge that way, you wouldn't even need to mention that you're doing the challenge and the average player wouldn't have a problem with that

but what a lot of users do when attempting "the paperclip challenge" (or at least this used to be done a lot - i'm not sure how common it still is) is send a suggestion with their pet and ask the other user to offer them something of greater value to help with the challenge. a lot of people (at least used to) not do the challenge just by sending regular trades, they would send suggestions until someone was kind enough to willing offer something of more value. so when people say "no paperclip trades" it generally means "no lowball/unfair offers" and "don't send me a suggestion asking if i'll offer you something of greater value"

[alolan vulpix]

when done like a regular trade, for example trading an uncommon cat from march 2020 for an uncommon dog from january 2020 for example, yes that is just a regular trade. if you're doing the challenge that way, you wouldn't even need to mention that you're doing the challenge and the average player wouldn't have a problem with that

but what a lot of users do when attempting "the paperclip challenge" (or at least this used to be done a lot - i'm not sure how common it still is) is send a suggestion with their pet and ask the other user to offer them something of greater value to help with the challenge. a lot of people (at least used to) not do the challenge just by sending regular trades, they would send suggestions until someone was kind enough to willing offer something of more value. so when people say "no paperclip trades" it generally means "no lowball/unfair offers" and "don't send me a suggestion asking if i'll offer you something of greater value"

thank you so much! this wasn't really clarified at all in any of the explanations I saw. I was afraid that trades I was doing would be interpreted that way but it makes sense that its more so a specific challenge/trend than just offers that are interpreted as lowballs (though I have heard stories about people being rude about unintentional lowballs - but I haven't encountered this yet!). I really appreciate the explanation