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Etsy employee #3 or so here but haven’t worked there in more than a decade. Rob is a great guy, but I don’t think he could have grown Etsy the way it has. I’m sure some people will say that’s not a bad thing but my response is you probably wouldn’t know about Etsy if he stayed on.
I think on the whole, the new CEO has done more good than bad for the company. They’ve always had criticism of non handmade stuff being sold on there. I think they could do more to that end, and if the video is right that the new CEO is allowing non handmade stuff on there, I don’t agree with him on that. I haven’t seen that myself and I do still use the site. While he’s made other decisions I don’t agree with, encouraging sellers to do free shipping was a good move. Many buyers expect that thanks to Amazon. The fee increases while for sure had an impact on sellers bottom lines, don’t compare to what Amazon Handmade (if that still exists) and ebay charge (not to get into most other marketplaces like the app stores that charge 30%). The current CEO in my opinion understands Etsy way more than the other two they had after Rob was out.
Also in terms of Fred Wilson, she should have done a little more homework on him. He was one of the original investors. He understands Etsy. He’s also entitled to some return for making a very risky investment on 4 kids (they were like 20 when they started it). I haven’t spoken to Fred in some time so maybe he’s changed, but I doubt it.
Anyway, I don’t mean to be so negative about the video, but I also don’t think Etsy has lost its way as much as the video implies. Granted I am not a seller, just a user at this point.
I’m disappointed this video is doing so well in the Fediverse. It’s largely unsourced and highly speculative like most of the videos on TikTok.
I used to love Etsy for true, handmade items. Now I have to wade through a sea of drop shipped AliExpress crap.
Dropshipped AliExpress crap and hundreds of people with a cricut and the same free clipart making tote bags/tshirts/dog tags.
I think it’s mostly because etsy stood for something, then shifted over time to something else.
Seems to be par for the course. When did Google remove “do no evil” as their mantra again? They start off all stary eyed and idealistic, but almost always go “alright give it to the sociopath”.
Yeah, very unfortunate there
Google isn’t evil. Human morality doesn’t apply to an algorithm. They’re amoral.
Can you start moral and end amoral? I would say that giving up morality is immoral (even if a snapshot of your end state is amoral)
its not an algorithm. its a legal box made of people who make choices, and we can make moral judgements about those choices.
Is there an article I can read? Besides hating video in general for getting information, also fuck TikTok.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/30/23001727/etsy-seller-strike-boycott-fee-increase
Article from seller strike that covers much of this
Right? A video on why Etsy is bad hosted on TikTok. There’s gotta be a joke there somewhere…
It doesn’t help that a bunch of influencers descended on YouTube one day selling classes for how to get rich quick with drop-shipping. A couple thousand gullible dipshits emptied their wallets and dumped a load of cheap crap onto Etsy, with product descriptions that read like they were written by Skaven.
Similar happened with an article for self-promotion on Imgur, and honestly I’m almost not sure why people found it acceptable for there to be accounts dedicated to selling and hyping. Even stuff that looks very formulaic or is like $300+, plus deleting+reposting if their post isn’t successful and other questionable stuff like that.
Etsy aside, there even were (well, still I guess) successful multi-million dollar game publishers that had multiple accounts pushing crowd-funding and early-access games (and I’m pretty sure the actual devs were burned by publishers, particularly if they were encouraged/coerced to handle their own online marketing).
In either case it seemed way too oversaturated, I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.
I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.
You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.
Enshittification:
See also: reddit, amazon, tiktok, facebook, etc. etc. etc.
Another notch in the portfolio of “public companies” being made worse due to shareholder supremacy. Public companies aren’t even really public anymore given the advent of a million tools to limit the role the public has in governance.
I wonder if it would be possible to develop a federated model for sales. You’d like still need a platform like shopify between the consumer and the manufacturer, but the point of Etsy wasn’t just the commerce side, it was also the discoverability and searching side. I wonder if a federated approach to searching for products utilizing independent websites or marketplaces, but with a unified search and sales platform would even make sense as a means to offer a decentralized marketplace. On some level that’d be just a digital swap meet/flea market, but with less oversight and commerce protection of a centralized platform like Etsy or Ebay.
Omg please can this be a thing! However if there is money, bots will come.
Such things already exist. They have two main problems, though. Firstly they’re still very new and complicated to interact with, so there’s not a lot of buyers and sellers yet. And secondly, they rely on cryptocurrencies and so have an enormous stigma associated with them. The technology is sound, though.
Thanks for the link, i learned from that. It looks like OpenBazaar closed its door/servers when the investment money dried up.
Another case of enshittification.
Can’t play the video due to technical issues on my side. What is it about?
In short, capitalism happened. A new CEO took over and decided “handmade” wasn’t marketable enough, and did the typical layoffs, changes in company direction, and general shitification of the platform. They now aim to compete with Amazon in sales of cheap, mass-produced items, instead of Etsy’s original goal of being a platform for craft enthusiasts to sell their creations.
I fucking hate this. Ty for letting me know, will not recommend etsy anymore___
You definitely still can find real people making cool handmade stuff, but yeah there is a fair amount of just bot-posts reselling cheap wares.
You need to be somewhat tech-savvy (at least in terms of distinguishing automated accounts from humans, which might be more of a social skill) and knowledgeable about whichever craft you seek to purchase, though. And Etsy as a platform has gotten pretty bad for small-scale creators, demanding more of them (such as encouraging them to offer “free” shipping at their own cost) and offering less support.
Is there any alternative?
The Artisan’s Coop is building itself right now. Only time will tell how successful it will be, but they’re taking their time to try to build a useful and real cooperative.
I can’t play it due to ideological reasons (can we please not post tiktok links?)
Agreed. If we really must, let’s use proxitok
