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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, this is a great development for people who want to make more things, but don't have the bandwidth to do it all themselves.

On the other hand, this seems to move away from the all-hand-crafted philosophy Etsy has had up to now.

I'm torn.

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> all-hand-crafted philosophy

I write software for desktop CNC machines, and am a maker myself who periodically sells his work. I constantly am thinking about what it means to be 'hand-made'. The machines I write software for can only make one thing at a time, it isn't large scale manufacturing. The designs are hand-crafted, I suppose, but they are of course made digitally. The machine is controlled by the computer, so the process of carving doesn't involve any manual skill. However a piece is rarely 'finished' the moment it comes off the machine. An added level of complexity, for myself at least, is that I am writing the software that controls the machine. Does that make the things my machine creates any 'more hand-crafted'? I like to think it does, but I'm not sure!

Links to your work, please!

I have been hand-writing the code that generates my gcode. That counts too, right?

I'd say the "source code" for your designs is hand-crafted, but the material coming off the CNC machine is not. It may not be mass manufacturing, but if additional copies are essentially a button-push away, I'd say that it wasn't hand crafted. Now if the setup time on the CNC machine took longer than making it on a manual mill/lathe, then we might have some grey area. BTW, what are you using for your "desktop CNC" machine? Do you have any recommendations? And what materials are you machining? Steel? Brass? Aluminum? Plastics?

On top of that, Etsy will be/is facing extra pressure from companies like Amazon with their soon to be offered Marketplace (I think that's the name). My wife has an Etsy shop, and talks with a lot of other Etsy shop owners in her space, and Etsy is not well thought of in the handcrafted world. So far she's had nothing but nice things to say about the Amazon experience, and is eager for it to go live.

Couple that with Etsy's continued lack of support for sellers at some really basic levels... let's just say people are still on Etsy only because a good number of people still think Etsy means handmade.

This is on top of Etsy's complete lack of communication in allowing Etsy sellers get in early on Etsy stock despite the misinformation in suggesting that it had made it possible to do so.

This is the first I've ever heard this viewpoint! I'm surprised. Why is Etsy not well thought of in the handcrafted world?

My opinion, and this is after looking into it with my wife, is there are a large number of sellers, selling mass produced stuff. Etsy does nothing about it either.

Yeah, read an article about Etsy's #1 seller [0]. Her team makes some items, but a lot of what they sell is just stuff sourced in India that they embellish (or likely sell as sourced).

[0] http://www.fastcodesign.com/3042352/how-one-knitter-makes-al...

This seller is no longer on Etsy.

https://www.yahoo.com/makers/exclusiveetsys-richest-seller-e...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/business/media/etsys-succe...

The short answer is that Etsy started as a marketplace for purely handmade goods and then kept changing the definition of handmade till it ended up being flooded by cheap, counterfeit Chinese mass manufactured goods. Naturally, Etsy sellers who believed in the original indie creed felt betrayed.

This is the rough timeline over which events developed:

In October 2013 Etsy redefined handmade and allowed Etsy sellers to get help with making and shipping their items. [1] [2]

In early 2015 Etsy did an IPO as an effort to grow much faster.[3]

Over time, a lot of China-based sellers piled in and started selling counterfeit goods at low prices - something that Etsy chose to do nothing about.[4] Its stock price tanked and class-action lawsuit was filed.[5]

Sensing an opportunity, Amazon stepped in with its 'Handmade' category and lured in a lot of Etsy sellers for its launch on Oct 8, 2015. [6] Ironic, huh?

[1] https://www.etsy.com/teams/7722/discussions/discuss/13091813...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/opinion/etsys-industrial-r...

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/29/unpacking-etsys-s1/

[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-15/etsy-count...

[5] http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/11/investing/etsy-stock-fall-co...

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/business/amazon-challenges...

Wired has good coverage on how things evolved at Etsy over time:

http://www.wired.com/2012/09/etsy-goes-pro/

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/why-etsys-future-depends-on-lea...

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/etsy-not-good-for-crafters/ (Related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9092872)

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/etsys-surging-ipo-shows-losing-...

http://www.wired.com/2015/09/etsy-embraces-mass-manufacturin...

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/amazon-takes-etsy-see-whos-auth...

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