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Comment by JAlexoid | Hacker News Reader

But... That curation is a VERY expensive task.

Etsy is for artists/creators. If you add curation to the mix one side needs to take a hit - and it ain't going to be your wallet.

Basically the reason for Etsy to exist is "direct to consumer" model, with low intermediary overhead and 0 setup hurdles.

(If you ever tried to get a product on a supermarket shelf, that's how it is to get onto a successful curated store shelf)

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That is the cost of doing business. Without the curation they risk losing their customer base. Why should I as a customer go to Etsy if it's filled with knockoff crap rather than handmade things?

Maybe, but Etsy is part of a long line of businesses that think they can solve adversarial search. The fact that Google can't and is losing the war should tell you everything about your chances. As long as you never use the "discovery" half of their business and find shops elsewhere, IG, TikTok, it's a fantastic experience. Basically Shopify but a little more streamlined.

> The fact that Google can't and is losing the war

Google has zero incentive to actually win that conflict, as frequently the SEO spam serves up ads from which google directly profits.

> Why should I as a customer go to Etsy if it's filled with knockoff crap rather than handmade things?

You don't go there. They aren't a curated product website, so why do you expect them to be one?

Let them fail. It's baffling to me why so many people are so heavily invested into that brand here...

I've bought handmade things on Etsy that are a) very high quality and b) obscure/weird enough that I wouldn't know where else to go for them.

Enabling this sort of thing is Etsy's pitch. I have no particular loyalty to their brand, but in the past they've done a great job living up to that promise for me, and I have to assume others have had similar experiences. If they get filled up by Chinesium knockoffs and the quality sellers are driven off, Etsy's product will no longer hold any value for us, and they will lose our business.

So yes, "let them fail". But before you accuse us of blind, unearned devotion to a brand, you might consider that there is---or once was---a good reason to prefer Etsy over other options.

Capitalism DOESNT fail! This IS the system. In the presence no rules, people will converge on the lowest common denonomiter. The problem with Estsy happens to any platform that gets popular. Its been happening in the real world since the 1990s where large coperations have moved in on mom and pops. Curated gets undercut.

There is no way around this in the free market. Ad comnpanies are the largest companies in the world, THATS NOT A CONINCIDENCE. Its about making people consume. Making people want sh*t that in reality they could live without. Overloaded by stimulii, people break. People want the dream. They hear about the dream. People want the cheapest thing so they can 100x instead of 2x. People who knock things off want the most popular thing. This is competition working. Its a race to the bottom or we sacrifice infinite growth. There is no other way. You either create new markets, create new consumers, or steal other peoples cut of the pie. "Disruption".

Please stop writing in caps, it makes your comments look more agressive and rant-like than you probably intend, and it makes it hard to read for me and likely others.

It’s not hard to read per se but I just can’t read it in any mind voice other than someone yelling right in my face.

Every human made system and most every non-human system fails in some way at some point depending on the stresses put upon them.

I don't disagree that 'race to the bottom' is the rule rather than the exception in modern capitalism, but I don't think your response here captures the context. The fact that Etsy's decline into something like Amazon (which has truly embraced the race to the bottom, enabling it to thrive) was more-or-less inevitable doesn't change the reasons I've used it in the past, or the reasons I may be less likely to use it in the future.

do you want to go back to "mom and pops" shops in lieu of supermarket chains? I don't. I would like supermarket chains to treat their employees better and I'm willing to pay 10% more for it.

Multiple times each year I rent an inexpensive cabin at one of our state parks, and on the way here I always visit a small grocery store in a small town that carries a local Amish bakery’s goods. I absolutely love their bread.

This past weekend I noticed a Dollar General had popped up nearby. They’re like weeds in rural Indiana.

I have no doubt that within a year or two the small grocery store will be gone, and I’ll no longer have a convenient place to buy that bread I like so much.

Yes, I do want to go back to mom and pop shops.

"Mom and pop" shops offer sub-par and high overhead products, almost exclusively.

Dollar General pops up, where people are very, very, price sensitive.

That "mom and pop" shop is either for tourists or is taking an unreasonable rent off the local economy.

I now live in a rural area and I like my local artisanal stores. But they cannot sustain the economy, due to very high overhead.

> Ad comnpanies are the largest companies in the world, THATS NOT A CONINCIDENCE

Apple is not an ad company, Tesla is not an ad company, Microsoft mostly isn’t an ad company, Netflix isn’t an ad company.

There are very few of the large companies that are ad companies.

> I've bought handmade things on Etsy that are a) very high quality and b) obscure/weird enough that I wouldn't know where else to go for them.

And my experience with Etsy is that it's a crafty people selling low quality handmade stuff.

Etsy is the last place on the internet, where I would got looking for quality stuff.

> Etsy is the last place on the internet, where I would got looking for quality stuff.

Well, that's your loss. But it may be Etsy's loss, too, if they allow chintzy crap from overseas to drive the quality sellers off their platform. Amazon has embraced the race to the bottom, so I don't see anybody else competing effectively with them without (at the very least) being all-in on Chinesium.

> It's baffling to me why so many people are so heavily invested into that brand here...

Firstly, I never said I am invested in their brand. Nor do I have to be to argue that "cost is very high" is not a good reason to ignore doing something that your business (I would argue) needs to do (keep the knockoff "handmade stuff") in order to the accomplish your stated goals (connect sellers of actual handmade stuff with buyers).

You don't need to say that you're invested into the brand, for me to see it by the terminology you use.

> They aren't a curated product website, so why do you expect them to be one?

They used to be that! At least, a site for handmade things. That's what they built their brand on. Yeah, nowadays I avoid them like the plague because they're just a shitty ebay.

Except that is not what the word curated commonly means...

If that were so - then your local supermarket is a curated store. (which would be a preposterous claim to make)

I see an opportunity here. A website who wants to curate products could use Etsy to locate sellers and convince them to list on their site. That curation website could develop a "stamp of approval" brand and grow that way. The art seller could include a printed note in the delivery saying "find more products like this on this xyz site". That way you use Etsy to draw in new customers but keep them as repeat customers for other products on this curated site. The main idea being that the curated site would not have to spend nearly as much money on advertising that Etsy does. Might work.

It's kind of how topsites used to work back in the day

This assumes every customer has that discernment. No shortage of potential buyers end up on Etsy because they saw something cool, asked the person where they got it, and the only answer they received was "Etsy".

Etsy may be compromised these days but it still IS for artists/creators as you say. We have a stand alone website that gets 2 to 9 visitors a day and our main Etsy site gets hundreds every day. That's why we are on Etsy. We are too small to hire comprehensive SEO/advertising help (I've tried a few) so we let Etsy collect the main slug of customers. We employ 4 people full time.

What kind of products do you sell?

Bootleg game boy games.

Underrated comment lmao

we make furniture out of old wood

Therefore it should be clear that the rise in fees is a reasonable tradeoff, for access to more potential customers.

I understand the desire to make sure that goods are authentic, but that is the only reasonable argument in the whole strike manifesto.

Curation is expensive, and difficult/impossible to automate, but there's value in it, in a world where anyone can post anything anywhere. We all felt better using Amazon ten years ago, when we could trust reviews, and trust products, but now it's flooded with brand names like "UZOOG" or whatever. People generally liked Facebook more before their grandparents and weird uncle got on it.

Look at Reddit as a platform which has many well curated 'subreddits', almost entirely for free.

It's totally possible on an e-commerce platform. Just nobodies quite managed it yet.

This has in some ways been a roll filled by subscription boxes.

The reason it works on reddit is because there is not money to be directly made by tricking the volunteer curators. If those reddit mods were controlling who could sell something, there would be a lot more effort going into corrupting them.

I still think you're right, Reddit has a much higher signal to noise ratio than almost anywhere else on the internet. But there's absolutely money to made by paying off mods of larger subreddits to curate content in such a way that makes their brands look good.

Looks like Etsy made $160M last year. I think they can afford to ramp up their efforts in this area. But, like the Apple App Store, people are only going to get satisfaction if they can make a big enough stink on social media.

A) Why should they?

B) Are investors not allowed to make any return on their investments in form of dividends?

> Why should they?

Because otherwise their brand is asymptotically approaching just being a more expensive Ali Express.

The brand is established and it's not that heavily diluted... Even then - it only needs to keep up with the aesthetics and product types, to keep on top.

So no... They don't need to. And curated storefronts were many - I knew of at least 5 startups in that space - they all folded.

> Why should they?

If they do not, many sellers will stop using them. Many buyers will stop using them. They will have competition.

You're basically arguing for a monopoly now.

Let them fail.

As a consumer, I don't want to go through the effort of finding the next Etsy. I want to be lazy and have the current Etsy be good.

Whatever comes next will be small. They will lack some of the things I want for many years.

As a lazy person I want sixpack abs, without putting in the effort.

Also - monopolies are never good.

If shouting at the sky had a chance to convince God to endow me with abs, I would make it a daily practice.

Etsy does listen to it's consumers, at least some times. The cost of complaining here is commensurate with the potential benefit.

"They should do this thing in order to continue to succeed."

"Why?"

"Because if they don't they'll fail."

"Now you're arguing for a monopoly."

You can't possibly be arguing in good faith at this point.

You have to ignore the "They will have competition." to make your own bad faith argument.

PS: And then miss our further interaction

Is Etsy paying dividends?

Well, yes it is. And it works just fine on the "mom and pop shop" scale. But the whole idea of the post-2008 startups is to "disrupt" the industry by replacing the knowledgeable people with algorithms and minimum wage employees.

So what is the bottom line? Consumers get to enjoy products that are 2x cheaper and 4x worse. Individual makers get priced out and have to join the drone ranks. And the corporate owners of trademarks and algorithms rake in so much cash they don't know where to invest it anymore.

Sadly, this is happening across every sector, and most people seem to be just fine with it.

Etsy is also for curators, though (at least a specific kind). You have always been able to sell vintage items on their platform, and antique sellers are curators and restorers.

Before manufactured goods were on the platform, you were basically browsing items that were either handmade or hand curated. It was a much better experience.

Etsy is really for everyone, but the brand image is that it's really artists sales channel.

Based on my experience, curators add an extra 50%+ to the price of a product. Which is the cost of well curated storefront.

Artists and creators are Etsy’s brand. But those sellers have not been the bread and butter of Etsy’s business for ages.

I still occasionally find small sellers on Etsy whose stuff interests me and I always wonder why they choose to sell via Etsy and I’m sure it’s: because it works and because it’s less hassle than the other options. The traffic to your shop is worth swimming in a sea of knockoffs and doodads. And that’s what you compete with on the internet at large anyway.

I would argue that for artists all their work is already curated if they built it themselves and hence they wouldnt need to curate stuff

But if i am selling someone elses stuff, then i am in the business of curation.

You're right. But we are talking about Etsy taking an active role in what is available on their site, which is curation. Not an easy task as well.

They also decided to be way more lax, than some people want it to be.

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