He doesn’t say that. He said “improving working conditions for slaves is not an argument for slavery”.
He then goes on to say that 19th century slave-owners argued that slavery is good, because “slaves were better treated than wage laborers”. Which is an equally ridiculous argument in favor of slavery.
The idea that slaves had it better than workers is and always has been blatantly false, as evidenced by the many black people fleeing slavery in the south to be workers in the north and the non-existent line of northern workers attempting to become enslaved in the south.
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".
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.
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.
Sometimes it’s possible to contact people via their social media accounts and figure out a way to make the transaction happen without a middleman, but I imagine that’s not all vendors. I’m not aware of any alternative platforms to Etsy at the moment, sadly.
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.
At a similar time as The Verge was threatened I noticed some articles changed their tune and switched to downplaying the Reddit situation. The one I recall is Gizmodo reporting that Reddit traffic was back to normal.
It'll be interesting to see how things play out at the end of this week when the 3rd Party Apps go offline, but to be honest I'm happy to say my new home is Kbin.social and don't see the need for an active Reddit account, though I may lurk from time to time if I'm looking for some particular information that's not yet on Kbin.
The game changer for Fediverse is stable mobile applications, once the Apollo shaped hole on my phone is filled I think it'll be pretty much a drop-in replacement.
This is a very non-specific statement. As a former moderator, Reddit gave us lots of metrics to measure "traffic". Site visits, unique visits, engagement.... all of these can be used to talk about "traffic". It's also not hard to spin up a couple bots, talk about site visits, not unique visits and call everything "normal".
Metrics, especially vanity metrics are very easy to twist if you have a narrative to tell. And boy, does Reddit, Inc. have a narrative to tell.
The first thing they taught us in my graduate level statistics class was:
Anyone can make a statistic that backs up their bias. You’re here to learn how to accurately represent a situation with statistics, and be able to point out when others are misusing statistics
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.
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.
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.
For anyone out there who doesn't want to browse to TikTok, the short version is that the Reddit communications staff refuses to comment on information that's being used for upcoming stories, and instead they say that they will issue corrections after the fact.
This is of course an old tactic that companies have tried to use to discredit reporters, but it doesn't work very well when you tell everyone that you're using it.
Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
They believe they’re wealthy because they have natural talent. It ignores lots of people are more talented, and never got the same opportunities to be successful.
In a real apocalyptic disaster, they’d be the ones real leaders sentence to death (either overt or shunning them from the group) to set an example for the rest of the group.
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