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.
Oooh, good to see it that you made it over from Reddit. I tend to avoid linking my account names -- one more thing to make life difficult for eventual data-mining -- but you probably know me as an American who comments rather a lot on /r/Europe. Saw you comment on the /r/ModCoord thread on all this too, hoped that you might show up here. :-)
Love this. I just finished reading Huey Newton’s “Revolutionary Suicide” and what struck me most about it was how ahead of his time he was on issues of intersectionality and class warfare. Yes race, gender, sexual orientation…etc are all things that matter, but until we have a system that works for ALL people (which can only be gained through class solidarity and crushing the entrenched oligarchy), all of the other issues will only sow class division and play into the hands of the oppressors.
I wouldn’t even go that far, although I’m not deep into the tactics and action of getting progress done like Huey was. To me, fighting for trans rights right now is obviously a good thing. As is fighting for worker’s rights. Refusing to fight for worker’s rights alongside someone, unless they’re willing to also join your fight for (for example) trans rights, is what I think is silly.
Works flawless in all my browsers, Firefox, Vivaldi, Otter, Netsurf, all with ad/trackerblocker. Maybe some extension, lack of some video driver or security soft you use? It’s very strange that you can’t even open TikTok. Although it is not a page where I would like to open an account, there should be no problems accessing it, just like X or Meta with the necessary blockers.
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.
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