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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.
Enshittification:
See also: reddit, amazon, tiktok, facebook, etc. etc. etc.
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
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 case of enshittification.
