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So Etsy was a great place and then they "fixed" it and now it's full of Aliexpress garbage thanks to the algorithms. Thanks for telling us how ridiculous it was

by aphroz 4y ago

So Etsy was a great place and then they "fixed" it and now it's full of Aliexpress garbage thanks to the algorithms. Thanks for telling us how ridiculous it was to ask someone to manually compose the homepage by writing a 55 tweets story.

suction 4y ago
It's the age-old battle between investors and entrepreneurs wanting to make crazy money and creative people just trying to make enough to live somewhat comfortably. It's also happened in the brick and mortar world, when American ideas took over Europe. For this to change, the American age would have to end, but I'm not sure if whatever comes next will be an improvement.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  > It's the age-old battle between investors and entrepreneurs wanting to make crazy money and creative people ... ... wanting to wake up every hour, 24 hours a day, to sift through pictures of shirtless men to find some beautiful furniture to put up on the frontpage?
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Yeah, that was valuable, and obviously could be distributed among more people.
    - organsnyder 4y ago
      That's the piece I don't understand. I get that they're a scrappy startup, but surely they could have spread the work among more people so that no one had to work 24/7?
      - spookthesunset 4y ago
        I kinda took that more as a slight embellishment than a hard truth. Surely there was at least a few people on rotation doing that. Having that done by a single person 24/7 would be almost literally impossible. It still sucks for the person in rotation, especially whoever was doing it at night. But in startup land, where you have limited resources, somehow the ticket to make that somewhat automated by queuing up a bunch of these things at once wasn’t high enough of a priority. Honestly the best way to have gotten that fixed was to put the developers into rotation. I bet somebody would have cooked something up after the first shift!
  - suction 4y ago
    The shirtless men were optional. But curating a selection of photos out of a bigger amount of photos is creative work, I'd say.
IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
Tweet 54 agrees? "The magic in the system was the person yanking 24 beautiful treasuries a day out of the sea of shirtless dudes."
- ertian 4y ago
  The thing is...that doesn't scale. If somebody was still manually updating the homepage with a handful of curated beautiful items, then we wouldn't be talking about it because none of us would've heard of it. Or maybe it would have transformed into a mad scramble to snatch up the limited, curated items. Part of this thread suggested it was headed in that direction. In either case, it would've been more or less irrelevant, and we'd be talking about some other site full of AliExpress garbage instead.
  - musingsole 4y ago
    > then we wouldn't be talking about it because none of us would've heard of it That's defeatist logic. Sure, scaling with a single person doing it is likely impossible, but all of this reads to me as a bunch of technologists being utterly unable to integrate the human element into their systems. The conclusion is that a human aesthetic sense was needed -- first to filter dickpics and second to put together a gestalt page. I can imagine ways to scale that, but it hinges on trusting the human element -- something technologists and investors are utterly incapable of.
    - ertian 4y ago
      It's hard for me to imagine, in a commercial setting. Wikipedia demonstrates that it's possible, but the financial aspect makes it so hard to manage incentives. Sellers have every incentive to game the system, up to and including bribing the curators, and curators presumably like money as much as anybody else. You can monitor the behavior of one guy sitting in a room performing curation, but when you start scaling up and have thousands of curators, all over the world, doing the same thing for thousands of different combinations of language, subculture or market segment, etc...it's hard to picture how it could work.
afavour 4y ago
Etsy isn’t garbage because someone stopped curating the homepage. It’s because investors demanded growth above all else and Etsy now probably makes 100x the money it used to, human curation or not.
- ghaff 4y ago
  More generally, truly artisanal is low volume and high priced. And as soon as someone discovers $SITE attracts buyers, all the incentives are in place to substitute mass-market manufactured good that maybe have the minimal handmade touch layered on top.
zemo 4y ago
the story is probably 2008 or so, maybe a little later but not by much. The author was long gone before any of the changes you're talking about happened. Etsy was still very handmade for many years after this story takes place. It wasn't until after the IPO (2015) that activist investors pushed out the folksy leadership and installed a more corporate CEO (2016) that changed everything and made it suck.

by aphroz 4y ago

suction 4y ago

It's the age-old battle between investors and entrepreneurs wanting to make crazy money and creative people just trying to make enough to live somewhat comfortably. It's also happened in the brick and mortar world, when American ideas took over Europe. For this to change, the American age would have to end, but I'm not sure if whatever comes next will be an improvement.

amadeuspagel 4y ago
> It's the age-old battle between investors and entrepreneurs wanting to make crazy money and creative people ... ... wanting to wake up every hour, 24 hours a day, to sift through pictures of shirtless men to find some beautiful furniture to put up on the frontpage?
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Yeah, that was valuable, and obviously could be distributed among more people.
  - organsnyder 4y ago
    That's the piece I don't understand. I get that they're a scrappy startup, but surely they could have spread the work among more people so that no one had to work 24/7?
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
      I kinda took that more as a slight embellishment than a hard truth. Surely there was at least a few people on rotation doing that. Having that done by a single person 24/7 would be almost literally impossible. It still sucks for the person in rotation, especially whoever was doing it at night. But in startup land, where you have limited resources, somehow the ticket to make that somewhat automated by queuing up a bunch of these things at once wasn’t high enough of a priority. Honestly the best way to have gotten that fixed was to put the developers into rotation. I bet somebody would have cooked something up after the first shift!
- suction 4y ago
  The shirtless men were optional. But curating a selection of photos out of a bigger amount of photos is creative work, I'd say.

IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago

Tweet 54 agrees? "The magic in the system was the person yanking 24 beautiful treasuries a day out of the sea of shirtless dudes."

ertian 4y ago
The thing is...that doesn't scale. If somebody was still manually updating the homepage with a handful of curated beautiful items, then we wouldn't be talking about it because none of us would've heard of it. Or maybe it would have transformed into a mad scramble to snatch up the limited, curated items. Part of this thread suggested it was headed in that direction. In either case, it would've been more or less irrelevant, and we'd be talking about some other site full of AliExpress garbage instead.
- musingsole 4y ago
  > then we wouldn't be talking about it because none of us would've heard of it That's defeatist logic. Sure, scaling with a single person doing it is likely impossible, but all of this reads to me as a bunch of technologists being utterly unable to integrate the human element into their systems. The conclusion is that a human aesthetic sense was needed -- first to filter dickpics and second to put together a gestalt page. I can imagine ways to scale that, but it hinges on trusting the human element -- something technologists and investors are utterly incapable of.
  - ertian 4y ago
    It's hard for me to imagine, in a commercial setting. Wikipedia demonstrates that it's possible, but the financial aspect makes it so hard to manage incentives. Sellers have every incentive to game the system, up to and including bribing the curators, and curators presumably like money as much as anybody else. You can monitor the behavior of one guy sitting in a room performing curation, but when you start scaling up and have thousands of curators, all over the world, doing the same thing for thousands of different combinations of language, subculture or market segment, etc...it's hard to picture how it could work.

afavour 4y ago

Etsy isn’t garbage because someone stopped curating the homepage. It’s because investors demanded growth above all else and Etsy now probably makes 100x the money it used to, human curation or not.

ghaff 4y ago
More generally, truly artisanal is low volume and high priced. And as soon as someone discovers $SITE attracts buyers, all the incentives are in place to substitute mass-market manufactured good that maybe have the minimal handmade touch layered on top.

zemo 4y ago

the story is probably 2008 or so, maybe a little later but not by much. The author was long gone before any of the changes you're talking about happened. Etsy was still very handmade for many years after this story takes place. It wasn't until after the IPO (2015) that activist investors pushed out the folksy leadership and installed a more corporate CEO (2016) that changed everything and made it suck.