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How the Creator Economy Destroyed the Internet
- skybrian 11mo agoWarning: flashing images, paywalled
- rectang 11mo ago> Copycat Pirouette Skorts have been sold on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, TikTok Shop, DHGate, Temu, Shein, and countless other fly-by-night storefronts that will seemingly disappear as quickly as they popped up. Are there any moves afoot to adjust laws to make "marketplace" websites liable for the actions of sellers? Illegitimate knockoffs would be less of an issue if you had to go to independent websites to find them.
- burningChrome 11mo ago>> Illegitimate knockoffs would be less of an issue if you had to go to independent websites to find them. There's tons of counterfeit stuff on Amazon. I'm at the point now where I avoid Amazon because the last five things I bought there were all counterfeit and the products were not limited to one industry. They were across areas you wouldn't think you'd counterfeit stuff.
- derefr 11mo agoApparently Amazon is starting to do something about this. They've recently introduced two filtering toggles: - a "Premium Brands" toggle, that seemingly filters down to just a hand-curated list of known brands per category - a "Top Brands" toggle, that seemingly applies some heuristic to filter out listings by companies that haven't accrued enough aggregate "experience points" (some formula like "product-listing-age times product rating", per listing?) across all their listings. Which makes it actively counterproductive to create a new random six-letter fly-by-night brand for each listing, while still allowing new brands to organically "grow into" relevance.
- LorenPechtel 11mo agoSounds like a very good idea, although I haven't noticed it yet. So often you are buried in garbage hits. And they also need to cut it out with the comingled inventory from the new guys!
- paradox460 11mo agoMaybe they could add a filter which removes items from brands with gibberish titles. No, I don't want to buy something from zxutringly or qorduger or any similar nonsense
- derefr 11mo agoDefine "gibberish title." It's harder than you think! For example, there's a (Shenzhen-based, but well-established in the US market) 3D printer vendor called "Elegoo." Their name was (apparently...) chosen as an abbreviation of "Electronics with a Googol applications." Does your filter block them?
- em-bee 11mo agochinese speakers in particular have a hard time recognizing what kind of names make sense in the english language. mind you, we would have an equally hard time to come up with chinese names that don't sound weird to native speakers.
- stackskipton 11mo agoI mean, the law already holds shops accountable, but problem is regulators let Amazon get away with "We are a marketplace" despite them actually selling stuff as first party and allowing third parties use their logistics and warehouses.
- rectang 11mo agoThe "marketplace" loophole which allows a few dominant websites to insulate themselves from consequences for illegitimate sales is at the root of the consolidation decried in the top-level article.
- rtkwe 11mo agoI'm not sure there's a way to do that, there's no real way for a platform to definitively know if you're selling legitimate items or not and sellers are legitimately allowed to resell any legit items they have bought so there's not even a definitive list of "who's allowed to sell product X" they could query to know.
- ndriscoll 11mo agoI don't think anyone is alleging that these are illegitimate? It sounds like it's just copying the style, but not pretending to be the original/infringing on any trademark or anything.
- rectang 11mo agoYes, the article alleges that the dupes are illegitimate: > They simply use Popflex’s copyrighted images without permission, sometimes editing the color of the skort in the photo to fit the listing. In May 2025 alone, Popflex counted 461 listings it believes infringe on its Pirouette Skort design patent, but it’s still a drop in the bucket of the thousands that Ho has encountered just by doing reverse image searches.
- linksnapzz 11mo agoWarning: "Vox Media" property.
- Sivart13 11mo ago...so?
- ChrisArchitect 11mo agoRepackaged article collection: July https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/709635/knock-it-off https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/709635/knock-it-off (https://archive.ph/Y0dvZ https://archive.ph/Y0dvZ) Nov https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/804409/perez-hilton-lively-baldoni-subpoena https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/804409/perez-hilton-liv... (https://archive.ph/fuXL4 https://archive.ph/fuXL4) Nov https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/818380/college-students-news-sources-tiktok-instagram-newsdaddy https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/818380/college-students... (https://archive.ph/Edc6G https://archive.ph/Edc6G) Dec https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/836456/influencers-tiktok-debt-shopaganda https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/836456/influencers-tikt... (https://archive.ph/Atrlc https://archive.ph/Atrlc)
- dale_glass 11mo agoI don't think I've seen a web design this garish even on Geocities. It's like somebody set out to do what the 90s Geocities couldn't, using modern tech.
- tzs 11mo agoThat's not garish. This is garish: https://yvettesbridalformal.p1r8.net/ https://yvettesbridalformal.p1r8.net/
- acessoproibido 11mo agoThis is genius tbh a work of art
- rickydroll 11mo agoIs this another example of we did it because we could, but didn't ask whether we should?
- Abekkus 11mo agoThis CSS is specific to the article. Not the same across the site.
- acessoproibido 11mo agoI quite like it, really fitting for the topic too
- anon_cow1111 11mo agoNgl, I had a split second of "oh damn did I just pick up a url hijacker somewhere?" Especially with awkward gifs at the bottom.
- dylan604 11mo ago90s Geocities sites never looked that clean.
- dyauspitr 11mo ago
- themafia 11mo ago> How the creator economy destroyed the internet Let's put the blame where it belongs. Monopolistic companies destroyed the internet. > This is the media ecosystem we live in now — a supercharged shopping system that thrives on outrage, dominates the culture, and resists any real scrutiny because no one’s really in charge That's the media ecosystem you've lived in your entire life. The internet, as always, just scaled up what we already had.
- jrm4 11mo agoTrue, and I trust then that we look toward what actually fixes this, which is (boring) regulation and anti-trust work. It's been done before, time to revamp for a new generation.
- bogwog 11mo ago> Let's put the blame where it belongs. Monopolistic companies destroyed the internet. This is also true for more than just the internet.
- CodingJeebus 11mo agoFor real. I used think that society really suffered from a fractured media ecosystem compared to the monolithic pre-internet media era until I learned about how the US gov used the media to sway public opinion on invading Iraq back in 2003. I don’t know if the current media environment is better than what we had then, but it’s pretty foolish to think that it’s automatically worse based on US foreign policy going back the last 50 years alone.
- drpepper42 11mo ago[dead]
- rtkwe 11mo agoIMO this really misses the changes that the democratization of access to attention and media caused. Anyone being able to directly reach anyone is a massive change from the gate-kept pre-internet media landscape.
- tamimio 11mo agoAs soon as you “monetize” something, you remove the fun out of it, it’s really that simple.
- 0manrho 11mo agoWhat the eye-fuck is this design? Also, that's rich coming The Verge/Vox. Pot, meet Kettle.