> Why should I as a customer go to Etsy if it's filled with knockoff crap rather than handmade things?

You don't go there. They aren't a curated product website, so why do you expect them to be one?

Let them fail. It's baffling to me why so many people are so heavily invested into that brand here...

I've bought handmade things on Etsy that are a) very high quality and b) obscure/weird enough that I wouldn't know where else to go for them.

Enabling this sort of thing is Etsy's pitch. I have no particular loyalty to their brand, but in the past they've done a great job living up to that promise for me, and I have to assume others have had similar experiences. If they get filled up by Chinesium knockoffs and the quality sellers are driven off, Etsy's product will no longer hold any value for us, and they will lose our business.

So yes, "let them fail". But before you accuse us of blind, unearned devotion to a brand, you might consider that there is---or once was---a good reason to prefer Etsy over other options.

> I've bought handmade things on Etsy that are a) very high quality and b) obscure/weird enough that I wouldn't know where else to go for them.

And my experience with Etsy is that it's a crafty people selling low quality handmade stuff.

Etsy is the last place on the internet, where I would got looking for quality stuff.

> Etsy is the last place on the internet, where I would got looking for quality stuff.

Well, that's your loss. But it may be Etsy's loss, too, if they allow chintzy crap from overseas to drive the quality sellers off their platform. Amazon has embraced the race to the bottom, so I don't see anybody else competing effectively with them without (at the very least) being all-in on Chinesium.

Capitalism DOESNT fail! This IS the system. In the presence no rules, people will converge on the lowest common denonomiter. The problem with Estsy happens to any platform that gets popular. Its been happening in the real world since the 1990s where large coperations have moved in on mom and pops. Curated gets undercut.

There is no way around this in the free market. Ad comnpanies are the largest companies in the world, THATS NOT A CONINCIDENCE. Its about making people consume. Making people want sh*t that in reality they could live without. Overloaded by stimulii, people break. People want the dream. They hear about the dream. People want the cheapest thing so they can 100x instead of 2x. People who knock things off want the most popular thing. This is competition working. Its a race to the bottom or we sacrifice infinite growth. There is no other way. You either create new markets, create new consumers, or steal other peoples cut of the pie. "Disruption".

Please stop writing in caps, it makes your comments look more agressive and rant-like than you probably intend, and it makes it hard to read for me and likely others.

It’s not hard to read per se but I just can’t read it in any mind voice other than someone yelling right in my face.

> Ad comnpanies are the largest companies in the world, THATS NOT A CONINCIDENCE

Apple is not an ad company, Tesla is not an ad company, Microsoft mostly isn’t an ad company, Netflix isn’t an ad company.

There are very few of the large companies that are ad companies.

Every human made system and most every non-human system fails in some way at some point depending on the stresses put upon them.

do you want to go back to "mom and pops" shops in lieu of supermarket chains? I don't. I would like supermarket chains to treat their employees better and I'm willing to pay 10% more for it.

Multiple times each year I rent an inexpensive cabin at one of our state parks, and on the way here I always visit a small grocery store in a small town that carries a local Amish bakery’s goods. I absolutely love their bread.

This past weekend I noticed a Dollar General had popped up nearby. They’re like weeds in rural Indiana.

I have no doubt that within a year or two the small grocery store will be gone, and I’ll no longer have a convenient place to buy that bread I like so much.

Yes, I do want to go back to mom and pop shops.

"Mom and pop" shops offer sub-par and high overhead products, almost exclusively.

Dollar General pops up, where people are very, very, price sensitive.

That "mom and pop" shop is either for tourists or is taking an unreasonable rent off the local economy.

I now live in a rural area and I like my local artisanal stores. But they cannot sustain the economy, due to very high overhead.

I don't disagree that 'race to the bottom' is the rule rather than the exception in modern capitalism, but I don't think your response here captures the context. The fact that Etsy's decline into something like Amazon (which has truly embraced the race to the bottom, enabling it to thrive) was more-or-less inevitable doesn't change the reasons I've used it in the past, or the reasons I may be less likely to use it in the future.

I see an opportunity here. A website who wants to curate products could use Etsy to locate sellers and convince them to list on their site. That curation website could develop a "stamp of approval" brand and grow that way. The art seller could include a printed note in the delivery saying "find more products like this on this xyz site". That way you use Etsy to draw in new customers but keep them as repeat customers for other products on this curated site. The main idea being that the curated site would not have to spend nearly as much money on advertising that Etsy does. Might work.

It's kind of how topsites used to work back in the day

> They aren't a curated product website, so why do you expect them to be one?

They used to be that! At least, a site for handmade things. That's what they built their brand on. Yeah, nowadays I avoid them like the plague because they're just a shitty ebay.

Except that is not what the word curated commonly means...

If that were so - then your local supermarket is a curated store. (which would be a preposterous claim to make)

> It's baffling to me why so many people are so heavily invested into that brand here...

Firstly, I never said I am invested in their brand. Nor do I have to be to argue that "cost is very high" is not a good reason to ignore doing something that your business (I would argue) needs to do (keep the knockoff "handmade stuff") in order to the accomplish your stated goals (connect sellers of actual handmade stuff with buyers).

You don't need to say that you're invested into the brand, for me to see it by the terminology you use.

Maybe, but Etsy is part of a long line of businesses that think they can solve adversarial search. The fact that Google can't and is losing the war should tell you everything about your chances. As long as you never use the "discovery" half of their business and find shops elsewhere, IG, TikTok, it's a fantastic experience. Basically Shopify but a little more streamlined.

> The fact that Google can't and is losing the war

Google has zero incentive to actually win that conflict, as frequently the SEO spam serves up ads from which google directly profits.

This assumes every customer has that discernment. No shortage of potential buyers end up on Etsy because they saw something cool, asked the person where they got it, and the only answer they received was "Etsy".