Originally published at: Etsy lays off 11% of workforce | Boing Boing
…
5 Likes
I recently delved into Etsy to find what I thought the site was all about, which is handmade stuff, only to find it ruined by the Amazon ethos of cheap rebranded crap. You can still find the handmade stuff, if you wade through all the “ad by Etsy seller” listings. But it’s barely worth it.
12 Likes
Yep. Etsy once was truly hand crafted and/or vintage stuff and it was wonderful. It’s far harder these days to find that sort of thing among the mass-market “fake” hand crafted crap which is really just mass produced twaddle with a slightly nicer esthetic look. Like the same “steampunk clock” is available from dozens of sellers instead of just one person who makes them by hand.
7 Likes
I feel bad for the workers, and getting laid off right before Christmas is especially sad, but sometimes I feel like major toymakers are bringing ruin upon themselves with poor decisions. For example, Hasbro bought the Super Soaker brand decades ago, then decided for whatever reason not to sell the cool, simple pressurized water guns of my youth. Then last summer they decided to finally sell some vintage-style pressurized Super Soakers for a limited time, but, according to all the reviews that I read, completely cheaped out on quality and the guns are worthless, leaky junk that are nowhere near as good as the originals.
Toymakers like to blame video games sapping children’s attention, but my kids actually don’t spend much time doing video games at all. The reason that I don’t buy them a bunch of toys is that there don’t seem to be a lot of great new toys that are actually worth playing with.
6 Likes
There have always been cheap crappy toys, but the shittification has increased.
That was the ‘other’ reason Toys R Us died, because it was chock full of licensed landfill bound trash. Actual good toys were almost impossible to find in their stores.
6 Likes
Since I bought a home, I’ve been using Etsy quite a bit for custom fixtures. It has been really satisfying to buy shelves and a mirror from the Ukraine, all bespoke handmade of solid wood, which is super hard to find here in the states. I also bought a custom real wood vanity from a small business in AZ that I heard about on etsy.
Just this morning I was installing some custom 3-d printed lighted house numbers from a craftsman in China.
I don’t think local means what they want it to 
8 Likes
Etsy also became more enshittified when they started forcing sellers to verify their banking information using the 3rd party service Plaid where they wanted sellers to supply banking login info to them.
4 Likes
To be fair to Hasbro, they’ve informed people of layoffs but a lot of the jobs are still there for a year or two. While some people are out right away they’ve given a lot of employees a lot of notice as well. Better than nothing, at least.
3 Likes
Video games as something you could do at home really got going in the early '80s before I was a teen, so almost 40 years ago. Anyone blaming anything on video games really needs to get some new material for their act.
4 Likes
I seem to recall the NES and the Super Soaker coming out around the same time. Lots of kids in the neighbourhood had (and used) both. We had a Sega Master System and Super Soaker and I’m sure the Super Soaker got more use.
2 Likes
So who’s going to fix the new app they all hate?
For an alternative that isn’t run like all the other black box, vending machine social apps: Artisans Cooperative. Run and owned collectively by hand-crafters.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
