On Missing Etsy, Webrings, Catalogs, and Whimsy
I miss Etsy circa 2007. I miss when every new thing wasn't a bland average of everything else or an outright scam. I miss when the internet that wasn't a handful of interchangeable techno-overlords encouraging our worst behaviors while setting their platforms to maximum extraction.
While I'm at it, a few more things I miss:
- curated treasuries - by color, theme, or niche interest.
- genuinely being able to stumbleupon new interesting websites.
- picking up new matte paper magazines at the nearest bookstore.
Fatigue is catching.
I've quelled some of this by subscribing to a curated magazine stack for tangible variety. I've turned off AI slop in my Pinterest settings for digital sanity. I've printed a dozen recipes and tried a few so far (who knew tortillas were so simple? Tedious, mind you, but simple) for my offline well-being.
Lately, I've been thinking about greed, slop and the irreparable damage done to "handmade" online. As someone who owns a mug that makes me happy simply knowing someone took the time and care to make it by hand, it is painful to see honest cottage industry decimated by scammers, slop, and platform sabotage. The lady selling her own unique embroidery patterns was never in danger of threatening anyone's livelihood and it makes me mad to think how many people have quit, helpless in the face of endless low-effort generated fakes.
On this note, I've been toying with the idea of an Etsy alternative for nearly a decade, though with far less immediacy in years past. I've supported various attempts to compete, and poked at building something myself, but for many reasons, I do not want to build a platform. Excuse me while I repeat this to myself sternly in the mirror a few times.
I read recently that there is little point in gatekeeping your ideas, so I'll share the latest imaginings. All three people who read this, enjoy: The latest angle I've taken is somewhat like a modern e-commerce webring/curated catalog for handmade. I imagine it like a whimsical little digital village, good for window-shopping, real shopping, and events. Remember DailyCandy? I hung around for the illustrations as much as anything.
I want to serve the solo & small team sellers who can't get the attention they need to stay afloat and the earnest buyers who genuinely want to buy handmade but don't know who to trust anymore and need someone else to do the vetting. The idea would be that through initial then ongoing curation of a known set of rules, a limited group of artisans would have their own space (individual websites) but as part of the group, they would also have shared space that connects them - an email list to broadcast updates and sales, a shared landing page as a sort of community catalog with "neighbors" to complement their work, borrowing from the effective strip mall model of varied tenants.
The biggest hurdle I foresee is how to garner interest in the first place, as I will need to utilize existing channels without funding -- the same channels that are much of the reason that attention is so hard to get for all but the highest bidders. The second is scale and the third, moderation.
Scale appears to be what has so far prevented other would-be wanna-be Etsy-killers from taking off - each fledgling new platform has a chicken-egg problem with too high of a barrier for sellers to take the time to port over their inventory for an experiment, and therefore no incentive for buyers to bother browsing, which compounds sellers' initial hesitation, and on and on.
Can I make up for a single large-scale platform in several smaller curated pods? No idea.
As for moderation, I'm afraid that I will build this thing and immediately have nightmarish robot crawling problems that find some silly thing I've overlooked and find a way to broadcast malware or some equally terrifying exploit. Hm, that's security. Bump that to the top of my concerns.
As for actual moderation, if my criteria are too narrow, I'll risk too small of a pond for anyone to care about (see the related scale issue above). Too loose, and I become the monster I tried to fight accidentally promoting slop. Too manual and the whole endeavor will crush me under the weight of its oversight demands. Too automated, and again, I am the monster I tried to fight.
It's a nice idea though.
I like to imagine sellers collaborating to put together catalog spreads to represent their virtual block, with whimsical little storefront illustrations and animations to get buyers to browse different avenues. Each street a new possibility, even if it follows the same formula: a sewist's boutique, a pottery studio, a fine artist, a pattern maker, an illustrator, a paper artist, a quirky one-of-a-kind shop. Fine-tuned to the scale that feels interesting without being repetitive, attracting tenants with the disposition to support each other and buyers who care as much as the sellers about the whole thing.
Wasn't that nice? I hope you've enjoyed this daydream as much as I have. Hopefully you can enjoy the real thing someday too :)