Comment by swatcoder
1 day ago
Etsy still welcomes small craft artists and makers and provides a convenient e-commerce portal for them, but yes, it's the discovery that's been ruined.
They originally broke through and defined themselves by insisting that vendors only sell original cottage-crafted work, but gave up on that requirement years ago and the sincere low-volume, low-margin crafters can't compete with high-volume, high-margin importers in either advertising spend or in the etsy-profiting metrics that drive algorithmic discovery.
It's a lot like Google search: the good websites are still there but now it's impossible to find them.
Etsy in particular has an incentive to fix this in ways that Google would never