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Etsy likes to make changes to what sellers have to do without enforcing current rules or actually giving sellers something functional. It appears they're at it again.
Mature content filtering: A treasury experiment
Experiment would imply they aren't deadset on this being permanent, but since they aren't responding to much of the feedback they're receiving...well...it is Etsy after all.
This isn't the first group of sellers to be treated as substandard members of the site. I remember a particular dolls and miniatures hubbub...then there's vintage and supply sellers...yeah, it's Etsy. Five years in and they still don't know what they want their site to be. It would be so much easier if they were just straightforward and honest about who is and isn't welcome to sell there.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Mature sellers getting the shaft
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27 Comments:
Meh so they won't label label their treasuries as mature anyway
eh just means sellers won't tag treasuries as mature.
Doesn't Etsy have anything better to do- like actually fix their site
I'm sure Kalin was just waiting for you to post.
In answer to your question, etsy wants to be all things bland to all people.
In the quest to be hip with mustaches, owls and cowls, they have simply forgotten that "all things handmade" credo.
Mature makes the hipsters nervous. Oh, you can poke around their favs and see mature items (admin from marketing scramble to delete favs) but they are simply too juvenile to deal with it.
Is anyone in charge?
and the filter to opt in/out of is buried, and users are NOT being told it is there, unless they stumble into the forums.
tell your etsy friends,
go to Your Etsy: your account, and about 1/2 down the page is the option to enable/disable (they keep switching it) the mature filter.
If you are a grown up, PLEASE disable the filter, apparently people opting OUT of the filter is what's going to tell them if people want it or not.
Nothing like discussing things with your clients/users BEFORE making such a substantial change.
Ok.....I'm only page 6 of the thread, but can someone please tell me how this filters out the sellers who don't bother to tag mature?
This doesn't get to the real problem of sellers who don't follow the current rules of a first photo for general audiences and a mature tag. All this does is filter out the ones who follow the rules.
Another shining example of Etsy fail. Is anyone surprised?
Bwaaahaahaa!!! Sorry guys, up to page 8 and I couldn't resist! Admin Sean says:
"That's why this is an experiment. We're asking curators to moderate, and define and maintain community standards. When a curator adds a tag to a Treasury list, they're saying something about other people's items. Treasury is more inherently community-driven in this sense than sellers tagging their own items. From Treasury list tagging you can start to derive a lot of interesting things about the community. "
_______________________________
Seriously? Treasury curators can't "moderate, and define and maintain community standards" with resellers or blatant category and/or tag abusers, but you expect them to be able to do it with mature items? Really?
And what kind of 'experiment' doesn't inform the entire user base of these changes so they can get meaningful data from it?
It's like the drug companies that run their own trials with their selectively chosen control group to skew the data in their favor.
sark, you read my mind. Underdeveloped psyches indeed.
wow sark I would have read your whole "mature" rant but couldn't get past all the "mature" language. *eyeroll
Sark.....I think.....I....I think I love you!
My stance on this this whole time has been "A choice is not a wall"
Giving someone a choice to see mature content, is not censorship. When you have an international audience it's responsible to have protections in place to opt out. Lacking to have those protections could get Etsy banned even in some major "western" and "progressive" countries. This isn't about censorship, it's about choice.
however, Etsy is doing this is... shocker... completely fucking wrong.
It needs to be a status link right above the content beig viewed saying "Mature Conent Filter ON" clicking it will give you a pop up and ask you to click yes to turning it OFF. And make it stick with a cookie. I cant tell you how many sites work this way. Easy. Peasy.
Is that so fucking hard? I mean really!
And I'm with Sark. Fucking A.
Ditto Sark and The Cranky One, including the solution. It's true that Etsy is putting their international roll-out at risk (not that they actually know how to do that) but they've also given their audience one more reason to tune Etsy out.
Etsy does everything half-assed because it's populated by half-assed brains who never finish a thought.
Allowing mature content means you have to figure out a concrete set of rules to handle it. Once Etsy gets inundated with lawsuits and other legal crap, it'll be too late to fix it.
Etsy is 99% responsible for making this an issue because they're too lazy to filter their own faves. They see a fave treasury-maker name and let it rip (mature content & lots of resellers included).
The tagging issue is a much bigger issue, but Etsy is too busy counting money in its own till to pay attention.
They like putting the word "view" in the shop column so it sticks out like a sore thumb, and now visitors are blinded by numbers rather than looking at the products.
Ask anyone WHAT IS ETSY and I bet big bucks that no one, not one person knows what Etsy is anymore.
As usual, they excel at wasting time on things that are not important, at the expense of actual issues. Like...I don't know...the 8 non-paying "buyers" I've had to deal with over the last week. Sigh.
I have a 14 year old who wants so badly to dress like a hooker, wear gallons of makeup, and for us to acknowledge that she's "grown up" and let her do "grown up" things. But she still plays with her dolls and stuffed animals and spends most of her free time writing sad, gothy poetry and fantasizing about meeting her perfect vampire love.
She may look like an adult, but she's still very much a child.
Etsy reminds me a lot of her.
Congrats to Sark (who is too cowardice to use a real name) and his equally idiotic minions.
Mature sellers like myself, spamberly, FannyHill & Spidercamp have always been in support of people following the TOU.
Why the hell wouldn't we be? We follow it to the effect of losing business to the idiots that refuse to follow the rules and admin, who stated in that thread that enforcing the TOU is not necessarily the solution.
Mature sellers who punish the rules are constantly punished for the actions of those who choose not to.
This is just another case of the same.
If you opened your eyes and your minds, you would see that.
Apparently you are too busy ranting swearwords to actually comprehend what is going on.
That's a real shame, because the mature sellers who follow the rules need your support. Instead we get called fucktards.
Don't get me wrong, I have said much of what Sark said before. The treasury curators started this whole debacle by using the treasuries as a platform to throw 'mature' in the faces of the ones complaining about mature treasuries filling the first page--mostly with listings that didn't follow the ToU. Because "mature is allowed and complainers can go fuck themselves".
Instead of doing the mature and respectful thing and take into consideration that there are many different sensibilities on Etsy, they act out in a childish manner. Instead of discouraging the ToU violators they flaunted them in everyone's face. Which then caused the complainers to complain en mass to Etsy, perhaps citing some legal ramifications and now Etsy is trying to do something about it.
The big problem is that once again Etsy is leaving the work in the hands of the 'community', the ones who couldn't handle the problem maturely and respectfully in the first place.
Mature and objectionable material does need to be separated from the rest. They need a mature category, crystal clear rules as to what is considered mature with and make that the first tag, like vintage or supplies. The rules should also be crystal clear that if an item is found in the general search which is considered mature the item is automatically deleted by Etsy. Because of the lack of maturity of sellers, Etsy has to play the role of grownup, and just like a parent will threaten to throw away a child's toy if it doesn't get picked up, so they will have to do with sellers.
The mature category should not bleed into the general search results, except perhaps 'all things' and if that is selected, a popup box to alert the user that they will be including possible mature items in the results with a 'proceed' or 'cancel' option.
If they click on the mature category, there would first be a page describing that mature items run the gamet from funny to more explicit and by clicking the permission box they acknowledge this (and even an 18 or over acknowledgment box).
As much as mature is allowed, and I have no problem with it myself, it does need some containment. No other website that contains mature items leaves them in the general search to be happened upon randomly.
I'm sorry that mature sellers feel they are being hidden away, but you chose to sell those items and should have known the potential risks involved.
Every time a forum thread comes up like this I lose more and more respect for mature sellers. I'm about as liberal as they come and might actually buy their products if they didn't have such a mean attitude and twisted sense of freedom.
The fact remains that SOME people are offended by certain body parts and words. YOU can't change that, nor can I, no matter how much words like "prude" and "book burner" are thrown around. And if those people aren't going to visit a site where they have to go out of their way to not see what they don't like seeing then that affects EVERYONE who isn't a mature seller. Which is pretty much all the people who sell on Etsy except the ten nutcases that tear the forums apart all the time. At least it hasn't been demonstrated to me that there's a large, well-balanced group of people who like to sell naughty things on there...
I wish there was a perfect solution, but there really isn't. It's either going to be about playing nice with restrictions or what eBay finally settled on, which is a separate category that nobody ever visits.
And frankly with mature sellers being such self-centered whiners I'm inclined to say they deserve the latter.
I wouldn't call it a "sense of freedom" as much as "entitlement", and that is the most basic thing wrong with Etsy. everyone fucking feels entitled to doing as they fucking like.
I support mature sellers, I think you should rally for your own category!
Think about it, unless you are a forum or Etsy regular, how would you even know that mature items existed unless you accidentally stumbled upon it?
Before vintage had their own category, they were mixed in with handmade, and unless you knew vintage was here, you happened upon it by accident.
Your own category, with a couple of added permissions would probably give you more visibility. As it stands now, a newcomer to the site has no clue that mature items even exist to know enough to look for them or avoid them.
It's too bad it's come down to this, it's something that should have been taken care of a long time ago like so many other things on the site.
Etsy should never have been taken out of beta. It's not moving forward in any meaningful way, it's just doing damage control. It's still the same old site held together with duct tape and rubber bands. A shiny coat of paint can't disguise the fact that what's inside is just a shambles.
I'm verbose, god damn it.
When this whole bruhaha with the “mature” treasuries broke out in the first place, after finally paying attention to it, my exact thought was: isn’t there a mature policy, and why isn’t it being enforced?
And then I went to the forums, and because the staff are a bunch of fucktards, there were a bunch of people calling people names.
Those treasuries should have been shut down IMMEDIATELY, those items should have been pulled and forced into compliance. It should not have dragged on for a fucking week and turned into a catfight.
And then I read all this crap about the "mature community" and just shook my head. I'm an artist, and believe me, those other people are my competition, and some of them have such low standards that they will get in the good graces of etsy admin just to try to cut the legs out of their competition in order to make themselves appear taller...
But getting up in arms over a filter page? Honestly? It’s 2 months late, but it’s actually the most rational solution.
I find it very VERY amusing that my word verification is "liturgic"
I remember when I was new at etsy. And I remember posting happily on the forums and being kind of… oh, I don’t know: happy. And I also recall people who were just completely willing to be a total dick to me. Amusingly, one of those was abitabite.
I’m female.
I’ve also made no bones about the fact that I’m an asshole. Figuring out who I am shouldn’t really be that difficult, as I have mentioned before, my “etsy bitch posting name” is a very thinly veiled reference to my real name.
I find it hilarious, on a level that only exists esoterically in literature that people who are so opposed to standard “adult / mature” filters that they try to call censorship are so offended by intentionally “offensive” language. Like, you’re pro penis / vagina, but anti use of the word “fuck?” Okay.
You know, because fucking is what happens when you actively combine the genitalia…
I guess we loves smut but hates bad language… who knew irony could have so many planes?
I enjoy having sex with my boyfriend, frequently. So, while I had a roommate in college who had the most fascinating looking dildo in the shape of a chameleon, I never really understood why I would need one. Or why I would want to jams something with horns on it up my vagina… Cripe, do I hate my vagina or something? I can orgasm without stabbing something down there.
I tried out the mature treasury filter through the treasury MABjewelry set up in the thread with 1000+ responses in site help. It was just some dopey page that said something to the effect that ‘this is mature stuff, are you sure you wanna look?’ Obviously, I’m paraphrasing, because I just clicked through 10 pages of that ridiculous thread and can’t find the link that made the screen.
There is nothing evil and vile about a filter for “mature” treasuries.
For fuck’s sake, there are filters for adult / explicit / mature content on blogspot — which is something far more universal than etsy.
So, it’s a fucking filter page, and it only works if the people have actually tagged their treasuries as mature. I’m sure this will work about as effectively as the mature first picture policy from the TOU, right?
I don’t object to the fucking items being listed, I don’t object to the policy about the first picture. There are many things I may not be, for instance a homemaker, a mother or an aunt, the heir to a coffee fortune, overly religious, or really, at all conservative… but I have no problem, qualms, or reservations about selling things to people with belief systems and standards that differ from mine. I don’t want to only sell at a place where the only customer base is based on devotion to whatever you call 5 steps down from porn. There are plenty of people who don’t want to be confronted by what is basically five steps down from porn when they came there to look at a tutu or a cool handmade ash tray, or dish towels with embroidery, and a baby blanket… and like the standard shopper had the unmitigated gall to just click on site features that might show them other random cool stuff that they might buy. Suddenly sticking a painting of a demon in phallacio humping a naked hooker while she vomits into the mouth of a bear who is swaddling a blonde woman wearing mittens might be a turn off. But it’s also why there was a mature listing policy to begin with.
Etsy: The Return to Puritanism. A complete lack of ability to see beyond the peachfuzz coming out of their noses.
Preparation for what???? Who got their panties (or lack thereof) in such a twist over something basically pretty mundane?
Another opportunity for the mistaggers and scammers, hooray Etsy for adding on to their assholish and thoughtless progression through inanity.
The return to puratism? Seriously?
What is wrong with you mature sellers? I mean honestly, I've never seen a whinier bunch of people.
You're the one selling something controversial. Friggin get over it. It's not like someone made you draw a picture of a demon raping someone or whatever you are selling.
Nobody is censoring ANYTHING. It's JUST a filter, just like every other big website out there. It's a warning so that people who do NOT want to see your product, don't have to see it.
It doesn't stop anyone who wants to see your product from seeing it.
But besides that, I get tired that Etsy is blamed for every single problem when it tries to face ANY single problem. Etsy works on mature content, and everyone says they are stupid for not working on resellers, they work on the flagging system, everyone whines about the road map, they do any work on any one thing and everyone just deflects the work they are actually doing and instead say they should be working on something else.
Etsy could have announced this better, yes. But honestly, I'm just glad they are trying to do SOMETHING actively. Especially when it is something that makes the entire site friendly to more customers.
If one complaint about Etsy begets 10 more complaints, it's Etsy that started it. Let's not forget this is a company without a plan, always playing catch-up with tweaks and "improvements" that are way after the fact and way off any seller-needs-agenda. They groove to their own tune (juvenile as it may be), watching out for a handful of sellers they personally like and promote. Nothing more, nothing less.
Any public/business interest in Etsy is based on Etsy's own press releases about the huge amount of money they make every month, not on cutting edge design or clever ecommerce --- but on profit reports that can't be verified because it's a private company.
Despite their daily mistakes, Etsy can be singled out for one thing -- that they manage to fleece hundred of thousands of new sellers every month who read the Etsy-produced Dorque sludge and believe they can make quick, easy money because, frankly, that's all Etsy talks about. Behind this facade is a rigged show, and no one is making money but Etsy.
Hi Pretty Bitches...
Etsy has no artistic integrity, it never had any. They have created a site to appeal to a particular kind of consumer. I believe it it those people who wish to eliminate the "mature sellers", and they have to appease them.
And/Or, they are doing housekeeping, because they are in preparation to sell the company.
Whatever the reason, to hell with these individuals and the ignorant misguided sanitized assembly-line fantasy world that was sold to them.
I am happy to be rid of them.
There's bad art and craft, and good. Most of it is pretty bad; let's face it, talent and training is a small % of the whole.
YOu are going to see amazing jewelry on Etsy and some dimestore throwaways.
Bad art and junky craft bother me more than "mature" items. If the mature item is beautiful because is is well done, great! Larry Flynt, not so much.
Unfortunately we have to live next door to garbage of all kinds. Makes the good stuff look better.
in other words, there are penises and then there are penises. Some are adorable, cute, interesting, and well done. Others are just jackoffs.
I saved a penis drawing confiscated from a desk in one of my HS classes, because it's hilarious and a work of art. I thought of framing it but it's on notebook paper with blue lines.....and was torn out of a spiral binder. I would have to mount it on good rag and have it framed and I am too cheap.
Ok folks, I did little experimenting. I had already gone in my account and deactivated the filter before I tried to view the treasuries and not wanting to fiddle with that I just logged out and then back in.
If Etsy is open to refinement, this may not be such a bad thing. The one thing that is bothersome is that if you are logged out (and I would guess unaware of the automatic filtering in your settings) you have no idea that any treasuries may be missing. And there is no mention on the treasury landing page that mature treasuries are filtered out. At least if you get to mature treasury by direct link you are alerted that it is mature and you are give 2 links, one to change the setting in your account, and another to just click through.
If they had this option on the landing page, then those with an account can either go and disable the filter in their account or choose to view all treasuries (including mature) until they click out of treasuries altogether.
Unfortunately it still relies on treasury curators who historically have been known to feature rule breakers and show little regard for maintaining site integrity.
So it ultimately relies on user honesty, just like categories and tags that are so badly abused with absolutely no ability to enforce compliance.
Will we be able to flag treasuries that fail to tag 'mature'? will there be a task force assigned to monitor the treasuries or will it be another half-assed attempt like alchemy or forums where violations go on for hours or days before they are closed down? You know, after the damage is already done?
This is why people are constantly complaining about everything Etsy does. It's poorly thought out, rolled out unfinished under the guise of wanting community input, when really all they are doing is buying time while they tweak it and work out the bugs. And they create yet another feature they cannot monitor.
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