JJ M.

I'm a buyer on Etsy (i. E., not a seller or shop owner). I used to love Etsy and could spend hours there shopping all of the unique, high quality items for sale. I don't mean to be unkind, but there were always some untalented artisan sellers there. But you could just skim over their stuff. Now when I go there, it is almost impossible to find unique items that also get me excited. Everybody seems to just copy each others designs on there. Boring! Untalented. As a buyer, I'd rather look at quality mass production items than just some handmade beads strung together in an untalented manner. But if I'm going to do look at mass production, I'll go to retailer like Nordstrom.

And it bugs me I cannot search by "most viewed items" anymore. Etsy quit allowing that functionality early on. Here's a perspective from a buyer: when I search for earrings, I don't want to look at 1,000 pairs of earrings, I want to start with ones that other people have found extremely interesting. There's usualy a good reason a large group of buyers have found a specific item or seller extremely interesting on a site for handmade items: talent. I could tolerate the loss of "most viewed items" at first when it was only 1,000 earrings, now it's 10,000 earrings. Yuck.