We need etsy to get bought by someone who will run it like the navy i need to only see small businesses in eastern europe weaving baskets by hand and anime yaoi keychains with original fanart
Literally need someone with an serial killer level obsession with content moderation to sit at a wall of monitors sniping dropshippers. I need etsy HQ to look and sound like the nerv command center in Evangelion
I actually think it would be relatively simple to have a dropship-free version of something like etsy without too much of an increase in moderation, if you structured it right. The main problem is that my model wouldn’t have the rapid growth (and therefore rapid income for the platform) that online markets are going for. It would be very unlikely to ever achieve the breadth of etsy or ebay so marketplace creators wouldn’t be interested.
An AO3 Etsy?
Yep, an invitation-based system. Artists can apply directly to the platform for an invitation, by showing their existing shop on another site. These would have to be manually vetted by moderators to determine that they’re a) actual independent creations and b) actually belong to the person petitioning for an invite, which would be time intensive, but this shouldn’t be a huge problem because it’s only going to be the main way that people sign up for a short period of time. The real growth of the site would be in giving every seller, let’s say, one invite every six months (number and frequency can be tweaked to fit the platform’s needs) that they can give to anyone else that they want.
This makes it very easy to find and investigate violating sellers because there’s a clear chain of how they got onto the site. When a dropshipper or ai artist or whatever is flagged by a buyer, the platform investigates that seller as well as the seller above them (and anyone below them) in the invitation chain. If both sellers in the chain are dropshipping, they keep going up. They ban the dropshipped accounts, send a polite email to the legit seller who accidentally invited a dropshipper explaining that someone they invited was banned for violating the terms of service, and move on. The legitimate user is (secretly, internally) flagged so that the next few people they invite will have their accounts watched for a couple of months to ensure they’re not also dropshipping.
Since each user can only invite one person per six months, and nobody can sign up without an invitation from a user who’s putting their own reputation on the line (or by being directly vetted by the platform), this prevents automated mass signups of dropshippers creating a hundred accounts in case a few get banned. If a user is found to have invited, let’s say, three dropshippers, then they don’t get any future invitations to give out; they can keep using the site to sell as normal, assuming they’re obeying the rules, but the dropship invitation channel is cut off.
This system would make moderation of a big site with a lot of sellers much, much more efficient. It would be much easier to find problem areas and snip them off. But it would also mean a lot less sellers and a much slower growing seller base, which means less money for the platform, and sales platforms will generally rather make a lot of money through garbage than a respectable amount through a good platform.