The connected economy does have aspects that can be concerning:
* Many see bartering as a grey business. Profiting from a disparity in pricing between buyers and sellers is always a touchy subject. The usual justification is the service of connecting sellers and buyers. One can honestly wonders if buyers and sellers really would not have found each other otherwise.
* How much is the match-making worth. One person does the actual work, one is doing the referal. How much is referal worth? 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%? Most people value referral pretty low, right or not.
* Driving prices down. By making markets more efficient, it creates a race to the bottom. It's almost inevitable. What starts as a nice service connecting sellers to buyers becomes a force that impoverishes the workers. The wal-martisation of the work-force only profits the few. It's unfortunate that to collectively save pennies on disparate items, we transform once-confortable workers to lower and lower standard of living. The author admits this on HN when he comments that artists asks for higher prices on Etsy than they get on his site.
* The automation makes all this less palatable. Now the profit seems to be un-earned. What is the ethic of making X00k$ per years for what is admitted as requiring little actual labor? This is even more explicit when he claims that SEO is the driving factor. How does SEO prvides a service to the artists? It doesn't. It only profits instapainting. So most of his work is now spent on labor that is solely profits him.
* SEO is itself a touchy subject.
* How does writing a game that is a clone of a ripoff (2048 being a ripoff of threes) helps artists?
The interesting thing is that all of these are white sins. The author, the provider of the service is not doing it out of malice and is providing, at least initially, a great service to some the workers who had trouble acquiring buyers. But as the service grows, becomes more efficient and dominant, the adverse effect of this very efficency drives the quality of life of the workers down. The more success instapainting gets, the more artist are tied to it, the more the closed competition drives prices down. The theory is that it leads to an equilibrium, and economically it does, but nothing, nothing prevents that equilibrium from being low. Economic efficiency drives quality of life right out.