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Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

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Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#151

Post by macNchz »

sciurus wrote: post #85

Black-and-white Capital's press releasing calling for changes at Etsy is at http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170502005999/en/blac... To me it's fascinating how deep in the technical weeds it is. For example, suggesting changes to their search ranking algorithms. Some of it strikes me as likely inaccurate. E.G. "It is black-and-white’s understanding that more than 50% of the approximately 450 people on the R&D…

This is kind of interesting:

>It is black-and-white’s understanding that Etsy’s current search algorithm is scored to favor new sellers and other factors instead of trying to deliver the listings that are most likely to convert, leaving its marketplace drastically under-monetized. This is in stark contrast to other comparable online marketplace practices.

There's a delicate balance to be struck on a platform like Etsy between highlighting new sellers and concentrating sales into a smaller number of high volume sellers.

Etsy surely has a very long tail of inexperienced new sellers. Some will blossom into successful online businesses and some will falter and drop off, but the first step of that process is to get them hooked on the platform. An early sale goes a long way towards encouraging new people to keep working on their products.

Rejiggering their search algorithm to bury new sellers underneath all the existing, high-converting popular products feels like something that will slowly have negative long term effects on the breadth of their seller base and the kinds of products that you might find.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#152

Post by badosu »

colatkinson wrote: post #108
malandrew wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, everytime I hear someone complain about capitalism I eyeroll because they clearly aren't "woke" enough to realize that capitalism is the reason they can remain blissfully ignorant of how capitalism supports their blissful ignorance. Capitalism isn't without its bugaboos, but the wholesale rejection I hear people making can only come from a place of ignorance.

200 years ago: > Yup, everytime I hear someone complain about feudalism I eyeroll because they clearly aren't "woke" enough to realize that feudalism is the reason they can remain blissfully ignorant of how feudalism supports their blissful ignorance. > Feudalism isn't without its bugaboos, but the wholesale rejection I hear people making can only come from a place of ignorance.

To be frank this supports the parent's argument.

> So now that we aren't avoiding that we live in and understand our feudalistic society let's be realist and figure out things in perspective.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#153

Post by asdfjlkasdf88 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

This concern for the survival of a particular corporation is just as arbitrary as your questioning where they drew their arbitrary lines around DIY operations.

80% of the Fortune 500 list in the 1960s is gone. Survival is not guaranteed of any of company. So why get so worried about it?

You know why they do it that way? Because the people there decided to.

What's more self-parodying? People on here grousing about the issues of our society, only to lean into more capitalism and VC/startup life?

Or people deciding to bike their food "several miles" for their own reasons?

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#154

Post by nasalgoat »

manyxcxi wrote: post #119
shiftpgdn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except traditional "cloud" hosting is wicked expensive in comparison. Ideally you should shoot for a hybrid model where excess capacity spills into AWS/GCE/Azure. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s connection for $150/month.

Except then you're stuck with a $15K server, and you had to spend all 15K up front. What happens when a component prematurely fails? Better buy two. What about the person-hours you spend with ISPs, CoLo provider, etc? You want network redundancy? Big ISP bills. Yes, cost per compute measurable (memory, CPU, etc) is higher in the cloud. But what's never mentioned when people complain about the cloud being expensive: a…

Cloud doesn't automatically come with that stuff - you need to set up your own failovers, backups and monitoring. Also you still need to administer those servers.

Also, tying yourself exclusively to AWS services is not a good long term strategy because then you have vendor lock-in that's worse than being stuck with some old hardware.

If you don't need the scaling abilities of cloud, then it just doesn't justify the added expense because no matter what you say, you still need people to manage systems.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#155

Post by Domenic_S »

irrational wrote: post #124
sciurus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: Yes, I understand the pricing differences of cloud. So just say "it's cheaper to run our own stuff", don't pretend its due to some desire for "craft". I think your criticism would make sense if the article was accurate. But I don't think this quote > Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that…

1) Etsy has been around longer than EC2 This is a good point. My company is on cloud servers, but not EC2 since EC2 didn't exist when we moved to the cloud.

It's not a great point. Many companies have been around since before EC2, and many of them have moved to EC2.

Not saying EC2 is right for everyone, just that this particular point is bad.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#156

Post by nasalgoat »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #116
shiftpgdn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except traditional "cloud" hosting is wicked expensive in comparison. Ideally you should shoot for a hybrid model where excess capacity spills into AWS/GCE/Azure. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s connection for $150/month.

On the other hand, a reserved m4.Large instance is $45/month. After a year of that, you're just $550 into hosting, barely enough to select and order the case and power supply for your server. It would be 30 years before you paid the cost of that Dell, so unless you actually need that power and your time is free, it's easier to let this be a tiny fraction of Amazon's expenses and workload than a big part of yours.

Not all instances are the same. You can't run a database on an m4.large, not any database you plan on running queries on.

So you need that m4.16xlarge to handle the load, and honestly, there's no single instance available on Amazon that I've found that can come anywhere near the performance of physical hardware when it comes to handling database loads. Right now I am running ten r4.16xlarge instances to do the job of two Dell R710s, at considerably reduced performance even still.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#157

Post by nasalgoat »

smileysteve wrote: post #118
sametmax wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cloud is very, very expensive. If you want low cost, you do your own servers for anything under 20 nodes. Which, given the power of modern machines and with unmethered bandwidth, will take you to the millions of user easily. I have setup a streaming website with 500k/d visitors, and it runs on 7 servers for 2000$ a month give or take. That's very, very cheap compared to GAE or AWS.

> If you want low cost, you do your own servers for anything under 20 nodes. This seems unlikely to be true unless your software engineers love doing ops (and the needs of the business don't need those on software.) The salaries of having Operations that can replace failed hardware 24/7 (and w/ vacations) alone is more expensive than a company like Etsy should have in ops. Then there is the cost of the pipe, power, a…

Don't believe the lie that you don't need ops people in cloud. You're still running servers. So since you have the staff anyway, why not save 3-4x the cost?

Hardware failures are far less common than you believe. I lost one hard drive in 10 years and because it was a RAID array it didn't even fail.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#158

Post by opportune »

asdfjlkasdf88 wrote: post #153
MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

This concern for the survival of a particular corporation is just as arbitrary as your questioning where they drew their arbitrary lines around DIY operations. 80% of the Fortune 500 list in the 1960s is gone. Survival is not guaranteed of any of company. So why get so worried about it? You know why they do it that way? Because the people there decided to. What's more self-parodying? People on here grousing about the…

I think there's a special hypocrisy involved in getting paid a six figure salary supported by some combination of venture capital and running an open market, and criticizing the system that pays you to do that, all the while spending money on luxurious shit like hand delivered food (which the vast majority of the world only does out of necessity, or otherwise cannot afford to do).

Capitalism has issues, society has issues, the modern phenomenon of worshipping the wealthy and "self made" has issues. I think it's possible to see those issues and want to address them without decrying the idea or system as a whole as this guy does.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#159

Post by Domenic_S »

mintplant wrote: post #107
malandrew wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, everytime I hear someone complain about capitalism I eyeroll because they clearly aren't "woke" enough to realize that capitalism is the reason they can remain blissfully ignorant of how capitalism supports their blissful ignorance. Capitalism isn't without its bugaboos, but the wholesale rejection I hear people making can only come from a place of ignorance.

Not sure I understand your point. Are you asserting that anyone who argues against capitalism as a system must be doing so from a position of ignorance?

They're asserting that someone aggressively arguing against capitalism while freely and wholeheartedly participating in capitalism has some dissonance to reconcile.

I've got a hard time taking an "I'm allergic to capitalism" tweet seriously coming from someone who 1) lists all the ways they participate in capitalism in their profile and 2) makes this statement in the context of their job which depends completely on capitalism functioning.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#160

Post by PhasmaFelis »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #114
fdsfsafasfdas wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With all the AI being thrown around, can't someone build a "tastefulness" filter? It turns out taste varies.

I would argue (somewhat tongue in cheek) that people who don't have a taste [1] don't need a filter. The filter is for people who want to climb above the trash, not for those who willingly submerge themselves. [1] https://www.etsy.com/shop/GrainyDayCreations , https://www.etsy.com/shop/PurpleHeartUK , https://www.etsy.com/shop/BigSwigDesign , https://www.etsy.com/shop/CraftyMamaGifts , etc.

Based on those links, I think you may have confused "taste" with "irony". :)
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