[dangrossman]

> I don't even see how things like the AI-powered "trust and safety" garbage they implemented or the "Star Seller" thing benefit Etsy in the slightest.

Etsy basically tripled its user base in the past 2 years, to something like 100 million active buyers and sellers. This happened during the pandemic, when Etsy's offices were locked down, everyone had to learn to run the business remotely, and the labor market tightened up making it harder to hire (and then to train remotely).

Almost every change Etsy's made in the last two years is about reducing the burden on their staff, which now has a much higher user to staff ratio to deal with. Requiring sellers respond to messages within 24 hours reduces the number of people contacting Etsy's support staff. Requiring sellers resolve issues to customers' satisfaction to maintain their standing reduces the number of people contacting Etsy's support staff. Requiring customers contact sellers before they can open a case reduces the number of people contacting Etsy's support staff. Implementing AI-powered review of new sellers and listings is the only realistic answer to having ANY review of new sellers and listings when there are hundreds of thousands of them being added every month for each employee in charge of enforcing policy on them.

[jeremymcanally]

I'm 100% sympathetic to their growth issues, trust me. Their support team is stretched very thin, and I always try to be really understanding when tickets sit unanswered for a bit. At the same time, if they're cutting off someone's livelihood (especially in a case like ours where we're being too successful for their algorithm), it really, really should be reviewed by a real person before the policy is enacted rather than depending on the AI to not have issues identifying real problems.

The truly annoying thing is that when it is reviewed by a real person, they have strict policies about how long things have to be a certain way before they will reverse what is obviously a flaw in their algorithm. We ran into "well yeah obviously you didn't do anything wrong but bans like this are a week long so you have two more days to wait" a couple of times. I'm guessing they had someone new take over their T&S team who feels like strict enforcement across the board regardless makes things more fair (which I can see from one angle), but given that Etsy's whole pitch is making commerce more personal, it'd be nice if things like that were also more personal.