[blargey]

> it's not incredibly hard to figure out

When you’re a core user / minor subject expert, yes. But malicious actors wouldn’t be on the site in the first place if there weren’t a hundred naive consumers for every keen-eyed user like you doing Etsy’s most important job for them. Not sure how that’s supposed to be a defense for this sort of practice.

“Scaling our value proposition is hard, so let’s just stop maintaining it and ride out the brand name we built at low scale and enjoy the bigger margin”. It’s the website / “tech” equivalent of physical-good brands letting their product quality deteriorate through rampant cost cutting.