Etsy-specific Examples:
While mandating 24 hour response rates to buyer inquiries for all sellers or else penalized, Etsy takes _weeks_ to reply to seller inquiries such as reporting a hacked account.
Etsy routinely "permanently bans" seller accounts with no reason, no warning, no response to appeal and a stated SLA of 'about two weeks'
Platform risk is alive and well on Etsy make no mistake. If it's perceived as good for Etsy everyone else is disposable.
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.
