Looks as if Etsy’s decided to dump all over its’ sellers again with this new ‘Browse’ thing. I personally find it useless. It’s slow to load, shows you the same things over and over again, and has moved categories around so they’re pretty much irrelevant.

I used to love to browse Etsy. I have happily spent many hours just flipping through categories. That is, until started testing this crap a few months ago. The test group I ended up stuck in made it impossible for me to browse; it was both slow and clunky, and really hard on my eyes. Other test groups reported vanishing and reappearing categories as they tinkered. Eventually that went away…

Until today. And now it’s back to the same sort of thing, but…worse. Wouldn’t have thought it possible…

I dislike change when it seems to be change for change’s sake. Just like with Facebook’s endless pointless march forward, I don’t understand what purpose Etsy really thinks they’re achieving with this. It’s random looking. It’s hard to navigate. If I wanted to use Pinterest, I would bloody well use Pinterest! I have no idea where some things have moved, let alone why they’ve been moved. And the timing is idiotic; why massively disrupt your sellers (and buyers, for that matter) -right- before the winter holiday shopping season?

I never invested a terrible amount of time ‘optimizing’ my Etsy according to the guides they put out, simply because it never seemed to pay off in the end for most people. Endless tinkering and $$$ for little return. Etsy has been slowly but surely squeezing out handcrafts in favour of high-volume, soulless, ugly hipster crap and one long endless wedding show.

It should be obvious I’m a bit irked with this. I have lost one of my favorite ways of passing time, just looking around at all the other excellent handmade artistic things other people make. I think of all the great stuff I’ve seen and bought and people I’ve met there - and all the stuff and people I’m going to miss now. :(

I had thought, earlier this year, that I might move my jewelry business entirely to Etsy. I won’t be doing that now.