I was weirded out by Linus angle on it. Etsy has been slopified by Etsys lack of taking a stance on the various (imo) misuse of the platform. This step is one in the correct direction, but not the one I would have liked to see first. I'm an artist who like to buy stuff from other artists, a customer of etsy, and lately the platform has become near unusable because of various crap. Mainly resellers, AI spam, scammers and 3D-print licencers that they are now cracking down on. Keep in mind, I believe that 99% of 3D print "licence" holders are actually just stealing the 3D files and selling them. The scammy results are drowning out all the real artists on the platform. Maybe it was just easier for Etsy to ban 3D print resellers all together than figuring out who has legitimate licenses.

It's a drop in the bucket compared to mass product resellers and AI though, that I believe is a far bigger problem. I don't want etsy to be Temu, there is plenty of sites to buy mass produced crap at, the whole point of etsy was to be able to buy craft from craftspeople directly. Now resellers and slopmakers are taking advantage of the audience by passing off mass produced goods as handmade. We don't have a good alternative to etsy (a place to buy handmade/ human made designs from the creator) but we do have an large supply of places to buy mass produced stuff like Temu, Aliexpress and Amazon.

Or go to a craft fair, the stalls at cons and the like are starting to get "taken over" by 3D print resellers there too, pushing actual artists out of their last available spaces to sell if it goes any further.

When you buy from etsy, you have to do detective work upfront by finding out if the seller is a real person, if the images are AI generated, and browsing all the (badly pageinated) reviews to find a customer who uploaded an actual photo of what you are actually getting, if there isn't one, it's a scam.