Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/technology/fosta-sex-trafficking-law.html <comment><USER4> As someone who spent over a decade in the adult industry BackPage was extremely responsible. They had a staff of 70 people dedicated to reporting suspicious ads to police. They were the #1 source of trafficking tips.

Another socially responsible escort ad site was owned by a woman (former sex worker) and was forced to sell to a very shady eastern european gentlemen who is referred to as the trafficking king of europe. She sold because she didn't want to go to jail.

<comment><USER5> > _Another socially responsible escort ad site was owned by a woman (former > sex worker) and was forced to sell to a very shady eastern european > gentlemen who is referred to as the trafficking king of europe. She sold > because she didn't want to go to jail._

Was shutting it down somehow not an option? Better to shut it down than to give it to a gangster.

<comment><USER6> Parent says she didn't want to go to jail. Do you know her preferences better? ISTM most people don't want to go to jail.

<comment><USER5> It seems to me that the legal trouble would have come from continuing to operate the site, and by selling the site instead of deleting the database and shutting it down, she sold out those women.

But supposing she was being threatened with imprisonment unless she sold it, biting that bullet would have been the honorable thing to do. She owed that much to the people who trusted her with data of that nature.

<comment><USER6> A person in the situation described above is dealing with corrupt and capricious police and prosecutors. Honest cops would have just charged her and asked the courts to shut her down, if they really felt she had broken laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Noooooo! When I ehard about backpage being shut down because it was the biggest place for child sex trafficking, I said it was the dumbest move they could make. You have a website with the vast majority of illegal sex traffickers COMING TO YOU, and you close it? Why? Make BP a deal, give the FBI an office to scan everything so they can go after child sex traffickers, and you can stay open. We'd have arrested thousands of them by now.

<comment><USER8> If you can't speak English to the prostitute or she seems afraid, it would be a suspicious situation.

"child sex traffickers"

I don't know where you get that from.

<comment><USER7> It was one of the big reasons the gov't claimed they shut it down. [https://u.osu.edu/osuhtblog/2018/04/17/backpage-com-and- chil...](https://u.osu.edu/osuhtblog/2018/04/17/backpage-com-and-child-sex- trafficking/)

<comment><USER9> Didn't that turn out to be bullshit though?

<comment><USER7> Even so, it's a dumb reason when the alternative is to keep it going as a trap.

<comment><USER10> It is dumb if you want to protect people.

Not so dumb when the goal is to look tough and win votes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Its so simple for me. Just like with weed....

Legalize it!

Why are we concerning ourselves with how people pleasure themselves in private? It's disgusting.

Of course, have law enforcement root out the kiddie stuff, and have a legal framework to ensure safety (STI testing, etc) but my goodness, the efforts we currently go through to catch consenting adults in mutual benefit...

<comment><USER12> Sex trafficking is not consenting adults. There is a significant difference between a sex worker who voluntarily engages in their profession vs. people who are forced into it.

<comment><USER13> If you legalize it you can arrest the human traffickers while enabling professional sex workers to be professionals just look at the enlightened approach to the problem taken by Australia. No brothels allowed and no pimps but independent sex work is legal.

<comment><USER14> so you're advocating for regulatory capture? That'll go just like the legal pot industry; prohibitively expensive licensing that only goes to the already big players in the game.

<comment><USER15> Except the sex industry isn't at all as scalable as the pot industry. You can't grow a field of ass and sell it yourself.

Plus, the cost of entry is pretty low, I hear.

<comment><USER16> Robot sex will be the next big thing.

<comment><USER17> Nah.. VR will do just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You mean exactly how sex workers said it would, but nobody listened to them, because it was never actually about protecting sex workers or victims of sex trafficking?

[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sex-workers-bill-fosta- sesta_...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sex-workers-bill-fosta- sesta_n_5aa1924fe4b04c33cb6cecb2)

[https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy- dani...](https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy-daniels-a- bipartisan-bill-will-lead-to-further-victimization-of-sex-8e5ef184f5ef)

<comment><USER19> It was so infuriating to watch Democrats willingly get played by the religious right into supporting something that was so blatantly designed to legislate morality rather than actually help victims of trafficking. Glad that elected officials are now rethinking it, at least.

<comment><USER20> > designed to legislate morality

Like... almost all other laws?

Do you think murder is immoral? Well guess what? There's a law for that. Just because you disagree with the morality being legislated, you can't pretend that "legislating morality" is the problem.

<comment><USER21> Making murder illegal _should be_ mainly about preventing people from being the victim of murder. Whether or not murder is moral or not shouldn't really be relevant. We've decided that people have a right to not be murdered for whatever reason. The only thing the law should then be concerned about is how to prevent murder.

Using the same reasoning to outlaw prostitution is harder. Sure you could argue people have a right to not be a prostitute -- and I heartily agree with that -- but then the job of the law is to prevent people from being prostitutes _against their will_. All outlawing prostitution outright does is hide it from view. It doesn't help people get the rights they deserve. In fact it takes away the right to be a prostitute if you want to. The only line of arguing that prostitution should be illegal is either because we should outlaw anything we deem immoral, or because somehow concocted a right that prevents people from doing what they _want_ to do.

In my opinion the basis for any system of law _ought_ to be that people can do what they want to. The only exceptions being when doing so infringes on the right of others. I should be free to be a prostitute. I should not be free to force other people to be prostitutes against their will. I should be free to wildly swing my arms. I should not be free to punch someone in the face.

Of course everyone has their own opinion of what the law _should_ be and so we end up with a patchwork of intentions -- let alone how the law actually gets applied. That's fine. People are free to have opinions.

Either laws are written based on morality, or laws are written based on rights. You can't have both without being inconsistent.

<comment><USER22> > prevent people from being prostitutes against their will

The important part here is if you include economic factors into "against their will" or not.

<comment><USER6> Do those factors have the same meaning when someone would rather not be e.g. a cleaner or an orderly at a nursing home? Those jobs are physical and not so pleasant. They pay much less than prostitution. Yet, many people are so employed.

<comment><USER23> Prostitution is still about selling what is most intimate, not really the same.

Also, how are we supposed to reach gender equality if one gender's body is for sale as a matter of routine ?

Note that I still agree with your point on being a cleaner, that's why I think universal income is a good idea.

<comment><USER9> Coal miners sell their body for their job too. There are plenty of jobs that will destroy your body but pay better than average for your skill level.

At the end of the day when an adult makes the decision to do a particular job because it pays better than the alternative we can't automatically count them as a "victim". It robs people of their agency and infantilizes them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just wrote this, in reply to an essay about _The Irishman_ [https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/18/links-lessons-to- unlearn-...](https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/18/links-lessons-to-unlearn- carbon-capture-and-storage-status-and-signaling-and-more) :

 _"The lonesome Irishman." On the movie_ The Irishman _; the essay almost makes me want to watch it, but not quite enough, because I feel like I've seen enough mob movies. After The Sopranos, Goodfellas, The Godfather, and probably some more, plus reading Diego Gambetta's Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, I think that universe is pretty played out. Killing people is also bad. Many of the things that thrive in the underworld should be legalized, like gambling has been and marijuana is being. If gambling, prostitution, and most non-opioid drugs are legal, there's not much left for the mob to do, and it will be starved of revenue, because most activities are best done using conventional means and corporate or legal structures._

We've seen gambling move from being illegal to being conducted by the state (lottos) or sanctioned and taxed by it. Marijuana is moving in the same direction. Certain other things, we should probably be seeing move that way too.

<comment><USER25> Why shouldn't opiods be legal? Sure, they are bad. But so is tobacco. Most overdoses happen precisely because of unstable dosages or unexpected fentanyl.

<comment><USER26> I think you need to balance the risks of addiction and negative health consequences against the cost of having gangs/cartels profiting off of the fact that the substance is controlled. With marijuana, it is neither very addictive nor are the health consequences of using marijuana very severe, at least in the short term. Legalization is a bit of a no brainer for marijuana.

Opioids are at the other end of the spectrum - they are highly addictive and aside from the possibility of accidental overdose, even just using them at the correct dosage carries a lot of negative health consequences. It is not clear that you get a net win for society by legalizing opioids.

<comment><USER27> Decriminalisation (as opposed to legalisation) is a good step, though. Remove the jeopardy from seeking help from healthcare professionals and the state.

Keep the supply of the substances illegal, but provide safe places - <USER2> with medics - where people can have their drugs tested, take the drugs in as safe a way as possible and be signposted to rehab and recovery services, including mental health services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As an occasional consumer of sex work, here is the reality: yes, It's more dangerous now for both parties, but much more so for the women. The labor supply has gone down sharply because the economics went upside down. If you can't count on as many clients per day the fixed cost of the hotel room becomes harder to risk so many girls exited the market. Prices have gone up sharply. The kind of girls that were charging $250-300 are now charging $400-500. "Trafficking" is an almost nonexistent issue at these price points where I dabble but as I understand is depressingly common on the low end of the market where people are picking up girls on the street for $20 blow jobs. Those girls are now more vulnerable than ever because with the smaller size of the marketplace they need pimps, madams, agencies, etc. to help them get enough work.

<comment><USER29> Just to satisfy my own curiosity, what is your use case for paying for sex? Married? High powered executive? I can't imagine paying for something that is easily free on a million different dating apps.

<comment><USER9> Not to be too mean here, but perhaps the OP doesn't have an easy time finding willing partners in the traditional dating scene. Maybe they have the kind of look that makes women swipe left.

<comment><USER29> It's possible, but in my experience, there is someone for everyone. I suppose if the goal is to hit way above your weight, paying makes sense. Money does seem to have that effect on women. But if you have that much, you should be able to pull it easily without prostitution?

<comment><USER30> > It's possible, but in my experience, there is someone for everyone.

lol citation needed.

I've used dating apps for the last four years. I've gotten maybe 3-4 dates per year, and 0 relationships out of it.

<comment><USER29> Please take this as friendly. It sounds like maybe you're setting your expectations too high, and not giving other women a chance. In my experience women take what you write in your profile seriously. Spend what you would consider an inordinate amount of time perfecting it, like you would a resume for big job prospect. Get great photos taken of yourself, this doesn't require money or a professional service. Find good light, take lots, use the best of them. Grainy, poorly lit, unflattering photos will be dismissed quickly. Don't make them all selfies. You want to show off your best features, and what makes you, well you.

But seriously, work on what you say in your profile. Nearly every response I get from a woman, is about how well my profile is written.

<comment><USER31> You still need to be somewhat attractive for all of this to matter. Not everyone is.

<comment><USER32> Not really a serious advice but there it is: if you can fix some of it with some light photoshopping, do it.

Plenty of women do it too and for many of them it's not at all light.

Think of it as polishing your CV by omitting some embarrassing stuff and putting forwards the things you want. Your goal shouldn't be to be 100% honest when writing your profile/CV. Just to make it enticing enough to get your foot in the door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There is a debate as to whether or not legalizing prostitution exacerbates sex slavery by creating a market for prostitution that willing market participants are unable to fill. This author[1] points out that studies on this question use the term "sex trafficking" which can mean either illegal immigration of willing sex workers or sex slavery. That distinction seems important, but is often not clarified by investigators.

I think this issue is vexing because there are so many groups with different compelling reasons to favor or oppose prohibition. The below list is obviously a gross over-simplification, but I think it captures the largest forces in the debate.

FOR: Men. Men would benefit from legalization in the obvious way.

AGAINST: Women. Women stand to lose if their partners are tempted by legal prostitution.

FOR: Sex workers. Sex workers would benefit in the obvious way.

AGAINST: Religious groups. They lost the battle against pornography, but they're winning this one.

AGAINST: Feminists. Not all feminists, but many feminists believe sex work is exploitation by definition. [2]

Each group has powerful motivations completely independent from the effect of legalization on sex slavery.

1\. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/15/legal- pr...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/15/legal-prostitution- and-sex-trafficking-from-the-annals-of-bad-economic-research/)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_prostitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_prostitution)

<comment><USER34> > AGAINST: Women. Women stand to lose if their partners are tempted by legal > prostitution.

If someone's partner is gonna be tempted away simply by legal prostitution, maybe they aren't the most faithful to begin with.

<comment><USER33> I suppose it depends on whether you're more concerned with your partner's character in an abstract way or you're more concerned about actual infidelity.

<comment><USER34> Actual infidelity seems inevitable if the only thing preventing it is inability to find someone to have sex with.

<comment><USER35> Sure, but that might be the difference between 2 years and 30.

"Inevitable either way" doesn't mean that the needle stands still.

<comment><USER36> More like 2 and 30 weeks in this particular case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's important to note that whenever trafficking is discussed , in 95% of cases it's going to be about consensual prostitution between adults. Anti-sex activists have been successful at attacking the vocabulary.

"But anti-prostitution activists like Hughes often use "sexual exploitation" to include any kind of prostitution or sex work—in fact, Hughes insists in her article that "trafficking occurs even if the woman consents." "

[https://newrepublic.com/article/123302/human-trafficking- has...](https://newrepublic.com/article/123302/human-trafficking-has-become- meaningless-term)

<comment><USER38> 95% seems like an awfully wrong guess. There is a lot of forced prostitution, then a huge great area of those that for various reasons have no other option (from abusive boyfriend to immigration status to economic factors) and then a very small crust of voluntary sex workers, mostly at the high-end of the market. The ratio between these three will vary massively between country/region/city but in any case it is often difficult to identify who is victim and who is voluntary because the world is complex. (Are the African ladies prostituting themselves in Italy doing so voluntarily when they are afraid of voodoo curses? Is the meth addict doing it voluntarily? Is the girl that can't afford her daughter's diabetes medication by any other 'job' doing so voluntarily?)

<comment><USER39> Could you cite sources for these claims?

The numbers I've seen are opposite to what you claim, and seemed to indicate that a lot of the "trafficking" is actually people traveling to another country for a while to earn (relatively) easy money without risking getting stigmatized by people they know.

You can see sort of the same thing play out without the stigmatization with carpenters and similar coming from low-wage countries. They'll generally have worse working conditions than local carpenters (if for nothing else being away from their families), but still come for the opportunities.

I do think the stigmatization makes it a difficult subject.

<comment><USER4> As someone who spent 10 years in the business trafficking is indeed rare. In my experience it is mostly through organized crime in LA, SF, and NYC.

Almost all Asian AAMPs are trafficked women. They are snuck in on ships and forced to work to pay their "debt".

Outside of this women work in prostitution because they need money. A lot of people demonize this work saying how terrible it is, but the reality is an hours work is a days wages at a normal job. That's very tempting.

Internet ads and online advertising got women off the streets and made things incredibly safer. Women could focus on screening clients instead of attracting them, increasing safety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> As the article says, lots of sites in a mad panic did a purge of sex and dating related content since SESTA/FOSTA was passed.

I've launched Libr, which won't be doing any such purge. It was built as a replacement for Tumblr. I'm in Australia, SESTA/FOSTA is an American law.

[https://librapp.com](https://librapp.com)

<comment><USER6> Will you have American customers? If so, how will they pay you?

<comment><USER40> There are already American users, but they're not paying anything for the service. I don't have ads yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Hah! No shit. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of steet prostitution. One night I was smoking a cigarette on my porch when a girl who was working that night popped out from behind a car, walked over and asked if I had a smoke, and I obliged her.

Apparently she was ducking a guy who had asked for services she wasn't comfortable with, and when they started to argue, she got out. He started to get out and then reached for something, and she booked it.

I asked her if she had seen changes since the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, which she wasn't aware of. She did tell me that the neighbors on the main drag wanted Backpage and the like back, because there had been a significant uptick in street prostitution.

<comment><USER42> FOSTA didn't actually take down Backpage, it's a common myth they were connected. The investigation into Backpage stated well before FOSTA ever existed and they just used the timing of taking down Backpage to announce the release of FOSTA, which resulted in the public perception they were related.

Street prostitution is actually very rare these days compared to the past and it's mostly just the last remaining bottom-of-the-barrel stuff by the community that is connected to the homeless/junkie scene that's in every city. A minor niche in an otherwise large grey/black market.

95%+ of escorting is still all online and the 'noble' fight to bring Backpage down to protect 'human trafficking' only forced more less technically literate women to engage in this backwards and far more dangerous method of marketing, which was otherwise quickly on its way dying out (there will always be some diehards to stick to the streets), protecting women by giving them a venue to request IDs and verify people through shared blacklists of bad-actors, and helping clean up communities.

The sites also making the polices job catching guys looking for minors way easier since they could just set up some ads from the office and catch 100 guys at a time who egregiously and explicitly ask for young girls.

There's still plenty of other grey-market websites and forums that quickly replaced Backpage for this sort of thing and there will always continue to be, just like piracy sites playing whack-a-mole.

Regardless of FOSTA it will be a constant problem for LEO to try to take them down and instead of having a few big sites to monitor the bad guys, they'll exist in shadier forms. And just like drugs, protecting women and preventing actual human trafficking will go to the wayside of punishing websites and workers for something that will never meaningfully go away.

The solution just like drugs in better prevention and regulation of these sites and of sex-work itself and ignoring the "think of the children" hysteria.

One of the biggest problems is that sex worker activists are naively extremely hostile to any attempts to legalize and regulate the industry. They think they can get it decriminalized and maintain a complete hostility to working with government oversight (ie mandatory testing), courts, and working with police, which is not how any safe, stable industries works. Just like how it was impractical for pro-marijuana groups to except decriminalization in Canada. They'd get this along a lot further if they just accepted this reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I prefer Germany, Austria and Switzerland's model.

Its not a panacea in preventing trafficking but for the workers that want to be there it doesn't criminalize them, and the market for establishments are pretty competitive and great for patrons. Game of Thrones can't even compare, while many tourists corral themselves over to one street in Amsterdam due to its marketing campaign even though there are whole countries that are way more awesome.

The std testing is the most attractive part of these systems. "Tolerant" and "Decriminalized" places do not have the capability of offering that. Let alone everywhere that outrights criminalizes workers and/or Johns.

I think the population health should be a prong that is weighed heavier. Regulated systems do that. If there is any coercion of the sex workers then spend resources enforcing that and providing avenues just like anybody else in a domestic abuse relationship.

<comment><USER44> As far as I know the problem here in Germany is legalization.

They could simply have decriminalized prostitution and leave procuration illegal, but no, they had to throw around with laws to make the live of sex- workers harder.

<comment><USER45> Why is that making sex workers lives harder?

<comment><USER44> If they have to follow more laws, their work gets harder.

If prostitution was just decriminalized, their work would just have been easier, it would have been a normal job like every other job.

<comment><USER43> "Just decriminalized" means there is no confidence or way to assume that the sex workers are routinely tested. Pass.

As a sidenote, this reminds me of another reason why criminalization is a waste of time as it only ensnares the poor or impatient, while an even distribution of the more privileged ones of us engage in the exact same behaviors but where it is legal, remaining upstanding citizens by every metric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "Stamping out" anything moves it underground. The transaction volume almost always goes down and the risk for those remaining in the market almost always goes up.

<comment><USER47> In the same way the war on drugs had a lot of casualties (and collateral damage) and did absolutely nothing to reduce drug usage.

Prostitution is called the oldest profession in the world for a reason. It has always existed, in all countries, cultures, etc.

IMHO legalized prostitution with some sane policies for health and safety combined with a threat of prosecution for 'customers' of victims of human trafficking (e.g. for rape, because that's what that is) would do wonders to clean that business up. A blanket ban just drives women in the hands of criminals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> What is sad is that there are a lot of real-size social experiments in various countries that have a variety of legislation and situation and a ton of literature to guide policy there.

I have (like everybody) some opinions on how sex should work and what limits paid sex should have. I'll just say that: My preferences are totally irrelevant and should be dismissed if they have any chance of increasing human trafficking.

These policies should have a single, fact-based, evidence-based goal: fight sex slavery and human trafficking. If it leads to a system I don't like, so be it. Fighting slavery is the #1 goal there.

<comment><USER49> Then put everyone under 24 hour surveillance. That is the only logical choice given your goals. If you allow someone any amount of freedom, you can't be sure they won't used it this try and enslave someone else.

<comment><USER50> That's clearly not what the comment you're replying to was saying.

It was saying, I might have my moral opinions in a vacuum about whether prostitution is good or bad, but the moral principle of trafficking being bad overrides that, and we should follow what the evidence says. If the evidence says that decriminalizing sex work reduces trafficking, then a moral opinion against sex work doesn't outweigh the evidence.

It was clearly not about higher moral principle of fundamental liberty.

<comment><USER35> The "higher moral principle of fundamental liberty" is choosing the more free/less restrictive path _even when that leads to worse outcomes_.

That's _literally_ the idea behind the entire liberty vs freedom discussion - that (for instance) _even if_ giving the government access to all our communications would make us safer, _it 's still not what should be done_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> You'd think that we might have learned by now that if you try to vigorously suppress something that people want, this sort of thing happens.

</comment><comment><USER52> It doesn't seem to me that this result should have been difficult to predict. Some people did, of course, but neither politicians nor the mainstream press seemed to give the argument much consideration.

There's even evidence suggesting that backpage.com was effectively railroaded, and actively aided law enforcement in identifying and prosecuting pimps and child abusers (this source has a known libertarian political bias):

[https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the- governme...](https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-government- has-been-lying-about-backpage/)

</comment><comment><USER49> The only part of this article that can be considered "news" is that two presidential candidates support doing a study on the bill's effects. Everything else is the same as the articles written before it passed.

What prompted reprinting this article without actually doing any investigation into the ramifications?

<comment><USER53> A law proposal to make a study of the impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> [https://archive.md/iTRDs](https://archive.md/iTRDs)

</comment><comment><USER16> Stamping out murder only has pushed it underground! Stamping out rape has only pushed it underground! Stamping out kidnapping has only pushed it underground! I long for the day all of these practices can be legalized and done safely and in the open!

<comment><USER54> Truly voluntary prostitution isn't the same as murder, rape, or kidnapping.

People have to work to survive. Some people make so little at work that if they lost that job, they'd be homeless or suffer other harm. And, most people would rather not be at work. Companies often provide this work.

Are workers slaves? Are companies exploiting workers?

If that type of worker-company relationship is morally permissible, then on some level prostitution has to be as well.

<comment><USER55> the metric I use is mutually consenting? Do both parties consent to the agreement? Then it should be legal. Do I consent to trade XXX for YYY with a company or other individual? Does the company/individual consent to trade YYY for XXX?

I don't consent to murder, rape, or kidnapping of myself, nor do I consent to do those to others.

<comment><USER54> Unfortunately this doesn't take into account some nuances. For example: A homeless, jobless woman who engages in acts of prostitution simply to eat is consenting technically, but most would say this situation shouldn't exist. But marriages do happen all the time for economic reasons...

<comment><USER55> Shouldn't exist? If its really her only option, who are you (or anyone else) to take it away? Unless its not really her only option, then who are you to take away her choice?

<comment><USER54> What I am saying is X really a choice if the alternative to choosing X is suffering harm, such as starvation, lack of shelter, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I mean that was the intention, was it not? A full discussion of our incoherent approach to work, sex, sex work, morality, patriarchal power dynamics, and so forth is out of scope here but it was never about making material improvements to anybody's life.

</comment><comment><USER57> the reason, backpage was shut down is that the gvt couldn't get a cut. and like all activities that are morally, grey. once the gvt stops getting their cut, they will scoop in. it's just the same, way the mafia is allowed to operate unions etc and once they ruffle feathers and stop contributing to politicians then all of a sudden the mafia is running a racket. Yet the gvt runs the biggest racket, protection scheme. so yeah, now all the SW are back on the streets or in the hands of pimps. Also the backpage era, due to supply and demand markets efficiencies, seems SW had become a safe sustainable, decent livelihood for many.

<comment><USER58> I believe it was shutdown not because they didn't get a cut, but because they were the perfect boogeyman to create a large cut of other pies.

From 'im a do-gooder' message in campaign ads, to raising money from church groups - backpage was popular enough for just about everyone to have known about it, and many people likely to have an associate that actually uses it..

from Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, and all of his free press coverage (free campaign money) - to others. I believe Kamalla Hariz, Marcha Blakbern, and others used the backpage boogeyman as a springboard to capture free press, free exposure, and drum up free campaign money.

Sadly many of those the used the victory lap of the shutdown got lots of exposure for the occurrence and the various roles they may have played - <USER3> the same outlets that pushed those stories have been remaining silent on the exposure of the shady investigative work, and the truths of the case like showing that most the investigators knew backpage was actively helping them take out child workers.

It seems the political grandstanding and free capitol from the exposure and donations outweighed keeping a popular tool that was used by many investigators to separate the kids from the adults and the forced from the free willing.

The boogeyman in AZ in now porn in general and cell phones I think? Some kind of forced tax to unlock porn on your device, enforced by the phone companies?

<comment><USER59> The reason Backpage got shut down is because the owners pissed off Cindy and John McCain with negative reporting in the Phoenix New Times and large donations against them. Everything else is just excuses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I hope people will consider the idea that UBI could factor into this type of discussion.

</comment><comment><USER61> You don't pass conservative legislation like this to reduce fear of crime.

</comment><comment><USER62> Libertarians were way ahead of the curve on drug legalization, criminal justice reform, school choice, and police brutality to name recent victories. We have been banging the drum on legalizing sex work for decades, and I'm optimistic that true freedom for consenting adults will continue to win over the 'Controllers of Lives' that want to ban freedom.

There is nothing wrong with two consenting adults choosing to have sexual relations for monetary exchange, and I care nothing about "downsides" that come from legalization. It's morally imperative that we allow freedom, then deal with the consequences. Otherwise, we should just ban alcohol, driving, having kids, or anything that can _potentially_ have negative effects when we allow people to be free and make their own decisions.

</comment><comment><USER63> uhhh ya think?

</comment><comment><USER64> > "stamping out murder may have pushed it underground"

Okay, and how is that a bad thing?

<comment><USER65> If the end effect is greater body count then yes, it is a bad thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> For real though, in my world, the other America, 'online sex trafficking' is alive and well. Apps are blowing up with whores, they literally offering subscription services now.

E-Thot is the word of the year, all these money sending apps that came out recently are capitalizing on a new thriving market with blurred lines as to what is legal.

</comment><comment><USER67> Where prostitution has been completely legalized there's been a huge increase in demand, and the market has responded not with an increase in wages for sex workers but with an increase in slavery. In practice the least-bad policy seems to be legal/decriminalized to sell but illegal to buy.

<comment><USER68> Why should it be illegal for customers to pay for prostitution? Why do you feel prostitutes are entitled to above-market wages?

<comment><USER33> Their contention is that legal sex work creates a market that incentivises sex trafficking, in which case it should be illegal to protect women from being victimized.

<comment><USER69> Can male sex workers be legalized then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I think the most unmentioned facet regarding prostitution is that for many men, prostitution may be the only way for them to obtain sex, which I feel is just as much of a "right" as is the right for women to obtain an abortion.

No I don't believe taxpayers should be required to pay for prostitutes, nor for abortions.

But the market for both should be decriminalized. Not only is this something that is morally right, though I'm sure feminists especially will not agree, I believe this is in society's best interest, too.

There are more and more studies showing most men did not actually propagate throughout history, and this is also true with many other mammals. The alpha obtains a harem, and the rest fight over what's left (or die trying).

I have a feeling that the institution of monogamy came about in almost all cultures simply to avoid the problems associated with large numbers of males, programmed by evolution to do one thing, unable to obtain it.

Inexpensive and shameless prostitution might be an alternative as it seems monogamy is declining, and some version of polygamy becoming more normal with few men sharing many women (if you believe the online dating app stats and lots of anecdotes online).

<comment><USER71> No, it isn't the only way for many men to do so. The issue is that they don't want to put in the time or effort to be the kind of man that can, and they have radically unrealistic expectation of sex itself. No, you cannot bang a supermodel, but you can find a woman who loves you and will be with you.

No, men don't have a right to sex, because it involves a woman surrendering herself; its not something innate to the man that is being denied. It's dark to make it so that women need to surrender themselves to strangers on demand for cash because men have a right to the act, and that's just part of it. Sex is really only healthy where there is mutual love and at least some level of commitment; without it there is a huge lack of protection for the woman and it becomes a banal experience for the man, because he cannot have love or intimacy from it, just the act that becomes more and more extreme over time precisely because its divorced from human sentiment.

honestly i wish dang would ban these kinds of topics because we usually only get one side of them based on sort of an inhuman libertarianism; there's no "intellectual curiosity" about this, just sort of a repetition of a specific set of views with very little attempt to challenge or provide the unpopular side.

<comment><USER70> > No, men don't have a right to sex,...

I would say men have a moral right to sex as much as women have a moral right to not be physically and sexually abused by men, at least in an advanced human society that we want.

Naturally, evolution has left the sexes in an unpleasant predicament - look at higher mammals like chimps or great apes for the state we'd fall into without our societal boundaries.

We're long past the point where we've 'artificially' propped up women to a pedestal that wouldn't be obtainable without men raising them up - the freedom to earn money regardless of actual production, safety against physical / sexual violence which is only enforced by other men, reproduction rights, etc.

If this system is to sustain itself, a large amount of men will also need to provided for, and that means sex (or maybe in a sci-fi future some sort of drug or simulation that mimics it in the brain, and releases the 'pressure'). Otherwise, one side of our artificial society is no longer balanced.

>Sex is really only healthy where there is mutual love and at least some level of commitment;

Sex itself is the goal for most men, at least primitively. The rest is just a bonus.

> honestly i wish dang would ban these kinds of topics because we usually only > get one side of them based on sort of an inhuman libertarianism;

Typical. You've been able to express you opinions. I've been able to express mine. Censoring / banning speech is ridiculous, and should never be even considered by a company like YC who owes quite a bit of debt to the US system, which believes in free speech. If they want to start banning more and more speech, they can go set up shop in China or the UK.</comment></comment></comment>


New algorithm that can fairly divide a cake among any number of people - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161006-new-algorithm-solves-cake-cutting-problem/ <comment><USER2> But what if the density of the cake matters?

Solve that one, and you can create a neutral algorithm to create voting districts across states and countries. That means you can put an end to gerrymandering forever; that will eliminate a lot extremist politics in Congress (etc) and the opinions of people whose views are more in the middle (and more representative) will start to count, again.

If density doesn't make sense to you, think of a U.S-shaped cake with a couple hundred million raisins, mostly clustered at the coasts. Now come up with an algorithm to divide that cake evenly into voting districts that are as circular as possible and each contain the same number of raisins, plus or minus one.

The counterargument is that cities gather left-leaning voters, so it wouldn't change as much as I'd like to think - but it would still help.</comment>


Embedded Python/NumPy in MonetDB - <AUTHOR> https://www.monetdb.org/blog/embedded-pythonnumpy-monetdb <comment><USER2> Pushing calculations to the database is a great idea, good to see it gaining more traction. Too often people pull back "all" the data just to iterate it locally.

I looked at MonetDB as part of researching column databases in general. It was as fast as the commercial databases on some queries, I was really impressed. The main thing that put me off was that you couldn't seem to nudge data layout / the query optimizer to do exactly what you specify. They seemed to have the idea of an all-knowing system that would optimize for you, perhaps as a research idea that works but for commercial use it worried me too much.

For anyone interested in column databases in general I put this list of comparisons together: [http://www.timestored.com/time-series-data/column- oriented-d...](http://www.timestored.com/time-series-data/column-oriented- databases)

<comment><USER3> The list seems out of date, InfiniDB has been open-sourced since Calpont went bankrupt, and Greenplum is open-sourced under Apache 2 license[1]. There's also MariaDB Columnstore, a fork of InfiniDB[2].

1\. [http://greenplum.org/](http://greenplum.org/)

2\. [https://mariadb.com/products/mariadb- columnstore](https://mariadb.com/products/mariadb-columnstore)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is anyone using MonetDB production? How does it compare to other column stores?

</comment><comment><USER5> You can do this in Greenplum too.

I've always liked the idea of moving general compute to the database, but usually in an organisation the databases are pretty tightly locked away and it becomes a pain to get the right versions of your libraries installed.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've never hear of this database, but it looks sort of interesting.

<comment><USER7> It's over 15 years old.

<comment><USER8> Still, it suffers from a lack of visibility. I'd only heard about it because one of our DB vendors in the past had mentioned integrating with it.

That said, it's had a lot of interesting development in the last few years (e.g. ocelot which tries to hardware accelerate operations via OpenCL).</comment></comment></comment>


Real-time spam-detection for blog/forum comments - <AUTHOR> https://blogspam.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> This site has been up and running for a good few years now, but the code behind the service has recently been rewritten in go.

The aim behind the rewrite was to ensure that the service could continue to operate with only a small server powering it - the alternative being cancellation.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice. Thanks for sharing. Why Ip is a required field? Just curious about the tech design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Only three fields are required, the comment itself, the IP of the submitter, and the site which is running the test.

More details are useful, and give a better result, but I've found that often an IP will submit hundreds of spam-comments in a short space of time, so requiring it allows you to do things like insta-reject comments from "known bad" sources for a short period of time. (Off the top of my head I cache bad IPs for 24 hours in some situations.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN:How much harm can my data in wrong hand can do to me? - <AUTHOR>

For e.g. Facebook know quite a lot about me. The worst case I can think of is lots of people spamming me to sell their product. so fundamentally  If I am strong enough to ignore advertise, that concern may be invalid, right ? ( there are some people who want to watch the world burn. What they can do with my facebook's data. They do not have facebook's data. Do they ? ) What about google? I do not think they ever misused my data. If they want to misused it somehow, what are their option without legal penalties ? <comment><USER2> First of all, anyone wishing to misuse the data probably doesn't care about legal penalties, as they're inevitable should the scheme be uncovered. What can anyone do with enough of your data? Well, how about "impersonate you, make a huge debt in your name, disappear with the money, leaving you to pay it"? Note that this is actually an _optimistic_ scenario.

</comment><comment><USER3> (<http://www.identitytheft.org.uk/>)</comment>


Show HN: Realtime Social Video Watching - <AUTHOR> http://www.frozenhot.com/hnbeta/

<comment><USER2> Great idea. I've been looking for something like this for a while. I wish there was a way to create private rooms though, I might want to watch something with just a friend.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great stuff!

Didn't see anything like "invite your friends to this room" buttons... if they were there they should be clearer.</comment>


Mr. Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers-neighborhood-talking-to-kids/562352/ <comment><USER2> Here are the actual rules in the article:

\---

1\. "State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand." Example: It is dangerous to play in the street.

2\. "Rephrase in a positive manner," as in It is good to play where it is safe.

3\. "Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they trust." As in, "Ask your parents where it is safe to play."

4\. "Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive." In the example, that'd mean getting rid of "ask": Your parents will tell you where it is safe to play.

5\. "Rephrase any element that suggests certainty." That'd be "will": Your parents can tell you where it is safe to play.

6\. "Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to all children." Not all children know their parents, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play.

7\. "Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice." Perhaps: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is good to listen to them.

8\. "Rephrase your new statement, repeating the first step." "Good" represents a value judgment, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them.

9\. "Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand." Maybe: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are lesson to learn here for documentation, slack conversations, and even code itself.

</comment><comment><USER4> What a beautiful human being he was. A great example of empathy.</comment>


The Faces of Divestment:Ron Conway, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore and Snoop Dogg - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@keywonc/the-faces-of-divestment-ron-conway-leonardo-dicaprio-al-gore-and-snoop-dogg-2b14200bd154#.3cn0swpp0 <comment><USER2> Since 2014, Snoop has been the voice of Unload Your 401K, a website where you can you examine your 401(k) plan for gun stocks. <\- didnt know this at all. Snoop Dogg, Gun Divest and 401k? Pretty interesting combination. Full of fun facts :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Last fall, Leo invested in a trash-hauling startup called Rubicon Global. He had invested in other environmentally focused startups before, including an electric car maker, and a synthetic diamond startup Diamond Foundry."

This is really interesting.

<comment><USER3> Anyone has come across the synthetic diamonds? I don't know much about how far along/well received they are, but Diamond Foundry sounds pretty interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What gets me is the sheer volume of money being divested. $3.4T is no joke! Even Norway's sovereign wealth fund (the largest in the world)--based on oil profits--is divesting from coal...

<comment><USER3> Norway is indeed an intriguing story.

Their sovereign fund is based on the fossil fuel, yet 1) their pension fund is divesting from fossil fuel 2) the sovereign fund has all kinds of ethical guidelines.

You can see their exclusion list here. It includes: Weapons, tobacco, human rights and environmental damage, and corruption. [http://www.nbim.no/en/responsibility/exclusion-of- companies/](http://www.nbim.no/en/responsibility/exclusion-of-companies/)</comment></comment>


Hooknook: Like GitHub Pages for Your Server - <AUTHOR> http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~asampson/blog/hooknook.html

<comment><USER2> Another way to approach this problem is to use travis-ci. Travis already comes with a full stack of ruby/go/node/python working that you can take advantage of to do any arbitrary commands on `git push`.

Just set the language to ruby, change your test command to a script that performs `jekyll build && rsync`, then encrypt any credentials using travis encryption keys ([http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/encryption- keys/](http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/encryption-keys/)).

Here's one article that takes advantage of this exact setup to automatically deploy to a gh-pages repo: [https://medium.com/@nthgergo/publishing-gh-pages- with-travis...](https://medium.com/@nthgergo/publishing-gh-pages-with-travis- ci-53a8270e87db)

<comment><USER3> For the record Travis is not the only option in town, you can use [wercker]([http://wercker.com/](http://wercker.com/)) or [Bitrise]([http://www.bitrise.io/](http://www.bitrise.io/)) too. There's even a tutorial on [how to publish middleman based sites/blogs]([http://devcenter.bitrise.io/tutorials/middleman- project.html](http://devcenter.bitrise.io/tutorials/middleman-project.html)) on Bitrise - though Bitrise is currently an iOS CI/CD focused service but generally speaking it's a PaaS with OS X virtual machines.</comment></comment>


Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/5/2/15522672/etsy-ceo-change-josh-silverman-chad-dickerson-layoffs <comment><USER4> The conversion problem on mobile does seem like an issue, but speaking as a former customer of Etsy what drove me away was the selection. Not that it's too small - rather, Etsy is now flooded with thousands of storefronts selling "artisan" pieces that are actually bought on AliExpress or similar and marked up. If they're trying to apply ML to managing customer recommendations, they should figure out how to identify who's actually selling legitimate wares.

I stopped buying from Etsy a couple years ago - I purchased my SO what I thought was a unique, interesting "handcrafted" necklace. I thought it looked a little factory-made when it arrived, but it wasn't anything too expensive so I didn't sweat it...then she found it on AliExpress for $5. I then realized the six week lead time for "hand crafting" was actually the time for international shipping and domestic re-packaging.

<comment><USER5> This is tougher than it seems on the surface.

A few years ago, I was involved in planning and running a maker "fest". We invited makers, and artists to the festival to show off their projects, and some of them wanted to sell things.

A not-insignificant number of participants who wanted to sell things were just reselling things you could buy at Michaels, or buy online (in bulk) for cheap.

Sometimes with just a little modification, or maybe a creative recombination, or repackaging.

The problem is that you basically have to examine _every_ single item, and then personally decide if it qualifies as art or not.

That's a lot harder than it sounds, and can quickly devolve into a judgemental mess that nobody wants to participate in (we wanted to encourage makers, not subject them to some "must be at least this cool" test, which is scary for people).

Imagine the PR fallout for etsy the first time they tell somebody that their handmade widgets look like mass produced junk.

I think they're in a really tough spot. When they weighed the options, my guess is that they realized that it would be best to let the consumers just decide what they want to buy.

<comment><USER6> > I think they're in a really tough spot. When they weighed the options, my > guess is that they realized that it would be best to let the consumers just > decide what they want to buy.

...but then the problem is, what makes them better or different from any other storefront? If there's a ton of mass-produced product on Etsy, why would I want to shop there rather than on Amazon?

<comment><USER7> Maybe if there was a system where consumers could identify the wares as manufactured themselves. Like a "legitimacy" rating system

<comment><USER8> They should really just add a rating system, I dont know anything about etsy but if customers say that they found it on alibaba with a given link then the seller would probably lose all future sales. Sounds like a very easy problem to solve...

<comment><USER9> But then Etsy lose all those sales, which presumably is why they don't do that.

Are they more committed to their morals or their profit?

<comment><USER10> That would be a very short-term perspective of them to take. If it becomes common knowledge that it's mostly repackaged chinese goods, then the storefront as a whole would collapse. In this case, preserving their morals I believe is very important to their business as a whole.

<comment><USER9> They probably only need to maintain the perception to keep most of the profits though, so look like your trying but don't do all you can.

<comment><USER11> They need to maintain their customers' perception, which is not so much about trying as actually having an effect...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I ordered a rustic pipe desk from Etsy a while back and the seller was not able to deliver the item on time. He/she communicated the issue so it wasn't that big of a deal for me. I had a prearranged vacation coming up while waiting for the item to be finished and sent, so things took a little bit longer then expected on both ends.

When I finally got back home and put the desk together, I noticed that there were items missing and some things had not been packaged well so they were damaged/scuffed in shipping. Most of the issues were minor and I decided to not make a stink about it with the seller as I could easily work around and fix the problems. I did however want to leave a review of my experience for the seller to be made aware and future buyers to be warned.

Etsy's policy was however to deny me to review an item outside of a certain time window. I emailed Etsy's customer service to petition that I should be allowed to leave a review even though my window had passed given that the seller could not deliver in the time he/she had promised. Etsy's replies and refusal to allow this left a permanent impression on me and I will never spend another dollar there as a result of this ordeal.

<comment><USER13> This is why centralized marketplaces in general are, in my opinion, on the way out. In the future people with something to offer will be able to offer it without being routed through one-size-fits-all platforms who want to control your options for communication, payment, reputation, shipping, etc. in a "my way or the highway" attitude. If one takes this perspective, then Ebay, Taobao, and Etsy are all anachronisms, though Amazon has smartly enhanced delivery speeds by focusing on logistics and will therefore maintain relevance. Why can't I barter for goods? Why can't I route around Paypal, credit cards, or USD? In the future, these will be normal consumer decisions.

<comment><USER14> i dunno, people like those centralized solutions because managing communication, payment, reputation, shipping, etc. are a huge pain in the ass.

i mean even if you look at major alternatives to etsy (like shopify), they still are "centralized" in that regard.

buyers also need some sort of discovery platform - even if it's just google, then google becomes the centralized platform, no?

<comment><USER15> > buyers also need some sort of discovery platform

These platforms exist in all sorts of places outside of marketplaces. Pinterest is essentially bookmarks for shopping. Ditto Wanelo (and other similar sites for different demographics/verticals). Certain Instagram networks are all about products. Babylist is to baby showers what The Knot is to bridal showers. And these are just what I can think of off the top of my head.

Greenhorn merchants love marketplaces b/c they want to market themselves at any cost. But I'm close with several former Etsy sellers who, once they achieved traction with their products, decided to build their brands on their own and not compete toe-to-toe with copycat sellers (which drove them bezerk, btw). Shopify + Facebook ads + Instagram can go a very long way.

<comment><USER14> > Pinterest is essentially bookmarks for shopping

except they're trying to capitalize on the marketplace part too: [https://about.pinterest.com/en/shopping- pinterest](https://about.pinterest.com/en/shopping-pinterest)

> Certain Instagram networks are all about products

ditto: [http://blog.business.instagram.com/post/152598788716/shoppin...](http://blog.business.instagram.com/post/152598788716/shopping- coming-to-instagram)

> former Etsy sellers who, once they achieved traction with their products, > decided to build their brands on their own and not compete toe-to-toe with > copycat sellers

yeah, this is etsy's real problem - they do a bad job of keeping top sellers on the platform. i haven't seen much attrition because of copycats, but more that etsy is just a really bad platform for managing a big shop. the fact that your sellers went to shopify is, to me, just evidence of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I looked into this, because a bracelet I bought for my wife looked great on Etsy, but when it arrived, it was obviously shitty chinese-knock-off quality

Here is the bracelet I bought as a gift, $52

[https://www.etsy.com/transaction/1238204808](https://www.etsy.com/transaction/1238204808)

Here is the same fucking thing, on AliExpress for $6.52 a piece, or you can buy them in lots of 6 for $20.

[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/24k-Gold-Electroplated- Edge-...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/24k-Gold-Electroplated-Edge-Mixed- Color-Bar-Quartz-Druzy-Bangle- Bracelet/32765306497.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_2_10152_10065_10151_10130_10068_436_10136_10137_10157_10060_10138_10155_10062_10156_10154_10056_10055_10054_10059_10099_10103_10102_10096_10052_10053_10142_10107_10050_10051_10084_10083_10080_10082_10081_10178_10110_10111_10112_10113_10114_10181_10183_10182_10078_10079_10073_10070_10123,searchweb201603_16,ppcSwitch_5&btsid=d1696a11-7f72-4896-8629-496304840bb6&algo_expid=7cd84419-e60d-44b9-bce5-030e3106d0ab-11&algo_pvid=7cd84419-e60d-44b9-bce5-030e3106d0ab)

fucking fuck.

<comment><USER17> Your etsy link doesn't work for me

<comment><USER18> It's a transaction ID rather than a link to the actual seller's page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's bizarre to see how Etsy went from producing a significant amount of technical software and community engagement a few years ago and then suddenly stopped. Their GitHub is a testament to this sudden dropoff. Was there anything ever mentioned about why they went from super public about things like dashboarding to nothing?

<comment><USER14> former etsy employee here:

lots of reasons, but around that time etsy invested heavily in infrastructure and tools like statsd resulted from it.

the last few years the focus has been mostly on product, and product teams usually don't produce the kind of significant technology contributions you're talking about (huge generalization there obviously).

this is more of a personal opinion, but my experience was that the last few years etsy has focused less on technical solutions to problems and more on "people solutions" \- if something is inefficient they look for non-technical solutions to that problem, sometimes fruitlessly. as you can imagine in that environment, things like statsd don't get made.

<comment><USER20> I just assumed everyone booked it after the IPO.

<comment><USER14> not really. some people, but very few all things considered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can only add my experience with etsy on the affiliate side. TheHunt.com previously sent them significant traffic (as in, hundreds of thousands of visitors) via their affiliate program. We then got a email that they were going to change our rates to be something like 5x less than our current rates because we were high volume. Needless to say we removed every etsy product on our site and replaced them with amazon/farfetch/etc.. products within a week. We actually ended up tripling our revenue off of the etsy traffic so I am glad it happened.

It did show a lack of appreciation for traffic on their end they were so willing to let us go without a fight. No room to budge on rates or even suggest a alternative- Not sure if that was management or department based decision but it was certainly enlightening.

<comment><USER22> Affiliate marketing involves so much scams and tricks that I can understand they are limiting it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I spend a lot of time with Etsy sellers, all one-person micro-businesses creating fully-handcraft items.

They tell me there are three major problems that are all interconnected: 1) search is poor, 2) cheap knockoffs swamp the search results, 3) there's no obvious way to emphasize truly handcraft items.

All the sellers are experimenting with alternate platforms, such as Shopify, Wordpress, Wix, etc.

<comment><USER24> You have only half the picture because the three problems you've listed have existed for quite some time.

Here are some new problems that are driving more sellers off Etsy:

4) October 2013: Etsy redefines "handcrafted" and allows Etsy sellers to get "help" with making and shipping their items. [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/opinion/etsys- industrial-r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/opinion/etsys-industrial- revolution.html)

5) September 2015: Etsy openly embraces mass manufacturing [https://www.wired.com/2015/09/etsy-embraces-mass- manufacturi...](https://www.wired.com/2015/09/etsy-embraces-mass- manufacturing/)

6) October 2016: Etsy forces sellers to enroll in Google Shopping ads and spend their own money promoting their items. On the surface it looks innocent enough but most sellers are not sophisticated enough to run their own ad campaigns. They expected Etsy to provide that service as a marketplace. With no traffic coming in from Google any more, sales have tanked. [https://blog.etsy.com/news/2016/introducing-google- shopping-...](https://blog.etsy.com/news/2016/introducing-google-shopping-ads- for-etsy-sellers/)

7) April 2017: Etsy forces sellers to direct all revenue to Etsy's own bank account (no more Paypal), or the seller can't sell on Etsy any more. [https://www.etsy.com/teams/7716/announcements/discuss/183258...](https://www.etsy.com/teams/7716/announcements/discuss/18325841/) The deadline to comply is May 17 so expect many shops to die on May 18 because shop owners are loath to turn over their bank account information and personal identity proof to Etsy. [https://www.etsy.com/teams/7722/discussions/discuss/18322006...](https://www.etsy.com/teams/7722/discussions/discuss/18322006/)

I can confirm that I know at least one seller who set up their shop on Shopify in January this year.

Here are some current Etsy forum threads discussing the situation from the point of view of the buyer as well as the seller:

Josh Silverman, Here's What You need to Know from Sellers [https://www.etsy.com/teams/7722/discussions/discuss/18351569...](https://www.etsy.com/teams/7722/discussions/discuss/18351569/)

Out of curiosity... reasons you won't buy from etsy stores? [https://www.etsy.com/teams/7722/discussions/discuss/18232946...](https://www.etsy.com/teams/7722/discussions/discuss/18232946/)

<comment><USER25> And... 8) Artists and craftsmen creating legitimate handcrafted products are under assault of [Chinease] mass manufacturers that appear to monitor items/craftsmen whose items sell fairly well only to offer their el-cheapo counterfeit / knock-off alternative of these same products. (*

This at least appears to be the case for a friend that is selling his handcrafted stuff in Etsy. And at least his experience seems to be that Etsy has done very little to curb this behavior even when reported to them.

(* caveat emptor - <USER2>

<comment><USER26> Yup, I've had a lot of stuff I make by hand get copied. Now my store has only a single listing up, and I use the Etsy app to show that item for sale and then de-list it when I make the sale. No sales actually happen online through Etsy. Makes my store stats look bad but I need to protect my designs.

<comment><USER24> So where do you actually make the sale? On your own website?

<comment><USER26> I basically use Etsy as a mobile storefront so I can display wares to people via my phone. Sale happens cash-in-hand, check, or credit card (I had to get my own reader since Etsy would never send me my plug-in card reader) then I just remove the listing on Etsy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I browsed and bought a lot of stuff off Etsy about 5 years ago. Anymore it's hard to find anything decent unless I discover someone's Etsy store by some other means. Which is becoming less and less frequent. I don't think I've purchased anything there for maybe a year.

<comment><USER28> My sister sells handmade art on etsy and she's seen a big drop in sales recently, and she's been looking at other places to sell on, where do you go to buy these things these days?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not sure if it's related to this, but I was scheduled to have an interview with them on 1/24/2017 for a Full Stack position, and an hour before our scheduled time, they sent me an email that "due to some changes in hiring priority this role is currently on hold", and cancelled the interview.

I wasn't too impressed :)

<comment><USER30> I interviewed with them just a few months ago for an analytics role - <USER3> friendly and intelligent people. I was impressed. #anecdotes

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This should have happened sooner but it took longer than they expected to knit a pink slip.

</comment><comment><USER32> Based on reading through all the comments, it sounds like Etsy should've never gone public. A lot of people saw this coming a mile away.

<comment><USER14> eh, etsy should've never gone public because etsy was trying to be a company that put "people above profits", which is extremely difficult to do as a public company. market backlash against that kind of sentiment is severe. see also: american airlines.

<comment><USER33> I scraped all the Etsy stores about 4 years ago and ~80% of stores had never sold more than 20 items. Ever. In aggregate over several years for many stores.

They started as "people above profits" but in reality it was all resellers because that's what did volume. They turned the other cheek and allowed them to take over. They eventually changed policies and alienated a lot of real artisans. That strategy boosted revenue of course but removed their core differentiator.

It's hard to turn down revenue and growth, even moreso when investors are involved. But like most empires, you eventually fall from overextension.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What's the deal with the "Activist investor" that is forcing these changes? Is this a common thing in the investment world? Does anyone have deeper insight into this?

<comment><USER35> Yahoo is a basic example of activist investing. Activist investors try to increase shareholder value in the companies they invest in, in any way possible, to achieve above average returns for their investors.

If that means burning down the house (e.g. selling a company in bits and pieces, or pushing certain strategic changes) then they will.

Apple has plenty of cash on their books. If an activist shareholder could somehow force them to spend all that cash on buybacks (-> significant share price increase), they can make a nice buck that way. That's actually what Carl Icahn did, over the last few years.

<comment><USER36> Yahoo was a bloated carcass by the time activist investors got involved. Cutting the fat, selling off parts, and returning some value to investors was the only fair outcome.

<comment><USER37> Yahoo stock price went up 400% in 5 years. Investors made out quite well.

<comment><USER38> ... almost entirely off their stake in BABA. YHOO was effectively just an ETF invested in just one stock, their actual business had negative value.

<comment><USER35> Meaning it was a good activist play? It was trading negatively because there was a chance Yahoo management would sell that BABA stake, and use that money to fund their operating business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > "We are fully prepared to take any actions we believe are necessary to > protect the best interests of all Etsy shareholders."

What exactly are they insinuating?

<comment><USER40> fuck everyone else who isn't a shareholder, especially you

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> If Etsy can't fix discoverability it's dead. It's the only problem. There's so much low quality, zero effort, dropshipped crap that there's no real value to the platform anymore.

</comment><comment><USER42> On a related note, how is Pinterest doing? How long can it survive as an independent social network. It focuses solely on one thing but how much is that pie growing?

<comment><USER28> I try to avoid Pinterest at all cost (as a user), it's filled with crap these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Thing is, even my favorite Etsy artists (I have bought five Unicorgis from Squidbrains...) I have found via social media and not through Etsy. If they were selling on their own website, Shopify or whatnot, my willingness to buy and discovery process would be the same. I just do not see the value in Etsy. I am sure there is some but I do not know what.

</comment><comment><USER44> Maybe ignorant question. Why would one choose Etsy over Amazon

<comment><USER45> Well, a consumer generally visits Amazon for cheap, not quality, goods. Etsy is supposed to be the place a consumer goes to purchase small batch, hand made, custom items.

<comment> j-walker Which, from my experience, isn't the case anymore. It's people selling cheap Chinese charms on some string.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I've put basically no work in marketing and no money in advertising yet I've got a lot of sales already in the last few years. I really hope they stick around a long time! eventually I want to take my shop seriously.

<comment><USER47> What are you selling?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is there any kind of conflict of interest when a board member names themselves CEO? Or is this considered OK in corporate governance circles? (Or is just "Beware when swimming with the sharks"?)

<comment><USER49> He is interim CEO. This is very common when a CEO is fired and there is no one internal to the company who is appropriate to take over. Someone has to do the job so the board member does it for a while while they look for someone to hire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I really think the start of a lot of marketplaces closing down. Facebook has become so easy to use and quick to list it will be dominant one

</comment><comment><USER51> Etsy alternative: [https://www.thegrommet.com/](https://www.thegrommet.com/)

</comment><comment><USER52> I moved away from Etsy once I started comparing prices to EBay . Products on Etsy is overpriced for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER53> Always dreadful to hear this.

Years of best practices in product/engineering in blogs (DevOps, I also remember their endless scrolling A/B tests!), youtube, conferences, then product doesn't work, company fires people.

</comment><comment><USER54> No monthly who's firing thread for may?

<comment><USER55> There was one today, but it seems to have disappeared.

<comment><USER56> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14247701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14247701)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Wow, this has been a bad day for tech stocks.

</comment><comment><USER58> Interesting in that I came up with the idea that is basically etsy in 2000 (as I'm sure thousands of others did), after noticing that various artist/artisan friends I had made after moving to Montana had no viable way to sell their work on the 'net. I still have the code for the site somewhere in my projects directory, called "asite" for "Artists' Site".

Anyway, I got distracted by an influx of work, a new baby, and ultimately other startup ideas.

Good to know I would have wasted my time trying to finish and launch that company...

<comment><USER59> Etsy is very successful overall. They've been dogged by poor management the entire time... Especially the founder. He had very confused visions that were wildly ambitious with ridiculous ideas, ignored the practicalities of the actual business they were in, and regularly shot himself, his staff and his customers in the foot.

I wish someone else had done it. The way this worked out has hurt the segment they tried to serve - small business artists who want to bring their work to the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Etsy should just die. They've been in a perpetual state of "not quite making it" for more than 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER61> Welcome to the bursting of the second tech bubble. It's been slow so far, but it'll accelerate soon. Hang on!

Why is it that on these threads, nobody seriously considers the possibility of a secular decline? Fundraising, after all, has slowed, real estate in south bay has softened, and interest rates are rising (making tech relatively less attractive). Not to mention the scandals that have erased billions; see Theranos. Look at Yik Yak collapsing. A few isolated incidents is to be expected, but there seems to be an emerging pattern.

There's a real possibility that articles like this reflect a real bubble bursting.

<comment><USER62> How is mismanagement and terrible user experience about the tech bubble bursting? How are you making that leap?

<comment><USER63> My guess is that the argument is because companies with mismanagement and terrible user experiences are getting gobs of funding and going public. Not that I necessarily agree, but I can see the argument.</comment></comment></comment>


Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers – EE Times - <AUTHOR> https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333090&_mc=RSS_EET_EDT <comment><USER2> I look forward to the day when Power 9 is less a dent than x86 is to my wallet. I'm serious, I do want a Raptor Engineering Talos II, but it's not within my current budget for easily accessible hardware.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same here. I can't just dedicate the same amount of money a high-end sure-to- work Xeon E5 machine would cost to an unproven machine I am not absolutely sure all my software will work seamlessly with, with results that would be transferable to the more common x86 servers my software runs on.

<comment><USER3> I presume you mean Xeon Gold (Skylake-Servers are the latest release. Intel just did away with the "E5" naming scheme).

Between Xeon Gold and AMD Epyc (or really: their stripped down HEDT cousins. Intel i9 or AMD Threadripper), I find it unlikely that I'd ever get something like the Power9.

AMD's Threadripper 1950X gives 16-cores / 32-threads, compatibility with x86. Granted, its in a "NUMA" configuration with some warts, but switching to x86-NUMA is probably way easier than switching to Power9.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

The main advantage to Power9 seems to be the NVLink, which is like 10x the bandwidth than PCIe 3.0 x16. So if you're decking your computers out with NVidia V100 GPUs and have a dataset which is shared between GPU and CPU compute, maybe its worth a test.

Otherwise, standard server x86 with GPGPU accelerated over PCIe x16 is probably good enough. We're talking about computers well over $10k+ before Power9 looks like a reasonable alternative.

<comment><AUTHOR> For fun and expensive toys, I'd probably indulge myself with a Xeon Phi-based machine. It probably looks and behaves more like a future x86 machine than a POWER9 box will ever do and there are at least some advantages in experiencing the future a decade or so before the other kids.

<comment><USER3> As far as accelerators go, NVidia CUDA architecture seems to be the way. The Power9 Summit Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Labs really is just an architecture to communicate more quickly with the massive number of NVidia cards that they're shoving into the machine.

I'm a bit bearish on the Xeon Phi myself. The rival supercomputer: Aurora Supercomputer at Argonne National Labratory, was supposed to be Xeon Phi based. But its late! Intel and Cray dropped the ball.

At least in the near future, it means that Summit (Power9 + NVidia CUDA) is beating out Intel (Xeon + Xeon Phi) with regards to USA Supercomputers.

<comment><AUTHOR> My desire for the Xeon Phi comes from the hunch programming it feels a lot like programming a top-of-the-line Xeon Platinum from 2028. Core counts have been steadily rising.

And since the latest models even have virtualization (which I need to work) so, at least for me, Phi is just one Intel GPU away from the perfect desktop workhorse.

Seymour will have to forgive me, but I think we're all plowing our fields with chickens now.

That and my side project of putting a dozen Octavo SoCs on a PCB along with a ethernet switch chip to build a single-board cluster. If only Intel had an Atom part with ethernet, RAM and USB in a single package...

<comment><USER3> >> That and my side project of putting a dozen Octavo SoCs on a PCB along with a ethernet switch chip to build a single-board cluster. If only Intel had an Atom part with ethernet, RAM and USB in a single package...

What's wrong with Intel NUC Board DE3815TYBE ?? Aside from the fact that you can get an i7 like NUC7i7DNBE.

I'd imagine the main benefit of GPUs / Xeon Phi accelerators are their communication structures and RAM. AMD Vega64 has HBM2 RAM. NVidia V100 has HBM2 RAM as well, and also is pushing the envelope with regards to "dynamic threading" for its SIMD cores.

Learning to use the LDS (AMD / OpenCL) or "Shared Memory" region (NVidia) is very different than Ethernet. You only get 32kB (AMD) or 48kB (NVidia) per compute unit, but it supports atomics. Furthermore, multiple "true" threads as well as SIMD-threads can read and write to the region at speeds that are absolutely bonkers. LDS / Shared Memory is comparable to L1 speeds.

Xeon Phi also has a shared memory region between cores, but I don't fully understand it.

As far as I can tell, the "future" is about extending atomic operations above and beyond the current norms. For example, PCIe allegedly supports some atomic operations now (allowing CPUs and Accelerators to efficiently share data in a way that supports concurrency). In OpenCL, this is "Coarse Grain Shared Virtual Memory", and I know NVidia has an equivalent (I forgot its name however).

In theory, Ethernet (1 Gbit / s to 10Gbit/s) could support atomic operations with sockets or something. But that's way slower than the LDS of an GPU Accelerator (8-bytes per cycle per shader. On the AMD Vega64, there are 64-compute units with a total of 4096 shaders. That gives the LDS a bandwidth of 32768 bytes per clock tick)

There are all sorts of restrictions on this theoretical limitation: memory banks, memory channels, and whatnot. Its also heavily SIMD-based (shaders within a compute unit are "ganged" and operate in lock step). And finally, resources contend with each other: LDS is shared between workgroups and ideally you want multiple workgroups functioning at a time. But clearly this methodology supports a ridiculous amount of parallelism that truly cannot be emulated with a bunch of CPUs connected by Ethernet.

<comment><AUTHOR> > What's wrong with Intel NUC Board DE3815TYBE ??

It's for the cluster thing. With a 24-port switch chip I can fit 23 of these SoCs on a Mini ITX with one outgoing Ethernet port.

On the Phi, all cores see all of the memory. It really looks like a puny version of a future Core i9 (or the 2028 Xeon Platinum). And it was the first one to have AVX 512, which is kind of nice.

I guess I like my computing less asymmetric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does power9's single threaded performance stack up against modern x86?</comment>


Ask HN: Please help - how to take decision? - <AUTHOR>

I am doing some research on some web based product and found couple of good implementation.
Matching those features is not a big deal but will take time to implement.
I don't know how to take decision whether should I go for it or not.
This happened lots of time with me, I came up with some problem and solution is already exist after then I don't know how to follow it.
Please suggest!!! <comment><USER2> If the solution already exists, then the market is being addressed. You have to bring something else to the market. How can you make it better than what exists. If you can't then find the next great thing.

Who has made a success by just copying something that is already out there. Particularly when you say you found other good implementations. If the other implementations sucked, then you'd have some opportunity.

There are LOTS of things that haven't been done. Keep looking and maybe you'll find yours.

</comment><comment><USER3> Susan Blackmore says genes evolve using the technique: copy, vary, select. All have you have here is market validation.

The issue is not implementation as odd as it sounds. Who is your market? How will you reach them economically and timely manner? Why will they either switch or if greenfield turn to your app? Those are the real questions to answer. Do the marketing plan. Talk to potential customer base and see if what they think since it is their wallet before you even build. If you do not know who to talk to and where to find them, this issue alone will sink you.

Now which part of this market is not being served either by quality, quantity, or price. Perhaps there are too many features for the price so a portion is not buying the current market. Perhaps there are feature that are needed for a particular niche that are not being served. Perhaps nichify for a particular group.

Also look at the supply chain in this industry. Who in this industry can also benefit that isn't?

All your experience is telling you have not done your homework and asking you to collect more info before investment - there is nothing wrong with that. That's a good thing.</comment>


Show HN: Links – Just focus on reading and leave it on us to find links - <AUTHOR> https://appsto.re/us/PuBV2.i

<comment><USER2> Autobalance, exactly my thoughts. I get it now too after a bit of help. It is Pandora/Spotify for articles! Love the UX! Keep up the good work

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting idea. And a simple clear UI. Wondering how your curation algorithms work. I like it!

</comment><comment><USER4> Aha! I get it now. This is like spotify for information. Interesting idea!

</comment><comment><USER5> Can you add a section for travel please....</comment>


Game of Thrones petition: nearly 500k demands season 8 remake - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/may/16/game-of-thrones-petition-got-season-8-remake <comment><USER2> And here's the counrer-petiton we truly need.

[https://www.change.org/p/people-in-general-remake-the- game-o...](https://www.change.org/p/people-in-general-remake-the-game-of- thrones-fanbase-with-better- fans?recruiter=69810407&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition)

<comment><AUTHOR> :)</comment></comment>


Mini-productivity tip: send a Gmail without getting distracted by your inbox - <AUTHOR>

Easily distracted by new email messages (or old ones that make you feel guilty for not replying) whenever you go to Gmail to send an email?
Try this: instead of going to Gmail directly and being confronted by your inbox as normal, create a web shortcut for this URL --
https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm
-- and click that instead. You'll get a clean, distraction-less Gmail compose new message screen. You can send your email and be on your way as if your inbox never existed. <comment><USER2> I do this too:) I've aliased this to the keyword "sendmail" in chrome by adding it as a search engine in preferences, so I can just type "sendmail" or "sendmail email@example.com" in the url bar.

However, an even higher win for me is aliasing search in the same way. I used to find that when I went into my email to look for a particular piece of info I would get so distracted by my inbox that I never ended up completing the task I was originally working on. I've aliased [https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#search/<searcht...](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#search/<searchterm>); to "ms <searchterm>", such that I can type "ms paypal" in my url bar and get all my recent paypal receipts without having to be tempted by my inbox first:)

My only frustration is that gmail is still so damn slow to load. I know they've spent a lot of time trying to make this fast (I spent about 2 years working on reducing latency on Google search), but they're still so far away from where they could be.

I really, really wish gmail loaded the html first, showing my inbox or search or whatever, and then loaded and attached all the javascript later. This could result in search level latencies for the initial load of data for the user to start looking at, even if it took a while longer to be fully interactive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very nice re: the search alias. Thanks for sharing that -- it was the next thing I was going to try to figure out. I just wish there was a way to get a Gmail search result without the sidebar with the number of unread emails in your inbox... To look or not to look... :-)

<comment><USER2> I think you can turn off that that unread number somewhere in the options. It still shows up in bold if there are unread emails, but it's a partial solution at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I used to have <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#compose> bookmarked to avoid needing 2 steps to write a mail, but then Gmail came out with their new compose box. But the above lets you avoid the sidebar entirely..

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks! That's a really cool tip! There are so many interesting features that Gmail (and many other Google products) has to offer. My favorites are everything that goes on behind the hood.</comment>


Show HN: Fun with Palindromes and Rust Iterators - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bluejekyll/palindrome-rs/blob/master/src/lib.rs <comment><USER2> I really like the zipper function. It seems like rust's standard lib if full of useful stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. After a year in the language, I'm now starting to reach for Iterators much more often to solve problems.

It's taken a while for this practice to register in my head and replace my classic array and stack fallbacks for similar problems.

I've never had so much fun with a language...

<comment><USER3> Today I reviewed some old Python code I'd written pre-Rust and was shocked at how stupid my mutation of the list during iteration was.</comment></comment></comment>


Kolab 3.1 alpha released with iRony - <AUTHOR> https://kolab.org/news/2013/07/16/kolab-3.1-alpha-released-irony

<comment><USER2> I really like that, rather than reinventing the wheel, Kolab integrates and improves existing software.

[http://www.kolab.org/community/upstream- communities](http://www.kolab.org/community/upstream-communities)

</comment><comment><USER3> This simply isnt PRISM proof.

Will people stop saying x is prism proof without actually thinking about it first. Until you are self hosted(in a physically secure location), with "perfect" encryption, with clear delineations of trust, its never going to be PRISM proof.

Where are your emails destined to go? PRISM.

Where is your server hosted? in the cloud? well hello PRISM, good bye private key.

<comment><USER4> I don't know about Kolab, but I'm really curious about this sort of attitude. You think the NSA can crack PGP?

<comment><USER5> At least according to snowden, PGP itself is secure , but client security is still awfull.And i believe anonimity(tor) is probably broken by the NSA.

But the question is: is the NSA willing to expose it's hand to spy on some occupy protestors ?</comment></comment></comment>


Election Party 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://elections.npr.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Worth checking out if you have a chromecast or if you're interested in seeing how news orgs are experimenting with delivering news via new means.</comment>