Governing whose products are cooperative and defective within the market seems like a hard problem, and the same problem that forum moderators have, but mostly because the people doing it are adopting the wrong principles. If a defective participant can make an appeal to external/exogenous market principles, there's nothing the regulator can do. The artists markets (and forums) that do thrive are the ones ruled by direct curation to enforce sanctions on defective and noncooperative parties.<p>This is a general problem with any artisanal market, where artists who have made an investment in their craft attract crowds, and crowds attract opportunists who defect from the rule of cooperation that makes the artists market viable. The whole principle of competition is that it's only competition if you are playing by the same rules. Imo, artist markets resemble more of a co-operate/defect game theory model than a simple economic market competition model. In an artisanal market, the co-operation rules are unfortunately, tacit, and rubes will reward the honest players and defective/dishonest ones alike.<p>That it sucks implies there is an opportunity, likely for a federated curation model that looks more like a department store than the landfills of etsy and amazon.<p>Honest signals of quality and cooperation are necessarily discriminatory, and dishonest/defective parties (ones who do not cooperate) have the aggregate effect of increasing these signalling costs on quality goods to where the signalling out-prices its utility.<p>Regulation comes into play when dishonest parties increase the signalling costs so much that it destroys the market for the products, and parties have to decide whether the regulatory/moderation costs are lower than the signalling costs, or to abandon the market altogether, which in the case of Etsy, they often do. This is why Etsy is full of scammy junk. They have a curation and moderation problem they are not equipped to solve.<p>Ironically, what makes curation and moderation good is that it doesn't scale well at all, even negatively, but that's what makes it scarce and valuable - unlike anything available on Etsy. Maybe that's the lesson.