Yes she also willfully misread “mass produced goods” and asked me why I didn’t think Chinese artisans should use etsy for their handmade goods, a classic loaded question and a position I have never taken.
The mass produced goods — that didn’t belong on Etsy — were literally from China. Calling something Chinese doesn’t make it racist.
I don't know where to dm you, so I'll do this here:
I really shouldn't have posted this submission.
Ghost is a relatively big platform that I've always kept in consideration for projects. I was so shocked by the situation and the discovery that something similar happened in the past that I went "people need to know this!" disregarding how out of place it'd be to blast the thread here. Thankfully it was flagged quickly, but it shouldn't have been up to begin with.
I really appreciate you saying that. Don’t worry about it, it’s not causing me any distress and I’m too sick to do anything productive right now anyway.
But this place is a cesspit. This is actually a better experience than I would’ve expected from years before, and it’s still terrible. Just something to take away from the experience.
As I said at the time, I don't think she was willfully misreading you; I think she was suggesting you might be fallible. Because I said that, you've had me blocked on Twitter for eight years, which kind of amounts to conceding Star's original point.
I'm sort of puzzled about where you think the mass-produced artisan goods on AliExpress come from. Like, presumably we're not talking about goods like "one ton of calcium chloride" or "1MW supercritical steam generator", right? We're talking about the kinds of goods that Chinese artisans hand-make en masse and sell on AliExpress, things like furniture and decorations, right?
“mass produced hand made artisan goods” is not a thing. You’re inventing things and putting words in my mouth, just like you did originally, which is why you’re blocked. No, you can’t put words in someone’s mouth and say “you blocked me so it’s true” either.
I didn't put any words in your mouth in the original thread. If anyone had a legitimate complaint about that, it would be Star; you did put words in her mouth, and I suggested that you might be mistaken about your interpretation. Here are my tweets in full:
> Is it possible @starsandrobots did read your tweet, and simply thought you were fallible?
> I thought her point was actually pretty interesting: is Etsy a reasonable outlet for Chinese artisans? Could it be? How?
And then, in response to your accusations against Star:
> It's possible that might be in her heart, but doesn't seem certain to me.
And then (though this was hard to find) I posted this, but I'm not sure what it refers to; maybe someone said "for shame" in a tweet that's been deleted:
> I mean, it's possible that Chinese artisans who mass-handmake things and post them on Etsy will run into "for shame" even if not yet
And then, in response to a now-lost tweet from an extremely bizarre account that I now suspect was a Russian troll (flip-flopped from fervent support of Black Lives Matter to suddenly being some kind of alt-right account):
> @AmyStephen You're using these terms as if they're opposites, but I don't think they are. cc @amyhoy
(I just found those last two tweets and added them to this comment.)
That's the whole thread!
After that, you blocked us both, apparently for eight years.
Anyone can read this (at least, if they log into HN and turn on "showdead" in their profile, since my comments are getting flagged) and see that what I'm saying is true and what you're saying is not true, and moreover that you were doing what you falsely accused me of doing, so I don't know why you are posting these comments. Maybe you just think people are really easy to fool?
As for mass-produced handmade artisan goods, I'm not sure how you think mass production works in factories, but it generally involves a great deal of handmaking, much of which is done by artisans. There are exceptions, like JLCPCB and chemical plants, but I think their goods are not the kind that would sell best on Etsy. A lot of the totally unskilled assembly-line work, like what I did when I worked in a bubblebath factory, has been long since automated. What's left is largely skilled artisan work like investment casting.
Factory-created mass-produced handmade artisan goods? You're working really hard to misinterpret their tweet.
Do you expect people to think of skilled artisans working on handmade goods when they hear mass production? Because upon reading Wikipedia [1] or a dictionary [2], I'd think of factories, assembly lines, machinery and automation.
Etsy is a site that advertises carefully crafted handmade goods from independent creators, that are often custom and unique. They were looking for non-mass-produced handmade goods and found mass-produced goods from China instead. That's a mundane factual observation that couldn't be made clearer.
You're not really making your case here. Reading your flagged comments is not as flattering as you seem to believe.
> Factory-created mass-produced handmade artisan goods? You're working really hard to misinterpret their tweet.
You seem to have seized on a minor peripheral point and worked very hard to rebut it, I suppose because you want to take Hoy's side. But the entire original tweet thread except for Hoy's first tweet was about non-mass-produced goods from China, so the question of whether we should count mass-produced goods produced by skilled artisans working on an assembly line as "handmade artisan goods" is pretty much entirely beside the point.
In fact, the whole factual question there is beside the point. The reason this is at all relevant is that we're talking about Hoy's conflict with Ghost; her tendency to go nuclear and treat people very poorly over minor issues, as amply demonstrated here, is the relevant thing. There are people who applaud that sort of thing, which probably explains most of the appeal of Twitter. It looks like you're one of them.
Me, I'm sick of it, and I don't think this kind of behavior should be welcome here.
> But the entire original tweet thread except for Hoy's first tweet was about non-mass-produced goods from China
If I tweeted something and then a bunch of randoms started reply-guy arguing in my notifications about a straw man they'd made up, I'd block the lot of them forever too.
Every post you've made here is making you look even worse.
Minor peripheral point? The whole original thread was arguing about a point that wasn't made in the first tweet. They never claimed nor implied non-mass-produced goods from China were an issue. Replies created that point out of nowhere and you are using the fabricated discussion to paint them as somehow problematic.
Etsy (certainly back then, afaik they've sort-of given up on that by now: hard to police and bad for growth - turns out mass-production gives more turnover) was very much about things hand-made by seller. The promise was that you don't get people selling stuff they bought from factories on Ali[baba|Express] and claiming it's something they've handmade - in 2013 they had just allowed outsourcing production steps for the first time, if you documented who did exactly what step, so no buying things (handmade or not) and just reselling them. Nevertheless, that's what you get, X shops selling the exact same thing they supposedly made (or selling them with small customizations done, which was OK according to the rules but plenty people still disliked), and Etsy was pushing "integrity updates" and promising to better police this. And that wasn't in any way about Chinese people, because obviously if people are reselling massproduced stuff the problem is not the worker who made them. Nor are Chinese artisans selling their own product a problem, but I don't think that was a large group on the market anyways.
Of course nobody should resell things on Etsy that they merely bought, but there was nothing to suggest that Hoy was complaining about reselling; instead, she seemed to be suggesting that Chinese artisans who mass-produced things shouldn't sell them on Etsy. My reading of Hoy's reasoning at the time was "artisan = white person", so I tried to provoke some questioning of that assumption, and got blocked for my trouble. Certainly she had the opportunity to clarify at the time if that wasn't what she was talking about.
Rejecting the leading question clarified that quite nicely. And really, the jump of "could she be talking about the main Etsy point of complaints right now? No, way more likely she's just racist" is a crap starting assumption to make.
How am I supposed to know what the "main Etsy point of complaints" is, or was? I haven't talked to Kellan in years, I don't know if he even still works there.
I do pretty frequently see people making the "Chinese = impure" association, though. Maybe I should spend less time on places like this website, which would diminish my exposure to that kind of crap.
I don't think "reread what I wrote" clarifies anything. It leaves the interpretation entirely up to the reader, which is helpful when you're dog-whistling racism, counterproductive if you're trying to clearly express an idea that someone actually misunderstood.
So, I think your interpretation of the original tweet is plausible, particularly given the context you have—which I didn't have. But Hoy's response undermines your interpretation pretty strongly.
> so I tried to provoke some questioning of that assumption, and got blocked for my trouble. Certainly she had the opportunity to clarify at the time if that wasn't what she was talking about.
What would be the point of clarifying to you if you jumped in with those assumptions? She doesn’t owe you anything. Blocking someone like that seems like the right call.
You asked, "So you purposely provoked her instead of asking for reasonable clarification?"
No, to "provoke questioning" is to induce someone to re-examine something they thought they knew; it's not the same as "provoking a person", which means to intentionally offend them, which I wasn't doing. In fact, as you can see, I was very careful to phrase my questioning in as deferential and inoffensive a way as possible. And the particular way I was trying to provoke questioning was specifically by asking for reasonable clarification—clarification which apparently led somewhere she didn't want to go. It's good to see that she's now explicitly rejecting racism against Chinese people, which is something she wasn't willing to do eight years ago.
So you think you were trying to teach me with socratic dialogue by calling me racist? rather than asking, oh I don’t know, “what kind of goods”?
You made your decision — you called me racist then and now — and now you’re dishonestly trying to pretend it was more complicated and actually for my own good, really, when you think about it.
It’s super transparent tho so I appreciate all your replies that show just how twisted you’ve got it
I can’t reply to your nth nested comment so I’ll do it here.
You did call me racist, just like you did today. That’s how I knew EXACTLY which tweet it was 8 years later. Tweets can be deleted. I certainly don’t remember YOU as a person, you’re nobody to me.
You are being dishonest. You consistently saying things about me that are untrue. There was no racist tweet, I didn’t block Star — just you — and I didn’t flag your posts, among other lies.
You are using loaded questions and statements to try to assassinate my character.
You’re claiming I abuse people by blocking them.
You think you’re entitled to my tweets and attention. You fantasize we have some sort of relationships where I owe you conversation.
You’re obsessed with something that happened nearly a decade ago.
Bottom line: You need to stop talking about me and to me. I told you stop already and I’m telling you again: Stop.
I didn't actually call you racist then, as anyone who reads the Twitter thread can see; it's easy to see that the things that I'm saying are true, and the things that you're saying are not true. Even Star didn't call you racist. But (if I recall correctly) I knew that the line of questioning would quickly lead to you either having to take an explicitly racist position (which you'd probably be uncomfortable with) or strategizing on how to reduce the impact of racism (which you'd be even more uncomfortable with, if you were racist).
It's true that instead of asking, "What kind of goods?" I asked you whether you thought Etsy was a reasonable venue for Chinese artisans to sell their wares, which seems to me like a question you could have easily answered by explaining what kind of goods, saying something like "Of course, but people in North Carolina are reselling injection-molded Chinese toys like https://t.co/something." Instead, you blocked us both for eight years and counting, so I concluded that the discussion was leading someplace you didn't want to go, so you actually were just racist.
And now you're responding to me telling the story of how you treat people by smearing me as "dishonest" and "weird", which seems entirely in keeping with the kind of aggressive behavior that the whole discussion thread is about.
I really don't think that kind of behavior is the kind of behavior we strive for here, although I guess probably whoever is flagging all of my comments disagrees with that.
I see Star misinterpreting/extrapolating from the original tweet but (sort of) backpedaling or backing off relatively quickly, and you escalating and derailing the already tense situation with "interesting topics" Amy clearly doesn't want to discuss, then being whiny about this block 8 years later. Check yourself my dude. Amy does sound pretty annoyed in that thread from the start, but you were just pushing it further.
Just caught up on this thread, but just to reiterate what Amy said elsewhere and to refute your response that I can't reply to because it's flagged like basically everything else: She did not block Star.
Dude are you mad I deprived you of my tweets for 8 years, or are you mad I’m supposedly a racist? You can’t have it both ways. This is weird. You should stop.
I don’t think it’s in good faith to accuse someone of using multiple accounts to flag your comments without any basis and I believe this type of behavior is directly in violation of the guidelines of HN.
Claiming I refused to “explicitly reject racism” “eight years ago” is a loaded statement. You might as well accuse me of having refused to deny I was beating me wife. That would also be true. And it would also be dishonest and manipulative.
