Saturday, November 7, 2009

Unleashing a Firestorm on Myself

I don't have a photo to share today but if I did, it would be me scratching my head in disbelief.

I learned a painful lesson this week and it has NOTHING to do with yarn. The ancient flower child in me still loves a good protest so I made the mistake of trying to enlist fellow Ravelers in my fight to send Ebay the message that making fun of knitting and homemade gifts in general was not cool for a business that supplies crafters with craft materials. I had visions of millions of us hand crafters storming the Ebay castle with torches and pitchforks-but that is not exactly what happened.

Apparently, I am a giant crochet hating hufflebutt with no self esteem or sense of humor. The fact that I even saw a commercial because I watch TV leaves my intelligence suspect. And those are just some of the nicer comments I got.

Wowsa.

People can sure be mean.

This week Ravelry welcomed their 500,000th member and that could have been quite a force to be dealt with if the urge to fight Ebay was as strong as the urge to snark at each other. I have no idea how I became the bad guy in all this but I do know one thing: I am NEVER going near those forums again. It's a time warp back to high school. All name calling and hair pulling. Too bad.

I suppose Ebay knows the knitting demographics better then I do. You don't launch an expensive ad campaign without doing your homework. They knew who to attack and what the outcome would be. So I give up. If people start sniffing your handmades to see if they smell like church-you can't blame me. I tried.

2 comments:

  1. Oh well, lesson learned. Some people have the need to show their truly ugly side when they know they can hide behind a screen name. Be happy that you have the option to never ever have contact with these unhappy people ever again. Life is way to short to deal with that kind of crap!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I continue to be stunned by some of the comments that are left on the main boards on ravelry.(I avoid Remnants like the plague) Here you are, sticking up for our craft, and you get railed upon. I was blown away. I sure hope I never meet these people in real life. Life is definitely too short to spend any of it on them!

    ReplyDelete