Tell HN: An update from the new Tindie team
The new Tindie team has faced criticism for a lack of transparency regarding their ownership and operations. Concerns have been raised about the legitimacy of their registered address, which appears to be an empty plot of land. Additionally, many sellers are unable to access their funds, raising legal and ethical questions about the company's practices.
- ▪The new owners of Tindie are associated with a shell corporation linked to an existing company in China.
- ▪Sellers have been unable to withdraw their funds, leading to frustration and potential legal issues.
- ▪The registered address for the company is an empty lot, which raises concerns about compliance with U.S. laws.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945522 |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:16:37 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-29T08:56:54.493Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-29T08:56:54.493Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | BPgRZB-kizZa |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
> “It was decided”Ah yes, definitely the language of an organization that totally wants to communicate with candor.Also zero information about the new owners other than the name of a shell corp associated with an existing "EETree" company in Jiangsu, China that gets (mis?)represented as “a Washington State company”. Much honest, such wow. Sure, there's technically an LLC in Washington, but that's like calling pre-2020 Google "a Bermuda company" (which, tbf, is what Google did to avoid taxes via their Irish ~~subsidiary~~ "parent" company).And still no information, remarks, or even acknowledgement for all the tindie sellers who’ve been unable to withdraw their funds.The address listed at https://ccfs.sos.wa.gov/ ( 1475 NW SWENSON CT, POULSBO, WA, 98370 ) is shown on Google Maps as just…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.