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The National

Hostile takeover of craft groups by Tedooo app is soul-destroying

The project in question is a hollowed-out piece of log housing a woodland scene complete with hand-sculpted hedgehog and owl. It's fake, obviously. The photo is fake, the sob story is fake, and there's another tell-tale sign that it's fake – the part of the story that mentions 'the Tedooo app'. READ MORE: Scottish ice rink to close due to 'spiralling energy costs' Anyone who is a member of a craft or DIY Facebook group will be familiar with those three infuriating little words. Over the past five years, countless thriving communities have been taken over by this Israeli start-up, which calls itself 'the first social-commerce platform dedicated and customised for the handmade, crafts and DIY communities'. Members are then spammed with content that is either AI-generated fakery, or stolen from other online sources. In some cases, long-established groups with hundreds of thousands of members appear to have been bought from their previous owners and renamed accordingly. In others, the takeover is more stealthy, with the original moderators switching to posting Tedooo-promoting spam. The post with the sad boy was shared on 'DIY Crafty Fun & Crafters on the Tedooo app!', a group with one million members, by a moderator named Artur Zamber, who appears to be an elderly Russian with 18 Facebook friends. The post has 31,000 reactions and nearly 6000 comments, most complimenting the fake boy on his implausible skills. While some may be from bots, many others are from real people. READ MORE: Banned tall ship seen floating near Buckie harbour You might be thinking, who cares? If gullible folk want to waste their time on such nonsense, let them. But the extent to which Tedooo has disrupted and destroyed groups for creative people is driving members to distraction, and the site's unethical practices are having real-world negative impacts. 'The paid pattern sharing in their groups is rife,' says Bea King, an Aberdeen-based crafter who sells crochet patterns under the brand name cottontail&whiskers Ltd. King made direct contact with Tedooo's founder, Michelle Apelker, to have her products taken down, as the app had no copyright infringement system in place. Pictures of King's wonderfully detailed creations have also been pinched and used as false advertising on groups taken over by Tedooo, and she's in contact with many others who have had the same experiences. 'No-one knows exactly how they got all the groups,' she says. 'That bit is a mystery.' Another maker, Shropshire-based Laura Sutcliffe, has also been in direct contact with Apelker, to complain that her patterns and those of many others were being shared in the chat section of the Tedooo app itself. Apelker's response amounted to little more than a shrug. 'There's groups with hundreds of thousands of members. The groups made by private people. And they are managing their own groups.' READ MORE: Perth artist to sell Harris Tweed designs at major event this weekend She suggested that the same culprits were undoubtedly sharing copyrighted material on other social media platforms too, so Sutcliffe should take it up with them directly. When Sutcliffe pushed back, saying Apelker should take responsibility for the activities on her own app, her Tedooo account was suspended. Venture capital firm Stardom Ventures, which has funded Tedooo to the tune of at least $2 million, proclaims that it looks for 'rebels who want to revolutionise the way we create and consume media'. Tedooo is certainly doing that, by ruining users' experiences, permitting content theft and either driving people out of long-established groups or sucking them in with time-wasting trickery. The process of 'enshittification' of an online platform, as first articulated by journalist Cory Doctorow in 2022, comprises three stages: 'first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those [[business]] customers to claw back all the value for themselves.' It's difficult to see quite how this applies to Tedooo's business model, given the limited evidence that the app itself has many satisfied customers (except perhaps those looking for stolen crochet patterns). Its aggressive marketing might prompt intrigued new users to sign up, but surely it proceeds to alienate them by ruining their favourite communities. Unless, of course, the initial sign-up – and the data surrendered – is where the value lies. Among the infiltrated groups are those offering low-budget DIY and decorating tips, which were once an invaluable resource for people trying to maximise bedroom space for their children or make their homes more accessible to disabled family members. Now that the vast majority of posts are spam, featuring stolen content, any questions posed in the comments go unanswered. Close inspection of many pictures showing space-saving 'hacks' reveals them to be physically impossible. It's sad to see these wholesome, positive spaces captured, and trust among users broken. Hopefully those that have resisted the Tedooo takeover will survive and thrive.