Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

romy.posterous.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#41

Post by earl »

jeremymims wrote: post #22
forkandwait wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For the life of me, I can't understand why craigslist has had this mentality." You mean the mentality that has created one of the top five websites ever? I mean EVER? ... Oh, that poor Craig, silly idealistic fellow...

No, not the mentality that created a large website. The mentality that keeps people from creating ways to view the data that benefit the website's users. Craigslist won the market. Now it's time to open up. If craigslist were solely out to monetize this website, that'd be fine. But they don't. They keep some things free and Craig has made a big deal about making money in the categories that needed a charge to prevent…

Craig has made it pretty clear in interviews that he likes the UI the way it is and wants it to stay that way. Reading interviews of Craig and Jim also make clear they attribute a lot of their success to intentionally not providing features. For better or for worse.

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#42

Post by luckydude »

I know Craig personally, slightly, we've been on panels together. I also know Jim and Susan, been to their place in the city, hung out.

I'm old, 47, been in the valley for 20+ years. Seen a lot of shit, seen a lot of people get screwed over in stock options, seen the good and seen the bad.

What I'm trying to do is establish credibility (prolly didn't do a good job). Whatever. You can listen or not.

Craig is good people. Really really good people. He cares, he does the right thing as much as he can do it. Craigslist could be at least 2 orders of magnitude more rich if they wanted to fuck you over. They haven't done that, they repeatedly try and take care of their users.

If you are unhappy with craig I pity you. Real life is going to fuck you.

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#43

Post by qeorge »

shawndrost wrote: post #39
jimboyoungblood wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craigslist nets tens of millions in profits each year, most of which I would assume ends up eventually in Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster's personal bank accounts. I would guess they are operating under the principle of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

It's very clear that their primary motivation is not money. It would be trivial for them to squeeze much more money from their service. Craig could also sell his company for more money than he could ever spend.

That's true, but they couldn't continue to run with the skeleton staff they currently do (30 people I believe). It would fundamentally change the nature of the business.

I agree with you that money is not the primary motivation, but I think the choice is more complex than simply opting in or out of potential revenue.

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#44

Post by hyperbovine »

Hold on here, let's call a spade a spade. Your project has its own doofy .com name, calls itself "alpha", and was rolled out on a web site whose primary function is to connect people who are trying to launch online business ventures. So to wave the bloody shirt after Craig stated that RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes are golden, is a little disingenuous.

As others have pointed out, Craig's whole m.o. appears to be preventing people from building for-profit businesses on top of his site. Craig is anti-business. That's his prerogative. You obviously disagree with his philosophy, but a difference of opinion is not cause to go around calling somebody evil. He's done more good through his site and the $$ he generates off his site (which gets plowed into his foundation) than you, me and the next 100 people who read this combined.

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#45

Post by mmagin »

As a random datapoint: Back when I used bloglines, I had subscribed to some searches with them, and after a few weeks, it stopped working. Craigslist seems to block anyone who hits a given rss feed much.

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#46

Post by hyperbovine »

jeremymims wrote: post #22
forkandwait wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For the life of me, I can't understand why craigslist has had this mentality." You mean the mentality that has created one of the top five websites ever? I mean EVER? ... Oh, that poor Craig, silly idealistic fellow...

No, not the mentality that created a large website. The mentality that keeps people from creating ways to view the data that benefit the website's users. Craigslist won the market. Now it's time to open up. If craigslist were solely out to monetize this website, that'd be fine. But they don't. They keep some things free and Craig has made a big deal about making money in the categories that needed a charge to prevent…

"The correct moves"? Hah. It's very easy to sit around armchair quarterbacking how you would run a site that gets about four orders of magnitude more traffic than the most successful thing you have ever created. (In fact, it appears to be something of a pastime among bored, underemployed web developers, cf. "You're Killing Me Zappos" or that one about the American Airlines web site.) I fail to see what authority you have to prescribe strategy to somebody who figured out a way to get 50 million unique visitors a month. Your assertions aside, there's not a shred of evidence that what you say is right, and that what Craig Newmark does is wrong.

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#47

Post by skolor »

You know, I was playing with a couple scripts (mainly Markov chain implementation), that used Craigslist as a source for data. I got a good ways into it, and got a working model (I could generate text based on the handful of inputs I had set up for it). It wasn't until that point (I know, stupid) that I went back through all the ToS and realized I really couldn't do that.

Now, I know I might be able to get some where with them if I tried emailing them, and asked for the data I wanted. Then again, it sounds like I probably wouldn't. Either way, while the data was surprising well suited for what I wanted to do, it isn't really available, at least not in any way I could actually use it.

It makes me kind of sad every time I see someone do something like this. You've created something super cool, something with tons and tons of data. For what I was using it for (localized text samples), I can't think of a better, more complete place to find data from. But when you see something cool, something you never thought of/never thought was important enough to implement, and go out of your way to squash it, it makes the part of me that loves data feel bad about it. Craiglist has, at any given time, literally gigs of written text with all sorts of metadata on it. In the short bit I processed, I took all of the data from just a handful of boards, and ended up with over 150mb of data. Considering that most of that was (As a side note, anyone with a bunch of written text samples, with information as to where each of them was written, I would really like to talk to you. Actually, that goes for anyone with any sizeable amount of data. Just because you don't see a use for it doesn't meant that there isn't someone out there who would absolutely love to get their hands on it.)

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#48

Post by slay2k »

hyperbovine wrote: post #44

Hold on here, let's call a spade a spade. Your project has its own doofy .com name, calls itself "alpha", and was rolled out on a web site whose primary function is to connect people who are trying to launch online business ventures. So to wave the bloody shirt after Craig stated that RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes are golden, is a little disingenuous. As others have pointed out, Craig's whole m.o. appears to b…

It would only be disingenuous if there was any kind of commercial aspect to the site as it stands. There was none, and "rolling it out" on HN is merely asking for feedback, not trying to sign up paid users.

In the email exchange I've had with Craig, not all of which I've posted, I've asked him to clarify on this point:

"Oh, and about being noncommercial. A bunch of the RSS mashup sites I've seen, like Craiglook, throw up advertising presumably to cover server costs or make a few bucks. If I didn't want to go that route, would asking for donations be acceptable ?"

In his response, he said he can ask. I said please do, and that was the end of it. So for CL to break things when there is absolutely no sign of commercial purpose is a little unnecessary in my eyes.

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#49

Post by natrius »

luckydude wrote: post #42

I know Craig personally, slightly, we've been on panels together. I also know Jim and Susan, been to their place in the city, hung out. I'm old, 47, been in the valley for 20+ years. Seen a lot of shit, seen a lot of people get screwed over in stock options, seen the good and seen the bad. What I'm trying to do is establish credibility (prolly didn't do a good job). Whatever. You can listen or not. Craig is good peop…

This comment is a giant logical fallacy.

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#50

Post by slay2k »

luckydude wrote: post #42

I know Craig personally, slightly, we've been on panels together. I also know Jim and Susan, been to their place in the city, hung out. I'm old, 47, been in the valley for 20+ years. Seen a lot of shit, seen a lot of people get screwed over in stock options, seen the good and seen the bad. What I'm trying to do is establish credibility (prolly didn't do a good job). Whatever. You can listen or not. Craig is good peop…

Thank you for the life lesson luckydude, but I'd prefer an explanation from Craig or Jim themselves.
Post reply on HN