How does one go about upsetting this giant in the marketplace? Everyone wants a better craigslist, but it's useless if they don't have the content.
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Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
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Re: Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
#12Here's hoping Craigslist dies. The good news is: it is already dying(albeit slowly, one category at a time.)
I accidentally downvoted you, meant to upvote!
Craigslist doesn't even do a half-assed job trying to keep spam off, it has officially settled into the same place as eBay for me: a big, slow, shitty incumbent.
Re: Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
#13The biggest thing that pisses me off about CL regarding house/apt listings is that they don't require addresses! How is their mapping feature supposed to work well if 70% of the listings are all grouped together with just the city name? No wonder people are trying to fork their business.
How do the scrapers solve that problem? They scrape an address of "City". Now what?
Re: Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
#14Here's hoping Craigslist dies. The good news is: it is already dying(albeit slowly, one category at a time.)
I don't. It is one of very few platform that don't bother me with all the clutter other websites have. No log-ins, subscribe-me, buy-premium, click-this-ad bs. It just delivers relevant information straight to the point.
Re: Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Start super niche and expand in concentric circles, I guess. It's tough because people don't exactly look for new houses every single day so coming up in their brain as the app/site of choice when they do need a new house/apt is difficult. I would hate to do a "better apartment finder" startup in this space (airbnb excluded). I think craigslist grew pretty slowly over the course of a decade, right? Not sure there's a…
You might almost need to loss lead for years, paying people in some fashion to bring content. e.g., dress up listings similar to the way Airbnb sends out their photographer to shoot your place professionally, or Uber is subsidising drivers to establish a foothold. If you did car sales (as a bad example), you could handle the entire process for customers - sending out a photographer, building the listing and researchi…
Part of what attracts people to places like craigslist/gumtree is that you do it all yourself, though - it's easy to just take a couple of photos and provide a few details to advertise a car or house sale without a third party. If I wanted to have professionals take care of it I'd go to a sales garage or an estate agent.
Re: Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
#16How does one go about upsetting this giant in the marketplace? Everyone wants a better craigslist, but it's useless if they don't have the content.
I built a small CL scraper for a school project. I only used it a couple of times to make sure it worked before submitting it.
A few months later my whole class, including the instructor, received cease and desist letters from CL. They had found our code on Github and demanded we take it lest we face legal consequences.
So apparently it's quite easy to piss of CL.
Re: Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
#17Had a similar project that monitored CL and sent alerts. Got and C&D, talked to a few lawyers and gave up.
At least CL has an alert system now.
Re: Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might almost need to loss lead for years, paying people in some fashion to bring content. e.g., dress up listings similar to the way Airbnb sends out their photographer to shoot your place professionally, or Uber is subsidising drivers to establish a foothold. If you did car sales (as a bad example), you could handle the entire process for customers - sending out a photographer, building the listing and researchi…
Part of what attracts people to places like craigslist/gumtree is that you do it all yourself, though - it's easy to just take a couple of photos and provide a few details to advertise a car or house sale without a third party. If I wanted to have professionals take care of it I'd go to a sales garage or an estate agent.
People do it themselves because the garage or agent charges a fee. I'm saying that to tackle an incumbent, you could offer that service (and better) for free to win customers across.
I disagree that it's easy to take decent photos and then deal with a sales process (fielding calls, negotiating, etc). I have dozens of things I could sell but don't because it's too much effort and I don't have time.
Re: Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
#19I talked with a friend of a friend one evening about his couple year old startup. He had taken a good chunk of money from VC for the sole purpose of fighting legal battles. His IP sounded novel & interesting, but the incumbent was suing anyway.
It's a money game.
Re: Craigslist, 3taps settle scraping/antitrust suits with $1M donation to EFF
#20Here's hoping Craigslist dies. The good news is: it is already dying(albeit slowly, one category at a time.)
It's pretty decent at what it does, though...?
It solves the problem. It's ugly, sure, but a whole lot of people derive value from it, and that's what matters.