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Bye Bye Craigslist

blog.padmapper.com

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Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#181

Post by kalininalex »

eli wrote: post #160
nottombrown wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Housing, where location is easily the most important factor, is where Craigslist is least usable as a product. Padmapper's success is a testament to Craigslist's users wanting something better. This is a big middle finger to all those users.

I agree with you, but if PadMapper is really that much better, what's stopping them from getting users to post directly on their site?

Network effect. Sellers go to CL because that's where the buyers are, and buyers go to CL because that's where the sellers are. Other features come in play after that. Once the network effect sets in it's almost impossible to unseat the incumbent: eBay, Linked-in, Facebook, Craigslist, etc. The dominant company has 90%+ share, and can stay that way forever doing very little.

eBay, for example, hasn't changed its (rather mediocre) interface in years, and managed to alienate at least some sellers with their policies. And yet, no one managed to make a dent in eBay's position.

Network effect is the reason there is funding for a million social network start-ups. Everyone wants to capture it. But the odds of success, on the other hand, are also one in a million.

I believe there was a post recently on HN where someone pointed out how these things work - one day it just takes off. Some combination of factors (three out of 100, perhaps) gets right and people flock to the site. And then the fate is sealed. Even in retrospect it's often impossible to say what factors were the key. So, I wouldn't be surprised if founders of Craigslist have little clue as to why it worked.

I'd be really really interested to see what it takes for someone to unseat Craigslist (or eBay, or any other major network).

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#182

Post by eli »

kalininalex wrote: post #181
eli wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but if PadMapper is really that much better, what's stopping them from getting users to post directly on their site?

Network effect. Sellers go to CL because that's where the buyers are, and buyers go to CL because that's where the sellers are. Other features come in play after that. Once the network effect sets in it's almost impossible to unseat the incumbent: eBay, Linked-in, Facebook, Craigslist, etc. The dominant company has 90%+ share, and can stay that way forever doing very little. eBay, for example, hasn't changed its (rat…

I think there's more to it than that. I know people for whom craigslist is one of the very few websites they interact with. It's a very different demographic from the one that hangs on HN. I think this is a big factor in the CL design and the reluctance to change it.

I also think the network effect is being overstated in this instance. eBay has much stronger lock-in because I can't list my item in more than one auction at a time. But I can certainly list my apartment in more than one service.

I already check the local paper in addition to CL when looking for an apartment. If I'm looking for a bargain, I'm fine with shopping around.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#183

Post by phaus »

kylelibra wrote: post #156

For those wishing to take action: jim@craigslist.org – Jim Buckmaster, CEO craig@craigslist.org – Craig Newmark, Founder @jimbuckmaster on twitter - http://twitter.com/jimbuckmaster @craignewmark on twitter - http://twitter.com/craignewmark Simple email to copy and paste: Jim and Craig, I'm a longtime user of Craigslist, but I'm really disappointed in your decision regarding PadMapper. It would be great if you could…

Good luck, but I doubt it will work.

My first experience with craigslist was trying to figure out why they had the capability to block my wife's ad for a free dog that contained a mispelled word while the site's creator was busy trying to tell the government that there was nothing he could do about the many child prostitution ads that appeared on craigslist.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#184

Post by GigabyteCoin »

ericd wrote: post #171
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #103

I expected padmapper to be shut down a long time ago. Mainly because they are an incredible threat to the websites they are scraping all of their data from. That's probably why padmapper has no way of making money at the moment. They were hoping they could slink by, stealing other's content, until they were eventually big enough for people to warrant visiting them to list their apartments for rent. And then sell ads.…

You're right, I was hoping I could go on, but I wasn't stealing anyone's content, I was posting links pasted geographically located with stat summaries. Look at a listing on PadMapper - there's no listing text, and when you click through, it goes to the original listing.

My apologies. I may have used some improper wording there.

But if I may... you must admit that you have taken "something" from Craigslist.

Whatever you want to call it... be it geographical location points, links-to-listings, content, data, images, etc... it is inevitably some form of information that was originally curated by Craigslist through their 10+ years of existence online and is thus available to be used (and not used) at their discretion.

Canada Post for example charges $5,500/year (http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/business/productsservices/ma...) just to have access to a postal code verification system. It's all publicly available information... if you walked to every city, suburb, nook and cranny in Canada and asked the local people what their postal code is, they would tell you without hesitating.

But if Canada Post gets wind that you may have copied any of that publicly available information from their databases instead of doing the hard work yourself, you can expect a lawsuit at your door fairly quickly: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/04/13/technology-...

I don't think Canada Post had a case in the above example because the company in question didn't actually copy anything from their database, but you did when scraping Craigslist (for however insignificant you found the information to be), see what I'm saying?

Just because you are sending them traffic, doesn't give you the right to take (insert whatever might have been taken here) from them without their permission.

That being said, I love padmapper and have used it numerous times already for myself and friends. I wish you all the best going into the future!

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#185

Post by aninteger »

How is this different from when Bing was using Google search results? If people want to use Padmapper great. if people want to use Craigslist then great.. Am I missing something here? I don't see the problem. What if it were the other way around?

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#187

Post by jaggederest »

aheilbut wrote: post #95
jamiequint wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the pageload speed may be faster the total speed to find what I'm looking for is drastically slower due to the fact that the interface sucks.

Which paradoxically, seems to be an advantage, because it puts people in a feedback loop where they stay on the site, and every new search provides a tiny bit of reinforcement that builds the habit.

It's actually much more variable reinforcement - of course, the most addictive kind.

Each individual search has a low probability of success, but occasionally you'll succeed.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#188

Post by jacoblyles »

Craigslist is an evil monopolist that literally wastes millions of hours of its users time every year through the enforcement of shitty UI (if the amount of money that I save using padmapper is typical). They get a good reputation for some bizarre reason because their CEO is an anti-capitalist, but they are still evil for holding back innovation.

A human lifetime is about 700,000 hours. Craigslist is the moral equivalent of a serial killer.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#189

Post by gleb »

ericd wrote: post #177
minouye wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: Do you think CL would actually follow through with a lawsuit? It seems like they fire off C&D's all the time, but I have yet to see serious follow through.

No idea, but I've done a little bit of looking, and they have a history of attacking pretty aggressively, at least against things that auto-post. Those are mostly tools for spammers, though, so who knows if they'd come after me.

I don't think you are bound by their TOS simply by indexing their site. Whether it makes business sense to test this legal theory is a wholly different question.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#190

Post by jacoblyles »

binaryorganic wrote: post #37
jamiequint wrote: post #29

This is just offensive. It would be one thing if Craigslist was doing their best to satisfy their customers and they wanted to shut down others who were scraping their site and leeching off their business. However, Craigslist puts absolutely no effort into making their product usable. The continued existence of Craigslist is just a testimony to the enormous strength of network effect lock in.

Disagree. Craig Newmark has said that he's scared to make drastic changes to the UX specifically because he doesn't know what magic recipe keeps people coming back. Do I like the CL layout? Nope. Does that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it? Probably not.

People come back because craigslist has monopoly power. Craigslist knows this. They are afraid to release an API that would allow people to experiment with UI because they know that would train people to go to sites other than craigslist (I save hours using padmapper over Craigslist).
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