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

Bye Bye Craigslist

blog.padmapper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 312 posts

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#201

Post by ericd »

gleb wrote: post #189
ericd wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dunno, I guess my servers are accessing theirs? There are other ways to get the data, but yeah, I don't really want to piss them off. Was much nicer when I thought they were OK with this kind of thing from Craig's quora comments.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#202

Post by ericd »

hyperbovine wrote: post #140
kenrikm wrote: post #11

Craigslist is in major need of disruption. Actually apartment finding in general sucks I can't think of a single goto place to look for apartments other then Craigslist and that just proves point #1!

> Craigslist is in major need of disruption. This is about the 3000th time I've read that phrase, or some variation of it, in the past ten years. If that were true then it would have happened already, no? Markets can fail in the short term, but in space as crowded with upstarts as the web, I just don't buy it over such a long period of time. The thing I like most about Craigslist is that some guy made it just to help…

Yeah, I really don't think Craigslist needs disruption, it's mostly perfect for what it does. It's just for really complex/rare/non-commodity things like housing and cars where I think it needs some help.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#203

Post by gringomorcego »

phaus wrote: post #183
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.

One depends on a spellchecker?

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#204

Post by SoftwareMaven »

biot wrote: post #167
eli wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have anything you're unwilling to sell? And if so is it cool if I just take it?

This is unfortunately an increasingly common viewpoint. See for example the recent "Take My Money, HBO" site where people justify pirating the content because HBO won't sell episodes/seasons directly to them.

While I agree with you that taking something somebody isn't selling is wrong, it is still a force any content creator must come to terms with if they want to be realistic about 21st century content creation.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#205

Post by [deleted] »

trustfundbaby wrote: post #138
MartinCron wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it? Craigslist is unwilling to let Padmapper buy a license to use their content. This isn't as black and white as "stealing content".

Its their content, just because they won't let you use it doesn't mean you can break in and grab it.

[deleted]

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#207

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#208

Post by Alex3917 »

"They allow mobile apps to display their listings if you buy a license from them, but not websites."

Really? They used to allow any website to use their data for free as long as they didn't run ads against it or monetize it in any way. Kexter.com has been doing exactly what you're doing for almost ten years now.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#209

Post by localhost3000 »

kenrikm wrote: post #11

Craigslist is in major need of disruption. Actually apartment finding in general sucks I can't think of a single goto place to look for apartments other then Craigslist and that just proves point #1!

apartment hunting doesn't suck because you have to use craigslist. apartment hunting sucks because you have to deal with real estate agents.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#210

Post by ricardobeat »

mtrimpe wrote: post #79
jamiequint wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magic recipe that keeps people coming back is that Craigslist has a large network. I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that adding a map to search results and letting me put an upper limit on the number of bedrooms I'm looking for would not make people less likely to use Craigslist.

Their magic recipe is that an amazing amount of non-technical people have figured out how to work with the site. The Dutch version of Craigslist (Marktplaats, owned by eBay) is in a similar predicament. They have a very sucky UI and have experimented with new and improved versions, but every improvement was quickly reverted after large drops in engagement. It's almost surreal to look at their site ( http://marktplaat…

TBH that website isn't much of an improvement.
Post reply on HN