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They are too dependent on government sponsorship. 80% of their funding comes from the US government in some shape. I would imagine that a project of that impor
by Renaud 7y ago
They are too dependent on government sponsorship.
80% of their funding comes from the US government in some shape.
I would imagine that a project of that importance deserves to be able to be self-sufficient.
A US$2M budget/year is not that much, (m|b)illionaires making their money from the Internet could easily sponsor the project.
Better yet, having grass-root sponsorship is even more important.
Maybe they need marketing help more than anything else?
- mhuffman 7y agoThere is no tech company that is going to sponsor a browser that makes it harder for them to track customers.
- Renaud 7y agoCraigslist is a sponsor, so not all tech companies think that way.
- mikeg8 7y agoCraigslist isn’t a tech company. It’s a website. Not trying to disrespect them as I’m sure they do some impressive stuff behind the scenes to handle scale, I just don't feel they’re innovating in a way to be called “tech”.
- 93po 7y agoCraiglist was innovative when it started.
- mikeg8 7y agoTotally agree. I looked it up out of curiosity... 1995. 25 years in tech is basically a lifetime ago. Has it changed much?
- 93po 7y agoThey've made it a point to not change, which is frankly refreshing. It works perfectly fine as is for what 99% of people use it for
- papito 7y agoYou mean something so popular did not migrate to React and Serverless yet? HOW DOES IT EVEN WORK?!!!
- tinus_hn 7y agoCome on, everyone knows only MongoDB is web scale!
- tedunangst 7y agoNot changing and just working is also more innovative than about 99% of tech.
- mikeg8 7y agoAgain, totally agree. But are you arguing that not changing/innovating, while refreshing, should be considered tech? I associate tech with innovation and trying something new. Zero to One.
- 13415 7y agoIt seems to me that Craigslist must have made some monumental misjudgment when they didn't expand internationally. I for one, for example, only know of them from hearsay as some kind of obscure US-only classified ads site.
- waste_monk 7y agoThey are international; it's just that outside of the US the quantity of posts is much lower as people use local alternatives. Also a large portion of craigslist here was just the personals section - once that was shut down there is basically no good reason to use it anymore, as it simply doesn't have the network effect / critical mass of users to sustain itself. The remaining users all seem to be work-related scams of some kind (probably automated) and drug dealers (probably cops).
- hadtodoit 7y agoI still buy and sell all my cars on craigslist, I don't think I've ever dealt cars elsewhere.
- freepor 7y agoCompanies with network effects benefit from having literally everyone on the platform, so you don’t need to go to a competitor to communicate with any particular person. That’s why Facebook has a Tor endpoint, so that people in repressive environments can still use it and add to the network effect. The downside is that Tor support does enable harassment on the platform.
- maallooc 7y agoThey are trying their best to diversify their donation sources.
- justnotworthit 7y agoI work on a project depended upon and repeatedly promoted by Snowden (tweets) and less-than-public-figures-who-lives-depend-on-it (pastebins). We gave up writing grant proposals. After repeatedly pouring hours into crafting proposals exactly as specified, the big one (no plural) OTF (.gov funding) has never responded. The smaller, more informal ones aren't interested as well (no clue why). What little OTF money there is goes to the same projects, written by the same grant writers. We're told by insiders that we need connections, need to hire those writers, and we're told we need a sexier story. We can't fund a modest income for the lead developer (approaching nearly a decade). He lives cheaply in a developing country off anonymous donations of unpredictable amount and timing. Tor has resources we couldn't dream of, and if they're cutting staff, there's no hope for any open source security project.
- thaeli 7y agoWhat is the project? (I understand if you don't want to name it in this context, but I am curious.)
- justnotworthit 7y agoWhonix https://www.whonix.org/ https://www.whonix.org/
- badrabbit 7y agoHow can the US IC benefit from your project? That's #1
- AndyMcConachie 7y ago
- dillondoyle 7y agoIt's nowhere near that small. That's like a 4-6 person 501cX. Their 2019 revenue was 309 Million https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-annual-report-2019 https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-annual-report-2019
- geofft 7y agoDid you mean this for the thread about the ACLU? The comment you're replying to is about Tor, which is much smaller.
- dillondoyle 7y agooh yes i did! sorry... i had multiple tabs open. Now I'm actually surprised at the reverse that TOR had that many people on that small fo a budget
- Quanttek 7y ago> (m|b)illionaires making their money from the Internet could easily sponsor the project. The thing is: When you're the kind of person that is able to amass m-/billions, you're unlikely to be very altruistic. Most of these people had to, excuse my language, fuck over people (workers, customers, investors, the larger public) along the way in various ways. You simply can't be a billionaire without some kind of severe exploitation and it is unlikely that, when you have no qualms doing so in one area, it is unlikely you care about people's livelihoods etc. in other areas (there are some exceptions ofc, Bill Gates comes to mind). Jeff Bezos is a perfect example: The richest person on earth has donated what amounts to a few cents for an ordinary person but with great public fanfare. Not even during the COVID-19 pandemic, he views it as necessary (cf. with Jack Dorsey, donating 1/3 of his wealth).
- input_sh 7y ago> (cf. with Jack Dorsey, donating 1/3 of his wealth). He shifted 1/3 of his Square shares to an LLC. So far, that LLC has donated a little over 7 million.
- Proven 7y ago> Jeff Bezos is a perfect example: The richest person on earth has donated what amounts to a few cents for an ordinary person but with great public fanfare. Bezos has run his company for close to 20 years without making much profit. That's tens of billions in giveaways. And he has created enormous amounts of wealth for everyone who bought Amazon shares. What have you done?
- mr_woozy 7y agofuck off with your generalizations.
- yencabulator 7y ago> Bill Gates comes to mind I'd argue that Bill Gates is regretting his previous actions and trying to fix his "karma" in his retirement. He was just as bad as the rest of them.
- 7y ago
- willis936 7y agoBut removing fed funding would mean they have to remove their honeypot backdoors.
- sowithit 7y agoIronically, if they had more government sponsorship, they may be having fewer financial problems now. Government grant programs have multi-year contracts, and the agencies have yearly budgets. The government money is still flowing. It's the private money, from foundations and individuals, that has suddenly become unavailable due to declines in income and wealth.