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Craigslist went from 50 employees in 2017 to 407 today, and I wonder if that's partly responsible for its decline. Facebook Marketplace was probably the last st

Craigslist went from 50 employees in 2017 to 407 today, and I wonder if that's partly responsible for its decline. Facebook Marketplace was probably the last straw, but a smaller Craigslist might have been able to pivot and innovate ahead of them. Back in the 90s, I always wanted to be in a small startup that was mostly open source or maybe part of a software developer guild that pooled resources with other startups. Then every time a startup won the internet lottery, it would invest the proceeds into the local community or pay into UBI. But even today, there's no way to come up with the roughly $24,000 per year it costs to live in the rural US, so we all still work for the mega corps in one way or another, saving for a day we might free ourselves which never comes.

nbstme 5y ago
Interesting for Craiglist! Maybe they started hiring more in 2017 when their traffic decreased to fund new initiatives, and it finally didn't work out. Or perhaps it worked out, and they stabilized the traffic around 300m visitors per month. Who knows! Don't you think there are more and more developers - for now the most elite ones - who manage to live out of contributions from grants or github sponsoring?
- zackmorris 5y ago
  Ya there are, but it's such a vanishingly small percentage that it's not material. There's good stuff like Y Combinator, and I was excited when it started because it seemed to grok that the fundamental problem in startups is that first $10,000. But (and this may be a controversial opinion) I feel like they fell into the same trap that every other incubator falls for, which is catering to elites. Now it seems to be a bit gamified, filtered through the lens of a certain youth demographic pitching to wealthy investors for large sums of money ($125,000), like the show Shark Tank. I would very much like to see something that looks more like the grant system you mentioned, where small amounts of money could be obtained with relatively few hoops or strings attached. I've had countless times in my life where $5,000 or $10,000 would have given me the runway that I needed to finish a project and make money. But the money never came, so those all ended in failure, and a person can only fail so many times into midlife before playing the game itself feels like failing. If I knew in the 90s what I know now, I maybe wouldn't have chosen tech as a career. The flip side is that I've survived on almost nothing for so many years, that I feel a calling to work towards providing income to everyone, everywhere. I think that's something we can manifest if we go back to first principles. I'd propose studying the history of such attempts and discovering which steps of the process were sabotaged by external pressures, then routing around that interference. Basically a startup working to solve the problem of income. The fact that this sounds at least a little preposterous seems more like of a failure of capitalism to me, than something fundamental. A practical attempt at this might look like building solar farms to power cryptocurrency mining, to route around the problem of energy markets not buying alternative energy from homeowners at the going rate. Every market has that kind of defect that can be exploited. But they're difficult to see when we're at the losing end of the bargain as consumers, or dependent on the cashflow they generate as employees. I might be slightly bitter after watching no movement on this in over 25 years, so please take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. I'm also super-optimistic about stuff like solarpunk :-)
bps4484 5y ago
"but a smaller Craigslist might have been able to pivot and innovate ahead of them." I feel like they had a small team that didn't innovate for 20 years. Whether they were 10 employees or 10,000 they were due to have someone figure out a better way.
- fragmede 5y ago
  One of those 9,950/10,000 employees would have figured out that better way. Size matters when there are multiple orders of magnitude of difference.
  - verve_rat 5y ago
    Sure, one of them would have figured it out. But then they would spend the next year trying to get managers to listen and would eventually quit out of frustration. Counterfactuals are fun!
xmprt 5y ago
Craiglist's biggest advantage in the past was their userbase. They didn't make the website that user friendly. I might be an outlier on HN but I'd rather give my number and email once to a large corporation instead of having to use that email/number to directly call strangers, asking about what they're selling. They also have a problem with duplicate or irrelevant listings when you search for low volume items. Once Facebook Marketplace came in and essentially wiped away all those roadblocks. Facebook has its own share of problems but those are mostly with the people who are still using it and the ads. The marketplace product works pretty well.
- ramphastidae 5y ago
  You don’t use your own email on Craigslist, it’s obfuscated.
fragmede 5y ago
Or, maybe a bigger Craigslist would have better predicted Facebook marketplace's reach and have additional lines of business so Facebook Marketplace wouldn't be such an existential threat. Without additional, inside information it's impossible to say. Remember, Craigslist predates the cloud by a decade or so, so standing up their service would be a lot easier today than when they started. How much time of those 50 people was spent on procurement, to the opportunity cost of having a modern interface/other upgrades.

nbstme 5y ago

Interesting for Craiglist! Maybe they started hiring more in 2017 when their traffic decreased to fund new initiatives, and it finally didn't work out. Or perhaps it worked out, and they stabilized the traffic around 300m visitors per month. Who knows! Don't you think there are more and more developers - for now the most elite ones - who manage to live out of contributions from grants or github sponsoring?

zackmorris 5y ago
Ya there are, but it's such a vanishingly small percentage that it's not material. There's good stuff like Y Combinator, and I was excited when it started because it seemed to grok that the fundamental problem in startups is that first $10,000. But (and this may be a controversial opinion) I feel like they fell into the same trap that every other incubator falls for, which is catering to elites. Now it seems to be a bit gamified, filtered through the lens of a certain youth demographic pitching to wealthy investors for large sums of money ($125,000), like the show Shark Tank. I would very much like to see something that looks more like the grant system you mentioned, where small amounts of money could be obtained with relatively few hoops or strings attached. I've had countless times in my life where $5,000 or $10,000 would have given me the runway that I needed to finish a project and make money. But the money never came, so those all ended in failure, and a person can only fail so many times into midlife before playing the game itself feels like failing. If I knew in the 90s what I know now, I maybe wouldn't have chosen tech as a career. The flip side is that I've survived on almost nothing for so many years, that I feel a calling to work towards providing income to everyone, everywhere. I think that's something we can manifest if we go back to first principles. I'd propose studying the history of such attempts and discovering which steps of the process were sabotaged by external pressures, then routing around that interference. Basically a startup working to solve the problem of income. The fact that this sounds at least a little preposterous seems more like of a failure of capitalism to me, than something fundamental. A practical attempt at this might look like building solar farms to power cryptocurrency mining, to route around the problem of energy markets not buying alternative energy from homeowners at the going rate. Every market has that kind of defect that can be exploited. But they're difficult to see when we're at the losing end of the bargain as consumers, or dependent on the cashflow they generate as employees. I might be slightly bitter after watching no movement on this in over 25 years, so please take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. I'm also super-optimistic about stuff like solarpunk :-)

bps4484 5y ago

"but a smaller Craigslist might have been able to pivot and innovate ahead of them." I feel like they had a small team that didn't innovate for 20 years. Whether they were 10 employees or 10,000 they were due to have someone figure out a better way.

fragmede 5y ago
One of those 9,950/10,000 employees would have figured out that better way. Size matters when there are multiple orders of magnitude of difference.
- verve_rat 5y ago
  Sure, one of them would have figured it out. But then they would spend the next year trying to get managers to listen and would eventually quit out of frustration. Counterfactuals are fun!

xmprt 5y ago

Craiglist's biggest advantage in the past was their userbase. They didn't make the website that user friendly. I might be an outlier on HN but I'd rather give my number and email once to a large corporation instead of having to use that email/number to directly call strangers, asking about what they're selling. They also have a problem with duplicate or irrelevant listings when you search for low volume items. Once Facebook Marketplace came in and essentially wiped away all those roadblocks. Facebook has its own share of problems but those are mostly with the people who are still using it and the ads. The marketplace product works pretty well.

ramphastidae 5y ago
You don’t use your own email on Craigslist, it’s obfuscated.

fragmede 5y ago

Or, maybe a bigger Craigslist would have better predicted Facebook marketplace's reach and have additional lines of business so Facebook Marketplace wouldn't be such an existential threat. Without additional, inside information it's impossible to say. Remember, Craigslist predates the cloud by a decade or so, so standing up their service would be a lot easier today than when they started. How much time of those 50 people was spent on procurement, to the opportunity cost of having a modern interface/other upgrades.