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Eric DeMenthon, the man behind Padmapper, freely admits that "it still seems somewhat dickish to go against [Craiglist's] wishes." But he then proceeds to ratio
by eevilspock 14y ago
Eric DeMenthon, the man behind Padmapper, freely admits that "it still seems somewhat dickish to go against [Craiglist's] wishes." But he then proceeds to rationalize doing it anyway, using a "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few" argument:
"But then I did some back of the envelope estimates of how much of people’s time and effort it would waste if I didn’t, and it became clear how much less nice it is to waste the time of millions of apartment hunters out of stubbornness or some clearly inaccurate assumption about the will of the community."
If Eric is honestly doing this for the good of the community rather than for his own aggrandizement, and if I am right about the ethics and legality of a pure client-side solution, there is no excuse not to do it.
- ericd 14y agoI'm pretty confused by your argument. How is making a bookmarklet better morally or legally than just using an API, or less self-aggrandizing? Bookmarklets are disallowed by the TOU as well. Is it because I'd just be making hammers instead of making and using the hammers myself? And yeah, I have a bit of a communistic bent, so needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few arguments sway my decisions pretty heavily.
- J3L2404 14y agoIsn't PadLister a direct competitor? CL is right to tell you piss off. No one is falling for this "man of the people" crap, it just makes you look dumb. Sorry to be harsh but you seem to be deceiving yourself, why not start a legitimate business?
- ericd 14y agoPL was more of an insurance policy to collect feeds and other listings directly (it helps people post them back to CL). I'd be happy to take PL down if those were the terms for CL's complicity in keeping the CL search results.
- J3L2404 14y ago>insurance policy...CL's complicity What are you talking about? I can't parse this gibberish. I know you feel CL has no rights to their own site, but what the hell are they complicit in? The further you go down this road the more time you waste.
- ericd 14y agoHave I done something to offend you? I'm just saying that I made that in the hopes that if I ever had to take CL search results off, PadMapper wouldn't be mostly useless. If CL wanted me to take PL down as a condition of them being OK with my site searching theirs, I would make that trade happily. I'm explaining that my goal isn't to replace them/threaten them/etc.