5 ms·
I think it's perfectly fine if you want to play games dancing around what's legal and forge ahead against Craigslist's wishes. There's a long history of that ki
by trotsky 14y ago
I think it's perfectly fine if you want to play games dancing around what's legal and forge ahead against Craigslist's wishes. There's a long history of that kind of behavior in information services and they may or may not be able to stop you.
But making a big deal out of being some kind of ux hero is pretty tacky. At the end of the day, no matter how small you are you're still a commercial enterprise gaining benefit at another commercial enterprise's expense. You're bidding on eyeballs with an offer of time savings.
A vast majority of the web deliberately degrades their user experience in order to achieve business goals. Ads are almost always at least somewhat distracting, retailers stretch out checkout flows for up selling, sites "recommend" their high margin items ebay requires paypal and facebook sabotages their privacy management so you're less likely to bother.
If CL was to build a bunch of sweet vertical specific apps for their sections they'd need a ton more developers, designers, testers, project managers and so on. To compensate for the greatly increased burn rate they'd need to monetize a lot better which almost always means features, content or policies that negatively impact the user. Or maybe they'd have just taken too much VC to pay for it and gone under in '02 when the bottom fell out.
So by all means jockey away it's healthy for the industry. But crowing about it is a bit like taking a shit on the guy whose shoulders you're standing on while bragging about how tall you are.
- ericd 14y agoI'm not making a big deal about this, and I have a lot of respect for Craigslist, don't put words in my mouth. I think Craigslist is nearly perfect for the vast majority of things, I'm not on a crusade to "disrupt" them. It's just that for a long, drawn out, location-based search, it's objectively terrible, and I'm trying to patch that bug.
- J3L2404 14y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220106 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4220106
- trotsky 14y agoIt would seem like the definition of respect mostly conflicts with your behavior. re·spect 1. To feel or show deferential regard for; esteem. 2. to pay proper attention to; not violate "to respect Swiss neutrality" 3. to show consideration for; treat courteously or kindly
- potatolicious 14y agoHis behavior is not incompatible with respect, and you're being pedantic. I really wish "beating an argument to death with Merriam-Webster" wasn't as common on HN as it is. One can respect Craigslist for their history, and what they have done for the online community in the past, without conceding the right to say that they're wrong now, and that you'll be proceeding without their blessing. One can also respect and understand Craigslist's objection to Padmapper scraping their site, without conceding that the good vastly outweighs whatever valid concerns may exist. Respect is a complicated social concept, the colloquial usage of the word even more so. Using dictionary definitions to try and corner complex social phenomena is at best a poor idea, at worst an attempt at being disingenuous.
- zem 14y agoback in the usenet days, it was generally[0] held that the first person to reach for the dictionary had implicitly conceded the argument. [0] at least on the newsgroups i used to frequent
- trotsky 14y agoClearly my post came across poorly and not as I intended, as at the time I imagined it to be a softer way of suggesting that his words don't represent his actions. Other ways of saying that directly sound much more personal and less civil in my head, but perhaps not to others. With respect to your definition, I submit that you misunderstand the element that differentiates respect from admiration, appreciation or value. Further debate seems unhelpful, whatever you call it it's the same behavior.