Funny, this is still a pretty black-and-white issue for me, and I don't quite understand how so many are defending Craigslist. When Facebook blocked a Google C

Funny, this is still a pretty black-and-white issue for me, and I don't quite understand how so many are defending Craigslist. When Facebook blocked a Google Chrome extension from exporting friends (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084), nobody defended Facebook. Nobody defended the medical supply industry in an article about how they're blocking startups from selling to hospitals (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889305 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889305). I don't recall ever seeing a comment defending ISPs that attempt to block users from downloading illegal content -- even when those ISPs are themselves part of a media company. Hell, just a little less than three years ago, when Craigslist blocked a Yahoo service for pulling data from CL and customizing it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970934 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970934), the opinions on HN were quite a bit different than they are now. (Amusingly, you left a comment in that thread too -- except that you didn't seem to be defending Craigslist nearly as much as you are now.) If there were no such thing as a good online directory, and somebody built a startup out of digitizing phone books and making them searchable, and the phone companies then filed lawsuits against that startup, would people come out of the woodwork defending the phone companies? I find that difficult to believe. If regional banks started blocking access from Mint.com, would there be grounds for defending them? For me, it simply comes down to what I think of as "hacker morality": this tool sucks, and I can build a better one, so I will. I hate searching for stuff on Craigslist -- in fact, I never use it anymore because of the completely miserable experience that Craigslist is when trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. If I really wanted to get something from Craigslist, I'd probably write a crawler and indexer of my own -- I already have those tools -- and then stick a filter on to send me an email when it finds whatever I'm looking for. Padmapper is saving me, and a lot of other people without those tools, all of that trouble. Good for them.