4 ms·
They're a monopolist with a bad product, like Microsoft, but they have a crunchy image so bay area hackers love them, despite the fact that they are freezing a
by jacoblyles 17y ago
They're a monopolist with a bad product, like Microsoft, but they have a crunchy image so bay area hackers love them, despite the fact that they are freezing a whole sector of business in the dark ages (again, like Microsoft).
Everything you wrote could have been used as a defense of Windows 98, or IE 6. You may be defending a shitty user experience with a monopolist position, but we love you Craig because at least you hate capitalism.
- sirrocco 17y ago"Everything you wrote could have been used as a defense of IE6." Well ... that's how we have Firefox now isn't it ? I mean people went ahead and built something better.
- mnemonicsloth 17y agoHence the first sentence of his post about Craigslist's crunchy image. "Let's get rid of IE6" is a great way to rally people. "Let's get rid of that bastard Craig Newmark," not so much.
- scelerat 17y agoPeople like Craigslist. People like Craig. Hard to hate on something useful, free, and fronted by likable people.
- jacoblyles 17y agoSomething that wastes millions of hours per day and prevents anyone from replacing it with something better by virtue of its monopoly position and hostility to mash-ups? Yes, I can find the time to hate on it.
- luckydude 17y agoAs a long time user of craigslist I disagree with the "bad product" characterization. I find their website extremely pleasant to use, much like google. When will people learn that content is king and all that flash/image/whatever crud may look great but rarely does anything but distract from the actual content. But rather than asserting that it is a fine product (which it is, though I agree it could be made better), how about spelling out what it is that you think would make it better? I wouldn't be surprised if Jim and/or Craig reads this thread at some point.
- jacoblyles 17y agoI was on the fence about Craigslist's minimalism. Then I tried Flippity's search of Craigslist's data (the service that Craigslist just killed for no reason) and realized that an equivalent Craigslist search would have took me about ten times as long, manually searching through all the ads. This isn't simplicity. This isn't minimalism. This is Ludditism, backed by a monopoly position. How many millions of hours are wasted every day because of Newmark's anti-market fetish? And Jim and Craig have made it abundantly clear in interviews that they don't care about user feedback, so I don't expect anything to change.