On the Mess that is Craigslist

I detest CraigsList.  Any yet, like millions of us, I use it regularly.  Not because I want to, but rather because there is no alternative.

I often complain about the arrogance of tech companies like Microsoft.  They have become so rich, they no longer really care about their customers.  CraigsList also has incredible arrogance towards its users, derived from monopoly power.  But this is a monopoly based on price zero and size.

Gary Wolf writes about the service in Wired Magazine:

The glory of the site is its size and its price.  But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview.
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The current strategy for growth—a slow, bloblike, seemingly unstoppable accretion of new craigslist cities, each an exact clone of the others, launched with no marketing or publicity.  Sometimes a new site grows very slowly for a long time.  But eventually listings hit a certain volume, after which the site becomes so familiar and essential that it is more or less taken for granted by everybody except the distressed publishers of local newspapers.  Revenue from newspaper classified ads is off nearly 50 percent in the past decade, a drop that comes to almost $10 billion.  Only a fraction of this loss is because of Newmark's company, but as the largest online classified site, craigslist is easy to blame.
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It is difficult to overstate the scale of this accomplishment.  Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.  eBay has more than 16,000 employees.  Amazon has more than 20,000.  Craigslist has 30.
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The long-running tech-industry war between engineers and marketers has been ended at craigslist by the simple expedient of having no marketers.  Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist.  There is no business development, no human resources, no sales.  As a result, there are no meetings.  The staff communicates by email and IM.

Now I love the fact that they don't have marketing types.  But they have a tin ear when it comes to user needs, in no small part because their customer service is a joke.

The CraigsList people argue that they are not a business, but a community service.  But what do you get when you cross a free community service with a business monopoly with a hundred-plus cities?

Evidently the answer is:  Monopolistic anarchy.

I found this article thanks to my friend and blogging mentor, Craig Newmark (no, not the CraigsList idiot savant, but the economics professor).  On his blog, he has pointed out more than once, that if you don't like what you find there, he will gladly refund your money.  And sarcasm aside, his point is so true that it needs no further comment.  And he argues, this applies to CraigsList as well.

However, if I don't like his blog, or any blog, I can go elsewhere.  If I don't like CraigsList, where do I go?  The newspaper?  God forbid.

In fact, I often rail against newspapers on this site.  It's ironic that a company largely responsible for their demise, is so wholly undeserving.
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Hanna, Michelle, and Mary Jo

Hanna Rosin:

Public officials who do terrible things and then say they’re sorry (often in a press conference or book) are a dime a dozen.  But the ones who do something terrible and then repent indirectly in the form of a lifetime of dedicated public service are rare.

Well, in regard to Ted Kennedy, how hard is it to dedicate your life to public service when you inherit that much money?  What a sacrifice.  Public service from the family compound.  It would be funny if it were not so real.

Rosin goes on to point out that Kennedy did something terrible.  And, He made up for it partly by declining the ultimate glory of running for president, and choosing the more humble path....

Really?  Not running for president?  Let's get real:  Kennedy never paid for his mistakes.  The only thing worse than Ted Kennedy's unaccountable early life, and elevation to family-entitled position, were the dead brains who kept voting for him.

Michelle Malkin says it is crass to point this out today.  She is wrong.  The starry-eyed mainstream media will make Kennedy out to be an unblemished hero.  Somebody needs to point out their omissions.

Look, he was the brother of an assassinated president and senator.  He was a long-serving senator from the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  And to give him his due, he was an effective legislator.  I'm sorry he's dead.

But he was not a great man.
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