How does "Leveraging a monopoly to destroy technological progress" not fall under some antitrust laws? Is it just because Craigslist is free? I definitely feel the consumer is potentially losing out due to Craigslist's monopolistic practices.
Keep in mind 95% of their site is not the product they are trying to sell. It is in craigslist's best interest to keep users glued to their site. If someone takes 30 minutes to find a used bike instead of five then great. Maybe there is a chance the user get's bored of cruising bike listings or on one of their many trips to see the latest postings will click on the job section. Craigslist uses their massive user base on the free portion of their site as a significant competitive advantage over all other job posting sites. It is actually in their best interest to make it harder for users to find what they want. Craigslist is not in the business of people selling stuff to each other, they are in the business of attracting enough eyeballs for enough time to their site to click on enough job listings to keep their revenues flowing. They have absolutely no incentive to change or improve. I am pretty sure when they look at their revenues (the ultimate metric), it is actually doing pretty well.
Anybody know why craigslist allows some companies / startups to leverage their communities and not others? I can't seem to find any method to the madness. Looks like AirBnB got away with it for the most part, even after some blatant spamming, yet companies like CLmetric or Worthmonkey, that only made listing more informative got shut down. I have been looking at eggdrop and their posts seem to be searchable and they are much bigger than worthmonley or clmetrics ever got. Would love to hear some insight if anybody has any. Are the C&D letters provoked by something, or nothing at all?
Keep in mind this was a rant. Craigslist is awesome in many ways and has provided tremendous value over the years. All I am saying is their stubbornness to not improve has left a lot of value on the table. If someone else, maybe more capitalistic, was running craigslist we would probably be benefiting from it more at this point. Their monopoly of the local marketplace allows them to be complacent. The fact that they use their monopoly to not improve or let anyone else improve their platform is a crime in my mind. Just because it is free does not justify not improving it. There is huge a market inefficiency here that they are using to their advantage at the cost of the consumer...
It works, but what I am saying is it works for a fraction of the population. Those that have time to hunt for deals and deal with flakes and last minute hagglers. There is a ton of people like this, but I argue that there are even more people that would use it if it were cleaner. Why force people to develop "muscle memory"? The rate of recycling of used goods would be much higher if craigslist was more open to either improvement of their platform or to startups building features for their community. Maybe the folks that want to develop "muscle memory" to fish out deals can do so at the cost of their time and score the best deals, but the value of time varies a lot from person to person and even from year to year. For example I sold a bunch of stuff on craigslist in college, but now that I have a job I don't bother with anything less than $200. I usually just donate it to the salvation army and write it off my taxes or let crap pile up in my garage. If I had an app that I could use to post and sell objects quickly and easily I would use it. I'd even be happy to pay someone to make this simple and easy. I am not saying to make a new service a paid service, but let free markets and innovative entrepreneurs figure out how to justify the costs of improvement. I definitely think craigslist has generated an insane amount of value, but I the bar can be set higher. They have definitely done net good, but if they continue to use their monopoly of the local online marketplace as a justification for not improving their site, I think it is bogus.
Either improve craigslist or let others build value added tools on top of craigslist. Why stop an app like Bazaar that helped people post things easily? Let people make up their own mind. Using smartphones as an example again, people will trade int their iPhone 3GS for $80, when they can get $160 for it on CL. So there is definitely demand somewhere in the massive gap of services that retailers and B2C companies offer and what exists on craigslist. Making consumer to consumer commerce smoother and easier is a huge opportunity in my mind that is not only lucrative, but fills in a big gap that exists because craigslist is still stuck in 1995.
I think craigslist is notorious for this. I remember they recently blocked my favorite posting app, Bazaar, and all they did was host the images you posted from your phone. This was the simplest most user friendly app to post to craigslist with. So basically craigslist blocked any ad that had an image hosted by Bazaar. Killing Bazaar was a huge disservice to me as I stopped posting as many things to CL and a huge disservice to their community.
These guys are doing a disservice to the American public. Imagine how much more used stuff could be sold on craigslist if their interface and experience was better. One statistic is smartphones, which can resell for as much as $200 after two years of use, yet most people leave them in their drawer. If a platform existed where selling and buying was easier, then people that are too busy to use craigslist would have an alternative to give new life to the stuff that is just sitting in their drawer. More people could own higher quality products instead of buying the cheaper new crap as an alternative. We consume way too much new crap. I bet there are >10 million used iphones sitting in drawers, while cost conscious consumer resort to buying the Motorola Triumph as that is all they can afford for $200. I know a lot of people love craigslist, but it is time for something better. It is time to create an efficient and "beautiful" consumer to consumer marketplace that everyone wants to use. Craigslist is huge, but it serves only a fraction of the potential customer base. I would bet more people would use it if some of its fundamental flaws were fixed.
End of rant... Let me know if you agree. I am actually doing something about this and am always open to input and help...
We had a similar idea that we executed on during Mega Startup Weekend recently that was a lot of fun. It is similar to crowd screening in a sense, but really is more of a crowd sourced business idea validation engine. Imagine if there was a community / website where you could pitch your idea, have people vote on it and refine it. You could release your idea to as small or large a group or circle that you felt comfortable with. The goal would be to build a "tribe" around your idea that helps you refine it and validate it. We wanted to bake in the whole lean startup methodology into it. For example we had a step in the process called "assumption junction" where the tribe would list all the assumptions in the business idea and rank them by risk/importance. The community would then be tapped for building/refining surveys as well as for distributing the surveys or taking them themselves. Imagine if ideas where refined and validated by hundreds if not thousands of people before a single line of code was written. We called the idea "The Darwin Project", where only the strongest ideas survive.
This really jibed with coders we surveyed as they would love to be approached with ideas that are validated before they wrote any code. This could be a tool that finally empowers the non-technical business guys to vet their idea, get a critical mass behind it, and finally build enough value in the idea itself to build a team around. If anybody is interested in pursuing this I can put you in touch with the team that is running with this concept.