C'mon, Craig! Charge a dollar!

Datsun1500 wrote: Crazedlist, Searchtempest, and the rest are getting shut down because they are making money on something they did not create. If You built a business and someone else came along and built a business that was piggybacking on your work, wouldn't you have an issue with it? It's not a matter of being a control freak, it is a matter of protecting your brand.

You'd think that a "for the people" group like Craigslist would understand that you can't just play whack-a-mole with the Crazedlists and the Searchtempests, because there will always be new ones popping up. CL may want to force people to buy things locally, but that's not what the market wants. And the market will get what it wants, eventually, via Craigslist or some other way. It always does.

Craig's behavior makes no sense. He is deliberately taking away something his customers want and not providing them an alternative. "Protecting his brand"? Unless he is about to unveil his own multiple search, that makes no sense, either. Those sites are nothing but search aggregators, they've been around since there was a web. Does Yahoo need to protect it's brand from people who find it via Google?

Is it just me, or are people really berkeleying lazy and whiney? 15 years ago you'd have to pick up a new issue of Autotrader or the newspaper every couple weeks, call some dude who never answers his phone, drive an hour to look at the car...which you may or may not have even seen a single photo of, and may very well be a complete turd; or sold by the time you can get there.

Now you can pull out your damned phone, which will send and receive information instantly by beaming a berkeleying signal into space, search within certain price parameters (OH BOTHER, I have to enter $11 as the bottom of my budget to remove all the $1 cars,) and can EASILY eliminate dealers by selecting "by owner..." or cheat with your brain and realize that the 10 cars that are all the same price in the same town with the same verbiage in the first line are PROBABLY THE SAME berkeleyING CAR!

Yeah. Craigslist is hard.

All that said, berkeley yeah charge a dollar!!! This isn't the berkeleying People's Republic of America! Make money f00!!!!

poopshovel wrote: Is it just me, or are people really berkeleying lazy and whiney? 15 years ago you'd have to pick up a new issue of Autotrader or the newspaper every couple weeks, call some dude who never answers his phone, drive an hour to look at the car...which you may or may not have even seen a single photo of, and may very well be a complete turd; or sold by the time you can get there. Now you can pull out your damned phone, which will send and receive information instantly by beaming a berkeleying signal into space, search within certain price parameters (OH BOTHER, I have to enter $11 as the bottom of my budget to remove all the $1 cars,) and can EASILY eliminate dealers by selecting "by owner..." or cheat with your brain and realize that the 10 cars that are all the same price in the same town with the same verbiage in the first line are PROBABLY THE SAME berkeleyING CAR! Yeah. Craigslist is hard.

Yeah, and 100 years ago you couldn't jump in a plane and be on the other side of the world in 12 hours. So what? Just because it used to be harder, that doesn't make it wrong for people to complain when something is taken away. I used to buy Auto Trader every two weeks, too. Looking back, it was a terribly inefficient way of finding stuff. Now we have more efficient ways. One of them has just been taken away for no good reason. You're free to call it "whining" when we complain about it, but I'm free to say you're wrong, too.

However, I will admit that I, personally, and many others here, spend WAY too much time on Craigslist. That's the source of the complaining, if you get right down to it.

@Poopshovel: I absolutely am lazy and I would never deny that, especially when it comes to artificial restrictions on what I can do with data that I know is so easily searched differently. I'm not whiny, though, I always say that Craigslist is awesome. I use it all the freakin' time.

Craig Newmark, though, is not the free-lovin' hippie that some people seem to think he is. By most estimates he has a net worth of over $400 million and personally makes up to $20 million per year from Craigslist. They do charge for specific listings (housing, employment) in specific areas and that seems to be enough for them. They make a E36 M3 load of money off of it, and since they're a tiny privately held company he takes a lot of it home with him. As they say, nice work if you can find it.

Please note that I'm not begrudging him that money one bit, it's awesome. A true American success story.

EastCoastMojo wrote: Use the has images checkbox, and don't bother with ads that don't have them. Most of the real sellers will have a pic. Use the show images feature to see the thumbnail image. Spam ads will have the same images, making them easy to spot and skip.

I bought 2 trucks from ads without pictures and got amazing deals on both. Sellers were older and likely not so Internet savvy, but they did take care of their stuff.

So you might be missing out skipping the ads with no photos.

I have no problem with Craigslist. It ain't hard to use and I can always fine cool E36 M3.

B430 wrote:

EastCoastMojo wrote: Use the has images checkbox, and don't bother with ads that don't have them. Most of the real sellers will have a pic. Use the show images feature to see the thumbnail image. Spam ads will have the same images, making them easy to spot and skip.

I bought 2 trucks from ads without pictures and got amazing deals on both. Sellers were older and likely not so Internet savvy, but they did take care of their stuff. So you might be missing out skipping the ads with no photos.

True, nothing will apply for every case.

It annoys me too when the same car is listed 25 times. I see it already. Also wish a price was required so the price filter actually worked.

I will say, I am extremely thankful that CL still has a very basic appearance. No fancy flash/java/bullE36 M3, emoticons, animated images, embedded videos, etc. etc. Just text with a few pictures, which is great.

I guess I never search for things which would be posted a bunch times. Hell most of my searches come up with nothing usually. Who knew Trabants were that unpopular?

Sorry guys. Cancer pissed in my berkeleying cheerios for the second time in two years this morning. Got in an "altercation" at the gas station on the way home. All good now. Mr. McCormick was here to greet me when I got home.

Why didn't you just kill him? I mean, he'll be back next episode anyway.

Datsun1500 wrote: Crazedlist, Searchtempest, and the rest are getting shut down because they are making money on something they did not create. If You built a business and someone else came along and built a business that was piggybacking on your work, wouldn't you have an issue with it? It's not a matter of being a control freak, it is a matter of protecting your brand.

Huh? Entire industries are built around that! Ever heard of the Sema show ?

^^ +1 ^^

Protecting your brand is what you do to keep people from stealing your money.

Encouraging relations with vendors, etc. in a manner that other people can make indirectly off something they did not create is called "networking".

CL is just another tool in the 'ol tool box. More than often anymore it's the rusty E36 M3 magnet that picks up every bit of grease, oil or schmuck that pisses ya off... but it still works and y'all gonna keep it until something better comes along.