
Craig Newmark, the Principled Jerk - lloydarmbrust
http://blog.jeremymims.com/craig-newmark-the-principled-jerk
======
rubidium
Lay off the personal attacks. No place here.

Any company is entitled to whatever they provide and it's not your place to
sit as judge. People give them the information, for free. Craigslist displays
it, for free.

Unless someone sues Craigslist for some sort of anti-trust regulation, the
challenge for people desiring to compete in the Craigslist's market is to
build something from the ground up. (Oh, and it's always a market people are
after, it's not "Oh, we want to help people find apartments better because
we're nice people"). The fact that it's difficult is the entrepreneur's
problem, not Craigs.

~~~
jeremymims
This isn't a personal attack. It's an observation. I sincerely lack a better
way to characterize Craig's behavior. Since Craigslist is as small as it is
and is named after the founder, it's very difficult to explain these seemingly
irrational decisions without understanding the man behind them.

I think at heart he's a good guy, but he's clearly not thinking correctly
here.

~~~
flatline3
This kind of diatribe -- along with the PadMapper debacle -- simply makes the
participants look like naive entitled children.

You don't understand why Craig won't play in your sandbox, berate him for not
doing so, shout at the world that __CRAIG IS A MEANIE __.

Yet, Craigslist is phenomenally successful, and has an enviable organization
model that has allowed them to stay true to what matters to them. The fact
that these things don't matter to you _does not make them wrong_.

Craigslist has a "lifestyle" business with revenue numbers that would make any
startup green with envy, and it seems to me that you -- and others like you --
can't get your head around the fact that Craig (and Craigslist) is so
successful, and yet they _do not want to play your game_.

If you think Craigslist sucks, then either make a better one, or figure out
how to work with Craigslist within a framework that does not run counter to
their established ethos. That probably means no venture capital, and no
standard corporate organizational model.

Simply taking what you want -- or haranguing them openly for not operating the
way you would like -- is simply childish petulance.

~~~
jbooth
The point is that, due to network effects and first-mover advantage, it's way
harder to displace craigslist than building a better product.

Now, that's not illegal on craig/craigslist's part, but he can either be an
openness-advocating philanthropreneur, as he tends to brand himself, or he can
be a lockdown value extractor with a legal team, as it seems they're on their
way to becoming. Can't be both.

~~~
flatline3
> _Now, that's not illegal on craig/craigslist's part, but he can either be an
> openness-advocating philanthropreneur, as he tends to brand himself, or he
> can be a lockdown value extractor with a legal team, as it seems they're on
> their way to becoming. Can't be both._

So say The Police Of Moral Rectitude? I don't really see the point here.
Craigslist isn't actively harming the industry, they're just running their own
businesses. How they choose to do so is their own concern, and they have no
obligation to give their business away to people that want to replace them.

------
jmduke
I seriously don't understand the Craigslist drama.

It's an incredibly basic service that is astounding because of its network
effect.

So if you want to compete with it, make a BETTER service. Don't rely on them.
Adoption isn't going to be instantaneous, but if PadMapper's approach really
is so much better than why do they need to bootstrap themselves with
Craigslist-affiliated data?

~~~
jessriedel
> if PadMapper's approach really is so much better than why do they need to
> bootstrap themselves with Craigslist-affiliated data?

Because as you said: (massive) network effects. The claim is that they are
effectively a monopoly. You can't tell someone "Sure it won't be
instantaneous, but if you think you're so much better than Standard Oil, just
go out-compete them."

~~~
Androsynth
SO physically owned all the oil-wells. Physical ownership is much, much
different than network effects.

~~~
jessriedel
Why? Everyone needs to come to the network owner, and it isn't possible for
new competitors to create their own useful network. The network effect is
really the exact analogy for information-exchange businesses as physical
capital was for businesses selling physical goods.

Except that in one sense the network effect is _even stronger_ : oil wells can
be divvied up by a trust-busting government (and will still function) but some
networks _only_ work reasonably when monolithic. This is an argument for a
monopoly administered by the government (like for road infrastructure) or a
private non-profit (like wikipedia).

~~~
Androsynth
No, in SO's case, their competitors were physically incapable of entering the
market (because they couldn't purchase stakes).

With network effects, the barrier to entry is less for competitors to join the
market and there is nothing physically forcing a user to use a monopoly. A
great competitor has a realistic chance of entering your market. Plus, a
slight shift in public perception and a Monopoly can become a failed business
in no time.

Network effects may be a significant impediment to a small business attempting
to enter a market, but lets not throw around the 'monopoly' label so easily.

~~~
jessriedel
SO only had a 64% market share when it was broken up. Competitors weren't
prevented from entering the oil market because they were physically incapable
of buying oil wells. It was because SO had enough market share to greatly
influence prices through unilateral action, and to threaten business partners
with crippling retaliation for dealing with SO competitors.

I would guess CL has, in most classified markets, more than 80% market share.
The amount of market share necessary for monopoly powers varies between
industries (based, presumably, on the barriers to entry), but I don't think
I'm being casual with the term "monopoly". Especially considering the power of
network effects.

Is it not _obvious_ that CL can only get away with its crappy UI because it
has overwhelming market share? The fact that it is immune from normal
competitive pressures is the defining feature.

~~~
Androsynth
No its not obvious because I don't have a problem with their UI. Most CL users
don't. They have a clean UI that doesn't overwhelm you. Posting is dead
simple.

Anyway, at this point, neither of us will convince the other. So... good day
to you.

------
mapgrep
"They’re not concerned with fixing anything for newspapers because Craig
refuses to accept responsibility for helping break them."

Newmark's repeated donations and support to both new online journalism
endeavors and old-line journalism institutes like Knight Foundation are a
matter of public record. An example Google search:
[http://www.google.com/search?q=craig+newmark+donation+(journ...](http://www.google.com/search?q=craig+newmark+donation+\(journalism+or+newspapers\))

Newmark has expressly stated that he makes these donations of time and money
partly because of the role Craigslist played in disrupting newspapers. I find
it especially impressive that he does this given that he has nothing to
apologize for. Newspaper classifieds were insanely expensive and huge cash
cows.

~~~
jeremymims
Keep in mind that I was explaining to a newspaper publisher why Craigslist
would not work with them to help them make more money. Craig's focus is on
building tools that help fact-check stories and help news organizations remain
trustworthy, not efforts to help increase monetization.

That's fine, but it's a bit like polishing the brass on the Titanic.

From NiemanLab:

"Craig Newmark’s most recently announced project, CraigConnects, is, as best
as I can tell, a way of funneling Newmark’s attention capital towards (mostly)
nonprofit organizations."

Attention capital is nice and welcome, but hardly the thing that will save
good journalism.

------
res0nat0r
This sounds like another person who is pissed off he can't have a piece of the
CL pie (read: money).

> I figured the reasonable response from Craig would have been to hire Romy
> and his partner or buy their technology. It’s literally what every
> reasonable company in the world does when innovative young people come along
> and make something your users want.

Why should I as a CEO be expected to cater to your whims of how you think I
should run my company? I hear about people complaining all the time about how
ugly and cluttered Amazons website is. Would we all be hating Jeff Bezos as
much as we do Craig if someone started scraping all of the Amazon.com product
reviews and organizing them in a web2.0-html5-ajax-startup-cool manner and
Jeff sued their pants off?

------
nostromo
Craigslist is a business. Once you stop thinking of it as a non-profit,
everything Craig does makes sense.

Do you think PadMapper (if they were to overtake CL) or AirBnb or Google or
anyone else will let anyone crawl their data and disrupt their revenue stream
without putting up a fight? Of course not.

The cognitive dissonance here is simply caused by people thinking CL is a non-
profit, which he has shown it is not.

~~~
jessriedel
I think the standard response here is that CL clearly leaves _massive_ amounts
of money on the table. It can't be modeled well as a for-profit company.
Whether or not it can be modeled as a non-profit with a coherent philosophy is
debatable, but just pointing out that _some_ of its actions seem profit-driven
does not eliminate the apparent conflict with other actions.

~~~
nollidge
> It can't be modeled well as a for-profit company

I'm not an MBA, but why the hell not? They entice people to become regular
users with all the free stuff, building a network, allowing them to make an
enormous profit off of the few products they do sell.

If they started charging for other things besides job ads (and the other 1 or
2 things they charge for), they could very well start losing money because of
people refusing to pay and going elsewhere.

~~~
jessriedel
Here, "Money left on the table" doesn't mean "short-term money that would have
long term negative consequences for the business". I means _free money_ , that
is money _after_ you take into account the effects of various price changes.
You may disagree and claim that CL's strategy of charging for nothing besides
a few NY/LA business listings is for-profit optimal--and therefore that
there's really no free money--but you'd be in a minority.

~~~
dredmorbius
I do in fact argue that CL's strategy is profit-optimizing as a market-making
and competition-avoiding strategy:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4324889>

------
debacle
I'd like to offer up a different scenario:

Craig Newmark, the Guy with Fuck You Money

This guy is customer support. Yes, he's more than that, but he has enough
money to focus on the part of the business he likes - sitting in his walled
garden, pruning the content. God that has to be fulfilling.

Why criticize him for that?

------
bengarvey
A while back I wrote a greasemonkey script for craigslist that allowed you to
filter out any for-sale listings that didn't have pictures. It was called,
NoPicsNoService, and after I was done I emailed Craig the link. He emailed me
back that day and said it was cool.

Less than a year later, that feature was built into craigslist.

~~~
badclient
Well I'm glad it took them less than a year to add another condition to their
sql query.

~~~
bengarvey
Also, a checkbox.

------
a2tech
People that say Craigslist is broken are utterly, incomprehensibly, wrong. Its
an ugly website. It lacks features people on this website think it needs. But
average people love it AS IS. The tone of this article makes it seem like
Craigslist killed the newspaper industry-and paints Craig as the bad guy.
Newspapers failed to adapt. Full period, stop. Craig invented a tiny website
for his neighborhood and it went crazy popular and spread across the country.
His product isn't what we want-but it is what he and most of the people using
it want.

~~~
pessimizer
For me the site nearly causes physical pain to look for anything specific on.
For every non-tech person I know, they still think it's the best site ever
made, and some of them sit on it all day like facebook addicts.

And I'll be damned, but when I wanted to get rid of some trash in my house
that I thought someone else might've found useful, I had the ad up in 20
minutes. Before the sun went down, all of it was gone and I had a couple of
$20s in my pocket.

I didn't have every move monetized, they didn't make me pay per message after
the 3rd response, and I'm pretty sure they actually deleted my ad [at some
point] after I pressed delete. I trust Newmark's stewardship, and hopefully
this Padmapper thing shakes them up enough to introduce a non-intrusive
interface for apartment hunting that makes my head hurt less.

------
jessriedel
This misses the philosophy which I have been told is behind craiglist's
behavior: a sort of extreme localism. They want to try to keep craigslist
informal, encourage bartering instead of sales, etc.

I think there are some insights buried in this philosophy, it's just that in
this case craiglist is very wrong. If you actually want to understand the man
and the organization (rather than just bad-mouth them) you need to address
this issue.

------
angrow
A generally good post, but the claim that Newmark "refuses to take
responsibility" for "breaking" newspapers is something of a howler. Newspapers
do not have a monopoly on watchdog or investigative journalism, and even if
there is less of that sort of reporting nowadays (a claim itself worthy of
investigation and fact-checking), it can't be blamed on any one guy, no matter
how successful his business.

------
azylman
To be honest, I didn't get the "principled" impression out of anything written
here - I think the author was just trying to soften the blow a little bit...

------
ericd
I think that Craig actually isn't behind these decisions, though, which would
explain the apparent conflict between his friendly attitude and the unfriendly
attitude of the company overall.

~~~
fusiongyro
The company goes to some effort to maintain that "we're almost a non-profit"
angle though; Jim Buckmaster's "About" page calls himself a communist, for
example:

<http://www.craigslist.org/about/jim_buckmaster>

Like it or not, Craig is basically the brand identity for Craigslist. It's
going to be awfully hard for Craigslist to separate themselves meaningfully
from Craig. The more discordance there is between the two, the worse it is for
their brand image, whatever the motivation.

~~~
fleitz
And now Buckmaster owns your posts for the benefit of the community, sounds
perfectly fitting with someone who describes themselves as communist.

Soon they will roll out a special section of craigslist apartments that looks
like Jony Ive designed it but it's only for party members.

------
nc
I think this raises an interesting question about the nature of natural
monopolies in technology, and the lack of competition caused by that effect.

Craigslist is powerful cause of it's network effects, and it's getting away
with what is most probably an inferior service.

------
dredmorbius
My Eric DeMenthon's own admission, Craigslist offered a data sharing/licensing
agreement of $5000 and 10% of revenues. That's pretty reasonable. If PadMapper
can't cover this through its own business model, perhaps there just isn't much
money on the table?

[http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-07-25-craigslist-
goes...](http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-07-25-craigslist-goes-after-
website-developers-usings-its-data)

"Principled businessman" seems a bit more fair than Jeremy's blog post would
suggest.

And, as always, there's a lot nobody but Craig (and Jim) and Eric know. I'm
seeing one heck of a PR game being waged.

~~~
xanados
That is not fully accurate. Craigslist offered a licensing agreement for
MOBILE ONLY: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/craigslist-
sues-p...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/craigslist-sues-
padmapper-for-copyright-infringement/)

Given that PadMapper is a desktop-focused website (and the mobile experience
is terrible, so I imagine 90% of their use is desktop), this is sort of a non-
starter. It would be as if the Apple were willing to license Samsung their
design patents but only on the Newton.

~~~
dredmorbius
Web only? ORLY?
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.padmapper&...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.padmapper&feature=nav_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDMsImNvbS5wYWRtYXBwZXIiXQ.).

Edit: oh, not what you said. Granted, yes, I found the PM desktop tool much
more useful than mobile, though mobile was good enough to use when I was
roaming around town.

------
koeselitz
At this point, it seems as though journalism made an extraordinarily dire
mistake in relying principally on revenue streams that are entirely distinct
from their central business. Shouldn't journalism rather have sought to
monetize the thing it does best - journalism? If it had, maybe it wouldn't be
in this mess right now.

~~~
czr80
This seems a strange comment to make, given how much of the web is advertising
funded. Or do you think Google should charge users a subscription fee?

------
gwern
> He has very odd priorities. Craig spends his days manually removing flagged
> spam in a terminal view. You and me, we can’t understand someone like this.

Is this true?

------
gojomo
Remember, Craigslist's best-funded competitor is Kijiji/eBayClassifieds.
Craigslist has alleged eBay improperly used its minority stake and one-time
board seat at Craigslist to help launch Kijiji using proprietary knowledge of
Craigslist.

An initial lawsuit over some of the issues in Delaware resulted in a split
decision in 2010: eBay lost its board seat but the move by the other CL
shareholders to dilute eBay's stake was reversed.

Another lawsuit in California appears to be still in a lengthy discovery
process, more than a year after a judge ruled against eBay's motion to
dismiss, if I'm interpreting the data here correctly:

[http://webaccess.sftc.org/Scripts/Magic94/mgrqispi94.dll?APP...](http://webaccess.sftc.org/Scripts/Magic94/mgrqispi94.dll?APPNAME=IJS&PRGNAME=ROA22&ARGUMENTS=-ACGC08475276)

As a result...

• Craigslist may seem paranoid but perhaps justifiably so

• Craiglist may not want to grant an inch to anyone that might then also be
used by Kijiji/eBay, with their near-bottomless pockets, to
embrace/extend/extinguish the Craiglist core service

• this sort of lengthy deep-discovery process can distract management and also
impair internal communications/flexibility, knowing every word could become
discovered fodder for a current (or future) lawsuit

Any assessment that Craigslist is being a 'jerk' about competitive issues,
without considering this giant factor, is missing a giant part of the picture.

------
rprasad
tl;dr: whine, whine whine.

