"He and Newmark are neither, he wrote, but rather the kind of capitalists who are not fully focused on maximizing profit.
That ethos defined the company. Newmark and Buckmaster rebuffed ideas for expansion — like adding user reviews — because it would make Craigslist easier to game and harder to moderate."
Ye. The right call. User reviews worked great for some years until the KPI became the target.
Traditional journalism has had lots of pinpricks and the article doesn't really refute that Craigslist was almost certainly one of those--and maybe a fairly big one for big city papers in the US. I expect it's also a radical oversimplification to suggest that Craigslist alone decimated newspapers.
I'd say it most certainly killed the sort of dedicated small print classified ad publications you'd find at store checkout counters. But maybe those small pubs like The Want Advertiser (in Boston) were few and far between.
It's odd. People didn't buy newspapers for the classifieds. Classifieds were there nonetheless and they appear to have kept the lights on for the newspaper.
It suggests the newspaper funding model was already broken — they just didn't know it until the internet came along.
Of course by my own fucked up logic then any enterprise making money based on advertisements is on a precarious footing since no one engages in their business for the ads.
I don't know, classifieds still exist. Obviously internet is superior for this, but not everyone can afford internet of any kind, since the bloat scaled with Moore's law. 500KB/s right will give you the same rate of browsing articles as dial up in the 90s. Phones have been becoming obsolete after 2 years. That doesn't necessarily dictate the market but yeah.
Newspapers could have made their own "Craigslist". They just didn't want to learn anything about internet technology or how it could shape the media landscape.
They did not want any computer science people in the company boards or top management level.
Their articles are still written in the same style as when paper ruled. We still only get 1 or 2 photos per article even when it's easy to snap 10-20 photos.
We don't get links to other sites. Articles that says "Apple's press release announced xyz" never links to the press release.
The main cost today to host a site is bandwidth and electricity. Many small cities could host their own craigslist without Facebook ads. there wouldn't be as much bandwidth.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 27.8 ms ] threadThat ethos defined the company. Newmark and Buckmaster rebuffed ideas for expansion — like adding user reviews — because it would make Craigslist easier to game and harder to moderate."
Ye. The right call. User reviews worked great for some years until the KPI became the target.
B) newspapers were decimated in country X
Conclusion: ???
It suggests the newspaper funding model was already broken — they just didn't know it until the internet came along.
Of course by my own fucked up logic then any enterprise making money based on advertisements is on a precarious footing since no one engages in their business for the ads.
They did not want any computer science people in the company boards or top management level.
Their articles are still written in the same style as when paper ruled. We still only get 1 or 2 photos per article even when it's easy to snap 10-20 photos.
We don't get links to other sites. Articles that says "Apple's press release announced xyz" never links to the press release.