How I hacked my room hunt in SF (polaske.tumblr.com)

Cool. Easy hack I'll try next time I look for a place.

Very interesting... having never had to apartment hunt before in an area I was unfamiliar with, I find it fascinating that I would've overlooked sounding interesting in my emails and kept things pretty stock.

Great, now craigslist is going to be filled with a couple real rooms for rent, the usual spam, and a bunch of "hacker" spam.

I can imagine an unethical candidate reposting a duplicate job (or several copies) and then replying "sorry, no thanks" to the competition.

This introduces an interesting dynamic: how can you verify that a post you're replying to is genuine?

Well that ended abruptly.

Was considering of doing a similar thing for accepting candidates for my house. My plan was to take all the responses, strip all references to locations, and then randomly send them to every listing in every other major metropolitan area. The one that got the most callbacks I would then callback. In the end, my roommates read through all the responses and I didn't have to do any work.

You mean... If you make yourself sound like a somewhat normal and interesting person people will want to live with you? I don't understand how this was a breakthrough for you.

Thats a pretty sweet way to utilize startup strategies you have learned on the job to benefit you personally.

Unfortunately this fails the categorical imperative test. If everybody did this, the system you are using would be much worse off. You are benefitting at the cost of other people's wasted time and effort.

So I wouldn't brag about it too much.