Interesting Stack Overflow podcast this week.
I had seen the list of topics, and came in prepared to disagree with Joel Spolsky about Craigslist being a force for evil.
And I did disagree with the first half of his argument. It’s not Craigslist’s fault that the revenue model for journalism is broken, they just happened to be the ones who picked up the pieces.
But I think the second half was somewhat compelling. Craigslist has amassed a great fortune, and has decided to do nothing with it, which in effect subsidizes real estate agents, pimps, employers, and other advertisers. This is not the most socially optimal use of this resource of which they are stewards, particularly since it is coming at the expense of a vital institution like newspaper journalism.
What stuck out for me was this quote on why Criaglist blocks third party applications that search across locations from the article that triggered the discussion:
It is the same reason that craigslist has never done any of the things that would win approval among Web entrepreneurs, the same reason he has never updated its 1999-era Web design.
The reason is that craigslist’s users are not asking for such changes.
“I hear this all the time,” Buckmaster says. “You guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen. Don’t you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post—we’re the leader. It could be we’re doing one or two things right.”
This sounds a lot like the justification Wal-Mart uses for its business practices — this what the customers want; we’re just giving it to them. And the ethic is similar, some people have gotten rich at Wal-Mart, but for the most part they turn their savings into lower prices for their customers.
So, to summarize:
- Wal-Mart — Transfers funds from suppliers (including off-shore labor) and their own employees to low-income consumers.
- Craigslist — Transfer funds from investiagtive journalism to real estate agents, large employers and pimps.
So far, Wal-Mart is coming out ahead in this analysis. Ironically, elite disdain for Wal-Mart helps them look better here, since it means Wal-Mart’s beneficiaries are even more sympathetic.
This is obviously a simplification. Not all of Craiglist’s business is cannibalized from newspapers, and they facilitiate lots of transactions that would have otherwise not taken place. The path from classified ads to investigative journalism is less than direct.
Still, many folks who would never shop at Wal-Mart think nothing of advertising on Craigslist.
