[incongruity]

> These guys are doing a disservice to the American public.

This comment blows my mind. How quickly we take things for granted is astounding.

CL is a largely FREE site – I for one have sold around $1k of stuff I didn't want on there in the last decade or so – not much, but I paid exactly $0 for that. Try that with eBay or, even better, your local newspaper classifieds.

The entitlement that lurks behind comments like the one above – or at least the hyperbole within it is amusing, at best.

CL works – it's far from perfect, sure, but it's perfectly free for most users and most things – the change it has brought about and the value its given to its users makes it a textbook case for service to the American public in my book.

Now, if we want to talk about how it can be made better, sure, there's a lot there, but don't blow it up to be a crime against humanity, or God, King or Country...

[vijayr]

Totally agreed, the level of entitlement among the public is really amazing, especially when it comes to online/free services. CL is not a charity, it is not a non-profit. They can do anything they want, as long as it is legal. Of course their interface is bad etc. But they've got the biggest audience, the site is fast/predictable/never down, they also do their best to keep spammers/scammers out. What else could we ask from a totally free (for the most part) service?

[poppew]

Keep in mind this was a rant. Craigslist is awesome in many ways and has provided tremendous value over the years. All I am saying is their stubbornness to not improve has left a lot of value on the table. If someone else, maybe more capitalistic, was running craigslist we would probably be benefiting from it more at this point. Their monopoly of the local marketplace allows them to be complacent. The fact that they use their monopoly to not improve or let anyone else improve their platform is a crime in my mind. Just because it is free does not justify not improving it. There is huge a market inefficiency here that they are using to their advantage at the cost of the consumer...

[rhizome]

Why aren't you exploiting the market failure you see? Could it be that you're overestimating the amount of "value" left on the table by disallowing users to run riot over the site?