Comment by conanbatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by conanbatt | Hacker News Reader

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Craigslist has a fantastic moat: they are insanely operationally efficient. To make more money than craigslist at a lower cost is virtually impossible.

The real entrance cost to becoming a host in airbnb is not airbnb, its having a house. And a host will use airbnb or whatever to keep the appartment occupied. It can absolutely be commoditized, much like Lyft and Uber have. A service that posts your apt in multiple websites would make that permanent.

Today they must own the demand side: i have never seen something become so popular with no little ads (particularly in argentina, it was incredible to see it going from 0 to ubiquitous in 2 years). But demand on apartment rentals is incredibly price sensitive, demonstrated by the competition airlines have.

I have friends who worked at Craigslist, and was astonished to hear them describe a team of IIRC 35-40 employees. They have somewhere around 50 now? Makes you wonder what those 3k+ employees at Twitter all do.

A lot of companies have an affinity towards jobs numbers, and derive benefits from the local municpality by being able to print job numbers

It simultaneously helps the organization’s tax efficiency and MAYBE something interesting gets developed

Sales, Marketing, Partnerships, Content Moderation/Censorship.

While this doesn't explain all of the difference, Twitter tries, and largely succeeds, to distribute both Tweets and likes in mere seconds, all around the world, while maintaining a search that can find any string in relatively recent messages.

That this is a substantially harder mandate than that of Craigslist I take as a given.

It's irrelevant how many sites you can use to list your apartment. What matters is which site guests use.

Sure. Unless, let's say, a company that's already used by travelers to book travel options enters the space and/or syndicates the data to hotel search engines in addition to their own website. If I can find both hotels and apartments in hotels.com, why do you think I'd use airbnb? (Assuming apartment owners don't mind listing their space in multiple sites - which is a hard problem to solve but not an impossible one. It has less churn on the supply side compared to, let's say, Uber)

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