I'm Joining Craigslist in July (by Jeremy Zawodny) | Hacker News Reader

I'm Joining Craigslist in July (by Jeremy Zawodny)

jeremy.zawodny.com

50 pointsajbatac24 comments

Craigslist should go into micropayments. Requiring a micropayment of a few cents for posting an ad could completely shut down spammers.

For the sake of debate, I'll challenge this. As long as money is made by spamming the site, even a micropayment wouldn't completely eradicate spam. Profits from spamming would decrease and spam would probably drop, but only until the expected value of each post equals the micropayment price.

Micropayments could even increase spam. People might feel entitled to take more liberties with their posts if they are paying for them.

But since the success rate for SPAM is so low, it only takes a miniscule per-post charge to make it uneconomical. Also, the requirement for payment could be structured to make it much harder for spammers to make arbitrary new identities.

Even if spam never saw a financial return, there would still be spam.

A lot of spam is purchased as a 'marketing service' by fools who _think_ spam works, who make a payment to a third party to spam on their behalf.

As the failure happens after the payment the effectiveness or lack thereof only modifies the decisions of repeat offenders - and even then only those who actually learn from their mistakes.

Of course spam will stop once the world runs out of fools who think they can get rich quick... any day now, really...

The population of fools who think they can get rich quick is related to the incidence of fools who do get rich quick. If no one gets rich spamming Craigslist and everyone instead gets poorer because it's too expensive, then no one will spam Craigslist.

Combine the per-post micropayment with the forfeiture of your account balance one if you are caught spamming and I think this would be an effective deterrent. There will be fools who will still spam. They will just do it elsewhere.

It's like the two guys in the woods confronted by a bear. One ties his running shows and the other asks if he could really outrun the bear. The first guy says: "I don't have to outrun the bear, just you!"

That's very easy to say, but the reality is more complex.

Much of the attraction of Craigslist is the free posting. Not all the groups are commercial in nature, many are just discussion. Also, the Craigslist founders think of the site as a public service.

No convenient and reliable micropayments system yet exists. Cost per transaction on credit cards is far too high. Online games use private currencies; you buy a big chunk of currency and you draw on it for in-game transactions. That could work, and it kills spam dead, but the big upfront cost would make many users hesitate before posting. It's not like a game, where you can expect to play for hours at a time. I bet most Craigslist users post perhaps once or twice a year.

Extra screens for purchasing would also complicate the UI. Another deterrent to posting.

It's not clear to me that you could set a price which deters spammers but allows the good postings through. The economics are different from email spam. A spammer can flood a Craigslist group with just a few hundred messages, and then Craigslist will do the work of distributing it to millions.

Furthermore some Craigslist spammers are real local businesses that just post too frequently, or in improper places. Like a local car dealership flooding the used cars group. The dealership's expected return might be a few thousand dollars, and they may be perfectly willing to spend $20.

Maybe payments are part of the solution, but I don't think they can be the whole solution; at least not if Craigslist wants to be like it has been in the past.

Curious to know if Craigslist still hands out equity to employees?

Question: Do they have any intention of going public? If not, then what's the point of equity? Profit Sharing?

Right - profit sharing. Unless they are trying to build a cash hoard for an acquisition (doubtful) or buy out Ebay (somewhat more likely).

Probably not after the whole eBay fiasco.

No equity at all? I doubt that. The eBay fiasco arose because one employee had ~28% equity in the company, which is far, far more than an engineer joining at this stage could reasonably expect to receive.

Don't you think it had more to do with the fact that the company was structured so that he could sell his equity to outsiders?

Which is why I wanted to find out for sure.

Relaxing read, not a heck of a lot insight though. I guess the blog kicker means what it says "Some random bits scribbled"

Sorry it wasn't more insightful. Maybe after I've been there a few weeks I'll have more interesting things to say...

Some more thoughts about what would have happened had the Microsoft deal gone through.

That's probably best to get into after I'm not a Yahoo employee anymore, should I decide to get into it at all of course... :-)

You needed to incorporate aviation into it somehow. I think that would have sold everyone. ;)

I'm jealous. I've applied there a couple of times but could never close the deal. Good going Jerem.

I Farted and Would Like Everyone to Sniff It (by Jeremy Zawodny)

He didn't self-submit, he just posted to his personal blog, so why are you complaining?

edit: can one of the downmodders please explain where i'm going wrong? the blog author may have farted (no comment), but he did not do anything to make others sniff it.

We could all learn lessons in self-promotion from the blogosphere elite!

Do yourself and us a favor, and go back to reddit.

No kidding -- he's a perl scripter and knows some mysql. Did he start a company? Why do people care?

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