For the uninitiated… Cory Doctorow laid it out in a fantastic post that’s become legend rather quickly.
I still remember the gmail announcement: it was on April 1st and near everyone just thought it was an April fools joke that they promised a GB of space when Hotmail gave 5 MB. And their conversation UI, no delete button, labels: they innovated on every single aspect of how you could do email. Oh did I forget to mention it was the first true web application that was mass market end user focused? And did a killer job at it too?
At one point Google was a true innovators company. Failing to acknowledge that shows Cory’s own biases and continues to relegate him to one loud corner of the internet. We get it Cory, you loooove GNU. Doesn’t mean you can’t objective about other things.
The most annoying new “feature” is that every for sale search on my local CL also returns “more from nearby areas” results from New York, which is hundreds of miles away.
The problem is the meaning of distance is relative by culture. 250 miles is nearby in American west. Some people drive that far for groceries, a date, work even. Without leaving the county.
Meanwhile from say [checks map] Springfield Massachusetts, same 250 miles spans eight states. Half of which hate each other.
Now try buying a car on Craigslist in Hawaii, where half the listings are on the wrong islands. Part of this is CL's fault and part is the spammers mislabeling location (which is also CL's fault, indirectly).
In the parts of UK or EU where people don't have cars, search radius of 250 miles is worse than useless. Some people don't travel that far their entire lives, unless there's a war on. It makes the whole site feel like buggy American crap.
californian: it is not. that's a 3-4 hour drive and can get you from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. If I'm driving that far to meet someone, it better be some crazy rare item that can't be shipped, not for groceries.
Even as someone raised in the rual parts of California, the nearest walmart was "only" 40 miles away or so in the 90's.