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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

> You speak as though CL is broken, and it clearly isn't, as a marketplace it functions well.

I'm guessing you've never had to find an apartment on Craigslist. Sifting through spam, scams, fake listings by agents, listings that have already been sold... sure, you can do it, but it's not efficient.

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Clearly people are still finding value on CL. Hacker News readers are in a demographic that views the internet and the web VERY differently from how people who do not create internet services for a living view them. We care about a completely other set of factors then they do.

We don't bookmark facebook.com we rely on the browser history, having typed it in to the address bar once. They use google to search for the link to the facebook login.

They hear that CL is the biggest site for classified ads, so they post there. They don't care that padmapper will put their apartment on a map, they don't care about other sites.

CL did the hard work of attracting the people to the marketplace. Padmapper is not doing any of that hard work. It is my opinion, if you're doing the hard work of building the community and attracting the users, then you'll agree with CL on this issue. If you're a repackager, then you'll side with padmapper.

If your business idea is "Some corner of Craigs List with a better UI" then by all means, build the UI and then convince people to GIVE you their data.

Building a community takes work, but so does building a better UI. Both should be rewarded in the market, but because of network effects, the former is rewarded disproportionately.

To me, the word community connotes a separate entity that you interact with in some way, usually due to proximity. You might define the Craigslist Community as only people visiting craiglist.com but to me it would imply sites such as Padmapper that extend and improve Craigslist data. They are symbiotic and support the same community of users, Padmapper is not "repackaging" Craigslist like some sort of parasite like you imply.

Anecdotally, whenever I've used Padmapper to find a new apartment I would end up on craiglist.com anyway as Padmapper would often not contain the real estate agent's contact information.

Or a car. Try searching for one of three brands you like within a specified range prices and years, excluding vehicles that have salvage titles, sorted by how close the seller is to you.

The query syntax for CL is reasonably sophisticated, it supports phrase match, grouping and it's possible to specify to specify a price range, using minAsk and maxAsk, you can also specify exclusion terms.

Depends on the market - I understand the incentives in new york are such that scamming by agents is common, and problematic. In the Bay Area, (indeed, all of california to the best of my knowledge) - it's rare (as in, I've never heard of it happening) for a renter to pay a fee for a new rental, and so there is very little incentive to scam them. I've moved five times since 2003, every time using craigslist. If I want a graphical/map view, I just use housingmaps.com - unlike padmaps, they are simply offering a service to the user base, so, to the best of my knowledge, they've always had free access to the CL data.

I've never spent more than a week looking for a new place, and wouldn't consider using any service other than craigslist to do so.

Clearly the experience in other markets is not so positive.

Sorry, what's your claimed difference between padmapper and housingmaps?

As far as I can tell by looking at housingmaps, it's identical to padmapper, which tells me it's going to be shut down soon.

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