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Comment by Hilyin | Hacker News Reader

Hope padmapper comes up victorious, CL is being a huge bully it seems.

How are they being a bully? It's their service. If they want to kick someone off it and develop a competitor, that's their prerogative.

This is just another example of why you shouldn't base your startup on someone else's product. If you're successful, they'll develop a competitor and use their position to push you out.

>How are they being a bully? It's their service. If they want to kick someone off it and develop a competitor, that's their prerogative.

So? They're still being a bully. Just because you're acting within the confines of the law and your rights doesn't necessarily mean you aren't being a dick about it.

So CL are bullies for dictating what people can do with their data?

The idea that Craigslist owns their posts is ridiculous. It may be true from a legal point of view, but from a moral point of view they're just the custodian of that data for the people posting it, and they should act as such.

If Craigslist doesn't own the posts, then that means the users own their own posts, and you don't have their permission to re-use their posts.

This just puts you back where you started.

Not really - the users own the posts and put them up in order to get publicity. It's like claiming 'I republished your classified ad for you in 6 papers' is a problem - virtually every classified ad would be pleased that they had more coverage.

I don't want my classified ads republished because I've chosen to publish the advertisement in places that target specific types of people.

It's incredibly naive to assume you know best.

We have our job ads republished by job sites with user bases that are far outside what we're interested in, and it results in a massive waste of our time in filtering those candidates.

There is no morality in business. You can try to be as philosophical as you like about it, but it's all your imagination that morals play any role at all. In fact, your morals are entirely your own and only yours.

When you look at how badly CL's site has stagnated, and what a poor view most apartment searchers have of it, and then you look at the fact that nearly everyone uses it anyway, it's obvious we're dealing with a monopolist. No one who has real competition can get away with keeping their service that shitty.

Apologies for resorting to profanity, but I find Craigslist's behavior completely odious and am continually disappointed to see so many on HN defending them. For a more articulate argument, see 3taps' claims of anticompetitive behavior: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/3taps-files-craigslist-coun..., scribd document at the bottom, pages 25-30.

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