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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Is it really hard to create a Craigslist clone? Just curious. I say 'clone' because of the unethical practices followed by Craigslist, and we can have some one more open-minded replace them soon (with enough marketing). I'm not sure why no YC companies (or anyone else for that matter) want to disrupt Craigslist, though.

The internet works the way it is now because of the concept of 'free and open' information. Attempting to harm the ones that enable such open-ness isn't exactly the right recipe for a long term successful Internet based business model.

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Creating the clone is fairly easy. For every type of service that Craigslist provides there have probably been 1-5 clones over the past few years.

Currently both buyers as well as sellers have been trained that the place to go is Craigslist. Give that it would be impossible for a new service to have anywhere near the number of buyers and sellers as Craigslist, no rational individual is going to choose an alternative.

The problem becomes even tricker since Craigslist is for the most part free. They currently use the revenue gained by job postings to subsidize the other listings on their site. This makes it harder for a niche service to start up as they are competing with free.

For some reason, Kijiji is dominant in most of Canada. Craigslist is almost never used here. I'm honestly glad, because I occasionally check Craigslist and it's never a rewarding experience. Without the network-effects monopoly, it's a truly awful site.

They call it network effects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Notoriously difficult to dethrone. Craigslist being such a piece of crap for so long is an object lesson in the power of network effects.

There have been many discussions on HN about CL.a quick search will be extremely helpful.

Afai recall, CL is being pushed into corners by people who desperately want to eat it alive.

Further - users like CL. As much as people wax on about how features and a UI will make a big difference, fact is that in its geography people don't really care about that.

There's also a chart out there showing that CL is being disrupted, in that several silos its present in have alternate service providers.

I must further point out that the ideological posturing at the end assumes that the next firm who comes in, and adds yet another middleman to the chain, will let the data be free and open.

Should they end up consuming/transitioning most of CLs base, who is to say they won't institute a lock in of some sort.

And a YC firm definitely can't operate on the same budgetary and revenue constraints CL imposes on itself.

I'd hate to see a significant rework of the UI for Craigslist--it's so bloody simple that it exactly solves the problems I have, and the site is so barebones that I can browse it on near anything without issue.

New shiny is emphatically not needed here.

I probably save 95% of my apartment search time with Padmapper instead of Craigslist. What is needed is an API so that fans of Craigslist can keep their torturous interface and the rest of us can get the info we need and go on with our lives.

They can afford to be unethical (assuming they are) thanks to their popularity. So any clone would also have to clone Craigslist's ability to attract posters. Otherwise the site is useless, no matter how ethical or better designed it was.

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