Great, now craigslist is going to be filled with a couple real rooms for rent, the usual spam, and a bunch of "hacker" spam.
Agreed this is horrible.
Unfortunately this fails the categorical imperative test. If everybody did this, the system you are using would be much worse off. You are benefitting at the cost of other people's wasted time and effort.
So I wouldn't brag about it too much.
It's the methodology that's interesting, not the specific context or results.
I suppose we benefit too.
Was considering of doing a similar thing for accepting candidates for my house. My plan was to take all the responses, strip all references to locations, and then randomly send them to every listing in every other major metropolitan area. The one that got the most callbacks I would then callback. In the end, my roommates read through all the responses and I didn't have to do any work.
This means you trust the average populations opinion.
That was another problem
I can imagine an unethical candidate reposting a duplicate job (or several copies) and then replying "sorry, no thanks" to the competition.
This introduces an interesting dynamic: how can you verify that a post you're replying to is genuine?
Very interesting... having never had to apartment hunt before in an area I was unfamiliar with, I find it fascinating that I would've overlooked sounding interesting in my emails and kept things pretty stock.
You mean... If you make yourself sound like a somewhat normal and interesting person people will want to live with you? I don't understand how this was a breakthrough for you.
Well that ended abruptly.
Cool. Easy hack I'll try next time I look for a place.
Thats a pretty sweet way to utilize startup strategies you have learned on the job to benefit you personally.