Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value
by dantillberg on Friday February 05, 2016 @06:25PM
(#11045473)
You're right. My error. Thank you!
I have been seriously frustrated by the dominance of Craigslist re apt-hunting, but it's quite fair to note that, while I may object to their choices, it is obviously not greed that (primarily) motivates them/him. So it's definitely not right for me to group them with LinkedIn.
However... Craigslist for all its fault is driven by an egalitarian vision. The ideology which prevents Craigslist from improving their UI and providing an API (or supporting scraping) is the same ideology which prevents them from taking massive investment, becoming beholden to investors, monetizing at any cost, and selling out the users in the process.
It's very easy to sit here and split that hair and so, "but no, I want them to just improve the UI, but also not sell out." It's very easy to create a laundry list of the way we wish others would behave, but it's also childish and unrealistic to expect the world to conform to our ideals, especially when we are distant and ignorant of the actual choices in front of the stakeholders.
Given the nature of what is going on in the Valley right now—eg. Twitter considered a failure because they only have 1/5th the userbase of Facebook, and nary a drop of ink spilled on its contribution to global conversation, all because we need to see how many dollars this thing can actually generate before we decide on whether its successful despite whatever world-changing qualities it may have—I think Craigslist is a wonderful company that more should take as an example.