Back when the first bubble burst in late 2001, I scraped a bunch of historical craigslist data from a secondary archive and built an interactive gnuplot webpage of post-traffic by category over time. At the time, it got slashdotted, a couple hundred thousand people looked at it and it was all fun and good.

So I thought afterwards, hey, the economy is kinda sketchy still and looking at this stuff sure is neat... I should build a real tool that robustly and respectfully logs daily post totals for more locales, and maybe build out a cool little graph portal. Maybe I can even do a little NLP to make it smarter. hey, it's craigslist, they're community minded.. they thank me when I post, they won't mind. They give pencils to teachers even.

So I email them, and Craig responds in a cc'd message with a 'hey cool, can this guy use our RSS feeds'? At which point, the assholes that worked there started inventing every excuse under the sun as to why doing so would totally damage their infrastructure (because you know, polling RSS every half an hour is total abuse.)

Anyway, that's when I realized that all the hippie-dippie stuff was just window dressing and that I really truly was dealing with a really special species of asshole.

I put the project down and walked away. The end.