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Discussion (111 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://streeteasy.com/blog/craigslist-property/
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/craig-newmark/
Right now they rely on volunteers to combat that problem, in the form of legit landlords reporting the scams.
> In 2022, Newmark committed $50 million to the Cyber Civil Defense initiative.[39] As of April 2022, approximately $30 million of this commitment had been awarded.[40]
> In 2023, Craig Newmark Philanthropies announced it would double its donations from $50 million to $100 million for fighting cyber threats.[41]
> In 2026, Newmark founded a public service campaign, "Take9", encouraging users to pause and think before responding to a text or email to help avoid being scammed.[42][43] A video for the campaign featured Newmark teaming up with Count von Count from Sesame Street.[42][43]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark
There were tons of ways to advertise selling your used car (e.g. most towns did and still do have a high traffic spot where people will go park the car with a for sale sign, or - more directly in competition with local papers - were car classifieds publications distributed for free. These cost more than newspapers to place an ad and tended to target the enthusiast market).
Besides that, newspapers competed with each other. In the heyday of print, it was pretty rare - almost unheard of - that there weren’t multiple publishers in any market, even small towns. Kind of the anti definition of monopoly. Hell, the US constitution literally encodes the right for anyone to publish a newspaper. Even now, most markets have several options for buying print classifieds.
An “expensive” offering from a variety of vendors that happens to be effective is not a monopoly, it’s just businesses pricing at value not cost.
The $50 was what many people, apparently, were happy to pay to have their ad distributed daily for a few weeks, on paper, delivered to the homes of thousands of people. Look up the cost of a full size ad in a print publication, and classifieds look like a pretty good deal.
Around here it’s (very sadly IMO) been almost completely replaced by Facebook Marketplace, to the extent that people make Facebook accounts just to use Marketplace.
I had assumed that the fee portion of the site was substantial enough to cover all costs, and generate perhaps tens of millions of profit (he's well known for having given away money to media, so obviously there's some profit). But I didn't realize that it made hundreds of millions of dollars.
Are there any articles that break down how this pencils out?
Revenue peaked in 2018 at $1 billion.
Love news like this, happy tears!
I was on the security team for eBay/PayPal at the time they took a minority stake in Craigslist, and one of the jobs we got was securing their infrastructure (they didn't have a security team).
I wonder if they still have that arrangement with eBay...
Refreshing to see a multimillionaire+ who actually knows the meaning of the word "enough." The world seems to be run by people who don't even know of the word.
That is the explicit design of Capitalism yes.
It's literally a system built around "Those who can amass the most capital are explicitly in charge of distributing it."
It cannot go any other way. Without some external forcing, it will always lift up sociopaths who can squeeze more blood from the stone.
It's like getting upset that Apple's reviews aren't impartial and reliably screw over people trying to compete with Apple. Like, what did you expect? What are you going to do to prevent the obvious outcome?
I think a fundamental problem is that the non-profit/NGO sector doesn’t have the same caliber of people as the private sector. There’s no Jeff Bezos equivalent working on inner city education. Bill Gates is really the only one who has tackled this, by investing his own time into public health, which I understand has produced real results.
I think there's a case to be made that philanthropy produced the Internet Archive but maybe that's a little different from usual philanthropy since Brewster is very hands on for so long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...
If we assume you are right about billionaire philanthropy being basically ineffectual (I personally agree) there is a line of reasoning that I find explains why adequately. When systems don't have their incentives structured properly, then quite often the unexpected outcomes are stronger than the predicted outcome. Because the input to the system did not properly account for, or change the incentives which drive the dynamics of the system.
Examples about in healthcare, social programs, education... large SWE companies...
There's so little real pressure for results when you're backed by some billionaire's fortune, the existence of the organization is not threatened by non-performance... there's no free market to survive in, the goal is to lose money... the things you are trying to measure are slow signals or mostly qualitative...
I don't know whether John Arnold is spread too thin or not, but he's certainly top caliber and does a lot to measure progress before/during investment in various causes (including education). He also seems to be more agnostic on what the most appropriate solution may be at the beginning of the process.
but empty words to the american working class
it may be too late, now ppl hate the rich
When I was 9, my dad arranged a tour of East Berlin for his family. As part of the deal with the USSR when the 4 zones were partitioned, this was allowed for an Air Force officer. This was at the height of the Cold War.
The Wall is gone now, but it was something to behold in those days. There's the Wall, the kill zone, the tank traps, the dogs, the watchtowers, the barbed wire, and the machine guns. All on the east side.
We went through Checkpoint Charlie on a bus, and were searched by the East German guards entering and exiting. The guards ran a mirror under the bus. They were all carrying machine guns. You could sum up East Berlin in one word - grey.
There was a museum next to Checkpoint Charlie, which was about the Wall. It was loaded with pictures of east Germans being killed trying to escape to the west.
West Berlin built platforms next to the Wall, so you can stand on the platform and look over it and see what a freakin' abomination it was. I never heard of anyone using those platforms to "escape" to East Berlin.
In West Berlin, there was the Russian War Memorial. It was an island of East Berlin surrounded by the west. The memorial was surrounded by barbed wire. There were two guards on duty there, with machine guns, of course. We waved at them, and they grinned at us.
Then an officer came out and looked them up and down. Their faces turned to stone, looking straight ahead.
I asked my dad about it, he said the guards were a pair who didn't know each other, with strict orders to shoot the other if one attempted to get escape through the barbed wire.
It was pretty obvious to my 9 year old mind that people simply do not like living under communism.
I've read a lot of history books over the years. It's pretty clear that communes and communism and socialism do not work. They don't work when people do them freely, they don't work when people are forced into it.
And the more free market a country is, the more prosperous it is. The evidence is strong and everywhere.
It's too bad the Westerners did not leave a section of the Wall standing. It would stop people from rewriting the truth about it.
I don't know how long this asymmetric upside down pyramid structure will hold. Monopoly on violence requires participants to believe in its continuity, any fracture in perception no matter how small, will create an increasingly chaotic redistribution effect.
In American discourse, there's a ton of talk about inequality from the haves against the have-mores, pushing policy that often times will lead to worse outcomes for the have-nots.
Getting rid of the rich is probably a pretty bad idea for the rest of us.
That singular image should be the poster of this Epstein era.
Musk more amply demonstrated how wealth is created.
"Here is a few billion dollar to a non profit company I control but you better not write that in the article" or "I didn't care for social consequences, I was just another player, it was ultimately for you" vibes
it just doesn't have the impact it used to, ironically because then inflation was low and integrity/morality was rewarded as society.
I think Ray Dalio has done a fantastic job of mapping out the trajectory we are on. We've already started seen glimpse of it and I don't think its going to cool down. America and the West in general has growing fatigue with various elements and perhaps the biggest one is that of wealth gap disparity.
Perhaps a snapshot of where we are: The richer you get the more you need access and proximity to those that monopolized violence and pay protection money too. It's not unlike Italy in the 1800s, you need money to purchase and distribute violence to acquire more resources and eventually the gap gets too big, people can't afford bread, and they get bold.
The one exception I had for this was Bill Gates.
Then I looked into the past behavior of Microsoft, and what he was going with Jeffery Epstein.
I no longer hold him as an exception.