Via Lew Rockwell’s blog today, Wired ran a great piece on craigslist founder, Craig Newmark.
About craigslist’s stripped-down functionality, Gary Wolf writes:
Each of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation’s adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.
“More” of this, please. We are already inflamed with function-creeping, social networking incestuousness — we don’t need any more swelling. Unfortunately it’s bled over into blogging, where you, as the reader, are attacked on all visual fronts to hey hey hey hey hey click this do this now now now share it share it like like like, in warp-speed technicolor at 72 dpi. It’s something I’ve tried to fight on this here site; heck, I’m thinking of stripping things down even further. It can be done.
This is why I like books. Aside from the cover artwork and a few design flourishes on the inside, it’s all thoughts on page, committed to paper and the mind of the reader. When at one time books were what everyone relied on for entertainment and knowledge, they have now become Avalon for our wounded Arthurian senses.
On an interesting side note, Wolf describes Newmark as “politically liberal”, yet:
“People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day,” Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves.
Newmark’s words are classically libertarian: leave people alone and they will most likely work things out for themselves. For every single “craigslist killer” there’s probably a million mutually beneficial, peaceful, voluntary transactions. Not a bad ratio. I’ve done maybe a dozen sales through craigslist with zero problem — I simply use some common sense and intuition to avoid transactions from which I may not benefit. The idea of a society capable of functioning by itself, coercion(government)-free is fundamentally at odds with modern left-liberalism, as well as most other political positions, including conservatism. If Newmark believes we’re just trying to get “through the day”, what need do have for a government to make sure we play nice with ourselves (i.e., the left’s costly welfare state), or that we play mean with others (i.e., the right’s costly warfare state)?