Did Craigslist decimate newspapers? Legend meets reality

True. I built a web site for a local newspaper back in the late 90s. Their main concern was finding a way to charge for the content (difficult at that time) while making sure they didn't give anything away for free, so they did nothing useful with it for a long time.

That paper still survives, barely, ironically having cut back on home delivery and trying to push customers toward digital, while losing a lot of the content that made it worth getting in the first place.

I agree with everything you said, but don't underestimate the fact that we have been trained by the past couple hundred years to consume news in that way. News presented in a logical way would probably be off-putting to some huge segment of the public because it wouldn't carry the proper ritual air of "seriousness." Seriousness looks like a newspaper article.

For a related illustration: It's extremely dumb that Wikipedia has continued with the Voice of God tone that it borrowed from encyclopedias, for example, especially when people know that it is often edited by dimwits (and by purpose is open for any idiot to edit.) Encyclopedias had to pretend to be the Voice of God because you would only own one. That one would have cost as much as your living room sofa. It wasn't written by incel assholes, but people with lots of letters after their names who you assumed wore clean white coats.

Wikipedia doesn't have to pretend. Encyclopedias had limited space, so they had to leave out a lot. Wikipedia doesn't. Encyclopedias had to be conservative in what they included, because people were investing millions to print them, and once they were printed, you didn't get to change them. Wikipedia can print tons of things that turn out to be falsehoods, and balance them later with the articles that show them to be falsehoods.

The fact that Wikipedia doesn't feel obligated to include all primary or secondary sources that can be legally included is insane. Wikipedia should be nothing but a guide to sources, and the narrative linking those sources should be explaining their taxonomy of ideas; how they relate to and contradict one another, where ideas were introduced or expanded, etc. Instead, it's really obsessed with telling me who is "right-wing." Because as a Voice of God, it can't help but abuse its authority. Its addiction to that power is why it does not change, and why governments, NGOs, and random companies have found it so useful to control.

The reality is that it's working well for both the newspapers and Wikipedia. As entrenched institutions distributing knowledge through printing presses, their primary motivation after being obsoleted by information technology transforms into preventing the distribution of knowledge, and of casting aspersions on the quality of knowledge from other sources. Wikipedia basically says: "There are two kinds of sources, bad and good. The bad sources will hurt you. We include all of the good sources. There's no reason to go anywhere else."

They might as well include: "Therefore, we are worth the price of a sofa." They sort of still do, but now that pitch is made to intelligence agencies and weird foundations. And it's about owning that Voice. If you're not paying for Wikipedia, it means you're the product.

The reason online newspapers don't have links is because they don't want you to read the sources. They want you to passively accept what they are saying as true. Just like modern newspapers always have. To simply inform people would destroy their core value proposition, which is keeping people from being informed by others. They're not trying to expand the newspaper market in general, they're trying to expand their share.

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e.g. If there's a widespread conspiracy theory quasi-religion that has people feeding their children gravel will get rid of their autism, Wikipedia wouldn't think it should link to the publications of the people promulgating the theory, describe schisms between different groups of gravel-eaters, and the theory's apostates. It thinks it should spend a bunch of time telling me that they are right-wing, and that right-wingers do crazy things, and that everybody agrees that no one should eat gravel. If I'm lucky, I might get the name of somebody involved. At the bottom I'll get related links to "cults" "list of crazy right-wing beliefs." On the talk page: "Eating gravel to cure autism is insane and doesn't deserve the attention; can we just merge this into the 'Demographics of Trump Supporters' page?"

Reading Wikipedia I get the same feeling I get when you read histories from the middle ages or antiquity where they're describing something, let's say a card game, but seemingly have no interest in the rules. They describe the strategies being used, but leave out how many cards they played with and tons of other details. There's no way you could reconstruct it. It's because those histories were written by elites as a way of saying something like "the local peasants had a lot of color, and were smarter than one would think!" A romantic value judgement, a sign of approval or disapproval, not a description of what was in front of them, but a description of their feelings about it.

Thanks to those scribes, hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people could play the same card game for decades; it could be written about a dozen times; and to this day we may still not know how it was played. The fact that cultural elites can't see past their own eqos destroys history. Yet Wikipedia soldiers on, slowly becoming more entrenched in government than an encyclopedia ever was. Pretending to be authoritative. A zombie from the 50s, when a set of books sold door to door could contain all the information in the world.

sorry for the essay everyone, am procrastinating...

Many looking for a job, used car or apartment for rent bought a newspaper for the classifieds. I almost never bought a newspaper for any other reason.

Which is exactly the existential cliff that the ad driven economy is about to drive over. Those big search engine companies that also happen to sell ads are, like, gonna have to pivot hard.

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These things were everywhere, my hometown of 20k had TWO papers, one was a weekly and the town next door had one. And then even in a big city, you would have neighborhood level papers with a little news, some ads, etc.

They are all gone. Many of them folding before the internet became popular.

Like the article says, multiple things caused ( and are causing) newspapers to go out of business.

Just because a country didn't have Craig's List, there's similar services all over the place reducing ad revenue.

Craigslist equivalents arrived at the same time in those countries.

And DuckDuckGo, Petfinder, MusicBrainz, Yahoo!, and TicketMaster.

The Swiss army chainsaw saw some things.

Care to elaborate? I never heard this before particularly of Amazon which is notorious for Java

What about their DB? Did they fight MyISAM daily?

Shhh.

Craigslists secret sauce was also that eBay bought Gumtree and let it stagnate.

Probably deliberately so, as it was cannibalising eBay.

I can't remember the name of this law. So I'll just say it's Cunningham's law.

It's funny you mention 500kb/s. I have a painfully slow connection at home currently (long story). It's exactly in the 500kb/s to 800kb/s range and "dial up speed" is exactly how I describe it.

I was surprised by that part too. I always assumed that Craig was a young techy person.

My takeaway from this article:

- Craiglist was launched by a 40-year old, ex-IBM enginner. It started out as an online list for his circle of friends.

- The main competitor then was "Classifieds" section in newspapers. Craigslist out-competed them by simply being a better medium (No word-count limit + photo support).

- Meanwhile, newspaper executives failed to respond in a meaning manner. By 2010, 70% of their classified ad business was gone.

Craig seems to be fully retired by now, focusing on his philanthropy work, which I think is awesome.

Google's ads are the outcome of google's success at capturing attention. They aren't the cause of google capturing attention.

Newspaper's had everyone's attention and then they lost it to a million and one alternatives on the internet.

The phone was a major driver but newspapers had been in structural decline for decades as non internet alternatives for attention grew too. Warren Buffet called it in 1991.

I'm not sure so much online ads per se as the destruction on local buying monopolies on goods to a large degree, general unwillingness to pay for news (more or less related), and, also related, desire to (not) buy content online also related. There was essentially a bundle that supported things like foreign bureaus that largely was dismantled.

Looks fine to me on a 27" 1440p business class display in Firefox on Fedora 42 at multiple magnification levels.