Marketplace is a far worse replacement for Craigslist in the North American market.

It hides what you're searching for, ignores your distance filters, and fills your results with items that are essentially ebay cross-listings. The pictures are extremely compressed so you're unable to validate the item from pictures before reaching out.

The only benefit is many people already have a facebook account, but now I'm unable to delete my facebook account because marketplace is the predominant classified sales channel in most areas. It was a EEE style effort to collect more data on people.

The past few years there have been persistent spam campaigns against Craigslist in various areas of the for-sale classifieds. It wouldn't surprise me if meta was behind it.

Groups are in a similar vein. They've put a log-in barrier on various communities, lowering the barrier to entry tech-wise, but forcing people into their ecosystem when forums have existed for years.

These are bad services. They gain traction due to facebook's other malicious actions.

> Marketplace and Groups are actually pretty valuable and usefu

Craigslist created a new way to sell things and built up to what it is (was?) on being usable, having enough trust, and not fucking it up. Literally anyone could replicate that and add a shiny UI to rival it if they had a giant social network to support it.

Hyperbolic analogy: it's like pinning a medal to the guy who invented the roadside billboard and completely passing over the dude who actually invented the car.

In the long run the only innovating Facebook is going to do over Craigslist is monetization, and that just sucks for users.

well arguably they are still trying to wrestle with theorising what they can get away with, so there are clear limitations.

That's a bit of a stretch of the term engineer

My interpretation was that they’re referring to legal/financial engineers in the context of corporate butheshareholderism, where rather than trying to e.g. build a good nation, the goal is to maximize profits.

These are two types of engineers that, at some places, aim to find loopholes that immensely help themselves while immensely hurting others, maybe as collateral, maybe by design. The fact that you’re so gung-ho about this…is alarming.

What is the word for this type of troll that feigns lack of understanding?

found one

> Could you be more specific?

They're shifty fuckers enabling greedy scummy fuckers to make everything shittier forever for everyone in the world except themselves.

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