Craig Newmark Quotations

I'd like to build a way for people doing good work to connect, to learn from each other, protect each other, and then I want to get out of their way.

People are smart, good and surprise me with the way they use our site.

I was just e-mailing a few friends about events that were useful or fun and now my friends of 20 or more have become a mailing list of 7,500 people and a virtual community of at least 10,000 people.

Right now, the biggest shared value that I can think of is that you should treat others the way you want to be treated, and just have some good sense about what matters to you.

I think people like us because of the culture of trust we have in the site, the culture of goodwill -- and people manage to get stuff done,

We had one similar experience with 9/11. That was a matter of hours, but it was more intense, obviously.

The problem is that with blogging, the model is publish first, maybe fact-check later. In newspapers, the model is you fact check first and then publish. But those models are merging.

This wisdom of crowds thing--it may be a cliche, but it's mostly true. What we're talking about here is a democracy, and it works, but you have to be careful before it gets out of control.

Treat people like you want to be treated; live and let live; and also give the other person a break now and then.

Death is my exit strategy. I'll be doing significant customer service only as long as I live.

There's no genius behind it. It's persistence and listening to people.

In business, there are times when you disagree, and sometimes it turns out that you're just plain wrong. Humor takes away tension and helps you realize you're wrong.

I'm not in the news business and won't tell people how to do their job. I'd like to restore trust in the news business, though, and feel that restoring fact-checking will really help. News business realities mean that such fact-checking has to be practical, it has to be fast and cheap.

I am committed to doing customer service for Craigslist for the rest of my life. The exit strategy is death.

What works on the net works for people in general. The net has very little to do with technology, what matters is how people use the technology.

Finding a good cause is incredibly hard and time-consuming,

I want to help accelerate the evolution of the press because right now, newsrooms are cutting investigative journalists, and we need investigative journalists.

We want to offer job training and mentoring and build the site with more robust, reliable and flexible technology.

The country is in some trouble, because the media, which is supposed to provide a check and balance on government, has decided to stop doing that as a collective entity.

Craigslist does serve as a platform where people help each other for the basics, and also, shows people that the Internet is good for mutual support. I do feel pretty good about that.

Okay, I'm not in the news business, and I'm not going to tell anyone how to do their job. However, it'd be good to have news reporting that I could trust again, and there's evidence that fact-checking is an idea whose time has come.

A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.

Milestones aren't what I think about much,

My take on the whole dot-com bubble was that a lot of people who wanted to make a lot of money got too excited and hyped up the commercial aspects of the Internet prematurely. I think the vision of the Internet as a democratizing medium.. as everyone's printing press.. is real. We got distracted from that by the mass hallucinations of the bubble.

We are a very open, very democratic site, which means we get all sorts of people. We do get some bad guys who are a few fries short of a Happy Meal. So we have to enlist the aid of our community to help us. The lesson implicit in this is that people will help you out and behave in a really good way. If you trust them, they will respond to that trust.

I had one simple idea about telling friends about arts and technology events. People in the community suggested everything else to us, and that's our theme. We're really run by the people who use the site. We just run the infrastructure, and help out with problems.

I need to make an okay living. The people who work for us need to. But after you make a comfortable living, how much more do you need? It's like I make a joke about nerd values, because I'm very much in the rich nerd tradition. And you know, we say, like, hey, people pay us for this stuff, like programming. You know, what else do we need?

I feel that one of the best things a person can do for another is to create a job. So you do OK commercially, and then you try to make a difference of some sort.

We don't think of ourselves as do-gooders or altruists. It's just that somehow we're trying our best to be run with some sense of moral compass even in a business environment that is growing.

We don't have much in the way of a business strategy. Like no business plan. Which I say to torment all my friends who are VCs or MBAs. That's always entertaining. The deal is, it's a mixture of luck and persistence.

I look at what the phone company does and do the opposite.

People everywhere have the same needs and values. They need a place to live and a job. Beyond that, they may need to sell stuff or get a mate.

I admit that when I think of the money one could make from all this, I get a little twinge. But I'm pretty happy with nerd values: Get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world.

Choose your mistakes carefully.

Follow through with basic values, and remember to provide good customer service.

From the very beginning, I was involved in talking to people, listening to people. And it hasn't stopped. The idea was that people send me information; I'd ask them about it, listen, try to do something about it - and then ask for more feedback.

I don't expect to be a ‘leader’ with this thing. I'd rather be a builder. I'd like to build a way for people doing good work to connect, to learn from each other, protect each other, and then I want to get out of their way.

Sometimes a slow gradual approach does more good than a large gesture.

A lot of publishers have close relationships with people in power. So the press, which used to speak truth to power, doesn't. The big result of that has been the erosion of trust.

My understanding from talking to a lot of people in the business has been that it used to be that a newspaper was considered a community service. Now they're being run as profit centers, and they're trying to get pretty high profit margins. As a result, investigative reporting has been seen as a problem.

We think of Craigslist as a form of Social Media.We provide a simple service that is mostly free and we leave money in the community, instead of taking it away. Shared values, nothing fancy, treating people like we want to be treated. What works on the net works for people in general. The net has very little to do with technology, what matters is how people use the technology.

Getting out of the way is really important.

The stuff that works best is driven by passion rather than dollars.

I want you to know, at this very moment, I am simulating normal human behavior.

Crooks are early adopters.

I rely on Taegan Goddard's Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It's an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.

I started a simple list of what I thought were cool events, arts and technology stuff.

During the bubble, we got distracted by the prospect of big bucks. Now it's much better balanced.

Our sites are run by the people who use them. We just pretty much provide the infrastructure.

This feels particularly good. It reaffirms the confidence I have in people.

This is a mistake. eBay bad and robotic, Craig's List human and good. And now on the way to selling out.

I remember and know the Bill of Rights. But my instincts tell me to be helpful, and (that attitude) is surprising to a lot of cops who deal with Internet crimes.

All of a sudden one of my guys noticed they were doing this, ... And then after a little reflection, my team started thinking 'how can we do a better job of this?'

It's a pretty important conference regarding Internet trends, because people are talking a lot about what's really happening. Not just the technology, but what it means for our culture in general.

I do think the biggest problem newspapers have is loss of trust, and I feel that's a result of failure to speak truth to power.