Anyway, I hate Upwork and I miss craigslist, so I made GigDig. It's gone through many iterations over the years, never attracting even a single user. This is the newest iteration, and hopefully one people will find useful enough to adopt this time.
Of course, it doesn't even matter if it's a good idea, it's still just a needle in a haystack.
philipwhiuk•1h ago
* There's a clean aesthetic
* You do what looks like a full-text search on the entries making it easy to find stuff if people use the keyword I'm typing
* It's a decent MVP
Cons:
* Your attempt to prevent email scraping seems to boil down to base64 encoding the email.
* The site suffers from the chicken-and-egg problem - you need gigs to get users and users to get gigs.
* The 'hacker typer' font isn't for everyone
* Links in people's adverts aren't clickable - maybe you should support a very limited subset of Markdown for people's posts?
* With no categories or labels, people do have to use keyword stuffing.
* It looks like there's no way to mark a gig as filled / person as unavailable - a successful site would be filled with fake vacancies.
The Reddit mechanism for avoiding the chicken-egg problem doesn't work - you can't offer fake help or fake jobs. If you offered non-email communication options you could scrape HN Hiring I guess