* I far, far, far prefer Craigslist interface to anything else in that space. It's clear and focused
Its search engine too - I get things I search for in the area I search for.
For me, Kijiji and Facebook marketplace are awful UI, awful distractions, and give me 10,000 "suggested" or "fuzzy searched" things in random order, suppressing things I'm actually looking for. And I've completely given up on eBay over last decade.
However.
* Nothing is on Craigslist anymore in my area (Greater Toronto Area). Until about... 5-6 years ago, I could find comparable number of photography, computer, music & kids stuff on Craigslist and Kijiji. Today, Craigslist is a desert, a void, an oasis of empty search results.
CL is still alive and well here in LA. It's possible it's just in the markets I'm looking in (tools, machinery, cars, etc), but I've always preferred it over things like FB, OfferUp etc. I feel like the people I meet from CL are generally much more knowledgeable about what they have and its value. Other platforms often feel like a relative selling grandpa's stuff and have done the bare minimum of research to find a price point. Usually if someone on CL lacks knowledge, it means I'm getting a great deal that day rather than waiting for them to realize they're asking too much in a small market.
I think it's the certain markets that determine how useful CL is--I'm also in LA. I've mainly dealt in furniture & electronics, and CL in other cities, particularly Minneapolis, was a dream, so good in fact that I didn't know FB marketplace existed until I moved to LA and had to look elsewhere after seeing how bad the CL market for used stuff was.
The musical instruments page for Dallas-Fort Worth gets about 3-5 pages a day of valid new postings.
I went down to San Antonio and there were about 5 a week during the same relative time period. Thus I validate the notion that it’s market dependent. SA is not a tech hotspot but there are a lot of musicians there.
My theory about CL is that between the minimalist UI and bad press it discouraged “normies” (for lack of a better word) who were afraid to get scammed so it was mostly serious sellers, plus occasional scammers who were not hard to spot. I met many delightful people over the years dealing with vintage audio, motorcycles, midcentury furniture. Facebook marketplce sellers are much flakier in my experience.
I love craigslist, people who make craigslists ads are generally no bullshit serious about selling and every experience I have had was... fun, it honestly has been great fun meeting the people of craigslist lol.
I think the fact that craigslist hasnt changed look in 25 years or whatever attracts a certain kind of seller/buyer and that certain kind of seller/buyer is overall a really decent person who isn't trying to rip anyone off.
Echoing my thoughts down the page, the problems that you mention, from a "normies" perspective, make a interesting thought exercise in wondering how you could attach suitable features to satisfy these needs. It's easy to mumble "open the API", but first one may have to consider how a API can handle the continuation of crucial revenue generation native site features such as advertising and data analysis reuse. Something more involved than a REST interface seems necessary.
Facebook's interface is heavily burdened with ugly templates, is needlessly complex and clunky. Page crashes! Facebook is also draconian about logging in, can't see much if you're not logged in, thus FB is elitist. You're required to you hand over your identity and submit to forced content and advertising. I personally fully retreated from Facebook permanently by 2009. Good for you, if you don't mind giving up privacy and being a product, but it is not for me.
Craigslist's interface isn't sexy, but it is impressively fast and stable. No page crashes, ever. No forced content. No login necessary to search, often no account necessary to contact sellers. If an account is required to contact a seller, it is anonymous and disposable. Craigslist works the way the Internet used to work before it was taken over by advertisers, tracking and javascript. I hope it never changes, and I wish more web developers would take their cues from its simplicity and potency, because the more complex and tricky a website gets, the worse it is, unilaterally.
Facebook also does aggressively fuzzy searching. I was in the market for a sailboat last year, and knew pretty specifically what I wanted. Facebook would always be about 50% what my specific search term was, and then 50% barely related bullshit (wrong brand / size, sailing accessories, powerboats)
I've also found Facebook exceptionally flaky from both the seller and buyer side. I don't usually expect responses on half the stuff I'm interested in on Facebook, and it's almost impossible to even give stuff away with the flakiness of people actually showing up to pick it up.
Agreed. That being said for some more hard to find used items I have definitely used a friends Facebooks account to contact people because there are some real deals on FB marketplace comparatively.
it seems to, but sometimes getting the seller to ever reply is a herculean feat. people regularly fail to remove items they've sold, or they literally just never ever reply.
hard to tell if it really has that much more to choose from.
I really, really like Facebook Marketplace's fuzzy searching.
Random people listing stuff on local classified sites don't always use the correct keywords, and it's in everyone's best interest for these listings to actually get a good amount of views.
I suspect this "fuzzier" algorithm accounts for the far lower amount of spam too. A search for "heat pump dryer" on Gumtree will return 25 listings in a row from the same shop in Oakleigh, whereas Facebook will show different products from different sellers (some businesses, but mostly randos) - not to mention the people selling their heat pump dryer without including those magical two words in the title.
It's uncanny how good this algorithm is at returning what the buyer is actually looking for.
If I'm searching for Scooter, it may be good that it returns also mopeds and motorcycles.
But if I'm searching for Nikon d850, and get first 10 entries for Nikon d750, Nikon d610, canon 5dMkii, Sony rx100, and then finally a d850, then its really really annoying; and that's 80 percent of my experience.
For the other 20 percent, When I do want to search for something generic like bicycle or synthesizer, I frequently want to see new entries since the last time I searched - I don't want to see same synthesizer (or heat pump dryer:) day after day after day. Instead, Facebook's fuzzy algorithm fill cheerfully show me what it thinks is the best answer day after day and week after week, even though its a crappy casio that shouldn't even be listed as a synthesizer and it's been there for 7 weeks and is actually sold; it will refuse to show me chronological list so I can see what's new and added. It will then cheerfully ignore geographic distance and get me excited about something 4 hrs away.
So for me at least it's a lose lose scenario - our experiences clearly differ radically, and it may be simply down to how specific of a thing we want to. I typically want something specific, and if I want generic, then I'd like a category please, something which Facebook also sucks at as others have pointed out :).
(and I lied in my example to give FB a chance... In reality shen I search for "scooter" , I get motor scooters, electric scooters, the Segway wannabes, and six other types of things I don't want, so even then fuzzy search fails me :)
What absolutely confounds my comprehension of marketplace sites and any online business driven by user directed discovery, is the unbroken and never deviated from practice in every industry and field of making the method and techniques used for search as unique inviolable individual apotheoses of a imaginary USP.
why on earth doesn't occur to anyone that heterogeneous search methods producing a range of results with a identifiable classifiable process or at least perceptual sensibility that users can get some understanding of, might provide not only consumer choice but profit?
The only thing that I can imagine to be happening is the overriding objectives must be econometric optimization and blow every other consideration. Or maybe it's possible with the adherent mantra of "internet speed" development that without constant investment in maintenance "development" nothing will work if left alone while bringing in alternative abilities.
I’d politely suggest that you have interesting points here, and you could get them across much better if you wrote shorter sentences with shorter words.
Can you explain what the poster above you was writing? I have trouble parsing it, since it seems they are from some academic discipline I am unfamiliar in.
> What absolutely confounds my comprehension of marketplace sites and any online business driven by user directed discovery, is the unbroken and never deviated from practice in every industry and field of making the method and techniques used for search as unique inviolable individual apotheoses of a imaginary USP.
I don't get marketplace sites. Specifically, it seems like every company decides they have a unique selling point, and they should build all search features around emphasizing that selling point at all costs, instead of building it around showing the user the thing they were looking for.
> why on earth doesn't occur to anyone that heterogeneous search methods producing a range of results with a identifiable classifiable process or at least perceptual sensibility that users can get some understanding of, might provide not only consumer choice but profit?
Why don't they provide a search interface that will be familiar to their users? Wouldn't that be both more user-friendly and also more profitable?
> The only thing that I can imagine to be happening is the overriding objectives must be econometric optimization and blow every other consideration. Or maybe it's possible with the adherent mantra of "internet speed" development that without constant investment in maintenance "development" nothing will work if left alone while bringing in alternative abilities.
Maybe the companies are Goodharting themselves to death? Or maybe they value developing new features over making sure that their core infrastructure actually works.
No they're not from any academic discipline. They were ranting about useless search features but trying very hard to incorporate the most flowery and elaborate sentence construction for some reason. It reads like they replaced every single word of their original comment with a synonym or idiom off the thesaurus.
They're trying as hard to sound smart and going too far so it's just incomprehensible.
"the unbroken and never deviated from practice in every industry and field of making the method and techniques used for search as unique inviolable individual apotheoses of a imaginary USP"
Who the hell speaks or even writes like this?
EDIT: looks like their whole posting history is like this. Someone fed postgrad literature to GPT-3 and created a bot from it.
Maybe that's a personal difference. I tend not to get my heart set on a specific product, and will generally go with whatever happens to be well-priced on the market at the time. Especially so on Marketplace.
If I search for Nikon D850, and some of the search results are (for example), Nikon D750s at a significantly lower price[1], then at least for me personally I'm happy to be shown that result.
This isn't a hypothetical - I bought a Canon 1000D after searching for 1200Ds and 1300Ds and finding it for a crazy-low price locally.
I understand not everyone is like this, though, and they should at least properly support the option for less fuzzy or no-fuzzy searches.
[1] I don't know cameras well, but I've assumed the 750 is the previous year's or slightly lower specced model of the 850.
The difference between the Nikon D750 and D850 happens to be one of the most considerable and well defined product differentiation achieved in modern photography :~)
The D850 is a seminal state of the art camera that internally is identical to the contemporary flagship the D5 in every way except for major improvements like high resolution and exceptional sensor which is arguably not surpassed almost six years later. Whilst the D750 is a cost engineering marvel. The D750 is a very fine camera, but nothing in the league of the D850.
If you are actually considering purchasing a D750 I'd strongly recommend that you investigate the D780 which only appears to be much the same, but includes the majority of the successor mirrorless technology developments including excellent video giving live view operating far better than any other DSLRS from Nikon including the flagships.
Nikon managed some exemplary product differentiation in the last range of DSLR cameras. Unfortunately for everyone Nikon can't seem to be anything like as clear and focussed with the Z series mirrorless range.
Edit: the D850 compared with the contemporary flagship D5, is capable of only slower rates of shooting, has a smaller battery, no extended grip and dual orientation controls and the sensor can't -quite- perform in low light like a D5. In every non sports shooting environment the D850 would be regarded as a flagship, but for historical reasons and the attachment rate of D3/4/5/6 users buying proportionately many more elite lenses, it's the lower resolution action and low light big pro cameras that get the flagship accolade. Single digit pro cameras also optimize photo processing in camera for JPEG output as is big agency wont and urgency the need for finished product out of the box without any processing. In case you're looking into this, JPEG output from the D5/6 is incredibly good. "Merely" 20MP sensors in these cameras are far better than any specification can indicate, being developed to produce the cleanest pixel level signal, which really is visible in the output. A hardly used very good condition D5 can be had for $1500 lenses dumped en masse for Z upgrades are bargains. If you can deal with the bulk of these cameras, you'll very unlikely i've dissatisfied. And de facto unbeaten autofocus with a major feature omitted from new designs Group Priority AF which glues the focus to your selected nearest subject without any deviation that happens in the Z bodies because of the omission of this professional feature. Novices are apparently buying the Z9 mirrorless flagship because it's not got AF compromises to frustrating degree. But you can have a complete kit for the same money in the DSLR line.
Ok, what happens when a small mechanical component on your Nikon D850 breaks and the camera has been out of production for like a decade and what you actually need isn't a camera in general but a specific replacement part that will fit your specific model number? Or do you just throw out the camera entirely and buy that Nikon D750 that fuzzy search dug up?
Generally I'd look on eBay or AliExpress if I were after a specific component.
But even then, Marketplace will heavily bias you towards D850 parts if you type in "D850". It's not like it autocorrects your search term to "camera" - it instead just inserts a few generic listinga into your results.
That's how it should work. In reality, 50% of the items FBM shows for a search are non-local "ships to you" items that you'll never buy. But that juices someone's OKR somewhere.
In fairness, the only valid complaint I've heard about Craigslist is that it diverted classified ad revenue away from reporters, destroying local newspapers, and then local elections.
With Craigslist, this always felt like an unintended consequence. With facebook, it seems like one of their top ten strategies for getting us to devolve into mineshaft dwelling mole people that live in the metaverse.
Blaming technology for obviating business models is not a valid complaint.
In this case, I would say the participants of the local society are responsible for paying for journalism and working to support local elections. But even then, you could come up with arguments such as so and so population was too poor and had to work two jobs and did not have time to attend city/county/state meetings, or were not sufficiently educated or literate to understand them, etc.
This is a thing that happened in the world and the outcomes of it have been continuously documented for over 20 years now. Regardless of intent the results have been execrable. The complaint is absolutely valid.
You write “Blaming technology” in response to a comment that does not mention any technologies. You might want to examine what your preconceptions are, that you would see “technology” in a comment that does not refer to technology. You were responding to a comment that describes two business strategies, perhaps you should respond to that.
I wrote technology on purpose, to cut through useless information. It is not relevant that “Craigslist” obviated classified ads. The root problem newspapers were solving was a seller being able to provide information to a wide audience of buyers. Technology brought about a better way of solving this problem, so the root problem newspapers were getting paid to solve with classifieds no longer exists.
Not having local newspapers/journalism causing problems with the local civic process is a separate problem, that has nothing to do with technology enabling sellers and buyers to reach each other more easily.
This is an example of unintended consequences courtesy of paperclip-factory style optimization. Just because an effect is 2nd order doesn't give one leave to claim that it is a separate issue.
> Technology brought about a better way of solving this problem
Better for whom?
The discoveries of fossil fuels brought about new ways of solving certain problems, with the benefit of hindsight they too were also not without fairly major negative consequences.
They're either assuming printed local classifieds were overtaken by a website, or that CL is a site that performed better than the local classifieds website.
Not hard to extract, nor worth getting heated about.
Originally? Good to know. Thanks. But also not relevant in the context of the now.
"The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues.[1]"
My point is, we have "journalists" whining about "the democracy" and those same "journalists" aren't aware how badly their profession has already failed said institution / ideal.
Imagine pulling up to a fire. Tossing on buckets of flammable liquids. And then with a straight face claim to be a firefighter. It's Orwellian. The lack of self-awareness is not only embarrassing, but it's become down right dangerous.
I akshully think that the fourth estates to be more about a viable vehicle whose intent is to feel out the community and put them into actionable words back into the community.
Congress.com isn’t all that helpful if the laws are verbose and often at time seemingly obtuse.
Printing press is one such vehicle whose time may have come, unless digital realm has slips its stranglehold on this fourth estates.
Newspapers can and should recapture their market by allowing citizens, both verified and anonymously) to post their events, may that it be a house fire, stolen car, robbery, or shenanigans by politicians.
Newspapers may be able to recapture further if they provide a running tabulation of such categories.
But what do I know, the fourth estates is probably already hijacked by social media in their own bastardized manners.
Can’t believe I’m defending journalist but this analogy is only partially accurate imho.
People consume press and news media on their own volition, and even more less-vetted but newsworthy information through social media. Journalists are gassing what consumers respond to.
I believe what’s happened is that in the past, local news consumers were aware of their own “fire” (crime, civics, politics) and now in a connected world it feels like their standing amongst a great massive fire, but really they just have visibility into all of the little fires (or consternation that their local fire doesn’t seem important to anyone).
Many journalists, arguably most journalists, also see themselves as advocates; advocates for something other than journalism or speech. And this has become much more prevalent than in previous generations. Everybody is an underdog, everybody else is an abuser, and abuse can't be tolerated.
Even the concept of being able to report on an issue without becoming entangled in it has become anathema. The concept was, of course, always a fiction, but fictions matter. All morality is fictional, if not all reality. Even self-styled centrists and moderates tend to tacitly accept this new narrative; that dispassion and distance is impossible and undesirable.
Many older journalists who were keeping the flame alive crumbled during the Trump years. It was understandable, but it was sort of a one-way street; they accepted defeat and have largely embraced the new narrative.
I think we've all done this, myself included. It's one thing to recognize a pathology, but quite another to seek to address it, and yet another to actually succeed. Now we're all sort of lost in the wilderness. Even the ones who have clear memories from whence we came don't know how to get back.
The local newspapers were horrible about keeping anyone involved in the justice system accountable. They always took the words of the police and it wasn’t until everyone had a camera that police mistreatment of minorities became exposed.
On the other hand, national newspapers completely ignored the needs and concerns of “rural White America” and that’s why they were caught flat footed and couldn’t understand the rise of Trump.
The press has never been concerned about anyone outside of Middle class White America it needed to die or evolve.
I'm curious where you live. After all, craigslist famously decimated classified advertising in the US, primarily because classified ads in newspapers are hella expensive, and craigslist is usually free.
Interesting. In the late 1960s in Australia a classifieds-only paper called the Trading Post grew and absolutely dominated this space by the 1990s. My Dad would buy it every week to look for bargain junk, cars, etc. I'm sure the main newspapers took a hit because of it. They had local versions for each region. It was eventually bought in 2004 by Sensis (they were part of the main telco Telstra) for $636M which also owned the Yellow Pages with the intent of going online. It totally bombed and is surplanted here by Gumtree (now owned by eBay) and FB marketplace. https://www.theage.com.au/business/sensis-confident-of-onlin...
I will never be able to look marketplace or even Craig's list without wondering whether the great Australian joke about buying jousting sticks from the trading post would work in their place.
As I noted above, not as much of a problem here in LA, but I totally believe you that it's true elsewhere. And honestly, I'm probably missing some great stuff not perusing FB and OfferUp.
But there's one simple, guiding principle that I'm always following. And that's refusing to reactivate my FB account.
Much like 25 years ago when I said to myself, "there's nothing on the internet that I need to see so badly that I'll install RealNetworks", I'll put stuff on the curb with a "free" sign before I'll reactivate my long-deactivated FB account (or buy new, depending on the direction of the transaction).
Honestly, especially for bulky stuff, I’ve had great luck leaving things at the end of my driveway with a free sign. I wouldn’t get much money for them and they’re out of my house with almost zero effort.
I was right there too but all the rental apartments are via FB marketplace now to the point I literally could not find a place without getting back on it (DC). Absolutely pain, I miss craigslist
Same here in the Roaring Fork Valley. Two months of Craigslist, apartments.com, bulletin boards, etc. Finally I posted a "Place Wanted" on some local Facebook groups and I got something pretty quick. Tons of scammers on Craigslist here.
Probably but I can't say I love more intermediaries in transactions. I went direct to many apartment complexes but if you want to find a furnished place that's not outrageous you have to go to people leaving and looking for someone to take over a lease and apartment complexes don't seem to care to facilitate that.
I've found it pretty rare to _not_ find something I'm looking for on Boston Craigslist. As something of an "out there" example, I found ten old tube TVs for my Halloween decorations just a few weeks ago. Also: I got an absolutely great deal on a car through Craigslist about five years ago.
That said, I've definitely had less success on the sales side than I did in years prior, but I can't tell if that's what I'm selling being worth less used these days (desktop computers?), or if Facebook Marketplace is the de-facto place to check.
Functional - I'm leaning into the "analog horror" genre with some fake newsreels of things like the COVID-23 pandemic, $6 per gallon gasoline, and (of course - I live in Boston) the Red Sox losing the World Series to the Yankees.
Boston CL is indeed very stale, FB is way more active. Young people (< 35) seem to have mostly forgotten about CL or don't care about it.
Boston has a lot of good stuff in some areas. Need random leftover shelves? A pile of screened loam? Secondhand office furniture? An unused China set from the 1960s? No problem. But good luck trying to buy and sell normal home goods with any efficiency there; it will clear much much faster on FB marketplace. Maybe even for a better price.
Craigslist is basically unusable in my area if you're selling something. 90%+ of the people who respond to you will express interest, chat about the item, set up a time to meet, and then no-show and ghost you. I don't know what they're getting out of it. It's not worth the time for me to go through 5-6 of those people for everything I want to sell.
Maybe Facebook, etc., have this problem too, but I gave up on selling things locally. These days I just try to pass things on to friends and family.
We recently moved cross country and my wife tried to sell a lot of our stuff on Facebook marketplace so we didn't have to ship it. She dealt with an INSANE amount of bullshit. A lot of it was exactly as you said, they express interest and set up a specific time to come buy the item. Then just... don't, and we never hear from them again. Like 5-10 of these for the same piece of furniture or whatever.
Then there were the obvious scams (I don't understand how they work, but they were clearly not legit buyers). Where someone's first message is a demand for your Venmo or Zelle account name, and when you respond with anything but what they asked for they just disappear.
And finally there's the perverts who see a woman posting online and use it as an avenue to sexually harass her. Aggressive demands for address and phone number right off the bat, unsolicited nude photos, it's extremely gross.
So, yeah, I would say the experience of posting on Facebook Marketplace is as bad or worse than anything else. Especially if you're a woman.
I'm not trying to justify or validate this behavior, but in my own experience you basically want the ability to buy the item, but may change your mind. So you string a buyer along while you make up your mind.
(personally, I've found myself doing this and then having to stop because the seller isn't some big mega corp, but just some random other working class friend)
Yeah. All of my posts have some flake that is stringing me on but can't set a time to meet. Nearly a quarter of scheduled meets end in no shows. One was after I drove 30 miles to meet someone halfway. I won't meet more than 5 minutes out of my way after that - you want the item you can come get it.
my last craigslist experiences were similar, they either flaked or they showed up with less cash and said "how about a discount" even after the price was said to be firm.
I've said "nope" and walked away from cash sales that try that nonsense. and the whole experience soured me on Craigslist for quite a while.
also, around here there are a ton of small businesses that basically flood the listings with whatever they can. it's not even a person selling the stuff, it's a storefront.
Facebook Marketplace seems to have all but killed it, here.
You have to check Facebook anyway because schools, HOAs, businesses, even local governments often treat it as their primary outlet for information, as in, stuff gets posted there first, and sometimes only there. Though IG is taking over some of that (but of course that's still Facebook)
Luckily my wife does that, so I can get away without having an account, but I'd basically have to have one otherwise. If you've already got one and already have to visit Facebook sometimes, may as well use FB marketplace....
To be fair; lack of anonymity CAN increase confidence and safety in the transaction/meetup.
(I'm not saying it always does, or that it cannot be exploited, or that it won't eventually be scammed beyond usefulness, etc; but it's not always a clear negative today).
I personally deactivated my Facebook account, but note that this less anonymity is a benefit for buyers. It makes Craigslist a far more attractive target for scammers.
It’s more that you’re more likely to have some context as a buyer that you aren’t meeting a scammer or criminal.
Craigslist attracted drug dealers, hookers and fences for a long time. People like that figure out that it’s easier to scam a buyer than do the honest work of stealing shit to sell.
It helps buyers to know who the seller is. FB suffers from bot sellers and scams. I check the person’s profile before proceeding and it gives me a sense of confidence in my purchase/sale.
A bunch of people are making this point, and it implies that Facebook is highly reliable as an identity verification authority. I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s interesting whether it’s right or wrong.
That said, my personal experience with Facebook has been the same. It’s trivial to spot bot/spam accounts, and I typically end up with a high degree of confidence that the identity is real.
I think the reason people use marketplace is because they already have a facebook app on their phone. One less password to remember. The upload "just works" - never mind that the data is poorly tagged, etc.
The killer feature that Facebook marketplace has is the fact that you can do some basic verification of the person you are selling or buying an item from.
My sister does a fair amount of Craigslist-like transactions, but she abandoned Craigslist years ago, in favor of Facebook Marketplace, for this exact reason. She had a few scary situations from sketchy people via Craigslist, says that never happens with Facebook Marketplace.
(My sister flips baby strollers as a side-hustle. Seriously. She makes money with it, too. Not enough to retire, but enough to keep her home, raising her kids. She's been doing it since her first child was born 12 years ago, when she realized how expensive decent strollers are. She buys broken strollers for near-nothing, keeps an inventory of her own replacement parts, fixes them herself, then sells them. New mothers love it, because, once again, baby strollers are friggin' expensive.)
Interesting. My impression has always been Facebook is somehow more riddled with scammers than CL despite the associated accounts. It seems like it has more to do with the transaction.
It is hard to scam someone with an in person exchange of cash for goods.
Annecdotally, many CL sellers have told me to just get the item from their yard and put the cash under their doormat
> It is hard to scam someone with an in person exchange of cash for goods.
You would think so, but some asshole tried to do this to me. We had agreed on a price ahead of time, and when he showed up, he tried to low ball me with a 50% lower offer. I refused to sell the item to him, and then he became aggressive and I had to call the cops to get him to leave.
I won't get into the details, but based on what I saw, I think this guy runs kind of a side-business acting as a middle man reselling tech gear. I think he does this routinely, probably low balls people and then tries to re-sell the same stuff on marketplace afterwards. I think tech gear attracts assholes/scammers more than anything else because it has a potentially high resale value.
So, just be careful out there. Never share your phone number with people from marketplace, and don't reveal your home address if at all possible. Try to have a friend over if you have people coming for transactions or do it in a public place.
Related, so many sellers are now “pro” sellers like what happened to eBay. Keyword stuffing, prices that are comparable to sale prices of new, constant automated reposting, etc.
Right, which is great: because CL forces folks to say whether they're a private owner or a dealer you can filter for those properties.
And not hidden and tucked away either: it's the absolutely very first top-most set of options on the search results page. See those three [all] [owner] [dealer] buttons? Click "owner". You're welcome.
And then, of course, you go back to CL and flag their post, right? ...You do report abuse on this free platform so that everyone's experience can be improved, right?
Other than "getting your account banned for multiple reports on multiple postings"? Nothing. If you see someone abusing CL, you report it. If you don't, you're just helping make sure people can keep being dishonest on the platform.
Although unfortunately, it doesn't understand the fairly typical non-urban "yes, you found something that's less than 10 miles from me as the crow flies, but is about 80 miles away if I need to actually drive there because of the fact that my car can't cross a river/strait/lake on its own". Even after 25 years, that part can still do with improvement.
Careful what you whish for. That sounds exactly as one of those fuzzy algorithms that will hide posts randomly due to stupid reasons. Eg. some address has a glitched road and Google Maps believes it is only reachable by boat or helicopter.
This is craigslist, not facebook: don't over-engineer what you don't need to over-engineer. You just look at already-made datasets that give the real world distance between two places, and remove search results based on that.
Never, ever, use google maps for this, and definitely don't use it "per query, as needed". The overwhelming majority of infrastructure doesn't change on even a yearly basis: use someone else's precompiled dataset, and update whenever they push an update.
(aka if you actually need this for your project, you already know how to search for the things you need. If Craigslist needs one-time access to a GIS system to build an initial dataset for high volume countries, they can easily afford the limited time access and dev time to generate the dataset they need, as well as afford the dev time required to do a deep dive into which -free or paid- datasets already exists and are suitable, or not, for this purpose, as well as what licenses they come with)
Well since Facebook seems to update the user interface about every 15 seconds anyway, that shouldn't be a major roadblock. I swear if I'm on marketplace and I take a sip of coffee, the UX has changed somehow. Seems like they just have a pool of different interface designs and they just serve them up at random.
Not really: the search parameter is "km/miles from location", not "within a radius of..." (the circle is just a visual estimate). The distance in km/miles from A to B is not as the crow flies, it's the number found in any of quite a lot of datasets that gives you all the real world distances between two places so you can do proper distance filtering.
The FB algorithms drive me bonkers. I can be looking at a listing on one computer, and then search using the exact same terms and filters on another computer moments later, and be completely unable to get the search to deliver the same listing. Absolutely infuriating.
I still use craigslist for finding a place to rent, works really well (at least in SF). For the other stuff, I moved to facebook marketplace, although the UI is really awful (as a seller also), especially on mobile.
I think kijiji was never a thing outside of Canada from my experience.
To me it seems like CL never cought on outside of the bigger cities in Canada, but Kijiji became very popular. But I agree, Kijiji is not as clean with the results as CL, and yes, Facebook Market Place is a mess. Varage Sale is a small player in certain regions of Canada.
Yeah, craigslist never really had any marketshare (at least not for the past decade) in Montréal. Kijiji was king, and honestly I prefer it to CL but even then it is getting dominated by Fb marketplace.
I'm not often on Facebook, so I sometimes miss kijiji but honestly the fact that you can at least know a little bit about the seller on Facebook is a huge plus, even if I fully understand how that can also be a huge problem for some. The seller ratings, plus the ability to see what else they are selling/sold can be super helpful to make sure you aren't getting scammed or buying a stolen item.
... which would work if the stuff outside the oasis was cluttered with something. But the stuff outside the oasis is also approximately empty. So where does the desert of empty end and the oasis of empty begin?
What I do like on Facebook Marketplace is that it seems to understand what I’m looking for. On Kijiji I have to do try all the different ways someone might have written something, including common spelling mistakes. And since I live in Quebec, I have to do this in two languages. On FB Marketplace it seems to find all variations in one search.
CL personals had a seedy rep (maybe with good reason), but I found it to be undervalued as a straight-up friend-making and normal dating tool. It's the only platform I've seen that focused primarily on text instead of photos, which was a unique niche and opportunity.
People seem to gravitate towards photo-focused swipe-to-date apps... but most women and a bigger majority of men will tell you that they all hate them and how shallow they are.
And of course, the seedy stuff and trafficking happens on a whole host of other platforms that appear untouched by the policy push that took down CL.
> It's the only platform I've seen that focused primarily on text instead of photos, which was a unique niche and opportunity.
I have created such a platform since CL killed their personals and you can find it in my account history. Since I've already mentioned it once in this discussion I'd rather not do so again lest I be mistaken for a lowly shill.
Photos are not permitted in posts for multiple reasons. One is to emphasize the content of the post body. (Another reason is that I don't have the wherewithal to vet whether any given photo depicts someone of 17 or 18 years' age but I digress.)
In Spain all old craiglist equivalents are mostly gone or full of spam. We've got Wallapop though, and it's fine. It feels modern, not too clunky, and IMO it's a right balance.
It seems regional. In my community in Colorado, there's an extremely active Craigslist market. Where I used to live in New England, it was dead and Facebook ruled the scene.
I really love Craigslist's search, minimalist UI, lack of arbitrary moderators approving (or ignoring) your membership to local selling groups, and so on. It has its own problems of course, but I'm happy to live in an area where it's still a viable alternative.
FBM also has some glaring deficiencies in its search. For example, you can't do a keyword search within a category. So they have a bunch of categories like Vehicles or Electronics, but within those you can only use predefined filters. If you want freeform keywords you're stuck with the general search.
I was starting to move to OfferUp, but got a rude awakening when I tried to give away some old Garage Sale signs. They block posting anything that might encourage "outside sales". No thank you. Craigslist 4 life.
Used to feel this way but I really like OfferUps built in chat. With Craigslist you end up with people who expect phone calls or emails or texts and it's never clear which is which
you gotta search other locales to find what you want. search nashville craigslist for guitars, search rural areas for agricultural equipment, search lake areas for boats, etc
>Nothing is on Craigslist anymore in my area (Greater Toronto Area). Until about... 5-6 years ago, I could find comparable number of photography, computer, music & kids stuff on Craigslist and Kijiji. Today, Craigslist is a desert, a void, an oasis of empty search results.
I totally agree. There are a few areas where it is still good. Stuff for sale is actually quite good. For example, I got a great microwave oven, almost brand new, for $15.
But everything else is garbage. For example, I go on craigslist to look for an office space, and it is complete and total spammed for Regus, Bannister and other executive office suites. There's utterly no owners renting out space.
The job placements are shit. Everyone is on indeed, or linkedin or anything else.
Advertising...I went to advertise my services a month or so ago on craigslist. I listed multiple times, and all I get is spam from people pretending to be interested. I did that 3 or 4 times before I finally caught on.
Like, try to find a "kinda nice" bicycle. You can't find the bicycle category (though it does exist as a sub-group of Sporting Goods), you can't just say "show me bikes" unless you hack the URL, you can search for the word "bicycle" but for some reason people selling a "Specialized Rockhopper" think you know it's a bicycle so don't use that word.
Oh, and when selling, they just suggest random categories instead of letting you choose from their heirarchy. So you get bicycles in Hobbies. You get them in Sporting Goods. You get them in Bicycles. But... You can't search for them by type.
That's not even complaining about the lack of attributes, like "type=BMX" or "type=Mountain" or "Size=Large" or "Frame Material=Carbon Fiber"... all of which are in Craigslist and eBay.
And! when searching, they actively work to inject ebay-like selling (non-local) into the mix by resetting my distance preferences every time I change the search. "Find bicycles" -> "Find bicycles in 30 miles" -> "Find 'Specialized Rockhopper'" -> Why am I getting "Ships To You" results?! Why am I getting non-bicycle results?! Oh. They reset my distance again.
^-- BTW they do this because they actually make money when the sale happens through FB. If you just buy it in-person with cash they don't get a cut. Misaligned incentives, as they say.
And! even if I do find the bicycle category, if narrow the category by searching with a word in there, like "Rockhopper" it takes me out of the bicycle category to do the search!
It surprises me how much companies fail at the basics of online shopping.. FB market is a garbage fire. They’re more interested in selling ads than making a market place.
For new stuff Amazon is huge and cluttered yet still manages to run circles around almost every other online store for similar reasons to what you listed. The only exception I’ve found is BH Photo and Video. But all the others like Walmart/Jet, Home Depot, Newegg (now) etc all just “don’t get it”.
Craig’s list really nails the simplicity and usefulness of online used markets. It still amazes me.
Amazon suffers from this a little as well to be honest. Search something and pull up a page, search again and you are in this obscure category that has like 20% of the Thing A you are interesed on Amazon because some stuff is listed in other categories. Sometimes it also doesn't seem to respect my price ceilings on search filters.
Isn't Home Depot licensing Amazon's store logic? I don't remember why I have that impression, as I haven't been to Home Depot in ages, but for some reason it made me feel that Amazon was running their store.
I never heard anything like that. The Home Depot site doesn't feel much like Amazon's, but maybe they do and they just don't use it well. I have a friend who did some contract work for Home Depot and it sounded like they followed VP-empire-building-driven development.
Forget specialized bicycles. FB marketplace sucks at finding even the most popular items. Try searching for "MacBook air M1" or "MacBook air 2021" (without quotes) . It will show you all kinds of macbooks, including old garbage from 2013. I just want the most basic search feature - return results that include all my search terms.
It is like a bad magazine, which only has content about B celebs and other trash, some people being fully aware of it being trash, but aside from those, no one but the bottom rung would stick around to be there.
For bicycles in particular, most of the Facebook activity and impressions come from local buy and sell groups dedicated to cycling and MTB. If you live within a populated region a lot of these groups will exist. It's where much of the enthusiast market is still located, sadly.
I should've included this in my rant. If you have anything of value, instead of posting it on Marketplace (because it's a dumpster fire), people make these obscure fb groups you're just supposed to magically know about and hock their wares there. It's really infuriating.
My problem with Craigslist isn't that it looks old, the problem is that they seemingly refuse to modernize anything else about the site. Craigslist is chock full of spam and people abusing the search feature. I'm no anti-spam guru, but surely there is a way to cut down on people submitting the same thumbnail dozens of times using as many keywords as they can so their cellphone screen repair service shows up when looking for just about anything.
Craig is no saint, and actively goes after any competition to his site. That, coupled with the complacency or refusal to go after spammers leaves me with a very sour opinion of the platform and Craig himself.
IME any online platform is going to be a staircase into the bowels of human nature. It's all about being aware you need to protect yourself online. If you're encountering things like child porn or prostitution, or anything illegal really, it's your responsibility to at least report it.
Sure. I spent a few weeks looking for an Xbox Series X, and I don't believe that I'm exaggerating when I say that 90%+ of the listings were scams. For about half of those, the scammers just weren't very good, and automated or semi-automated checks should've flagged those listings before anyone saw them. The other half were various scams documented in thousands of articles by a cottage industry created in lieu of anti-abuse measures.
> IME any online platform is going to be a staircase into the bowels of human nature.
Granted, but some bowels are cleaner than others. Craigslist clearly does not get enough fiber in its diet.
> If you're encountering things like child porn or prostitution, or anything illegal really, it's your responsibility to at least report it.
I did, of course, but I got tired of working for Craigslist for free after a while.
Yeah, for a while I would flag any listing I felt violated the ToS. but I started to notice that THE SAME LISTING would come up shortly (if any action was taken on the initial listing to begin with). I'm not going to bother wasting my energy trying to flag listings when CL isn't doing their part to _learn_ and improve their detection of blatantly-obvious fraud or ToS violations. I mean I'm talking like blatant keyword spam (which is against ToS) that's even prefaced by "Keywords:", the same listing made in every possible nearby jurisdiction, stuff like that. It's so obvious and and easy to detect. The worst are car ads. You search for a really specific model, of a specific year, and somehow you get like 500+ results. Because every car listing is just a wall of keyword spam, of completely unrelated makes/models. Cool.
That's the buyer's perspective of flagging. The other side is having your listings deleted because they compete with another product or violate people's incorrect expectations. If people think it's a fake, and it's not, or if it is rule bound to a category, but people aren't used to seeing it there, it gets flagged and removed. There is no one to appeal to, and sellers aren't told why their listings are removed. As someone who sells high-end stuff occasionally on the side, I would rather deal with Ebay or Facebook.
My experience with Craigslist has been that there are a lot of keyword-stuffed scam listings in search results, but they are generally sorted below more useful results, and generally easy to spot and ignore.
It makes sense to me as a strategy for leveraging fuzzy automation. Sorting is less risky than hiding or deleting. If the system gets it wrong, there is a still an opportunity for motivated users to dig down and find incorrectly down-sorted items.
A lot of real estate management companies seem to use software that just spams craigslist with legitimate ads, but spam nonetheless because its 40 hits for the same apartment complex.
Housing is terrible on CL. Bot farms take past listings from sites like Zillow and apartments.com, cut the rent to a deal that seems too good to be true, then when you are interested you get connected to a "missionary traveling abroad who just wants their place taken care of." They will even be happy to rent to someone who is not yet in the area, which is otherwise really hard and expensive to do. All they need is you to wire a deposit and they'll have a friend deliver the keys......
I thought they pulled their personal ads because people were getting murdered -- the Phillip Markoff interrogation is a must-listen for fans of that genre; it's a shame there's only audio available. According to this QZ article from 2018 though, it was for human-trafficking reasons.
> In March, Craigslist pulled its personals section in response to a sex-trafficking bill that holds platforms liable if they are found to be facilitating sex trafficking and prostitution. The reaction was not without merit: over the years, websites like Craigslist and Backpage had become online marketplaces for illegal sexual activity. https://qz.com/1310350/what-we-lost-when-craigslist-shut-dow...
"Craigslist has sued or issued cease-and-desist letters to dozens of startups in recent years. A New York Times technology blog last year complained that the site "has dug an effective moat by cultivating an exaggerated image of 'doing good' that keeps its customers loyal, while behind the scenes, it bullies any rivals that come near and it stifles innovation."
The article itself is a little old, but it still holds true.
Re-read the article, the author does not give a primary source and cites a different article. The subjects of the lawsuits (from many years ago) seem to be sites that are scraping ads/listings on craigslist and mass populating their own site to make it seem as if they have users OR they are sites that are aggregating the information on craigslist and trying to pass themselves off as affiliated with craigslist by using their trademarks.
If you've ever searched for an apartment or a car for sale you'll find that many of the new and popular sites are literally just posting ads scraped from craigslist.
Craigslist to me, beyond something I still use regularly to hunt for musical instruments, electronics, bikes, furniture, garage sales, etc, is an enduring shibboleth when it comes to "design."
When someone says "Craigslist design sucks," I can probably guess how that person thinks about design and what it means to them.
IMO Craigslist has survived as long as it has, in spite of no promotion, no advertising, no partner deals, no api integrations, yadda yadda, precisely because it is designed very well for its purpose and its users. I would never claim that CL is the most aesthetically pleasing site to look at, but when it comes to posting, searching and browsing classified ads (and even participating in its message boards), it does the job quite well and with minimum hassle.
For the first three weeks after I moved to San Francisco, more than sixteen years ago, I couch surfed at my boss's place on Stanyan street in Cole Valley. At the time, Craig also lived nearby. My boss and he were friends and would frequently meet at a coffee shop, and I would often join them. When I was first introduced to Craig, I quipped that I had recently moved, and did he know a good place to search for apartments? He gave me a gentle smirk and a merely mildly condescending roll of the eyes. Very pleasant, intelligent, and unassuming person.
> I would never claim that CL is the most aesthetically pleasing site to look at
Which, I think, is a good thing. Experience has taught me that if a web site obviously put a lot of effort into being aesthetically appealing, it's probably not a great website.
I rent a couple of properties out in the bay area and up until this year I've always relied on craigslist to get new tenants, but this year we tried out Zillow and we got tons of applicants, and the whole application process including vetting and setting up a lease and everything was done through Zillow. On the other hand someone noticed our Zillow listing and created a fraudulent listing of my property on Craigslist. I'm pretty much never going back to Craigslist. Apartments.com is also good for creating leases and managing properties, but Zillow seems to be the place to get high quality tenants.
As far as I have been able to determine, literally 100% of the rental listings in Berkeley, CA on Craigslist are fake. They take MLS descriptions and photos of properties and repost those on CL as rentals with unrealistically low prices. The postings are identity theft scams. They want you to "apply" to rent these properties that don't exist.
The real problem for me is that the elected officials and even sometimes professional staff of the city will point to Craigslist as inventory of low-priced housing, but it's totally fake so their impression is inaccurate.
Yes, I think the prospective applicants pay for the background checks and then they are submitted for all the places they apply on Zillow. We can pay for them also. It includes a criminal check and a credit score check.
Craigslist is the only thing I have ever needed to rent out our condo for more than a decade. Long may it live! I'll also plug ezLandlordForms for everything else, inc. applications and background checks and contracts and yada yada.
> One thing I don’t get is why someone else would copy your listing? Do they somehow get a slice of the pie if a respondent rents?
Usually this is a scam. You advertise someone else's vacant property, break in to conduct tenant tours, collect fees/deposits/first month's rent, then bail.
Most of the similar scams I've seen don't involve entering and showing the property, or being even anywhere near it. A common style is to post a duplicated listing on Craigslist (it may be a house currently on the market, but often is an inactive listing on Zillow - they just need an address and matching photos) with a story written in a style that would be familiar to scam aficionados. The owner is a god-fearing good person who just wants their house to be safe while they are overseas on missionary work or in the military, and they're willing to rent it to the right people for a generous below market rate. Kindly do this-or-that, god bless you, etc. They request a sum of money, making it enticing by naming a rate 3/4 of what would be going rent for the property, and say they'll mail the key.
It's also common for them to say that this apartment has "just been rented," and then show them a completely different apartment for their clients. Usually these apartments are both worse and more expensive.
I tried to find a succinct name for this scheme but failed. I did find a blog where a retired attorney discusses this and some variations on it (and learned something new in the process: pulling this stunt on multiple prospective tenants at the same time makes this a hell of a lot more lucrative):
Basically financial identity theft and fraud combined with breaking and entering — there’s no need to makeup new names for simple combinations of crimes.
Long list for crimes people commit using Craigslist. Another similar one is for an attacker to post saying your moving of the country, out of town, already removed everything you’re not taking, but asked neighbor to leave the door open and anything in house is free to take; then they simply know when you’re away, pick the lock, leave the door open, and post the listing. Unknowing strangers rob you OR have a plausible explanation of why they are robbing you.
Interesting. Haven't seen that one, but it's reminiscent of the "revenge" personals where you solicit randos to randomly drop in on your [ex] to fulfill their supposed rape fantasy.
> no need to makeup new names for simple combinations of crimes
Fraud schemes are sophisticated and the better ones are not easily understood (by victims, investigators and jurors alike). It may be unnecessary/unconventional but I find it useful to reduce the complexity of schemes to a buzzword with a common meaning that anybody can reference without ambiguity. Gets it into the popular vernacular-- everybody knows to be wary of "catfishing" without having to explain it.
From the crimes they comprise to their implementation, it's function definitions all the way down: a concise, reusable reference that avoids repeat articulation of a more-complex set of behaviors :)
If you really believe calling something 419 scam, Nigerian prince scam, or advance-fee scam will help reduce crime, have bag of money with your name on it just waiting for you to tell me where to send it.
Literally had a friend once ask me how to wire money, asked why, they made me promise not to tell anyone, and then showed me scammer email. I told them I would show them how and got lucky and within few clicks tracked scammer down to a cafe in Nigeria. Told scammer I would leave them alone if they told my friend the truth and they did. Friend got mad at me told me I chased they away, and found out a week later they wired the scammer money.
Yes, some scams are complex, but are not. Highly doubt telling people not to get catfished never helped anyone. If the advice of beware of something that sounds to good to be true do not help someone, giving it a fancy name for sure will not.
I don't think we ever had break ins, but in our small house near the beach in San Diego, my wife and I regularly had to break it to people that they were not moving in next morning/weekend/week/month, and that they had been scammed. Don't know how much they were paying in.
Not to be “that guy,” but Craigslist has changed a lot over the years. They’ve kept the same coat of paint on it (visual design) but the way it works evolves continuously.
For one obvious example, search results come up in cards now by default and you can use hover arrows to go through the photos on each one. It is far more visual experience today than it was when search results were a compact list of text titles.
And depending on what you search, there are tons of specific filters that show up in the left column. Search “sailboat” and you can filter on make/model, propulsion, length overall, year manufactured, price, miles from location, etc. It works a lot more like eBay or other modern e-commerce sites than the blue links and default fonts let on.
Keeping the old fonts and colors seems sort of like the famous door-desks at Amazon. It looks like a functional decision, but really the main point is to represent a particular viewpoint of the job.
That sounds like a regression to me. A more visual experience isn't necessarily better - I and most people on this site probably prefer the compact list of text titles, since the information is easier to parse.
Filtering also limits search, not enhances it, as you are prevented from generically finding things, and now have to sort by filter.
One of the defining characteristics of filters is that, unlike categories, you can just not select any if you want to see everything. This is true on craigslist, ebay, and every other website I can think of that has filtered product listings.
"That guy" is a person who stands out among other people because they do something annoying or inconvenient. They may have reasons to do whatever it is, but most people would choose not to do whatever it is.
For example, someone who always takes the last piece of pizza without asking if anybody else wants it is "that guy who always takes the last piece of pizza".
The phrase "not to be that guy" is a way to acknowledge that you look like "that guy" (you realize you're doing something that some may find inconvenient or annoying in some way), but for whatever reason, you feel something is necessary anyway in a situation, and you don't take the annoyance or inconvenience lightly.
Continuing the example, if you don't typically take the last piece of pizza, but you you can't ask properly because you're starving and late for a very important meeting, you might say, "Not to be that guy, but I've got to have some food, so I'm taking the last piece of pizza."
So basically, you do want to be "that guy", but you want people to think that you don't enjoy doing it so you can beg some social excusal to do it, rather then just outright do it with no apology and clearly be "that guy"...
Yes, you're choosing to do what "that guy" would do, hopefully only in exceptional circumstances. Like with any apology, people who say "not to be that guy" can be sincere or just making an excuse to make their own lives easier.
An aged but still relevant article - "Increase your conversion rate by making your site ugly" is a good parallel read particularly with regard to accessibility
I feel like that article misses the biggest differentiator. "Be early enough that this looked reasonable at the time - win - rely on network effects to never need to upgrade your site."
I agree totally with the accessibility bit, but overall I think this article is based on a totally flawed premise. For starters most sites that gain traction look very good, and they are just citing the extremely small number of exceptions and acting like they represent some sort of trend. Second, almost all those sites gained traction in an era when their designs looked good or at least fine compared to their contemporaries and then lived off familiarity and network effects.
People use (or at least used) Craigslist because they like it when websites and apps actually work. I never encountered bugs or bizarre UI problems when using Craigslist. It turns out the only people who care about flashy animations, fancy drop shadows, "native" looking UI elements, Material/Human design principles, etc., are developers and designers. Normal people only care about those things when functionality is solved first. If it functions like crap, but it looks good, you're just putting lipstick on a pig, and lipstick might not have even been called for in the first place.
Not disagreeing at all. I get irrationally angry when a website shits the bed because of flashy UI BS.
One thing I will say is that I personally appreciate "modern" UIs (when they work) because I have ADHD and the visual clutter of "old fashioned" websites is a serious problem for me. I have old reddit set to 200% magnification just to keep the amount of content on the screen to a minimum, and to minimize the width of lines of text.
Again though, I do still prefer snappy and functional over 'elegant' and sluggish, even if it's more difficult for me to focus.
I also have ADHD and have an adoration for old-style website design. Not necessarily the 2008 - 2013 era (which I like to call the 1970's of the web), but websites before that which were more cluttered and unrefined.
Websites from the old days surface far more relevant information on the first fold than do contemporary sites, which I believe have gone overboard with Swiss Style design inspiration such that they think empty space is always preferable. The fact that many websites today use extremely large fonts in order to pass accessibility tests also doesn't help, but this is partly subjective because I personally hate reading text greater than 16px.
Maybe I would think differently if I did lots of heavy reading, but that's hard to do these days because most prose on the internet is filler and total rubbish. If I want to just find something, a website being designed like a magazine cover really doesn't help.
Allow me to illustrate my perspective.
This website, which has been online since 1994, would today be considered one of the most poorly designed sites of all time.
Bask in the dark repeating background, the neon colors, and the quirky use of font size.
And yet, unlike 95% of sites online today, it loads instantly, and is organized such that I can find what I might be looking for without distraction. The author provides a header guiding new users to categories, and underneath is a list of links to pages the author thinks I might be interested in. And that's it. No Fontawesome, no TypeKit, no box shadows, no hover animations, no hover dropdowns, no sticky headers, no scroll jacking, no transparencies, no accordions, no hamburger menus, no bullshit.
A "modern" website would make the first fold into a glorified billboard, hide anything interesting in horizontal navigation of categories that have to be expanded out, use 19px font for prose because The Google, a masonry type layout because CSS grid bro, a sticky header that annoyingly animates in/out, and one to three popup modals asking me to give them my email.
I gave up on CL years ago when the apartment rental lists for Amsteram became overrun with obvious scams. I would flag them, but it never seemed to matter.
Then also because of the Backpage disaster they stopped all the person to person (dating or hookup) groups. It's a shame too, because I actually met some good people in the past on those groups.
So on one hand, they over-moderated by eliminating whole segments of their site while apparently ignoring other segments which became rife with garbage ads or outright scams. And once the real audience finds wading through garbage to be too much effort, we leave and the site becomes irrelevant.
I still use CL, after I try NextDoor (and less often, eBay).
Many of the scammers are pretty easy to spot: they say "my agent will pick it up and give you a cashier's check (or money order)." I think CL could easily make it harder for the scammers, with minimal effort.
For the ghosting buyers: this isn't just limited to CL. On the last item, I was giving something away on NextDoor, and still had around 8 ghosts. What I finally resorted to was asking for the exact time they were coming, and making it clear that I was not holding it for them if they didn't show up.
If there were several on the same day, I'd tell the later ones that someone was (supposedly) coming before them, and it might be gone so they should double check before coming.
I've found better success with asking for something insignificant like 10$ when I just want to get rid of something. It weeds out the flakes and maybe gets the "buyer" more invested in the deal
Rock Auto is another such site. Looks old but is so much more effective than modern sites for finding the right car parts. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I love Rock Auto. The way they make it easy to see which warehouse your items are shipping from and choose other items from the same warehouse is super cool too.
Just ordered something from them earlier this week. They got my repeat business because the last time I ordered something from them it was effortless (other than their kinda poor UI lol) and the item arrived super fast. I guess the shipping was a bit pricy, but that's fine. They had the part and got it to me promptly, and charged a fair price for it. Works for me!
I would say because it is a tool, and tools should stay relatively the same. It's ok to make a new tool!
I have this discussion with people who make physical objects all the time, and their frustrations with the software world. Imagine learning to use a Heidelberg offset press 20y ago, and if you enter your workshop, it performs the same as before. Now imagine you are a painter who uses photoshop elements once in awhile. For some reason, your printer is printing all your pictures with a red tinge. You buy a new version of photoshop elements, and the problem is gone. The moving targets of saas and other remote updated software changes the perspective on tools, especially for production purposes. Many people who produce physical objects with software run into these problems. I fix up motorcycles in my spare time, and I dread the day my torque wrench needs an update!
My aging German automobile's radio failed to display an ö that a cloud service sent it yesterday. I really wonder how that regression slipped through. It has been able to display German in the past, along with all sorts of other unicode characters.
The only thing I can figure is the band that named the song is Mongolian, so maybe they used a U-1803 (Mongolian full stop ᠃) as a modifier on the o?
It's because it prints money. Is just a straight money printing machine. Of all the Golden Goose's, it's best to just leave it alone and let it do it's thing.
Facebook prints money too but that didn’t stop them from turning the clean perfect interface they had in 2010 into the steaming pile of eggs it is now.
It's because Facebook has to constantly "innovate" to raise the share price. I'm sure Craigslist makes some decent income for it's owners and can pay it's bills every month but it's never going to explode in growth. They don't need new investors constantly because they don't do anything new. Their whole site is basically LAMP except for Perl instead of PHP. The latest part of their tech stack is a mail server that's 10 years old.
Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day.
That mindset is worth more than anything else Web 3.0 can throw-up. (pun intended)
If only retail stores had websites like Craigslist! Just last night I was in one trying to do a simple search for a fairly common item (on my phone). After waiting between 20 seconds to a minute for search results to return, then trying to click the "search in store inventory" checkbox 12 times (sometimes because I wasn't sure the tap had registered, sometimes because I thought the page hadn't finished loading before I tapped it, etc), I finally just gave up after 5 or 10 minutes of struggling with it.
I had a decent signal (3 or 4 bars, I believe -- about as good as I ever expect to get in a store), but the web pages on so-called "modern" websites are so bloated and inefficient, sometimes it's a miracle to get anything done on a normal residential home internet service, let alone on a phone.
And before someone suggests it, NO, I am NOT going to install a stinking app from every store I visit (not that they'd be any better, most of the one's I've seen I would describe as "barely functional -- sometimes").
It would be interesting to know how many sales stores have lost because a customer was trying to search for something in their store via their website, but the experience was so miserable they just gave up.
Yeah, that's nice. Too bad the examples are so few and far between (especially among national chains). I've seen one or two good examples before I'm sure, just none that I can think of that I shop at now.
I have no problem with Craigslist's interface, but the site is pretty much Scamlist at this point.
I often simultaneously list stuff on Craigslist, FB Marketplace and Nextdoor. The latter two have a near perfect success rate. Craiglist replies are all the most obvious scams in the world.
This is becoming more and more the case for apartments as well. The majority of listings in my area are scams with pictures stolen from Redfin or elsewhere. Reporting will remove them but five more will show up the next day. Zillow Rentals, Strerteasy, Hotpads are a lot more reputable.
Craigslist needs to take all the money they have saved in design and put it towards anti spam and fraud detection tools.
Craigslist is one of my favorite tech companies. They have a fantastic product which they don't sabotage in the interest of growth. Huge respect to them for quietly being the best.
I feel like there is a risk of sabotage through complacency and a refusal to adapt to competition. People looking for rentals and homes to buy don't go to craigslist first, they do to sites like Zillow and Redfin. As I've mentioned in a different response, the spam and junk listings are a persistent problem and none of the spam seems particularly sophisticated or hard to stop - most are literally the same image and content with a ton of tags posted under different categories.
> Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day.
Web developers have this twisted idea that if code wasn't written in the past 6 months, it's legacy and un-modern and bad and needs to be refreshed. Stop.
Just because something was fun for you to build doesn't mean it's fun for me to use.
There's a joke that the Oscar for best editing usually goes to the movie with the most editing. Design seems the same way, where simplicity is underrated and things have change constantly or it's "dated".
Craigslist is proof that you do not need to occasionally “refresh the look and feel” of your website or app.
I have a real chip on my shoulder for the occasional design team that seems intent on justifying their own existence and nothing more.
I’d love to learn about big user studies that concluded with, “don’t change a thing. It’s good as is.” Surely that case must be appropriate some % of the time. But I think when you’ve got a hammer you just see nails and work for you.
I really respect this philosophy. I know the HN crowd hates when Reddit is brought up, but its redesign is a great example here. I find the old interface's technical simplicity serves me far better since it loads fast and can be extended with RES. Similarly, I love that HN still looks like a site from 2007, it functions beautifully
Man, just 10 people working there, couldn't have done that with vc backed funding. Have to grow, then have to add people to grow, then have to add features to try to pay for the people.
But man, if you think about every $25 car/apartment/job post, it's plenty of money for 10 people. Pretty insane.
Makes me wonder: if people were offered a lump sum up front which represented their lifetime take-home pay + fringe for the job they will do for the rest of their life, what would people's number be?
Or another way, a choice of a 10 year contract to do X worth 100k/annual take-home with 1m delivered at start, or an unchanging biweekly paycheck. Would the biweekly need to be higher to make it more attractive than the one-time payment or could it be lower yet still be the favored choice.
>a choice of a 10 year contract to do X worth 100k/annual take-home with 1m delivered at start, or an unchanging biweekly paycheck. Would the biweekly need to be higher to make it more attractive than the one-time payment or could it be lower yet still be the favored choice.
You can only make the up front payment so large before employees start quitting early and moving to Montenegro.
>> I doubt if he’s typical of people working at Craigslist.
> A billion split ten ways is still a decent chunk of pocket change.
The difference being that Newmark has an equity stake of some hypothetical value and the people working there would receive some fixed value per unit of time. If Newmark were to pay each of 10 workers $1B/10 then:
* their paychecks afterward would be much smaller
* their next tax period would be much larger
* someone else would control Craigslist since the equity stake would have been liquidated (probably causing it to be worth less than $1B)
Thus `has != earns`
> quitting early and moving to Montenegro
I'm of the thought that there is only so much leisure a person can take before there is a drive to contribute toward the betterment of humanity. If someone trusted you and you were trustable, would you take a large lump sum and work for work's sake? Would it make a difference if the sum was an equity stake in the work's environment?
> I'm of the thought that there is only so much leisure a person can take before there is a drive to contribute toward the betterment of humanity.
I agree completely.
> If someone trusted you and you were trustable, would you take a large lump sum and work for work's sake? Would it make a difference if the sum was an equity stake in the work's environment?
I wouldn't, if it involved a long-term commitment. It's the long-term commitment that's the issue. It locks you into one thing and eliminates the ability to do something better -- or just different -- later on.
> if people were offered a lump sum up front which represented their lifetime take-home pay + fringe for the job they will do for the rest of their life, what would people's number be?
You literally couldn't pay me enough to be locked into the same job for the rest of my life.
I also wouldn't want to be locked into a 10 year contract.
I dont think craigslist has a nice look. It's just stuck because it was the first in the world. I don't mean he needs to make it look like another cookiecutter bootstrap rounded-edges website, but he can reorganize to make it be more functional
When I lived in the US, at a certain point I realized literally every major aspect of my life in some way could be worked back to a craigslist ad - cars, places to live in and jobs.
We don't have craigslist where I live in Europe, and I miss it. Instead it's an endless parade of for-profit services like olx.
I tell people about craigslist and it's alien to them, this idea that something on the internet could be managed to be run by a dozen people and not be changed.
It's not even the simplicity that is so appealing to me, but that you get this feeling that it is a totally neutral platform. Like air, you don't see it but it's there. And nobody is trying to put perfume in it.
It's odd that this article came out only a few months after CL did a semi-significant change in the way they display listings -- the "gallery view" now lays out the screen differently, and it's fairly broken on mobile, pushing the left menu in and out randomly as you scroll (iOS Firefox and Safari anyway).
FWIW, I still use CL quite a lot in the SF Bay area. The cars listings are full of spam and scams, probably double what they were 5 or 6 years ago. This, despite the fact that they started charging for cars/trucks listings.
Craigslist might work well in large metro area like SF, but when your state is carved up into numerous non-overlapping regions and you're 60 minutes away from the center of either one to your side - it's just a sad roulette to see if you have to drive an hour to pick something up. With a simple distance-from-zipcode search implementation Craigslist could still be useful.
Sadly I'm stuck with Facebook Marketplace for now (which has been amazing for distance searches).
Its also annoying when its the opposite, if I want to search for a car in California, I just stick myself centrally in Frenso and click all the adjacent areas since you can get SF, Sac, LA, Vegas.
I don't particularly like Craigslist's UI, but I still prefer it to other online marketplaces because it's fast and simple. I do find it cluttered and not very nice to navigate, but I'll gladly take a bit of clutter and clunkiness over MBs of hideous banner ads shoved in my face, and god-knows what trackers and scripts are being used on the other sites.
Similarly, I still use old.reddit and will continue to do so until they force that new monstrosity on me.
See, I completely equate "clutter" with things like banner ads. CL is amongst the least "cluttered" sites I use.
It absolutely doesn't live up to the latest trends in UI/UX design, but the fact that it feels more like basic HTML forms with little styling is a feature, not a bug.
> It absolutely doesn't live up to the latest trends in UI/UX design
I'd have to disagree pretty strongly here. It is- excluding the homepage- a paragon of modern UX design, and I think many other sites have taken a lot of inspiration. Search oriented, minimalist design elements that stay out of the way of the user, key filters to narrow search, saved searches, alerts, etc. It's even almost entirely flat aesthetically! You could do a completely surface level reskin of Craigslist and it would appear, from a UX/UI perspective, to be a totally modern interface. I think people see the older visual aesthetic and assume that it's not in line with modern UX best practices, but it largely is! Again home page is excluded here. I think that's still the way it is for familiarity/nostalgia reasons, because they have made tons of changes to the main search UI but left the home page basically untouched.
The trends that it doesn't keep up with are mostly technological rather than UX/UI.
Cos it ain't broke and the people running it are a very rare breed who know better than to fix it. Same with McMaster Carr website and a very few others
in light of "Updating the UI to be modern just because", my 4yr old says "because" is not a reason. Even she knows, yet so many choose to have a modern look for no gain (likely the opposite).
Like most people here, I love the minimalist 90s UI and the lack of need to create an account. Unfortunately it's a ghost town of scammers now in my area. Craigslist really dropped the ball on policing their site and let competitors take over. Facebook is terrible, but the closed yard-sale groups really cut down the number of scammer responses.
I would argue the biggest reason craigslist is doing well it it's free and semi anonymous (it forwards all emails though generated addresses)
The UX has areas clearly neglected. For example in apartments there is a trashcan icon to hide a listing. But, it's inserted at the end of the description. If the description is long then the button does not appear.
Another is the categories. In SF, SOMA and Mission Bay arguably need to be separated but craigslist only lists SOMA and groups Mission Bay in with it. That's one of several areas that need to be split
I used it a ton over the last 6 months trying to find an apartment but in the end I found the apartment on apartments.com ... which is far from perfect but has some features arguably more suited to apartment hunting.
That I think might be the point. Different products can benefit from unique features
I remember watching a Harvard System Design intro lecture by David Milan on YouTube. He was talking about tradeoffs and said that craigslist stored all their listings as static html. which was extremely cheap and performant but made it harder to edit and stuff like that.
I still use CL frequently. I actually have a few search terms I literally search every day. I have got SO MANY amazing deals because of this. Yeah, you have to be patient, but stuff does come up. I have both bought and sold over CL and never once been scammed, but then again I do my due diligence and trust my gut. Anyway, one of the best things about it is that it has stayed the same and you know what to expect. No insane UI overhaul that makes it all "latest trend", no scummy user-exploitation dark patterns (that I've noticed), no animated video ads covering 1/3 of the screen... Yeah, it has some flaws, but for me it's still the optimal "local buy/sell" service.
One of the reason that finally got me to drop Spotify is their constant (and usually very small) tinkering with their interface. I used to use it in specific ways and not very often so when I needed to find or edit a playlist it was very annoying to discover that a button moved or even its text changed. Same for Slack, which I’m very thankful I don’t have to use anymore.
Slack and Spotify design teams really need to appreciate the purse: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
I think the counterpoint to this attitude is Figma. Figma looks great, and designers love it, but as a casual user it's a nightmare to use or find anything in.
There is the old "function over form" and "form over function" dichotomy. I'm a huge "function over form" fan; I like things simple and easily understood. But I understand that I'm in a minority and most people prefer "form over function"
This is an awful lot of words to say "it works fine." I love craigslist, and use it both for listing and buying quite regularly. There's plenty of fair criticisms of craigslist, but the UI is one of the strongest features. Maybe turn it around and ask why most other websites have loud, jarring, complicated interfaces and copious 3rd party JavaScript from dozens of other domains?
> Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day. […] It’s fast and easy for people, and that’s a big deal. […] For me as an engineer, simple is beautiful. Functional is beautiful.
It probably looks the same because it doesn’t need to look different. And it seems CL wasn’t enticed by the cult of money that is Silicon Valley. Thus, their organization was not taken over by countless layers of middle management attempting to justify their own existence by adding a bunch of useless features.
But definitely YMMV depending on the city you're in.
I'm glad it's stayed the way it is. Arguably the best marketplace website, period. Simple to post, simple to use, local pickup only. Not infested with ad/promoted listings.
Agreed, although the sad thing is that eBay/FB have a large audience.. so if I fail to sell something elsewhere I'll usually have to switch to one of those two :(
I closed by FB account 10 years, not opening it up again even if it's to access their Marketplace. Was big on eBay back in the day when bidding was fun (before sniper bots took over), you could find good deals, and wasn't full of scams. Used it just this week probably for the first time in 10 years to find an obscure part that I needed replacing--still good for that.
Craigslist works fine, I'm okay with the older UI. Yes, there are scammers but there are scammers on FB marketplace as well. Now it's lost it's users to FB but it's possible it may see a resurgence after a bad move by FB or some trend change.
I used to blame eBay for the lack of updates to Craigslist - but it seems that Craigslist is now back in the hands of the original creator…so the reason is probably that he’s got his and is doing something else while it runs on fumes.
"The current Craigslist site upholds its unmistakable '90s look and feel." <-- Text below screenshots of website that looks nothing like a 90s website :/
Still works well for the little functionality it has. Having a great UX and UI is always a good thing but at the same time if it only means putting a lot of new cognitive load on the user I would rather not have it.
But then how could they justify hiring an inexperienced ex-google woman? (nothing wrong with being a woman, but she tried to make a celebrity out of herself, look at her cover magazine photoshoot).
Marissa Meyer was certainly not the old hand CEO type that had already run Yahoo into the ditch but hardly inexperienced.
She oversaw the layout of Google's well-known, unadorned search homepage. She was also on the three-person team responsible for Google AdWords, which is an advertising platform that allows businesses to show their product to relevant potential customers based on their search terms. AdWords helped deliver 96% of the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2011.
There is little if anything that is still "right-wing" about Drudge today. If you doubt me, load it a few times every week and see what is featured. It's not the Drudge of 5 or 10 or 15 years ago.
Its search engine too - I get things I search for in the area I search for.
For me, Kijiji and Facebook marketplace are awful UI, awful distractions, and give me 10,000 "suggested" or "fuzzy searched" things in random order, suppressing things I'm actually looking for. And I've completely given up on eBay over last decade.
However.
* Nothing is on Craigslist anymore in my area (Greater Toronto Area). Until about... 5-6 years ago, I could find comparable number of photography, computer, music & kids stuff on Craigslist and Kijiji. Today, Craigslist is a desert, a void, an oasis of empty search results.
So network effect wins, as always :-/