>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site"
Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and keeping the site working under the huge traffic it's handling.
I don't remember seeing CL down or even slow - no cutesy "site is down" pages - which says to me they're improving the site constantly, just not in the way that gets the hypeosphere excited.
The fact that they haven't done the things you describe doesn't change the fact that craigslist is a terrible product.
It is clogged with spam. Clever types of spam, often ones that crowdsource their content by mining previously legit posts. Since there are no reputation mechanisms to speak of, it's far too easy to waste your time with stuff that's either spam or a scam.
Meanwhile, data visualization has progressed dramatically in the last decade. craigslist remains in 2001. Wading through apartment listings, for example, is miserable, and there are almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very basic information is communicated by people listing their properties.
craigslist can keep its hideous, serifed-out visual design as long as it wants. The big beef here isn't how craigslist looks – it's how it works.
The fact your dog doesn't shit on your pillow doesn't excuse his taking a dump in your shoes every day.
Not sure if reputation mechanisms would work in a site where people often post just once, and that doesn't require creating a user account in order to post.
I would love it if CL's sublet section would take some hints from AirBnB. That said, CL has a much higher volume of traffic and more pressing problems - and my experience is that ABB works great in smaller markets but is as almost bad as CL in a market like NYC.
CL isn't perfect. But if most of the dogs hyped in the various dog blogs would be shitting on pillows on a regular basis, the ones that wouldn't would stand out.
> Not sure if reputation mechanisms would work in a site where people often post just once, and that doesn't require creating a user account in order to post.
That's a weird premise to me. If you post an apartment, you could just as easily also want to find a girlfriend or buy a used bike or avail yourself of any of craigslist's other categories. That's their big value, after all – everything under one roof.
The fact that craigslist doesn't require a user account to post is an extremely dubious product decision at this stage.
Data visualizations have progressed in almost all craigslist competitors (and mashups), but visualizations won't be the death of craigslist. The battleground is content. Sure there's plenty of spam and scams, but people love craiglist listings because there is so much unique content.
One major contributor to craiglist becoming so successful as a website is essentially the ease of posting content. That lead to lots of content and not coincidentally lots of traffic, but it also means that much of the data is unstructured. Creating more intelligent ways to interact with data requires some structure, but the easiest way to structure data is to complicate the listing creation process. When someone figures out a great balance and has enough search traffic to keep listers coming back, craigslist will have a real competitor.
Wading through apartment listings, for example, is miserable, and there are almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very basic information is communicated by people listing their properties.
Where is a good place to look for apartments? Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier than CL usually are cluttered with a high ads to info ratio, inaccurate info and/or are slow to load/navigate...
A nit to pick, since elai has already provided some good examples.
> Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier...
None of these gripes are about appearance except inasmuch as appearance reflects functionality. craigslist is ugly, but that's not the problem. craigslist doesn't work well. I don't want it to look different. I want it to work differently.
A competing site could look much prettier than craigslist and still work no better.
I'm not sure how you use Craigslist but I've primarily used the site to sell a few big ticket items - and it flat out works. After listing a couple of cars on some larger, more feature rich sites for several weeks without any traction, I listed on Craigslist, received multiple inquiries from day one, and sold within 10 days. Granted, this has more to do with the scale of the user base than the actual product, but I'm not sure you can completely separate those two aspects in this business space.
My buddy is 40 years old, not very technical, but he's one hell of a mechanic. He's been making his living off buying and selling cars off of CL since the recession started. Just an anecdote. I'm not sure an "improved UI" would help him. So many entrepreneurs are mad at CL for whatever reason, but the main one seems to be jealousy. They would rather ruin it than allow it to continue.
I found that nearly every used car I looked at on CL was either being resold by small-time "car dealers" or bought up by these same people. It was nearly impossible to find a good used car so I finally leased a new one instead.
i don't think it's just envy that makes entrepreneurs mad. CL is also quite litigious (but in a hypocritical capricious way), which is generally out of step with the rest of data-is-free, api-driven world.
It sounds like you want CL to specialize in a niche, which is something they're not really setup to do, nor is it their claim to fame. They are a firehouse of classifieds information, that's why a lot of people like them.
They could mine the data they have a bit more, but where do they stop? Should they let you select computers for sale by CPU type(newegg)? Cars by model/make/warrant/color(autotrader.com)? Dates by body measurements/race/religion/compatibility questions(okcupid.com)? Should their forums have a karma system(hacker news)? There is a reason they are called "Craig's List" & not "Craig's Apartments", "Craig's Cars", "Craig's Dating" or "Craig's Computers".
Perhaps they should try harder on the spam, but redesigning how they operate could alienate a considerable portion of their community who like the simplicity & popularity of the site.
I"m partial to apartmentratings.com. Most rental sites earn their money from the apartments so they are not allowed to show you any negative info, meaning no user generated content. apartmentratings.com is a pariah in the industry because they actually let real people give their opinions.
Yelp is also good. I've read the reviews for my building and they are basically correct -- the staff used to be idiots, the walls are paper-thin, and the appliances are pieces of shit. Yup, pretty much.
i have a friend who worked there. he said they had a foot high stack of letters from apartments threatening to sue them because they refused to delete reviews.
I too wish I had a shitty product like that. However:
> And I even use it regularly to find stuff I want, locally, and cheap.
Are you really successful at that, though? 9 times out of 10 when I use craigslist the transaction is a horrible experience--for example:
- the buyer of an item claims it, then flakes out
- the seller of an item jacks up the price at the last
minute, when I'm there in person, saying, "oh well
there are 5 other people that want it"
- potential rideshare flakes out, or changes plans at
the last minute
- potential landlord turns out to be unreliable
The one area where I have had great success with craigslist is hiring, which I suspect is due to craigslist charging for job listings (which keeps the bar high).
Like I said, I'm successful at finding things I'm looking for.
In the last month, for instance, I've purchased:
-- a pressure washer (had it in my garage within 90 mins of searching)
-- an industrial grade hedge trimmer
-- 4 dock floats
-- a folding swimming ladder
The first three I found looking, the fourth I found by placing a "looking for" add myself.
Sure, I've had shitty experiences with Craigslist, by far the worst was when I was selling a truck. I had a lot of moronic callers and a couple of no-shows, but I also ended up selling it for good cash to a respectful guy.
The best bet in handling the bad parts was basically saying "sorry, not interested in selling it to you" when I get the sense that the other end of the call was a flake or not worth wasting time on. Sure, pissed off some of them, but I like to think I have a reasonable ability to read people, and wasn't desperate enough to sell the truck that I felt obligated to follow through with every potential buyer.
In the end, I'd rather deal with that crap than a dealership any day.
Just use an RSS reader and do some data processing. It's a small price to pay when the content (listings) come free. I think we begin to take that for granted, and start to get upset when our free cake isn't ALSO 6 tiers and made of exotic Swiss chocolates.
Sure, a tool that requires skillful end-users isn't one destined for great things and world domination (example: emacs) but that doesn't mean it has no value.
Right - it's so terrible nobody uses it -all those other awesome sites out there are just taking over then, right?
Craigslist is doomed?
It's obviously a highly successful product. The model is simple, IIRC from articles past, the operating cost is minimal for the size of the userbase, it takes very little staff to actually run it, microscopically little compared to other sites that do far, far less.
If everyone is so keen on saying there's a better way to do property listings - go build it.
Craigslist runs something like 50MM ads every month without a leak of personal information and a user-driven moderation system, all the while fending off myriad abusers for whom free (or nearly free) advertising isn't enough and think Craigslist should be their personal global spam shitbucket.
When the only thing people have to criticize you for is your appearance, I think that says a lot.
Craigslist is so full of spam and reposts it's practically useless for major categories. Take for example Dallas apartments/rentals... hardly a single legitimate posting in there.
There is A LOT more to complain about than appearance.
Craigslist has done a lot LOT of harm to the plight of the renter. Realtors have incentive to spam, post bait-and-switch, or flag the FSBOs when they are significantly < "market price".
Problem: locked down rental listings (can't search) + free advertising for Realtors = the leeches in the NAR controlling market prices w/nobody stopping them.
</soapbox>
Rather than that "beta testing" charge for companies to post jobs, craigslist should charge for posting in the rentals / housing, category imho.
In my experience, the quality level of ads has dropped considerably. My last two Craigslist experiences:
I recently tried looking for a used car in the Chicago area. It turns out almost all the postings in the "by owner only" area are actually dealers in disguise. I found this out the hard way after driving an hour to see a car at what turned out to be some kind of sketchball dealership.
Another time, someone posted an ad for a musical instrument. I go to the guys house and he turns out to be some type of dealer/wholesaler. He didn't even have the actual instrument from the ad and was pulling some bait-and-switch crap.
All of this has pretty much soured me on Chicago Craigslist, but I will say that the experience is probably still a bit better in smaller metropolitan areas.
> are actually dealers in disguise. I found this out the hard way after driving an hour to see a car at what turned out to be some kind of sketchball dealership.
before driving you should have run the search for their number. Serial postings for various cars is definitely not FSBO.
Jeremy Zawodny is implementing some interesting tech at Craigslist. It looks like they're doing a lot of development with MongoDB, Redis, and Sphinx. He drops tech notes on his twitter feed (@jzawodn) occasionally.
They've done a fine job of keeping the site responsive, but that's only a small part of what we normally demand from web apps.
I don't fault them for spam. It's a very, very difficult problem, and since I don't have a magical solution to propose, I'm not going to complain.
But there are a few areas where CL could have made major improvements at a reasonable cost, especially considering their revenue. They could have at least experimented with some of these ideas, and tossed them out later if they turned out to be bad. Here are some of the main opportunities I think CL has missed:
-Richer data, tailored to each category. CL started down this road, e.g. by adding the rent field. But there's so much more they could do in every category.
-Better searching. With the huge volume of posts to sort through--and the large number of duplicate posts--the basic search features currently implemented fall flat. Improvements in this area would probably have to tie in with the richer data set mentioned above.
-Abandon the serial model, where the database is just a chronological list of posts. This model creates an arms race to be the person who posts the most frequently without getting flagged. In other words, it incentivizes the fine art of sneaking what amounts to spam just below the radar.
The core problem, as I see it, is that CL still views their service as an extension of its original incarnation: a mailing list. In the CL model, a listing is just arbitrary text and maybe some metadata if you're lucky, and the listings simply appear in reverse chronological order. Sounds like a mailing list archive to me.
Sure, that's how CL got started, but why not grow into something better? There's clearly enough usage and revenue to justify a realignment. Rather than "sticking with what works," I think this is a case of inertia.
There also seems to clearly be enough usage and revenue, and profit, for the owners not to want to take it any further and be happy with what they have rather than risk change.
They are under no obligation to do anything with the site other than what they want to. They don't have to monetize it, or go public, or improve anything. If they're happy with what they've got, it's theirs to be happy with.
The only thing that would drive change would be an exodus of people - not just people complaining about how things could be better, but an actual clear, obvious drop in usage with a clear cause and a need for redesign.
(Look how well Digg's redesign worked out for them... it all but killed the site overnight.)
All good points, and I agree with them in the abstract. However, in this specific case, I don't entirely agree. The post was about how various other sites were taking aim at individual Craigslist categories, and this might be a good reason for CL to change in the long run.
"The only thing that would drive change would be an exodus of people - not just people complaining about how things could be better, but an actual clear, obvious drop in usage with a clear cause and a need for redesign." Maybe, or maybe the perception that an exodus is impending would be enough. In any case, that exodus may very well happen. Which, I think, is what the post is suggesting. I for one have stopped using CL for almost everything, due to the very reasons under discussion.
Craigslist wastes millions of hours of people's time every year by being a monopoly that provides a bad product in an industry with strong network effects. When I go to a site like padmapper, I am reminded of just how horrible Craigslist is and how happy it would make me to see them go and allow room for new firms to take their place.
Perhaps I'm seeing it too much from the perspective of the little guy, but harvesting that much money into your own pockets over a number of years may not be such a bad decision.
There is a strong difference between UI and UX, for example, when looking through postings for stuff for sale, or places for rent - filtering by HAS IMAGE is really the only way Ill look at an ad - yet there has NEVER been a way to expand and see images.
The FLAG FOR REMOVAL is and has been abused for YEARS. The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been used to effectively block competition in the buyers market. They should simply have a ticker to how many flags a post has been given.
Posting has been built upon, but made very cumbersome. And shows that they employ mediocre critical thinking when developing the UX.
Sure, the site is amazing, its a gem of the valley and I use it daily when looking for work, stuff, places to live, and weekly/monthly otherwise. But to defend this is the same as Quora trying to convince the world they have incredible design, which they dont.
The fact that sites like padmapper can even exist proves that CL is broken in certain areas.
Everybody likes the site, but everyone is also constantly defending poor design as if its some sort of hipster notion that we just wouldn't understand.
Craigslist is designed to make communication easier. If different people have differing ability to communicate, this makes it more difficult to communicate.
Mediocre UX makes for a better meeting ground, because when you start making things easier beyond a certain point, you start to do so at the expense of outliers. For a site like Craigslist, making 90% of people feel twice as comfortable and 10% feel less comfortable is a bad thing.
Your comment says nothing about the UX functions I mentioned. I agree with your statement, but it does not rebut the fact that image display is non-existent and actually works against you comment as it hinders people's ability to smoothly transact private sales...
List-jacking vi the FLAG is just retarded and makes me want to punch the screen.
The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been used to effectively block competition in the buyers market
You misunderstand the flagging mechanism, and it's never "the competition." The competition isn't united against you and there aren't enough of them anyway. You probably just used a hit counter or external images or some other commonly-abused or community-hated posting trope.
> "You probably just used a hit counter or external images or some other commonly-abused or community-hated posting trope."
Your insistence on the purity of flaggers is puzzling, but is in line with what all of flag-help believes. There is never the assumption that the post was flagged wrongly, and instead the assumption that that poster must have done something against the TOU. Except this assumption seems to be wrong more than it is right (based on the couple of hours I spent digging through flag-help postings anyhow).
In my case it seems that there are a contingent of users who are allergic to any unpaid gigs, and will flag just about any ad in the unpaid category. This is despite the fact that CL specifically has an unpaid category, and the posts I saw pass through were not TOU-violating in any way. Flag-help's best response for me was that, hey, that's the way it is, just live with it. This seems to put the kibosh on any assumptions that all flags are legitimate (or even most flags are legitimate). The funny thing is, during the short time that my posts stayed up, I got an incredible number of contacts expressing interest... so clearly I'm not advertising something unwanted to a brick wall.
Unpaid = volunteers. Yes, gigs has a "No Pay" option, but readers hate it (as I'm sure you gleaned from your forum scan). The readers make the final decision, it's pretty much as simple as that. Unpaid jobs are basically illegal, taxwise, and deferred compensation ("equity," usually) is prohibited by Craiglist elsewhere.
I agree that there's a learning curve in posting ads to gigs, but the number of flags required to bring an ad down puts the math on the poster violating community standards.
It's axiomatic that people who complain about flags never flag ads themselves, yet are convinced that there is a cabal focussed on them. This results in aggression proceeding from ignorance, where people who pretend Craigslist is a typical classified ad venue complain that posting whatever they feel like isn't having the intended effect.
No, but there's a large internal inconsistency that you have (that the rest of flag-help shares). There's on the one hand the assumption that the flag is used for good (a.k.a. flagging things that violate the TOU).
On the other hand there's the acceptance that users will flag whatever the hell they feel like, TOU be damned.
Which forms the standard path that a flag-help post travels through:
- Help!
- You must be violating the TOU.
- But... there's nothing in here violating the TOU!
- Sure you did, nub. I bet you had external pics too.
- But no, I didn't!
- Oh well, then, who knows, shrug people will flag what they will.
Which is why I keep saying flag-help is just about no help at all. It's just a lot of newbie-hazing, but very rarely do I see any real productivity out of it. It's only when the post is obviously TOU-violating or offensive that the flag-help users have anything tangible to add.
If the flag-help forum is anything even close to a representative sample of what users are flagging, I'd say that the main uses of the flag feature have nothing to do with violations of CL TOU, despite the site's repeated warnings in the UI that the flag feature is for TOU violations only.
> "I agree that there's a learning curve in posting ads to gigs"
That's the problem. There isn't. When everything no-pay gets flagged off in short order, there isn't a learning curve. There is a brick wall.
> "but the number of flags required to bring an ad down puts the math on the poster violating community standards."
This is an assumption, and a particularly false one at that. Craigslist has never released any documentation on how many flags it takes to bring down an ad. The only thing we know for sure is that it is higher than one. From my own observations on low-traffic categories, this number is likely < 5. An unsophisticated troll/griefer can easily issue five flags in short order and take something down single-handedly.
The fact that a post got flagged is not at all evidence that the poster has done something the community does not appreciate. In fact, from my own observations in gigs/creative is that my ads consistently get a strong interested response... as long as they stay up. From the looks of it from other posters posting ads similar to mine, there is a single dedicated troll who griefs the entire category. CL does nothing to solve this.
tl;dr: My ads are well-written, conform to all guidelines, and get a consistently strong response (at least 3/hour that the post stays up). Yet, what looks like a single griefer (or a small group of griefers) ruins the category for everyone - not only myself but other people posting similar ads. That a single griefer can take down this sort of functionality is part of why CL is fundamentally broken.
> "Unpaid jobs are basically illegal, taxwise"
Oh here we go. Now I know with good confidence you're one of the flag-help users :) When a perfectly innocuous-looking post is submitted to flag-help that seems to conform to TOU and is otherwise inoffensive, flag-help users will go to great lengths, make tenuous connections, and make assumptions about the poster in order to maintain their false belief that the flag feature is largely used properly by users, despite overwhelming evidence that it is abused.
So when an artist is seeking collaborators, flag-help will falsely associate this with "unpaid job", then link this to tax law, in order to convince themselves that somehow this post must violate TOU. Otherwise, why would the fine, upstanding CL community flag it? Surely there are no trolls and griefers in our midst!
This falls in line with my own experience. Flag-help insisted that, because I'm a photographer looking to collaborate, I should be posting to services/creative (despite the fact that I was looking for collaborators on a specific project, therefore am not offering myself up in general). The insistence was that I was miscategorized, and thus flagged. The notion of a troll was never acknowledged. After bringing this up, flag-help changed their tune, and at the end of the day settled on "well, some users just don't like no-pay gigs, tough".
tl;dr: Craigslist apologists have the incompatible dual beliefs that: flags are for the most part used as they are designed/intended (i.e. enforcing community guidelines)... and people will also flag whatever they want because they don't like it, even if it doesn't violate any community guidelines. This leads to the false belief that the CL flagging system is infallible, at the same time encouraging people to gloss over or construct elaborate stories to maintain the illusion that there doesn't exist an epidemic of false flagging.
Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here.
How about some sort of reputation system? And decent moderation? As it stands, CL is a great way to (not) meet flaky people, and to have your posts taken down on the indecipherable whims of a few obsessive users.
I've gotten one job, bought a few things, sold one motorcycle, and gave away most of my possessions via CL, and it was consistently an awful, frustrating experience.
It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," and there is a flag help forum on Craigslist to help explain how your ad might have trammeled your area's standards.
Having had an ad inexplicably flagged, the flag help forum is no help at all, unless you consider random, uninformed speculation a form of help.
For one thing, the tone of the flag help forum is that of a hazing circle. It's just a lot of people sitting around being snarky, making rude comments at relative novices and calling them names.
Which might be easier to swallow if they actually provided any real help - but unless your post is bog-standard flag-bait the advice given is usually off the mark. I sat through a number of threads besides my own and it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements.
Personally, I was looking for collaborative help in a photography project, and posted to gigs - but according to the great wisdom to flag-help I really should've been posting to services-creative instead (???)
The problem here is also that there is no safeguard against other posters flagging each other's content. Using the flag feature to push competing postings off the page is depressingly common, and the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves.
the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves.
Correct, it's up to the poster to construct an ad that can stay up. Community standards are different from city to city, but it's not Craigslist's job to keep ads up that the community doesn't want to see. Where is the "accountability and reliability" in your newspaper's classifieds? You think some editor at the Star Tribune is double-checking that that muscle car being advertised isn't actually a bucket of bolts?
The dominant "mechanism" or thought process I see getting thwarted on Craigslist is that since time-immemorial, classified ads (and really, ads in general) operated by the ethic of "Here it is, if you don't like it then you don't have to buy it (also: shut up)." Craigslist inverts this relationship and puts the power into the readers' hands: "You don't like getting flagged? Feel free to post your ad on some other website." This, I feel, is the most political thing that Craigslist has done: instead of forcing readers to overlook bad ads, it tries to motivate sellers not to write bad ads in the first place. That so many here are angry about having gotten flagged off in the past tells me that they were doing the bare minimum in writing their ad anyway. Good riddance, I say. It's not like Craigslist will die without whiners complaining about them.
By and large the people most frustrated with their Craigslist posting experience are those who just barf out a self-serving ad and expect the invisible hand of Adam Smith to protect their "right" to get $1200 for a Britney Spears ticket.
it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements.
If this was your experience, I'd look to the attitude of the person asking for help. There is a certainly an amount of "RTFM" in the flag forums, but so few RTFM. Lots and lots of people get "real help" in the flag forums. Unfortunately, lots and lots of other people have a "don't like it? don't buy it." attitude.
> "Craigslist inverts this relationship and puts the power into the readers' hand"
No, it doesn't - it puts powers into other advertisers' hands as much as it does the users. You are also forgetting that time is not a fundamentally equal resource - in my case it seems like there are griefers on the subcategory who consistent (and around the clock, it seems) flag posts that rub them the wrong way. Perhaps it's other regular posters trying to push competing posts out of the way (very, very likely, and in fact a common tactic), or maybe a disgruntled user with a beef against a subcategory and too much time on his hands. The problem here is griefers - and there is no mechanism to stop them.
Compare this with MMORPGs - players with a lot of time on their hands can stand to be incredibly powerful in ways that normal players cannot. Most games balance for this by nerfing extreme regulars and boosting infrequent players to lessen the gap. It doesn't remove the incentive of playing more, but it prevents situations where a bunch of Lv. 100 wizards are just constantly destroying a bunch of Lv. 10 noobs. CL faces the same problem - the morality police, griefers, and other obsessive users gum up the entire system.
> "That so many here are angry about having gotten flagged off in the past tells me that they were doing the bare minimum in writing their ad anyway."
This is an attitude I saw a lot on the flag-help forum, but I read through a large number of threads and I'd wager 95% of them were just fine - neither violating the TOU, nor being offensive, nor being illegal... There are many lower-traffic subcategories where the flag threshold for being pulled is absurdly low.
That's the problem with flag-help. Most posts submitted there don't have anything obviously wrong with them, and the flag-helpers are either there to flog the newbie for daring to have a post that got flagged, or speculate on various non-obvious reasons why a post was flagged. In the end nobody gets anywhere except in the 5% of cases where the questionable nature of the post is obvious, this is pointed out, and everyone goes on their merry ways.
> "By and large the people most frustrated with their Craigslist posting experience are those who just barf out a self-serving ad and expect the invisible hand of Adam Smith to protect their "right" to get $1200 for a Britney Spears ticket."
Citation required. I hung out on the flag-help forum for a couple of hours after posting my own, digging through past posts. The vast majority of the posts that go through there are neither self-serving nor entitled. They're just normal ads that get pulled for seemingly inexplicable reasons. The flag feature is neither accountable nor does it come with context. All there is is speculation on maybe, kind of, probably why something was flagged, where really this information needs to come from the flaggers themselves. The usage of the flag as an offensive feature between posters is also almost trivially easy to stop, but yet CL has done nothing.
The flag-help forum posters are also ill-qualified for the job, since they don't have any data on why posts get flagged either! All they can do is speculate - but without any input from real flaggers their speculation is about as reliable as anyone else's. For obvious offensiveness this works, but from what I saw the vast majority of posts that pass through there were flagged for anything but obvious reasons, and the responses are not informed.
> "If this was your experience, I'd look to the attitude of the person asking for help."
I gather from the tone of this sentence that you're a flag-help poster yourself. I saw dozens of puzzled people come into the forum, be perfectly respectful and polite, only to be faced with snark and derision from the "old boys club" of flag-help users. The prevailing attitude was "how dare you post something that got flagged, you sketchy sleazebag you! Here's some random speculation from me because there's nothing obviously wrong with your post, and your confusion and bewilderment as a result will only be further proof that you are not only posting shite content to the site, but clueless to boot!"
I've given up on Craigslist entirely from both a user and advertiser perspective. Mass-posters routinely flout the minimum-post-frequency guidelines, with nobody seemingly policing this abuse. Large advertisers will routinely flag competing posts to weed out competition. Griefers make the smaller, low-traffic subcategories impossible to use. Craigslist used to be a reliable way to just find simple classifieds, but the griefers and spammers have gotten more savvy and are exploiting the system straight to hell, and CL is still operating in the bubble of "the users know what's best" when their main audience has little to no say at all.
It always takes more than "a few obsessive users,"
As far as I'm aware, nobody knows what logic or thresholds are used by CL. Common wisdom is that it's "lots" but there seems to be no reason whatsoever to think that.
As someone who actually does flag ads (as we all agree to do by using Craigslist), I can say that it's more than "a few." Just because they don't verify the numbers doesn't mean it's low. What purpose would that serve them?
Look at it this way: read the comments here. Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible.
> "Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible."
No, both are possible, and in fact both are true.
Look at apartment listings - in any major city full of spam, obviously posting far more frequently than is allowed. I've tried flaggin these posts - but it looks like the flag threshold is proportionate to the category's traffic level. Which is to say, for something like apts/housing, very high. Makes sense on paper until you realize there aren't enough dedicated users policing to actually make the flags a working feature on these categories. So yes, shitty experience for browsers, chock full of spam.
Turn around, look at smaller categories where the flag threshold seems to become very low (say, anything outside the realm of selling/renting physical goods), and it becomes a terrible place to sell. Perfectly innocuous posts are flagged off for inexplicable reasons (believe me, I've sat through the flag-help posts and seen plenty of these), and incredibly common for competing advertisers to use the flag feature offensively against similar postings. So yes, too easy to flag and terrible place to sell.
You can insist all you like, and pretend that anyone who gets posts flagged is obviously doing something wrong - you'd be right there with the rest of flag-help after all, but that doesn't change the fact that the flag system is routinely abused and seriously compromises the credibility of CL. It's simultaneously too strict to filter to spam, and too lenient that it generates mass numbers of false positives. It's an utter failure of an abuse-detection scheme.
Craigslist is ripe for being disrupted - it's already happened in some categories, and there is a lot of ache in the market for the others. For me it's been relatively little loss - I've been using the craigslist-disruptor-equivalent to gigs/creative and it works great, much better than CL.
How can you say that? How does your personal experience of flagging postings in any way give you insight into the closed CL system?
I agree that flagging/community moderation is a good and necessary thing, I just think CL does it in an absolutely terrible way.
For example, if people find your post annoying, there is no "flag as annoying," or "flag and leave a comment." Instead, someone inadvertently offends someone else, and their post is taken down as spam. This example has netted only irritation for all parties involved, with no learning or progress. To me, that is simply a bad system.
Craigslist is the most UNBROKEN site on the web. It works flawlessly. Just yesterday I bought a cell phone from a local guy on Craigslist.
Scrolled down the page. Found the phone I wanted in the city I wanted for the price I wanted. Called him, met at a restaurant, paid for the phone, and we went on our way.
"if I'm looking to rent an apartment, it would be nice not to see the same listing reposted every day, and having to re-read it and figure out if I've called them before. It might be even nicer to view them on a map, or god forbid have new and relevant listing emailed to me."
Is that not broken? Sure sounds it to me.
I had my first experience of using AirBNB today. From start to finish it was an absolute pleasure; a real example of using some of theis "web 2.0" tech to provide a better experience to the user, and ultimately connect buyer to seller more efficiently. Excellent search experience, great integration with maps, ajax where it made sense, crowd sourcing was useful (feedback).
I don't know too much about the space but by the popularity of airbnb it certainly seems like it is disrupting at least one part of the space craigslist has historically occupied.
It's not broken, the apartment shopper is broken for not taking their own notes! Jeez, does Craigslist have to make up for everybody's personal failings?
I've heard of PLENTY of frustrated attempts to use Airbnb, enough that I would not use them without a Craigslist-level of (caveat-) emptorial vigilance. I wouldn't call your experience with them to be unbelievable, but Airbnb has not solved the Craigslist "random scammer" problem by any means.
And that is how most of my interactions with Craigslist have gone off.
However, there have been some more frustrating experiences. My friend getting his ad ghosted, when he was trying to post his mom's guest house for rent. And it costing them 3 months of rent because Craigslist didn't let on a peep that his ad was ghosted. And there really isn't any clue on how to find help, I got lucky and found the forums via a Google search for something like "Craigslist ad not showing up". Then there was the merry-go-round of pathetic employees I was trying to hire for the unskilled jobs in my warehouse. But that was back in 2008, before the bubble burst. The quality of the applicants I found in my more recent go at it was greatly improved. But the frustration now was 300 resumes showing up in my inbox in 12 hours, and sifting that down to 10 people to interview I guess I should not complain about that, it is a little frustrating though.
The bottom line is Craigslist will always be around because it works, and it works anywhere. There isn't any limited deployment like some of these startups that are piloting in 2 cities. And probably won't go nationwide for a long time, if at all. From what I read here on HN, the name of the game is for the startups to make the big sale and founders glide away on their golden parachutes, then the buyer crashes the company into the ground.
Click on Help and then click Help Desk at the bottom of the Help page. You have to be logged in. The discussions about ghosting are ongoing every 24 hours, someone usually posts a link to the "good" post that helps you out of the situation. But it's not guaranteed.
I've been trying to find summer housing on craigslist, and it's been mostly a failure. The biggest issue is the lack of semantic information in the listings. For example, every listing has a price, but it's mostly useless for filtering because some people list per day, some per week and some per month. There is also no place for listers to put the dates of availability (crucial information for temporary housing) except within the text itself.
Providing richer semantic information would alleviate many of the issues, but the very structure (taken directly from newspaper classifieds) seems unsuited to the web. In particular, why must people re-post every day in order to be seen? Why can't they have a single post which they can keep current and remove when it's been taken?
There are dozens obvious improvements, which could maintain the flavor while vastly improving the experience. Unfortunately, Craigslist still seems like the last word in the housing market, but hopefully that will change soon.
is showing exactly the reason Craigslist is doing well.
Each of the alternatives displayed represents a specialized, vertical solution for just one (or a couple) of the categories offered by Craigslist,
There is no way that Craigslist could compete head to head with every one of them anyway, at best they could choose a couple of categories and build new products focused on them.
Instead they are choosing to be a general platform.
Nothing lasts forever, and no doubt Craigslist will fade away over time, as will facebook, myspace and Windows itself, but in the meantime they are pretty well positioned, providing a 'good enough' solution for a wide range of categories is just as reasonable as providing a targetted solution to a specific category.
What they would absolutely fail to do is provide an excellent vertical solution for every category they offer,
Which means those competitors on that graph would still exist even if Craigslist improved its site, and probably they would still be doing well.
I completely agree. I'm surprised at the level of negativity towards CL here. I would expect a community of hackers to recognize a highly generic solution like CL when they see one.
The only critique I would give is that if CL were really trying to be a generic platform that does a decent job at solving a myriad of problems, then they should open themselves up and have an official API. Right now all of the CL mashups do some kind of scraping to get their data.
You know, that's a really good point. I may go straight to StubHub if I'm really into seeing ballgames, but am I really going to remember the hot new startups focusing on apartment rentals, spa services, or used car parts? No, I'm just going to Craigslist for any of my peripheral needs.
I am actually really glad Craigslist doesn't try to Buzz or #Dickbar itself and doesn't have those obnoxious social buttons/plugins all over the place. Newmark just wants to maintain a useful simple site. That's why Craigslist will be around forever, he doesn't spring unwelcome surprises on his userbase.
Also Craigslist probably gets used more heavily when the economy isn't doing so well. I'm not sure his magical line graph is as predictive as he imagines.
What's wrong with just being a stable place? Why does everything have to evolve? Craigslist works fine for a lot of people. It is familiar, doesn't hog bandwidth, and doesn't leak personal information like a sieve. Sometimes a hammer just needs to keep being a hammer.
Great point. I think this concept of "disruption" is out of place anyway when the existing site is mostly free and works fine on mobile devices. You might be able to steal traffic bit by bit by doing a better job, but there's nothing to really disrupt in a dramatic way.
CraigsList derived an estimated 53% of their revenue from job listings, 30% from adult ads
Not surprising, as those are markets with a supply-demand imbalance. These seem to gravitate towards marketplaces that require lots of hoop jumping, I guess because it artificially pares down the demand.
It does not look like number of job postings on CraigsList grew much.
Number of job postings overall on all web sites in the last grew more than on CraigsList (due to recovering economy).
So Craigslist is supposedly being disrupted by all of these startups that are taking over various parts of what Craigslist does, and yet I don't know any of those competitors.
When I am looking for something cheap, I go to Craigslist. I don't want to have to remember 10 - 20 different site names because of different categories. That in and of itself is a great plus to Craigslist. It's all there when you get to the page...
We have remote employees that come to San Francisco for 1-4 weeks at a time. We used to find temporary places for them on Craigslist. AirBnB is much more helpful.
I wonder how much of this disruption can be attributed to the removal of the erotic ads section. You can see a major slowing of momentum around the time they were taken down (May '09). I mean that was an area without any major competition and which I'm sure accounted for TONS of traffic.
Surely you're exaggerating. You've never heard of Etsy, okcupid, PlentyofFish, StubHub, or CouchSurfing? CouchSurfing in particular is mentioned very often alongside AirBnB, and okcupid has had at least one front page story on HN this year (namely their acquisition.)
I might be an atypical user (?), but none of those sites appear to do the two things I and everyone else I know use Craigslist for: 1) buy/sell used goods; and 2) find long-term apartment rentals.
For #1, eBay seems to be the only real competitor, and does non-shippable goods poorly (Ebay Classifieds has never really taken off). For #2, I don't really know of any (AirBnB and Couchsurfing are good for trips, but not really for finding somewhere to live).
I agree with you that none of these sites actually tackle the main uses of craigslist. I was merely questioning your assertion that you'd never heard of any of them :).
I don't know. The author states that CL is a bad site as if it is an accepted fact. He doesn't make a case for it he just starts with it as an axiom. Why does he assume this? Maybe it doesn't have enough flash, or css shadows or what?
CL is a great site that does exactly what people expect of it. You post classified ads in your local market and people get in touch with you. It is a web based classified ad and it works. When I want to buy something used locally and am not in a hurry I look through CL. Right now there is no other site organized to do this that works and is available in every market. Why should there be? CL works fine.
Because it's free it killed off newspaper classifieds but so what. Their bitter and angry competitors have to resort to dirty tricks like trying to get the police and FBI to investigate CL, which shows how desperate and out of ideas the competition is.
As an outsider looking in, I'm wondering to what degree the comments posted here on HN about Facebook (that it is full of people who don't tell the truth and who try to scam for monetary advantage) report a fact of human nature that might eventually disrupt Quora? What is Quora's defense against turning into a place with rather low-quality posts as soon as it attracts a lot of eyeballs?
This post is an example of the Silicon Valley echo chamber at its finest.
With regards to the vertical sites eating their base, I call BS. Regular users who don't live on the internet can't/don't want to remember 50 different sites. The halo effect for a marketplace site like this is very strong.
Craigslist is fighting extremely hard against spam, to the point where they're starting to make people jump through hoops by requiring phone numbers and texting confirmation codes for certain categories. They've even resorted to silent "hellban" style hiding for posts called "ghosting", which affects a lot of innocent posters in the housing categories. There's unfortunately a lot of money in scamming, so the scams keep coming despite all of this.
The dip in traffic is pretty easily explainable by the banning of adult content, and I've never known Compete/Quantcast to be even within 3x of actual numbers, so using those as proof of anything is pretty dubious. This may be different on a site as large as CL, but even on sites with millions of monthly visitors, I've seen some laughably wrong numbers.
RE: Craigslist not being "Social", what is more social than person-to-person selling? Does he just mean that they haven't put ugly buttons for x different social networks that their main constituency has never heard of?
Craigslist is all about being useful and accessible, fad of the week be damned. Their design decisions have made it harder to do quality control, but it has made it accessible to people to whom posting on many of the sites you take for granted would be confusing. It's a tradeoff, and it has worked out wonderfully for them on the whole.
>You might want to put lines on that graph showing that Craigslist was sued for its adult classifieds on May 4th and removed the section on September 4th. One could argue that the disruption has primarily occurred because of those events.
Good enough has been Craigslist biggest strength. You sure can innovate your self out of a good product, It does not always mean improvement. Disruption..I don't think so, competition yes. I'm pretty sure the use of disruption is getting diluted...... For the website It's not getting worse, that's a decent accomplishment for a website that's been around for such a long time.
When Craigslist is dead and gone, then I think we can have a informed decision about Craigslist disrupted status.(Wait! Just checked.....still lots of postings)
gnu grep disrupted, folks using new fangled Google instead. Craiglist is a great, stable design that works with a uniform interface to do common transactions that occur in most peoples lives. Can they be outpaced within a vertical? Sure, but their USP lies in the newspaper classifieds that they sought to displace originally. Until someone else comes up with a better catch all for real life transactions that is more economical and convenient, I wouldnt consider craigslist disrupted.
The site may be retro, but we think the data is great. Historically, its been hard to get and build on -- but we think it doesn't have to be that way because exchange postings are public facts and thus should be public propert that anyone can build on. Yahoo pipes was in theory a way of making this available for 3,000 developers -- but the RSS feeds were very incomplete and missed huge chunks of data becuase they are updated only every 15 minutes at most, and only for 100 postings at a time. When thousands of postings are streaming by, that's impossible to build something rigorous on top of.
We've focused on creating a Craigslist firehose equivalent to the Twitter firehose so that the good data can be enjoyed by all, regardless of how you feel about the site. Its developer accessible at 3taps.com/developers, and the fruits of that access can be seen at craiggers.com. Bottom line is that regardless of how you feel about the site (which grosses MUCH more than $50M a year based on the stream of data we see), the data itself is pretty darned interesting.
He doesn't need to re-invest - he's the only investor (more or less). As was pointed out, there's other sites which do a better job, so if you don't like it, don't use it. Mr. Newmark and his staff are well-off with little effort. Even if they lose 90% of their revenue, we're still talking millions.
Yes I totally agree why craigslist dominates the industry because of simplicity and ease of use for users. Craigslist has always been the place where i go first to look for used products especially cars. But there are two things i dislike about craigslist. One is sometimes you'll receive fishing emails asking you to reset password where you later noticed your computer is contain with viruses. Second, buying stuff on craigslist can be very time consuming especially with cars. You'll definitely have to travel multi times to different sellers before finding your ideal item. Plus the photos on craigslist are so low quality, you barely can see any scratches or damages. One time i had to traveled 2 hours to check out a car posted on craigslist then realized the seller lied to me which wasted 4 hrs of my time driving back and forth. So i started a website to help people buy and sell used stuff via videos instead of photos. I believe video is the best way to showcase something second hand online. It can save people so much time traveling to many places when they can instead watch it online without leaving the comfort of their homes. Although there are some disadvantages of using video to advertise your products but it can go a long way in the future as technologies increasingly advance. What do you think about the video concept? Can video replace photos for second hand market sometime in the near future?
Phishing emails are by no means restricted to Craigslist users, nor are they CL's responsibility. Should I complain to Chase bank that I received a phishing email in their guise?
Housing and Jobs are probably 90% of Craigslist traffic (and 100% of revenue?).
AirBnB is not even trying to be a replacement for Craigslist's housing section (and it isn't). It's a replacement for Hotels.com
Indeed/SimplyHired are nothing more than modern day Monster.com/Dice.com.
I also wouldn't take that Quantcast estimated chart at face value. It could easily be that even the trend is wrong and Craigslist is doing better than ever.
Who cares? It's Craig's list, not your list. He can do whatever the hell he wants with it.
In addition I get the impression most people here who lambast CL as being full of spam live in areas that CL is not thriving in. Ask a New Yorker or a Bay Area resident about how useful CL is and then rethink your perspective.
The graph is US traffic only and they peaked at 16.6% of the entire US population visiting the site once a month. Google called this the "law of large numbers" in 2006 when they predicted a slowing in their growth and Microsoft did the same a long time ago when they hit saturation.
The drop is only during the last 6 months, is less than 10% and could be a variety of factors including a stats gathering quirk, recession, etc.
Simply plotting their apartments or stuff for sale on a map would make a big difference in ease of use. A YC company, Padmapper, does this for you, but why doesn't CL see this as utterly necessary? Searching for something, be it an oak table or a house rental, is exasperating. Realtor.com, a site that's totally behind, got on the mapping thing more than a year ago. Amazing that CL hasn't done the same.
I dunno, it's pretty effective to narrow one's search by the part of town you're looking in, for example, in L.A. you can break it down by Central L.A., SF Valley, SG Valley, etc. and then search by city name. Click the map link to see where the exact location is. It's really not that hard. Found my current jewel of a home that way.
I'm certainly willing to concede that Craigslist has work to do in order to beat spammers and improve the usefulness of their product. But he has one core competitive advantage over his competition that, to my mind, trumps. That core advantage? I trust Craig Newmark, and I do not trust his competitors. I like his style. And as far as Kijiji goes, I wouldn't buy a ham sandwich from Meg Whitman.
This argument relies on Quantcast data that's not directly measured. When sites such as Compete, Quantcast and Alexa take a stab at measuring site traffic without direct measurement (like Google Analytics), the estimates they come up with are always way, way off. Unless there's better evidence that Craigslist traffic is declining, I don't buy it.
Despite these disruptions, the company is unparalleled from a profit-per-employee perspective. Craiglist's network effect may have reached its limit, but the company will continue to make huge profits. They clearly favor maintenance over product development, but that doesn't diminish their status as a profit-per-employee anomaly.
The only people who are in a position to lay any blame are the owners.... and we can be fairly certain the site is going in the direction they want it to.
The problem with the article is that it believes that sites like OLX are the disruptors. The real disruptors are the care.com's, the airbnb's, and others who are bringing a great UI and social experience to a category and owning it.
I completely agree with Josh that there is a gap in functionality that needs to be filled. I often hear the argument that I should be grateful for this free online service... Poppycock! My attention on the internet is worth something. Especially for such a profitable industry as classifieds.
If I'm looking for a house on the internet I want to be able to zoom into a certain area on a map and click 'refresh' to see all the relevant rentals with little pins on the map. This is not rocket science. Craigslist has a rich database and could make it far more useful and user friendly. There is something to be said for simple and minimalist design. Craigslist, however seems 'not designed' at all with little regard for making things easy to find or relevant.
So somoene is free to go out and fill it - craigslist is under no obligation to do this. They're private. They can do what they want.
Just because a whole LOT of people would love to get their hands on it because they think they could make billions off it or monetize it better doesn't turn it into an obligation. Craigslist is what it is - and if Newmark is pulling in 50 million a year off it, for all this time, he's probably not all that concerned if the site dwindles out over the next half a decade, if it does that. Unless he has a horrid gambling habit he's probably sitting awfully pretty right about now.
Nobody's forcing you to use craigslist. If you have a better site out there, go use it. IF you think you can do better, try pitching it to them. IF you just want to whine that it's not as good as it could be and you aren't satisfied as a customer... wait.. you aren't a customer. Nevermind.
craigslist won't be disrupted for the simple reason because they have a ton of traffic...UI etc, is pointless for classifieds since the only thing people care about is whether or not the service has buyers/sellers for the things they want...and Craigslist has that in spades.
i.e. I recently listed a car for sale on craigslist...listed it on Friday evening and got 8 interested people in a few hours, and it sold the next day.
Seriously. How many sites have gone the way of Digg, innovating their way into obscurity? If CL is still on top after all these years they're doing something right, even if that something is... nothing.
Dealing with Craigslist in NY I found it to be full of scammers and spammers.
Buying from people listing on craigslist is very much a buyer beware experience. Plenty of bait and switch. And my personal favorite "It's currently in pieces, you can pay me and take the pieces away. All the pieces are there but you have to pay cash first."
Craigslist has a lot of room for improvement and it would great to see useful changes made.
Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and keeping the site working under the huge traffic it's handling.
I don't remember seeing CL down or even slow - no cutesy "site is down" pages - which says to me they're improving the site constantly, just not in the way that gets the hypeosphere excited.