Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable
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VC: Shut up and light this bag of cash on fire. Focus on number of non-paying users and make sure it's big enough so I can introduce you to more people with bigger pile of cash to light on fire.
Craigslist Post: We are hiring front-end React.js developers with 10+ year experience.
The dream of creating an app that can shield a person from all the uncertainty of buying from an individual is appealing - but I don't see how you could really offer a better deal. The problem is that however smoothly you put two people in touch, those two people will have to do lots of annoying work coming to an agreement and it's hard to see a lot saved by this initial increased smoothness. Oh, and if you filter out the annoying people, you filter out a lot of people who actually have stuff to sell too.
I'll admit this doesn't really work for big stuff like couches and other furniture, but in that case you're asking for hyperlocal protections that an online business just can't offer. Check out a thrift store, pawn shop, estate sale, or local auctionhouse instead.
Craigslist has it's niche, and it's niche doesn't really have room to improve.
And I am pretty sure if you took a developer from say 6 years ago and told them to look into the front-end code, they could optimize the KB and keep the site looking the same. I am also sure you could optimize the way it is organized and bring some civility and style to posts without doing any CSS or JS work.
On top of all that, if they launched an XML version to each page, they could be the listing backbone of the internet.
Oh those nice simple features ... but maybe the only way of avoiding JS/CSS bloat is to avoid all features entirely.
I have seen a lot of CL alternatives that look nicer at first glance but the UI lacks. Sometimes more features is not a good thing. KISS principle is oftentimes better especially when you are working with such a wide user base such as Craigslist.
CL only has 30 employees, never took VC, is one of the most highly visited sites and brings in millions of profit a year. Not many other web companies can claim that. If I were in that position, I don't think I would be too worried about the tech community complaining about how ugly my site was especially if my users continued to come back and benefit.
CL does have rss feeds (example https://slo.craigslist.org/search/web?format=rss) but they have pretty strict terms on how you can use them.
If Craigslist decided to modernize today, they could potentially disrupt the state of things on the internet. Facebook is trying to move in on their territory for sure. Unfortunately, I don't think they will. If a new-kid-on-the-block could offer anonymity, reliability, and free regional market based transactions, with preferably integration with Monero, it would be a killer app for the crypto industry.
Genuinely asking - is that still an important quality as of today?
Sure you weren't using the basic html version? Because I've been using gmail since it was invite only and it always had a loading spinner.
My 70+ parents just listed and sold dozens of items in their spring cleaning - first time they used CL and they did it without my help. They might have had more problems if CL was "jazzed up".
I misread this as "decided to monetize today" and interpreted an IPO.
Has Craigslist ever thought about this?
Any thoughts?
Why on earth would they ever want to go public?
1. $300MM in profit each year, which has risk of going up or down.
2. Sell company for $6.3 billion ($300 x 21) and walk.
Note: I don't have time to investigate why Bloomberg is telling me EBay PE ratio is 21, vs Google Finance is 5x.
Why "unfortunately"? This is a good thing. Facebook is horrible, in many different ways, and the last thing we need is to hand even more power over the internet to them. CL is "ugly", but it's fast and works great, and isn't filled with ads and tracking, something I definitely can't say about Facebook.
Of course...there's also the ever present threat of a new social network growing up with another generation.
I'd be more concerned that someone is going to use the likely roll back of NN in america to dethrone CL.
Correct. Here in Stockholm no one knows about CL (even if there is one for our city at https://stockholm.craigslist.se/). Just about all you can see there are some robot spam listings for medical cannabis.
Over here https://www.blocket.se/ has near monopoly position, even though it's quite expensive. They got here first, it's as simple as that. http://sv.shpock.com/ is trying hard to establish a presence, but it's seems to be going slow.
I highly doubt more than 1% of Craigslist's userbase cares about this. The reasons are simple: first mover advantage and network effects.
Im sure that you can ask people on craigslist for a phone number, meet in a public place, etc.
I think the (slightly) higher threshold for creating even a throwaway account elsewhere makes for a better experience in the long run. I needed to get rid of a lot of stuff in the past couple months and fb/nextdoor/freecycle was more productive in a week than craigslist was in two months.
Same story for paid job listings on craigslist - I just put one up a few weeks ago. I'm starting to find that it's getting worse as time goes by for things like restaurant jobs. I've slowly started using other ways to find new hires, and next time craigslist won't be on my radar unless everything else falls through. Not that my few hundred bucks a year is a big deal for them, but I kinda expect better and get better from competitors.
JS is absolutely not required for any of it.
I think it's a little bit awkward to not use put, patch, delete... I wonder however if my server must follow the same technique, if not how to wire a delete endpoint to handle a form post and so on. I'll try to handle a form using only get and post sometime just to see how it works. Thank you!
I've always hated put/patch/delete because it tends to result in data centric UI's instead of workflow centric ones.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Forms
https://web.archive.org/web/20110117085131/http://w3fools.co...
Even if they have fixed all these instances since then, that all those errors were ever produced is a bad sign, especially when there were better alternatives even then.
When I learned HTML4 forms and CGI, javascript was solely the domain of input validation if it was available.
Okay I definitely feel old.
Anything you do on the client side via JavaScript can be bypassed by the end user and provides no guarantees about the input you receive.
Both of these have a French-language version, and I believe it had a lot to do with CL's failure to get the market here.
It has not found popularity in Vancouver, where Craigslist is ubiquitous.
Craigslist took over despite not having anything meaningful to offer over this site as it was free to list with a single picture and this was before the era of ad-infested local sites. I'm honestly surprised to learn a local competitor managed to withstand the Craigslist juggernaut.
Was it bargain news? I remember it beating craigslist for car listings for quite a while before fading into obscurity.
I did 3 craigslist deals in the past 2 days. Got coffee with a stranger at 2am who let me flash an os to a drive he sold me for cheap..at 2am.
Craigslist is the email of startups. It works well enough, its a cockroach, and other substitute & complimentary companies fill its gaps. Ebay, etsy, amazon, tradesy, ect.
This isnt even a problem. I have done hundreds of deals and havent had a bad experience. Have others; Absolutely. Do I think its common, not in my experience. I suspect the percentage is low, but I dont have data.
Craigslist is what ai would like to see other companies model after, simplicity, community and no greed.
I may be alone, but i find this absurd and destined to fail. Is it profitable? Probably, but show me that balance sheet. Probably founders not oaying themselves, a tiny server and an apartment. I dont want to belittle the founders, they must have had a terrible experience, but this doesnt seem like a profitable or good strategy at all
For instance, the last thing I bought on CL was a washer/dryer set, as my ancient washer finally bit the dust and needed a part that cost much more than a new economy washer. I seriously doubt the nice older lady I bought from had somehow stolen a washer and dryer to resell to me.
Also, there have been numerous armed or strong-arm robberies by fake "sellers" who arrange a sale of a higher-cost item.
I have no doubt Craig's intentions were honorable, but in reality, his refusal to make money to fund the site's innovation is hurting society. His users are screaming "TAKE MY MONEY AND MAKE THE SITE (MY LIFE) BETTER", but he refuses to do so and everyone is worse off because of it!
In a way, it's lazy and selfish, and nobody can do anything about it because..network effects.
When money exchanges hands, generally, value is being delivered. He refuses money which, in essence, equates to refusing to deliver value.
Are the loudest users the ones providing him with the most profit? If not, then why not ignore them?
Would being involved as a true middleman leave them more open to liability when things go south? If so, why open yourself to that risk if you are already making profit?
If you really think CL is so under-utilized, why hasn't a larger company bought them out, improved the site, and raked in increased profit?
Also, it's not about listening to loud users. It's about understanding whether your users (any of them) are willing to pay you to improve the site. And, the answer to that is a resounding yes.
Some folks just want to lay back and enjoy life. If I were Craig I'd sit on that goldmine for the rest of my life - most likely it will finance a very decent lifestyle until the day he dies.
Why bother with the stress of expanding and doing what everyone else is doing? I'm completely convinced that strategy makes for miserable people. The happiest folks I've met in my life are those who own the "lifestyle businesses" everyone on HN enjoys deriding so much.
Isn't Craig living the hacker's dream? A reasonably useful service that provides value to customer, that once built you don't have to put much effort into maintaining or improving - because it works. Then you spend the rest of your free time on the beach.
You also get the nice side benefit that most guys like this tend to provide relatively low-stress long-term jobs employees can build a balanced life around.
Don't get me wrong, he has every right to run his business in any way he so desires. And, who am I to pass judgement on him for this?
I'm just saying that we shouldn't see this sort of decision making as 'honorable' or 'selfless' in any sense. It's the opposite, in a way.
But I also completely agree that's subjective, and there really is no morality here. It's simple personal preference.
The problem with the benevolent dictator at Craigslist is his kingdom is so big and he does nothing to advance it.
It would not be hard to offer minor but relatively simple identity validation for users. Or dabble with the ability to create trust networks or reputation. Or offer basic mechanisms for safe transactional payments. Or an official mobile app that worked well. Or a hundred other things that would improve lives.
There is no question craigslist gets a "job well done" but there is a great argument that if they have a choke hold on the online classifieds market they should offer increased value over time.
Craigslist reminds me of the IRS. Sure, you can fumble your way through filing your taxes with us, but why would you do that when TurboTax can do it better. Except there is no alternative.
I think Craigslist is acting more like the old newspaper classifieds they disrupted if anything.
Despite this article's focus on a couple companies, there are other startups getting major traction in used goods space apart from Facebook.
If CL loses significant market share, I hope they don't go trying then to revamp the site. Because it would only be that much more obvious how much they held back from their users for so long.
And when users are lulled into a false sense of security from these changes, who is all of a sudden liable when things go south? CL being barebones is a feature, not a bug.
I don't know about you, but real hackers get personal enjoyment from creating software, products, and innovating. They don't do it so they can "spend the rest of their free time on the beach."
In fact, if you are trying to just make enough money to spend the rest of your free time on the beach etc, you're probably not a real hacker.
So in my world (I do consider myself a hacker, if a poor version of one) if I create something like Craigslist I don't try to squeeze every ounce of profit out of it at the expense of customers and employees. I spend as little time as possible on that solved problem which pays my bills, and I go hack on new problems that have yet to be solved. This may be in tech, but it may simply be learning an entirely different skill entirely. Work I leave as work, and of course hack on any interesting problems that come from that area of my life as needed. If I did my job right though building it, that should be relatively rare.
> In fact, if you are trying to just make enough money to spend the rest of your free time on the beach etc, you're probably not a real hacker.
I'd probably argue against this based on my above statement. I know very few folks I would describe as hackers who are motivated to make money beyond what they need to comfortably live and fund the projects/research they are personally interested in. Stacking millions in a bank account isn't something that motivates the folks I was describing - building things and living a free life is what I think motivates that archetype.
Another possibility is that CL has reached a local maxima and they can't see an easy way out of it that isn't actually reducing (globally) value to their customers. I'm somewhat playing devils advocate but it is plausible.
After all, many of the "innovations" suggested in the comments here have actually been tried by other services - ones that on average have not succeeded nearly as well as CL. Some of which were pretty terrible.
You can interpret this as due to network effect, or due to CL just providing more value, or some mix. But you have to at least accept the possibility that the other views are correct. It's easy to point at feature "A" in something like CL and say "I can make that better by just doing B". It's a lot harder to understand the effect of "B" across a large, diverse, heterogeneous user population.
Maybe CL just hasn't seen a compelling improvement yet?
Rather, I'm objecting to the "naive economist" approach being touted as clear evidence of, well, anything really.
Craigslist manages to offer what may be the last free webservice that hasn't been forced to sell the personal information of its users and/or turn into an ad-infested mess. It manages to make a modest profit by running incredibly lean in terms of manpower and server resources. The incredibly quick and clean interface is a huge appeal for users.
The problem with building an API is that you have now exposed your efficiently minimized infrastructure to the insatiable demand of content scrapers. The resources demanded by a search on a site like Padmapper are greater than those demanded by the same search made on CL. While a smart API implementation isn't the equivalent to loading every relevant listing, some data must be pulled from every one of those listings in order to populate the Padmapper map and provide filters for its users.
My point is that an API would not only increase the demand for resources which CL must pay for, it would break their minimized monetization strategy that keeps the site cleaner and more usable than any other rival. While they could charge for access to the API, the amount they would have to charge would likely break the business model of sites like Padmapper. Padmapper was also relatively clean and ad free but require them to pay any sort of fee for access to Craigslist's data and they'd have to ruin their user experience in order to stay afloat.
Craigslist is minimal for more reasons than simplicity for the developers and users. It's minimal because that's the only way their business model works.
It works, and I'm really glad they're leaving it that way.
Wrong. So many useful sites have been ruined because someone decided to hire a bunch of MBA's to make it better (and increase profit). It's successful, and it's wonderful. Just leave it alone. I can't deny the possibility of laziness (from what I've heard of Craig I very much doubt it), but it is certainly not selfish.
> He refuses money which, in essence, equates to refusing to deliver value
Ha! quite a ridiculous statement there.
Facebook has the existing user base to get a network effect, has a much better UI, notifications, and solves for the worry of meeting someone who is a complete unknown.
Will be interesting to see if Facebook chips away at the Craigslist user-base over the next few years.
CL has the benefit (and costs) of anonymity, as well as more diverse content. Hopefully they can keep the network effect going.
Also being able to directly message someone and (often) get a response close to immediately is great. Overall just a much better experience.
More than 60 million each month in the US alone
It outlines a model of "supernova" companies. Companies that initially earmark such a large market that they implode, creating the materials for many other companies. AirBnB for example is just a small chunk of craigslist. Twitter may be in the process of exploding, being unable to capture or tame the reaction.
> Twitter "failing" to own the revolutions it obviously took mainstream (messaging, chatbots) isn't a failure really if viewed that way
Twitter in no way made messaging mainstream. It had absolutely nothing to do with it. Twitter's peer to peer messaging system being so horrific is one of the reasons it failed (WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc. took advantage of that screw-up). ICQ, AOL, MSN messengers, MySpace and Facebook, all did drastically more to take messaging concepts mainstream (the messengers had hundreds of millions of users before Twitter even existed). Twitter was late to the party and showed up with the wrong solution.
But lately you have new players like mercari and frill with tons of funding behind them and a pretty app that somehow attracted users like crazy, but they all charge a 10% fee if your stuff gets sold. If I sell my MacBook for 2000 dollars that's a significant sum.
I love Craigslist for what it is and hope they will stick around longer
Generally the stuff sold has a low, but non-zero, payoff / hassle ratio (e.g. furniture), but most of its charm has to do with its rough edges (flaky users, tag spam), which adds a little sense of adventure.
One of my friends whom I would characterize as a semi-pro CL user says some of his best deals came from stuff the seller hadn't listed on CL.
[1] http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f0...
"The Roman historian Suetonius reports that when Vespasian's son Titus complained about the disgusting nature of the tax, his father held up a gold coin and asked whether he felt offended by its smell (sciscitans num odore offenderetur). When Titus said "No", Vespasian replied, "Yet it comes from urine" (Atqui ex lotio est)."
They didn't even have a map on their real estate listings for a long time, which is ridiculous.
I do my best to use any craigslist alternative available first these days. LetGo was good for me.
Back in the day, search engine home pages had a vast list of categories... Google just had only a text field to input what you wanted to search for. Google search won.