Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years
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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 :-/
However, Facebook Marketplace seems to be slowly gaining traction. Which I hate for all the reasons you mention. I dread the day it takes over :(
But there's one simple, guiding principle that I'm always following. And that's refusing to reactivate my FB account.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not hard to extract, nor worth getting heated about.
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.
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.
"Technology" isn't just relentlessly positive.
But where your value proposition is created by code your code defines your business model to a critical extent.
what?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness
It's sixth-grade Civics class: Without strong local and national press to hold politicians and public figures accountable, the country crumbles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate
Sadly, it seems even the Fourth Estate doesn't know its name and/or role. Being a parrot and/or sock puppet doesn't qualify (as journalism).
"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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
(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).
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.
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.
Whenever I'm buying something on CL, like say a car, I always ask the person who answers the phone: "I'm calling about the car. Tell me X about it."
If they reply "Which car?" then you've reached a dealer, not an owner.
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.
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.
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.
hard to tell if it really has that much more to choose from.
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.
it's a desert and an oasis at the same time?
(Also, don't forget, a void :-)
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.
Can you point me to a source? Thanks.
(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)
That kinda correlates to when they moved away from the personals business
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.
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.)
Until someone decides it needs to be more flashy.
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.
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
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.
(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.)
Compare e.g. https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof#search=1~list~0~100 for Bay Area software jobs, compared to something like Dice.
Once again, NOT the quality of the jobs listed, just the ease of scanning for something of interest.
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.
(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)
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.
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.
Seller: $5500 firm, no trades
10 people/day: Will you take a '83 suzuki 3 wheeler (stolen, doesn't run) and $97.24????
*Would you like to see results for Books, Used, Sorted by publisher instead?
*Often purchased together with ___ + ___ + ___
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I think kijiji was never a thing outside of Canada from my experience.
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.
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.
It's actively hostile to buyers.
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!
G. A. R. B. A. G. E.
[edit to correct snowclone]
Facebook usage seems to be correlated with reduced cognition, it invites the bottom rung of society
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.
Just sell on Craigslist, people.
That's too hard apparently.
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.
It was like a virtual clipboard in the laundromat.
Then the feds came and kicked in the doors.
https://lokilist.com/about.php
It's slow going but fortunately text is cheap to host so I can keep this up indefinitely.
Edit: If you like it make a post. Even better share the link to the post. Network effect is real.
The corkboard is still there. If you start using it again, others will. Same way CL, FBM, and the others got traction.
> 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...
I have no doubt that lots of people are getting hurt using Craigslist. I would never recommend it to friends or family.
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.
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.
What do you mean by this? Is he acquiring the competition or is there another way he's going after them?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
https://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2017/07/house-rental-scams...
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.
> 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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Filtering also limits search, not enhances it, as you are prevented from generically finding things, and now have to sort by filter.
When the topics are as diverse & nuanced as hn feed, sure. When searching for lawnmower or car, 300 text listings of vehicles not so much.
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."
https://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increase-your-...
For anyone wondering, there's a previous discussion on this article on HN[1]
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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?
But then why did my phone display it correctly?
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.
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.
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.
But I use it a lot for other things.
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.
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.
But man, if you think about every $25 car/apartment/job post, it's plenty of money for 10 people. Pretty insane.
I'm guessing a lot of people here wouldn't consider it plenty of money.
has != earns
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.
Yes, and?
>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)
> 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?
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1501096-let-s-suppose-that-...
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.
The money doesn't really enter into it.
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.
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.
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.
- Pcmag wants to push notifications (deny)
- give us your email! (full page sudden popover, tiny "no thanks" text)
- ads every paragraph (big enough to disrupt reading flow)
- ads in floating banner at the top
- browser creaks and groans trying to paint as I scroll, white blocks if I go too fast.
It's almost like they are trying to demonstrate why Craigslist looks the same by giving a vivid counter-example.
Sadly I'm stuck with Facebook Marketplace for now (which has been amazing for distance searches).
Similarly, I still use old.reddit and will continue to do so until they force that new monstrosity on me.
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.
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.
I'm happy he left the UI the same
Thanks, American prudes!
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 wonder if they have changed since then.
I like the aesthetic of the site, and see no reason why it would cause havoc with screen readers. However it was a common complaint in the past.
Slack and Spotify design teams really need to appreciate the purse: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
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"
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.
Long answer: Its good enough
Amazon on the other hand.. or aws console. I'd be amazed if UX said "leave it alone"
Real UX. No leading questions.
Craigslist. Short and simple.
Find all my spare parts to most anything there
CL is like a breath of fresh air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outing
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.
I don't agree with the somewhat right-wing political bias of the site, but it's clear and easy to use.
Though even in the early days there would be links to leftish news sources.