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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

* I far, far, far prefer Craigslist interface to anything else in that space. It's clear and focused

Its search engine too - I get things I search for in the area I search for.

For me, Kijiji and Facebook marketplace are awful UI, awful distractions, and give me 10,000 "suggested" or "fuzzy searched" things in random order, suppressing things I'm actually looking for. And I've completely given up on eBay over last decade.

However.

* Nothing is on Craigslist anymore in my area (Greater Toronto Area). Until about... 5-6 years ago, I could find comparable number of photography, computer, music & kids stuff on Craigslist and Kijiji. Today, Craigslist is a desert, a void, an oasis of empty search results.

So network effect wins, as always :-/

View on HN

CL is still alive and well here in LA. It's possible it's just in the markets I'm looking in (tools, machinery, cars, etc), but I've always preferred it over things like FB, OfferUp etc. I feel like the people I meet from CL are generally much more knowledgeable about what they have and its value. Other platforms often feel like a relative selling grandpa's stuff and have done the bare minimum of research to find a price point. Usually if someone on CL lacks knowledge, it means I'm getting a great deal that day rather than waiting for them to realize they're asking too much in a small market.

I think it's the certain markets that determine how useful CL is--I'm also in LA. I've mainly dealt in furniture & electronics, and CL in other cities, particularly Minneapolis, was a dream, so good in fact that I didn't know FB marketplace existed until I moved to LA and had to look elsewhere after seeing how bad the CL market for used stuff was.

The musical instruments page for Dallas-Fort Worth gets about 3-5 pages a day of valid new postings.

I went down to San Antonio and there were about 5 a week during the same relative time period. Thus I validate the notion that it’s market dependent. SA is not a tech hotspot but there are a lot of musicians there.

Try to find a used computer or phone or really any other electronic. FB Marketplace has 5x the inventory.

Facebook's interface is heavily burdened with ugly templates, is needlessly complex and clunky. Page crashes! Facebook is also draconian about logging in, can't see much if you're not logged in, thus FB is elitist. You're required to you hand over your identity and submit to forced content and advertising. I personally fully retreated from Facebook permanently by 2009. Good for you, if you don't mind giving up privacy and being a product, but it is not for me.

Craigslist's interface isn't sexy, but it is impressively fast and stable. No page crashes, ever. No forced content. No login necessary to search, often no account necessary to contact sellers. If an account is required to contact a seller, it is anonymous and disposable. Craigslist works the way the Internet used to work before it was taken over by advertisers, tracking and javascript. I hope it never changes, and I wish more web developers would take their cues from its simplicity and potency, because the more complex and tricky a website gets, the worse it is, unilaterally.

Agreed. That being said for some more hard to find used items I have definitely used a friends Facebooks account to contact people because there are some real deals on FB marketplace comparatively.

Facebook also does aggressively fuzzy searching. I was in the market for a sailboat last year, and knew pretty specifically what I wanted. Facebook would always be about 50% what my specific search term was, and then 50% barely related bullshit (wrong brand / size, sailing accessories, powerboats)

I've also found Facebook exceptionally flaky from both the seller and buyer side. I don't usually expect responses on half the stuff I'm interested in on Facebook, and it's almost impossible to even give stuff away with the flakiness of people actually showing up to pick it up.

it seems to, but sometimes getting the seller to ever reply is a herculean feat. people regularly fail to remove items they've sold, or they literally just never ever reply.

hard to tell if it really has that much more to choose from.

seems like when there are no local results they just flood it with global listings

Yea I still use CL mainly in LA as well. Then again I am not comparing it directly to FB marketplace. That being said CL was never good for some stuff

My theory about CL is that between the minimalist UI and bad press it discouraged “normies” (for lack of a better word) who were afraid to get scammed so it was mostly serious sellers, plus occasional scammers who were not hard to spot. I met many delightful people over the years dealing with vintage audio, motorcycles, midcentury furniture. Facebook marketplce sellers are much flakier in my experience.

Echoing my thoughts down the page, the problems that you mention, from a "normies" perspective, make a interesting thought exercise in wondering how you could attach suitable features to satisfy these needs. It's easy to mumble "open the API", but first one may have to consider how a API can handle the continuation of crucial revenue generation native site features such as advertising and data analysis reuse. Something more involved than a REST interface seems necessary.

the suitable features are customers that aren't normies.

Exactly. CL works perfectly. No improvement needed.

I love craigslist, people who make craigslists ads are generally no bullshit serious about selling and every experience I have had was... fun, it honestly has been great fun meeting the people of craigslist lol.

I think the fact that craigslist hasnt changed look in 25 years or whatever attracts a certain kind of seller/buyer and that certain kind of seller/buyer is overall a really decent person who isn't trying to rip anyone off.

I really, really like Facebook Marketplace's fuzzy searching.

Random people listing stuff on local classified sites don't always use the correct keywords, and it's in everyone's best interest for these listings to actually get a good amount of views.

I suspect this "fuzzier" algorithm accounts for the far lower amount of spam too. A search for "heat pump dryer" on Gumtree will return 25 listings in a row from the same shop in Oakleigh, whereas Facebook will show different products from different sellers (some businesses, but mostly randos) - not to mention the people selling their heat pump dryer without including those magical two words in the title.

It's uncanny how good this algorithm is at returning what the buyer is actually looking for.

I think it depends how specific your buying is.

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 :)

Maybe that's a personal difference. I tend not to get my heart set on a specific product, and will generally go with whatever happens to be well-priced on the market at the time. Especially so on Marketplace.

If I search for Nikon D850, and some of the search results are (for example), Nikon D750s at a significantly lower price[1], then at least for me personally I'm happy to be shown that result.

This isn't a hypothetical - I bought a Canon 1000D after searching for 1200Ds and 1300Ds and finding it for a crazy-low price locally.

I understand not everyone is like this, though, and they should at least properly support the option for less fuzzy or no-fuzzy searches.

[1] I don't know cameras well, but I've assumed the 750 is the previous year's or slightly lower specced model of the 850.

Ok, what happens when a small mechanical component on your Nikon D850 breaks and the camera has been out of production for like a decade and what you actually need isn't a camera in general but a specific replacement part that will fit your specific model number? Or do you just throw out the camera entirely and buy that Nikon D750 that fuzzy search dug up?

Generally I'd look on eBay or AliExpress if I were after a specific component.

But even then, Marketplace will heavily bias you towards D850 parts if you type in "D850". It's not like it autocorrects your search term to "camera" - it instead just inserts a few generic listinga into your results.

The difference between the Nikon D750 and D850 happens to be one of the most considerable and well defined product differentiation achieved in modern photography :~)

The D850 is a seminal state of the art camera that internally is identical to the contemporary flagship the D5 in every way except for major improvements like high resolution and exceptional sensor which is arguably not surpassed almost six years later. Whilst the D750 is a cost engineering marvel. The D750 is a very fine camera, but nothing in the league of the D850.

If you are actually considering purchasing a D750 I'd strongly recommend that you investigate the D780 which only appears to be much the same, but includes the majority of the successor mirrorless technology developments including excellent video giving live view operating far better than any other DSLRS from Nikon including the flagships.

Nikon managed some exemplary product differentiation in the last range of DSLR cameras. Unfortunately for everyone Nikon can't seem to be anything like as clear and focussed with the Z series mirrorless range.

Edit: the D850 compared with the contemporary flagship D5, is capable of only slower rates of shooting, has a smaller battery, no extended grip and dual orientation controls and the sensor can't -quite- perform in low light like a D5. In every non sports shooting environment the D850 would be regarded as a flagship, but for historical reasons and the attachment rate of D3/4/5/6 users buying proportionately many more elite lenses, it's the lower resolution action and low light big pro cameras that get the flagship accolade. Single digit pro cameras also optimize photo processing in camera for JPEG output as is big agency wont and urgency the need for finished product out of the box without any processing. In case you're looking into this, JPEG output from the D5/6 is incredibly good. "Merely" 20MP sensors in these cameras are far better than any specification can indicate, being developed to produce the cleanest pixel level signal, which really is visible in the output. A hardly used very good condition D5 can be had for $1500 lenses dumped en masse for Z upgrades are bargains. If you can deal with the bulk of these cameras, you'll very unlikely i've dissatisfied. And de facto unbeaten autofocus with a major feature omitted from new designs Group Priority AF which glues the focus to your selected nearest subject without any deviation that happens in the Z bodies because of the omission of this professional feature. Novices are apparently buying the Z9 mirrorless flagship because it's not got AF compromises to frustrating degree. But you can have a complete kit for the same money in the DSLR line.

What absolutely confounds my comprehension of marketplace sites and any online business driven by user directed discovery, is the unbroken and never deviated from practice in every industry and field of making the method and techniques used for search as unique inviolable individual apotheoses of a imaginary USP.

why on earth doesn't occur to anyone that heterogeneous search methods producing a range of results with a identifiable classifiable process or at least perceptual sensibility that users can get some understanding of, might provide not only consumer choice but profit?

The only thing that I can imagine to be happening is the overriding objectives must be econometric optimization and blow every other consideration. Or maybe it's possible with the adherent mantra of "internet speed" development that without constant investment in maintenance "development" nothing will work if left alone while bringing in alternative abilities.

This sounds interesting but maybe a little abstract. Could you provide an example of search term/ results you would like to see?

I’d politely suggest that you have interesting points here, and you could get them across much better if you wrote shorter sentences with shorter words.

Can you explain what the poster above you was writing? I have trouble parsing it, since it seems they are from some academic discipline I am unfamiliar in.

I have a sinking feeling they were trying to say "fuzzy search is good"

No they're not from any academic discipline. They were ranting about useless search features but trying very hard to incorporate the most flowery and elaborate sentence construction for some reason. It reads like they replaced every single word of their original comment with a synonym or idiom off the thesaurus.

They're trying as hard to sound smart and going too far so it's just incomprehensible.

"the unbroken and never deviated from practice in every industry and field of making the method and techniques used for search as unique inviolable individual apotheoses of a imaginary USP"

Who the hell speaks or even writes like this?

EDIT: looks like their whole posting history is like this. Someone fed postgrad literature to GPT-3 and created a bot from it.

I'll take a crack at 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.

That's how it should work. In reality, 50% of the items FBM shows for a search are non-local "ships to you" items that you'll never buy. But that juices someone's OKR somewhere.

That might be a regional thing. Here in Australia, FB marketplace is (if not enforced, then de-facto) local-only.

A local media company runs a "classifieds" on their online site. It dominates locally. Craigslist has been worthless for ages here because of it.

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 :(

Facebook Marketplace has completely taken over in most parts of the US. It sucks.

As I noted above, not as much of a problem here in LA, but I totally believe you that it's true elsewhere. And honestly, I'm probably missing some great stuff not perusing FB and OfferUp.

But there's one simple, guiding principle that I'm always following. And that's refusing to reactivate my FB account.

Much like 25 years ago when I said to myself, "there's nothing on the internet that I need to see so badly that I'll install RealNetworks", I'll put stuff on the curb with a "free" sign before I'll reactivate my long-deactivated FB account (or buy new, depending on the direction of the transaction).

Honestly, especially for bulky stuff, I’ve had great luck leaving things at the end of my driveway with a free sign. I wouldn’t get much money for them and they’re out of my house with almost zero effort.

And if it doesn’t move with “free” put a $5 sign on it and it’ll be gone in the morning.

I was right there too but all the rental apartments are via FB marketplace now to the point I literally could not find a place without getting back on it (DC). Absolutely pain, I miss craigslist

Same here in the Roaring Fork Valley. Two months of Craigslist, apartments.com, bulletin boards, etc. Finally I posted a "Place Wanted" on some local Facebook groups and I got something pretty quick. Tons of scammers on Craigslist here.

DC doesn't have property management places you can contact directly? The ones around here are happy to help you find units for rent.

Probably but I can't say I love more intermediaries in transactions. I went direct to many apartment complexes but if you want to find a furnished place that's not outrageous you have to go to people leaving and looking for someone to take over a lease and apartment complexes don't seem to care to facilitate that.

Any idea about Boston? Boston Craigslist has seemed a bit stale, but I'm not on Facebook to see how that compares.

I've found it pretty rare to _not_ find something I'm looking for on Boston Craigslist. As something of an "out there" example, I found ten old tube TVs for my Halloween decorations just a few weeks ago. Also: I got an absolutely great deal on a car through Craigslist about five years ago.

That said, I've definitely had less success on the sales side than I did in years prior, but I can't tell if that's what I'm selling being worth less used these days (desktop computers?), or if Facebook Marketplace is the de-facto place to check.

Are the TVs going to be a functional part of the display or just decorative?

Functional - I'm leaning into the "analog horror" genre with some fake newsreels of things like the COVID-23 pandemic, $6 per gallon gasoline, and (of course - I live in Boston) the Red Sox losing the World Series to the Yankees.

Boston CL is indeed very stale, FB is way more active. Young people (< 35) seem to have mostly forgotten about CL or don't care about it.

Boston has a lot of good stuff in some areas. Need random leftover shelves? A pile of screened loam? Secondhand office furniture? An unused China set from the 1960s? No problem. But good luck trying to buy and sell normal home goods with any efficiency there; it will clear much much faster on FB marketplace. Maybe even for a better price.

Photography and Musical Instruments, it still seems pretty active. Though FB Marketplace is unfortunately making inroads the past couple years.

Yeah, unfortunately the main reason I’m stuck on FB is its Marketplace in my area.

I'm curious where you live. After all, craigslist famously decimated classified advertising in the US, primarily because classified ads in newspapers are hella expensive, and craigslist is usually free.

Probably KSL Classifieds in the Utah market:

https://classifieds.ksl.com/

Yup. :)

Interesting. In the late 1960s in Australia a classifieds-only paper called the Trading Post grew and absolutely dominated this space by the 1990s. My Dad would buy it every week to look for bargain junk, cars, etc. I'm sure the main newspapers took a hit because of it. They had local versions for each region. It was eventually bought in 2004 by Sensis (they were part of the main telco Telstra) for $636M which also owned the Yellow Pages with the intent of going online. It totally bombed and is surplanted here by Gumtree (now owned by eBay) and FB marketplace. https://www.theage.com.au/business/sensis-confident-of-onlin...

I will never be able to look marketplace or even Craig's list without wondering whether the great Australian joke about buying jousting sticks from the trading post would work in their place.

In case anybody out there missed the most faithful reproduction of Australian culture to be captured on film:

https://youtu.be/dik_wnOE4dk

LOL. I forgot that the Trading Post got a free plug in The Castle. I guess Sensis was dreaming when they bought them.

In fairness, the only valid complaint I've heard about Craigslist is that it diverted classified ad revenue away from reporters, destroying local newspapers, and then local elections.

With Craigslist, this always felt like an unintended consequence. With facebook, it seems like one of their top ten strategies for getting us to devolve into mineshaft dwelling mole people that live in the metaverse.

Blaming technology for obviating business models is not a valid complaint.

In this case, I would say the participants of the local society are responsible for paying for journalism and working to support local elections. But even then, you could come up with arguments such as so and so population was too poor and had to work two jobs and did not have time to attend city/county/state meetings, or were not sufficiently educated or literate to understand them, etc.

You write “Blaming technology” in response to a comment that does not mention any technologies. You might want to examine what your preconceptions are, that you would see “technology” in a comment that does not refer to technology. You were responding to a comment that describes two business strategies, perhaps you should respond to that.

They're either assuming printed local classifieds were overtaken by a website, or that CL is a site that performed better than the local classifieds website.

Not hard to extract, nor worth getting heated about.

I wrote technology on purpose, to cut through useless information. It is not relevant that “Craigslist” obviated classified ads. The root problem newspapers were solving was a seller being able to provide information to a wide audience of buyers. Technology brought about a better way of solving this problem, so the root problem newspapers were getting paid to solve with classifieds no longer exists.

Not having local newspapers/journalism causing problems with the local civic process is a separate problem, that has nothing to do with technology enabling sellers and buyers to reach each other more easily.

This is an example of unintended consequences courtesy of paperclip-factory style optimization. Just because an effect is 2nd order doesn't give one leave to claim that it is a separate issue.

> Technology brought about a better way of solving this problem

Better for whom?

The discoveries of fossil fuels brought about new ways of solving certain problems, with the benefit of hindsight they too were also not without fairly major negative consequences.

"Technology" isn't just relentlessly positive.

This is a thing that happened in the world and the outcomes of it have been continuously documented for over 20 years now. Regardless of intent the results have been execrable. The complaint is absolutely valid.

>Blaming technology for obviating business models is not a valid complaint.

But where your value proposition is created by code your code defines your business model to a critical extent.

>elections

what?

"Democracy dies in darkness."

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.

The Fourth Estate is probably a better place to start.

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).

Just so you know, fourth estate was originally by lawyers, and not printers.

Originally? Good to know. Thanks. But also not relevant in the context of the now.

"The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues.[1]"

My point is, we have "journalists" whining about "the democracy" and those same "journalists" aren't aware how badly their profession has already failed said institution / ideal.

Imagine pulling up to a fire. Tossing on buckets of flammable liquids. And then with a straight face claim to be a firefighter. It's Orwellian. The lack of self-awareness is not only embarrassing, but it's become down right dangerous.

Can’t believe I’m defending journalist but this analogy is only partially accurate imho.

People consume press and news media on their own volition, and even more less-vetted but newsworthy information through social media. Journalists are gassing what consumers respond to.

I believe what’s happened is that in the past, local news consumers were aware of their own “fire” (crime, civics, politics) and now in a connected world it feels like their standing amongst a great massive fire, but really they just have visibility into all of the little fires (or consternation that their local fire doesn’t seem important to anyone).

Many journalists, arguably most journalists, also see themselves as advocates; advocates for something other than journalism or speech. And this has become much more prevalent than in previous generations. Everybody is an underdog, everybody else is an abuser, and abuse can't be tolerated.

Even the concept of being able to report on an issue without becoming entangled in it has become anathema. The concept was, of course, always a fiction, but fictions matter. All morality is fictional, if not all reality. Even self-styled centrists and moderates tend to tacitly accept this new narrative; that dispassion and distance is impossible and undesirable.

Many older journalists who were keeping the flame alive crumbled during the Trump years. It was understandable, but it was sort of a one-way street; they accepted defeat and have largely embraced the new narrative.

I think we've all done this, myself included. It's one thing to recognize a pathology, but quite another to seek to address it, and yet another to actually succeed. Now we're all sort of lost in the wilderness. Even the ones who have clear memories from whence we came don't know how to get back.

s/journalist/pundit/g

so sayth the specialist.

Unfortunately, most of those "journalists" don't qualify for the title.

https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1

I akshully think that the fourth estates to be more about a viable vehicle whose intent is to feel out the community and put them into actionable words back into the community.

Congress.com isn’t all that helpful if the laws are verbose and often at time seemingly obtuse.

Printing press is one such vehicle whose time may have come, unless digital realm has slips its stranglehold on this fourth estates.

Newspapers can and should recapture their market by allowing citizens, both verified and anonymously) to post their events, may that it be a house fire, stolen car, robbery, or shenanigans by politicians.

Newspapers may be able to recapture further if they provide a running tabulation of such categories.

But what do I know, the fourth estates is probably already hijacked by social media in their own bastardized manners.

The local newspapers were horrible about keeping anyone involved in the justice system accountable. They always took the words of the police and it wasn’t until everyone had a camera that police mistreatment of minorities became exposed.

On the other hand, national newspapers completely ignored the needs and concerns of “rural White America” and that’s why they were caught flat footed and couldn’t understand the rise of Trump.

The press has never been concerned about anyone outside of Middle class White America it needed to die or evolve.

Found the Utahn in the room! :)

Craigslist is basically unusable in my area if you're selling something. 90%+ of the people who respond to you will express interest, chat about the item, set up a time to meet, and then no-show and ghost you. I don't know what they're getting out of it. It's not worth the time for me to go through 5-6 of those people for everything I want to sell.

Maybe Facebook, etc., have this problem too, but I gave up on selling things locally. These days I just try to pass things on to friends and family.

I'm not trying to justify or validate this behavior, but in my own experience you basically want the ability to buy the item, but may change your mind. So you string a buyer along while you make up your mind.

(personally, I've found myself doing this and then having to stop because the seller isn't some big mega corp, but just some random other working class friend)

Dunno why the downvotes when this is something I experience too.

Yeah. All of my posts have some flake that is stringing me on but can't set a time to meet. Nearly a quarter of scheduled meets end in no shows. One was after I drove 30 miles to meet someone halfway. I won't meet more than 5 minutes out of my way after that - you want the item you can come get it.

I got two kids bikes for the price of one and he dropped that one by half because I was the only one to say I was coming and actually show up.

my last craigslist experiences were similar, they either flaked or they showed up with less cash and said "how about a discount" even after the price was said to be firm.

I've said "nope" and walked away from cash sales that try that nonsense. and the whole experience soured me on Craigslist for quite a while.

also, around here there are a ton of small businesses that basically flood the listings with whatever they can. it's not even a person selling the stuff, it's a storefront.

Make a time for the first ~ten responders to meet. First one to show with cash wins.

We recently moved cross country and my wife tried to sell a lot of our stuff on Facebook marketplace so we didn't have to ship it. She dealt with an INSANE amount of bullshit. A lot of it was exactly as you said, they express interest and set up a specific time to come buy the item. Then just... don't, and we never hear from them again. Like 5-10 of these for the same piece of furniture or whatever.

Then there were the obvious scams (I don't understand how they work, but they were clearly not legit buyers). Where someone's first message is a demand for your Venmo or Zelle account name, and when you respond with anything but what they asked for they just disappear.

And finally there's the perverts who see a woman posting online and use it as an avenue to sexually harass her. Aggressive demands for address and phone number right off the bat, unsolicited nude photos, it's extremely gross.

So, yeah, I would say the experience of posting on Facebook Marketplace is as bad or worse than anything else. Especially if you're a woman.

Yep.

Seller: $5500 firm, no trades

10 people/day: Will you take a '83 suzuki 3 wheeler (stolen, doesn't run) and $97.24????

Facebook Marketplace seems to have all but killed it, here.

You have to check Facebook anyway because schools, HOAs, businesses, even local governments often treat it as their primary outlet for information, as in, stuff gets posted there first, and sometimes only there. Though IG is taking over some of that (but of course that's still Facebook)

Luckily my wife does that, so I can get away without having an account, but I'd basically have to have one otherwise. If you've already got one and already have to visit Facebook sometimes, may as well use FB marketplace....

I don't know why anyone would want to attach their name and everything to stuff they are selling.

I personally deactivated my Facebook account, but note that this less anonymity is a benefit for buyers. It makes Craigslist a far more attractive target for scammers.

It’s more that you’re more likely to have some context as a buyer that you aren’t meeting a scammer or criminal.

Craigslist attracted drug dealers, hookers and fences for a long time. People like that figure out that it’s easier to scam a buyer than do the honest work of stealing shit to sell.

To be fair; lack of anonymity CAN increase confidence and safety in the transaction/meetup.

(I'm not saying it always does, or that it cannot be exploited, or that it won't eventually be scammed beyond usefulness, etc; but it's not always a clear negative today).

It helps buyers to know who the seller is. FB suffers from bot sellers and scams. I check the person’s profile before proceeding and it gives me a sense of confidence in my purchase/sale.

A bunch of people are making this point, and it implies that Facebook is highly reliable as an identity verification authority. I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s interesting whether it’s right or wrong.

That said, my personal experience with Facebook has been the same. It’s trivial to spot bot/spam accounts, and I typically end up with a high degree of confidence that the identity is real.

Honestly craigslist is a lot better moderated

I think the reason people use marketplace is because they already have a facebook app on their phone. One less password to remember. The upload "just works" - never mind that the data is poorly tagged, etc.

The killer feature that Facebook marketplace has is the fact that you can do some basic verification of the person you are selling or buying an item from.

Interesting. My impression has always been Facebook is somehow more riddled with scammers than CL despite the associated accounts. It seems like it has more to do with the transaction.

It is hard to scam someone with an in person exchange of cash for goods.

Annecdotally, many CL sellers have told me to just get the item from their yard and put the cash under their doormat

> It is hard to scam someone with an in person exchange of cash for goods.

You would think so, but some asshole tried to do this to me. We had agreed on a price ahead of time, and when he showed up, he tried to low ball me with a 50% lower offer. I refused to sell the item to him, and then he became aggressive and I had to call the cops to get him to leave.

I won't get into the details, but based on what I saw, I think this guy runs kind of a side-business acting as a middle man reselling tech gear. I think he does this routinely, probably low balls people and then tries to re-sell the same stuff on marketplace afterwards. I think tech gear attracts assholes/scammers more than anything else because it has a potentially high resale value.

So, just be careful out there. Never share your phone number with people from marketplace, and don't reveal your home address if at all possible. Try to have a friend over if you have people coming for transactions or do it in a public place.

That's a shitty situation, but I don't really think it is a scam or trick.

My sister does a fair amount of Craigslist-like transactions, but she abandoned Craigslist years ago, in favor of Facebook Marketplace, for this exact reason. She had a few scary situations from sketchy people via Craigslist, says that never happens with Facebook Marketplace.

(My sister flips baby strollers as a side-hustle. Seriously. She makes money with it, too. Not enough to retire, but enough to keep her home, raising her kids. She's been doing it since her first child was born 12 years ago, when she realized how expensive decent strollers are. She buys broken strollers for near-nothing, keeps an inventory of her own replacement parts, fixes them herself, then sells them. New mothers love it, because, once again, baby strollers are friggin' expensive.)

Related, so many sellers are now “pro” sellers like what happened to eBay. Keyword stuffing, prices that are comparable to sale prices of new, constant automated reposting, etc.

Right, which is great: because CL forces folks to say whether they're a private owner or a dealer you can filter for those properties.

And not hidden and tucked away either: it's the absolutely very first top-most set of options on the search results page. See those three [all] [owner] [dealer] buttons? Click "owner". You're welcome.

I've always wondered: what is the mechanism keeping people honest about being owner vs dealer?

Nothing. Dealers know to check the owner button.

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.

And then, of course, you go back to CL and flag their post, right? ...You do report abuse on this free platform so that everyone's experience can be improved, right?

Does that button... do anything?

If you have to ask: not until you actually use it, no.

https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/flags_and_community_mo...

The photos will be obvious enough if its a dealer car or being sold out of a driveway

Other than "getting your account banned for multiple reports on multiple postings"? Nothing. If you see someone abusing CL, you report it. If you don't, you're just helping make sure people can keep being dishonest on the platform.

Although unfortunately, it doesn't understand the fairly typical non-urban "yes, you found something that's less than 10 miles from me as the crow flies, but is about 80 miles away if I need to actually drive there because of the fact that my car can't cross a river/strait/lake on its own". Even after 25 years, that part can still do with improvement.

They wouldn't have to update the interface to do that, but they could give you 'crow-flies' and 'driving' distances for sure.

Not really: the search parameter is "km/miles from location", not "within a radius of..." (the circle is just a visual estimate). The distance in km/miles from A to B is not as the crow flies, it's the number found in any of quite a lot of datasets that gives you all the real world distances between two places so you can do proper distance filtering.

Well since Facebook seems to update the user interface about every 15 seconds anyway, that shouldn't be a major roadblock. I swear if I'm on marketplace and I take a sip of coffee, the UX has changed somehow. Seems like they just have a pool of different interface designs and they just serve them up at random.

ah facebook the AB testing hell.

Careful what you whish for. That sounds exactly as one of those fuzzy algorithms that will hide posts randomly due to stupid reasons. Eg. some address has a glitched road and Google Maps believes it is only reachable by boat or helicopter.

This is craigslist, not facebook: don't over-engineer what you don't need to over-engineer. You just look at already-made datasets that give the real world distance between two places, and remove search results based on that.

Never, ever, use google maps for this, and definitely don't use it "per query, as needed". The overwhelming majority of infrastructure doesn't change on even a yearly basis: use someone else's precompiled dataset, and update whenever they push an update.

>already-made datasets that give the real world distance between two places

Can you point me to a source? Thanks.

I got you fam: https://www.google.com/search?q=US+distance+between+cities+d...

(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)

Isn't this what the map view is for?

The FB algorithms drive me bonkers. I can be looking at a listing on one computer, and then search using the exact same terms and filters on another computer moments later, and be completely unable to get the search to deliver the same listing. Absolutely infuriating.

I still use craigslist for finding a place to rent, works really well (at least in SF). For the other stuff, I moved to facebook marketplace, although the UI is really awful (as a seller also), especially on mobile.

I think kijiji was never a thing outside of Canada from my experience.

To me it seems like CL never cought on outside of the bigger cities in Canada, but Kijiji became very popular. But I agree, Kijiji is not as clean with the results as CL, and yes, Facebook Market Place is a mess. Varage Sale is a small player in certain regions of Canada.

Yeah, craigslist never really had any marketshare (at least not for the past decade) in Montréal. Kijiji was king, and honestly I prefer it to CL but even then it is getting dominated by Fb marketplace.

I'm not often on Facebook, so I sometimes miss kijiji but honestly the fact that you can at least know a little bit about the seller on Facebook is a huge plus, even if I fully understand how that can also be a huge problem for some. The seller ratings, plus the ability to see what else they are selling/sold can be super helpful to make sure you aren't getting scammed or buying a stolen item.

>Craigslist is a desert, a void, an oasis of empty search results.

it's a desert and an oasis at the same time?

"Oasis of Empty"

... which would work if the stuff outside the oasis was cluttered with something. But the stuff outside the oasis is also approximately empty. So where does the desert of empty end and the oasis of empty begin?

The desert has nothing; the oasis lacks even that.

I get that you're saying the metaphor is strained, but in point of fact, oases are parts of deserts, no?

Yes but the whole point of them is that they are non-deserty bits inside of deserts

yes.

(Also, don't forget, a void :-)

CL isn't as useful as it once was, but the interface is still very straightforward.

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.

CL lost Canada to Kijiji a few years ago. Now FB is taking over. I'll probably eventually stop looking for classified ads because of that.

Oddly enough, Kijiji never took off in Vancouver. We just went straight from CL to FB.

Excepting Vancouver for some odd reason.

What I do like on Facebook Marketplace is that it seems to understand what I’m looking for. On Kijiji I have to do try all the different ways someone might have written something, including common spelling mistakes. And since I live in Quebec, I have to do this in two languages. On FB Marketplace it seems to find all variations in one search.

> Until about... 5-6 years ago

That kinda correlates to when they moved away from the personals business

CL personals had a seedy rep (maybe with good reason), but I found it to be undervalued as a straight-up friend-making and normal dating tool. It's the only platform I've seen that focused primarily on text instead of photos, which was a unique niche and opportunity.

People seem to gravitate towards photo-focused swipe-to-date apps... but most women and a bigger majority of men will tell you that they all hate them and how shallow they are.

And of course, the seedy stuff and trafficking happens on a whole host of other platforms that appear untouched by the policy push that took down CL.

> It's the only platform I've seen that focused primarily on text instead of photos, which was a unique niche and opportunity.

I have created such a platform since CL killed their personals and you can find it in my account history. Since I've already mentioned it once in this discussion I'd rather not do so again lest I be mistaken for a lowly shill.

Photos are not permitted in posts for multiple reasons. One is to emphasize the content of the post body. (Another reason is that I don't have the wherewithal to vet whether any given photo depicts someone of 17 or 18 years' age but I digress.)

In Spain all old craiglist equivalents are mostly gone or full of spam. We've got Wallapop though, and it's fine. It feels modern, not too clunky, and IMO it's a right balance.

Until someone decides it needs to be more flashy.

It seems regional. In my community in Colorado, there's an extremely active Craigslist market. Where I used to live in New England, it was dead and Facebook ruled the scene.

I really love Craigslist's search, minimalist UI, lack of arbitrary moderators approving (or ignoring) your membership to local selling groups, and so on. It has its own problems of course, but I'm happy to live in an area where it's still a viable alternative.

Weird. On the east coast it's still as populated and reliable as it ever was. Although I don't typically buy consumer goods on it.

In my stretch of the west coast, it's still as good as it always was, too.

Fuzzy is shit anyway. Suggestions are fine, but the whole point of search is to limit results quotes in google should be standard

FBM also has some glaring deficiencies in its search. For example, you can't do a keyword search within a category. So they have a bunch of categories like Vehicles or Electronics, but within those you can only use predefined filters. If you want freeform keywords you're stuck with the general search.

I was starting to move to OfferUp, but got a rude awakening when I tried to give away some old Garage Sale signs. They block posting anything that might encourage "outside sales". No thank you. Craigslist 4 life.

Used to feel this way but I really like OfferUps built in chat. With Craigslist you end up with people who expect phone calls or emails or texts and it's never clear which is which

It’s a great option in the states. The only other country I’ve heard of it being used is Mexico and people say it’s mostly used by non-Mexicans.

Did you find the results you were looking for?
*Would you like to see results for Books, Used, Sorted by publisher instead?

*Often purchased together with ___ + ___ + ___

you gotta search other locales to find what you want. search nashville craigslist for guitars, search rural areas for agricultural equipment, search lake areas for boats, etc

Network effects+ Astroturf

>Nothing is on Craigslist anymore in my area (Greater Toronto Area). Until about... 5-6 years ago, I could find comparable number of photography, computer, music & kids stuff on Craigslist and Kijiji. Today, Craigslist is a desert, a void, an oasis of empty search results.

I totally agree. There are a few areas where it is still good. Stuff for sale is actually quite good. For example, I got a great microwave oven, almost brand new, for $15.

But everything else is garbage. For example, I go on craigslist to look for an office space, and it is complete and total spammed for Regus, Bannister and other executive office suites. There's utterly no owners renting out space.

The job placements are shit. Everyone is on indeed, or linkedin or anything else.

Advertising...I went to advertise my services a month or so ago on craigslist. I listed multiple times, and all I get is spam from people pretending to be interested. I did that 3 or 4 times before I finally caught on.

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