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Comment by nottombrown | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Housing, where location is easily the most important factor, is where Craigslist is least usable as a product. Padmapper's success is a testament to Craigslist's users wanting something better. This is a big middle finger to all those users.

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Doubly agreed. With Padmapper you could tell whether or not the apartment you found was cheap because it was truly a good deal or just in the ghetto. Very useful in the bay area :)

I agree with you, but if PadMapper is really that much better, what's stopping them from getting users to post directly on their site?

Network effect. Sellers go to CL because that's where the buyers are, and buyers go to CL because that's where the sellers are. Other features come in play after that. Once the network effect sets in it's almost impossible to unseat the incumbent: eBay, Linked-in, Facebook, Craigslist, etc. The dominant company has 90%+ share, and can stay that way forever doing very little.

eBay, for example, hasn't changed its (rather mediocre) interface in years, and managed to alienate at least some sellers with their policies. And yet, no one managed to make a dent in eBay's position.

Network effect is the reason there is funding for a million social network start-ups. Everyone wants to capture it. But the odds of success, on the other hand, are also one in a million.

I believe there was a post recently on HN where someone pointed out how these things work - one day it just takes off. Some combination of factors (three out of 100, perhaps) gets right and people flock to the site. And then the fate is sealed. Even in retrospect it's often impossible to say what factors were the key. So, I wouldn't be surprised if founders of Craigslist have little clue as to why it worked.

I'd be really really interested to see what it takes for someone to unseat Craigslist (or eBay, or any other major network).

I think there's more to it than that. I know people for whom craigslist is one of the very few websites they interact with. It's a very different demographic from the one that hangs on HN. I think this is a big factor in the CL design and the reluctance to change it.

I also think the network effect is being overstated in this instance. eBay has much stronger lock-in because I can't list my item in more than one auction at a time. But I can certainly list my apartment in more than one service.

I already check the local paper in addition to CL when looking for an apartment. If I'm looking for a bargain, I'm fine with shopping around.

If you don't think Craigslist has an insanely strong network effect, you haven't been thinking about this long/hard enough. Why do you think it's one of the very few websites those people interact with? It's not just because it's simple (though that helps a lot). It's that a) everyone uses it and b) it has everything you could want. It means you don't have to remember 50 random websites, one for each vertical.

I may be in the minority in Silicon Valley, but I'm honestly a really big fan of Craigslist, even despite their C&D'ing me, and I don't think it could or should be "disrupted". I think it's perfect for most of the things on there: lightning fast, few restrictions, community driven. I think it's massively better than that other alternative of having a ton of small websites that each do one thing well, but differently. I shop for new stuff almost exclusively via Amazon for the same reason that I shop exclusively on CL for used stuff.

I think CL works because to most end users, it's really no different than newspaper classifieds. Classified users expect to have to wade through a bunch of useless stuff to find the diamonds in the rough.

http://www.businessinsider.com/network-effects-2011-5

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