Comment by glesica | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glesica | Hacker News Reader

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I just used Craigslist to find an apartment about 1.5 months ago. Based on my experience, I disagree with you. Sure, a slick interface would be cool, but it could very well change the nature of the site in a bad way.

I agree that it would be awesome to be able to filter listings on Craiglist through a neat-o UI mechanism ("Hipmunk for apartments maybe").

In fact, I basically spent the entire time I was using the site thinking "if only more landlords indicated whether the apartment is pet-friendly...". I ended up calling a ton of landlords just to find out whether they allowed pets, on the off chance that some of those who had listed no pet policy actually allowed them.

But is that really a UI problem? For me, Craigslist has already provided the UI tools I needed (you can search by pet-friendliness). The problem was that the landlords didn't include that information in their listings in the first place.

Craigslist is a site for "classified ads". Traditional classifieds (in newspapers) were usually very short, just a few words. Of course far more is possible with Craigslist, but a larger ad also requires more effort on the part of the seller.

As it is now, incomplete information has a cost for sellers (people skip their ads), but they can choose to bear that cost if they wish, presumably after comparing it against the cost of providing more complete information. Part of the reason people use Craigslist is that it is more or less a willy-nilly market that is friendly to small sellers.

So what would Craigslist have to do to make a new UI worthwhile (for me)? Enforce data completeness on the sellers. But that would turn people off. Requiring additional bookkeeping or punishing sellers for "incomplete" listings just to make a snappy UI practical would harm the community and the site.

Craiglist for apartment-hunting in NYC is basically useless. 95% of ads are spammy ads from brokers who, as soon as you call them, tell you that the apartment is already gone, but ask you to tell them what you're looking for, so they can start helping you... There's no deduplication, and you wind up looking at the same ad fifty times in two weeks. Brokers stuff their ads with keywords for every neighborhood, so narrowing results by neighborhood is broken. Price search doesn't work either, because searching for "$2000" gives you apartments that are $2000 per week, $2000 per month, or $2000 for completely arbitrary periods of time, like 11 days. 95% of the listings under "no-fee" actually have fees, 50% of the listings under "sublet" are actually being shown by brokers, and another 25% are actually just looking for roommates (posting in the completely wrong section).

There's clearly zero quality control. The user experience for apartment-hunting is HORRIBLE.

But most of those aren't UI problems, they're data quality problems. I agree that Craigslist isn't perfect, but the problem isn't the UI (ugly as it is).

Actually, I found that Craigslist was the best resource for apartment hunting in NYC. None of the other sites (with better UI) had the same quality of listings. By quality, I mean good deals.

+1. I've lived in the city for 5 years and found all places but the last on CL (last was CL through padmapper). If you manage to get a good workflow you can find little gems in less than a week.

That's the beauty of its UI, the fact that's it's not so appealing puts some people off but also rewards those working hard at it. The amount and variety of offered appartements on CL is huge and much better than what most other sites would offer. That makes for an experience whose reward can be very high and this is valuable when looking for a place to live.

> the fact that's it's not so appealing puts some people off but also rewards those working hard at it

Right... why would you want to only reward your users who work hard? That's idiotic.

Why wouldn't you want to make the site easy to use, with high-quality data, for everyone? When that really wouldn't be that hard to do.

When I was apartment-hunting, over the course of weeks, I literally learned how to recognize particularly spammy brokers by the formatting of their headlines, so I wouldn't click on them... (Four asterisks at beginning and end? Ignore. All-caps with a strange abbreviation for bedroom? Ignore. Etc.) This is a skill I deeply wish I hadn't had to learn. It's ridiculous.

it is and its not. the question you're putting fwd in the end is that of a fully transparent market or not. With cl as it is, the market for broker apts, new ones etc is fairly transparent as these are listing you'll often find on all rental sites.

The market for shares / sublets / by owners is much less transparent and in a city as NY where some places are rent controlled, other have a an amazing history / layout etc, this is actually interesting.

In a sense it gives anyone a shot at being lucky and finding an amazing place with a bit of dedication. If it was fully transparent I think the challenge to achieve the same outcome would be to continuously for long periods of time, be looking for an apt. Which right now isnt necessary.

That's it. Nevertheless I'd be curious to see this done right and see the difference.

> In a sense it gives anyone a shot at being lucky and finding an amazing place with a bit of dedication.

What you're describing is basically anti-market. You're saying, celebrate market friction and inefficiences, so people who are time-rich but money-poor can have a shot at finding underpriced properties, kind of like a lottery.

For me, it just means that I wasted probably 20 or 30 hours of my life sifting through listings that were 99% crappy, in order to find my apartment. I blame Craig, for not improving the efficiency of the market, which would be really easy for his site to do.

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