Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess
wired.com
wired.com
The noise seems mainly that people want to make more money on classifieds and they can't because Craigslist nailed it and you can't knock them out of the spot.
Their UI is dead simple and it saves them unimaginable amounts of bandwidth. They are more like Google than anything else in that respect.
>>""I hear this all the time," Buckmaster says. "You guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen. Don't you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post—we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right."
>>"The truth is that a lot of people complain about craigslist. Buckmaster is correct that few of them complain about the design. They complain about spam, they complain about fraud, they complain about the posting rules, they complain about the search, they complain about uploading images. They complain about every way a classified transaction can go wrong. They seldom complain about amazing new features they imagine they might possibly want to use, because they are too busy complaining about the simple features they depend on that don't work as well as they'd like. By eliminating marketing, sales, and business development, craigslist's programmers have cut out all the cushioning layers that separate them from the users they serve, and any right they have to teach lessons in public service comes from the odd situation of running a company that is directly subservient only to the public. "
As for the text itself, I'm still not sure if it's an intentional self-parody or whether Wired seriously claims CL is closed and distrustful for letting anyone post anonymously rather than requiring them to register and partake in some "networking features", or that it has less value for not having tags.
I find the conclusion that all this has to do with "Newmark and Buckmaster's wariness about what humans" particularly weird. Personally CL's approach of getting out of the user's way seems a lot more humane to me than forcing the latest UI trend on your users because the CEO read about it in last month's Wired.
From the comments here, I get the impression that many people just read the title. For shame! Hacker News is supposed to have higher standards.
For example my side hobby is old Volkswagens. Since they have no way to categorize vehicles that are for sale, I have a few bookmarks with crazy search strings. VW + (1951|1952|1953.. etc)
Add to that fact that you can only search one section of craigslist at a time, I have crazy search string bookmarks for like 5 sections of craigslist. I'd like to see a craigslist central where my searches span states and regions.
Other then that I love the dead simple UI and no ads.
make it dead simple for new users
and powerful enough for the power-users*
It's sad, but it's the best place for apartments in nyc.. and the listings are incredibly polluted: apartments listed in the wrong neighborhoods, without a location, lies about nearness to subways ("steps from the subway!" - but when you look up the intersection they list [if they list it], it's a 10 minute bus-ride away from the nearest train).. flagging doesn't seem to help any, either - they just repost the same ad, over and over again...
*In Craigslist terms, this of course is the peruser, not the poster.
CL seems to feel that doing anything at all to fight the asshats just results in giving the asshats more toys to play with... and for the obvious solutions, that's true. What they need are some non-obvious solutions - which might require them to spend a little more money than they're making today.
Craigslist make $100+M and growing with almost no overhead. Their UI works great, is very functional, and iconic. They have made it possible for millions to connect and saved consumers billions in classifieds. What has Conde Nast done?
They bought reddit. Have a look and tell me what you think they've done with the place.
...the result of which is usually more profit.
If St. Exupery is right at all about longing for the immenseness of the sea, I think just because you can profit max your customer, doesn't mean that you should. Especially if you inspire to something your customers can believe in, and if profit maximizing would take away from that belief.
Perhaps one that lists news stories for hackers?
The concept is great. But the execution? Ugh.
google.com and most other search engines.
twitter.com
wikipedia.com
most "we're a list of links possibly with voting/commenting sites".
I want them to charge a one-time registration fee of $10 to post apartments for rent in the Bay Area. Might be a good idea to do it in cars, too. This would be revoked for people who posted the same ad more than once a week, and they'd have to pay another $10.
I want to be able to see a Google map of classifieds' locations.
I want feedback, eBay style.
I actually resent Craigslist for having a dominant market position and being so dedicated to simplicity, because it means that there aren't Hacker News types to try out different things and maybe give me some of the features I want. This is a user speaking, Craig! If you won't complicate things yourself, then please put up an API so that other people can do it!
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
"Today, according to the research firm Hitwise, his creation is the largest dating website in the U.S. and quite possibly the world. Its traffic is four times that of the dating pioneer Match, which has annual revenue of $350 million and a staff that numbers in the hundreds. Until 2007, Frind had a staff of exactly zero. Today, he employs just three customer service workers, who check for spam and delete nude images from the Plenty of Fish website while Frind handles everything else."