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Craigslist has been disrupted

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Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#31

Post by cgs »

bradleyjoyce wrote: post #25
rhizome wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craigslist runs something like 50MM ads every month without a leak of personal information and a user-driven moderation system, all the while fending off myriad abusers for whom free (or nearly free) advertising isn't enough and think Craigslist should be their personal global spam shitbucket. When the only thing people have to criticize you for is your appearance, I think that says a lot.

Craigslist is so full of spam and reposts it's practically useless for major categories. Take for example Dallas apartments/rentals... hardly a single legitimate posting in there. There is A LOT more to complain about than appearance.

In my experience, the quality level of ads has dropped considerably. My last two Craigslist experiences:

I recently tried looking for a used car in the Chicago area. It turns out almost all the postings in the "by owner only" area are actually dealers in disguise. I found this out the hard way after driving an hour to see a car at what turned out to be some kind of sketchball dealership.

Another time, someone posted an ad for a musical instrument. I go to the guys house and he turns out to be some type of dealer/wholesaler. He didn't even have the actual instrument from the ad and was pulling some bait-and-switch crap.

All of this has pretty much soured me on Chicago Craigslist, but I will say that the experience is probably still a bit better in smaller metropolitan areas.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#32

Post by tokenadult »

As an outsider looking in, I'm wondering to what degree the comments posted here on HN about Facebook (that it is full of people who don't tell the truth and who try to scam for monetary advantage) report a fact of human nature that might eventually disrupt Quora? What is Quora's defense against turning into a place with rather low-quality posts as soon as it attracts a lot of eyeballs?

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#33

Post by jjhjh »

Who cares? It's Craig's list, not your list. He can do whatever the hell he wants with it.

In addition I get the impression most people here who lambast CL as being full of spam live in areas that CL is not thriving in. Ask a New Yorker or a Bay Area resident about how useful CL is and then rethink your perspective.

CL works. It gets the job done. 'Nuff said.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#34

Post by Gaussian »

Simply plotting their apartments or stuff for sale on a map would make a big difference in ease of use. A YC company, Padmapper, does this for you, but why doesn't CL see this as utterly necessary? Searching for something, be it an oak table or a house rental, is exasperating. Realtor.com, a site that's totally behind, got on the mapping thing more than a year ago. Amazing that CL hasn't done the same.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#36

Post by notJim »

jrockway wrote: post #2

I guess, but I've never heard of any of the things disrupting it, other than AirBnB. The apartment spam on Craigslist just means that it's harder to find an apartment, not that there is some other site to use.

Surely you're exaggerating. You've never heard of Etsy, okcupid, PlentyofFish, StubHub, or CouchSurfing? CouchSurfing in particular is mentioned very often alongside AirBnB, and okcupid has had at least one front page story on HN this year (namely their acquisition.)

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#37

Post by Klinky »

danilocampos wrote: post #23
nir wrote: post #8

>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site" Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and…

The fact that they haven't done the things you describe doesn't change the fact that craigslist is a terrible product. It is clogged with spam. Clever types of spam, often ones that crowdsource their content by mining previously legit posts. Since there are no reputation mechanisms to speak of, it's far too easy to waste your time with stuff that's either spam or a scam. Meanwhile, data visualization has progressed d…

Wading through apartment listings, for example, is miserable, and there are almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very basic information is communicated by people listing their properties.

Where is a good place to look for apartments? Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier than CL usually are cluttered with a high ads to info ratio, inaccurate info and/or are slow to load/navigate...

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#38

Post by originalgeek »

dpcan wrote: post #10

Craigslist is the most UNBROKEN site on the web. It works flawlessly. Just yesterday I bought a cell phone from a local guy on Craigslist. Scrolled down the page. Found the phone I wanted in the city I wanted for the price I wanted. Called him, met at a restaurant, paid for the phone, and we went on our way. It was perfect.

And that is how most of my interactions with Craigslist have gone off.

However, there have been some more frustrating experiences. My friend getting his ad ghosted, when he was trying to post his mom's guest house for rent. And it costing them 3 months of rent because Craigslist didn't let on a peep that his ad was ghosted. And there really isn't any clue on how to find help, I got lucky and found the forums via a Google search for something like "Craigslist ad not showing up". Then there was the merry-go-round of pathetic employees I was trying to hire for the unskilled jobs in my warehouse. But that was back in 2008, before the bubble burst. The quality of the applicants I found in my more recent go at it was greatly improved. But the frustration now was 300 resumes showing up in my inbox in 12 hours, and sifting that down to 10 people to interview I guess I should not complain about that, it is a little frustrating though.

The bottom line is Craigslist will always be around because it works, and it works anywhere. There isn't any limited deployment like some of these startups that are piloting in 2 cities. And probably won't go nationwide for a long time, if at all. From what I read here on HN, the name of the game is for the startups to make the big sale and founders glide away on their golden parachutes, then the buyer crashes the company into the ground.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#39

Post by nfriedly »

Is there anything better than CL for apartments in the SF area? RentHop (in the graphic in the article) looks like it's NYC only.

I'm looking at a move to San Mateo this summer and every "apartment finder" website I've tried has been a pitiful experience.

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