Craigslist has been disrupted • Hacker News Board

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#41

Post by elai » Fri, Apr 01, 2011, 11:57 PM UTC

Klinky wrote: post #37

danilocampos wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

padmapper.com gets info from craigslist and others. hotpads.com is also good.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#42

Post by shawnee_ » Fri, Apr 01, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

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.

Craigslist has done a lot LOT of harm to the plight of the renter. Realtors have incentive to spam, post bait-and-switch, or flag the FSBOs when they are significantly Side note: http://www.realtor.com/robots.txt

Problem: locked down rental listings (can't search) + free advertising for Realtors = the leeches in the NAR controlling market prices w/nobody stopping them.

Rather than that "beta testing" charge for companies to post jobs, craigslist should charge for posting in the rentals / housing, category imho.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#43

Post by originalgeek » Fri, Apr 01, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

Gaussian wrote: post #34

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.

I dunno, it's pretty effective to narrow one's search by the part of town you're looking in, for example, in L.A. you can break it down by Central L.A., SF Valley, SG Valley, etc. and then search by city name. Click the map link to see where the exact location is. It's really not that hard. Found my current jewel of a home that way.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#44

Post by rgarcia » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 12:01 AM UTC

bandushrew wrote: post #30

This graph: http://d2o7bfz2il9cb7.cloudfront.net/main-qimg-c18ef2d8f8bd7... is showing exactly the reason Craigslist is doing well. Each of the alternatives displayed represents a specialized, vertical solution for just one (or a couple) of the categories offered by Craigslist, There is no way that Craigslist could compete head to head with every one of them anyway, at best they could choose a couple of categories an…

I completely agree. I'm surprised at the level of negativity towards CL here. I would expect a community of hackers to recognize a highly generic solution like CL when they see one.

The only critique I would give is that if CL were really trying to be a generic platform that does a decent job at solving a myriad of problems, then they should open themselves up and have an official API. Right now all of the CL mashups do some kind of scraping to get their data.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#45

Post by _delirium » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 12:03 AM UTC

notJim wrote: post #36

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.)

I might be an atypical user (?), but none of those sites appear to do the two things I and everyone else I know use Craigslist for: 1) buy/sell used goods; and 2) find long-term apartment rentals.

For #1, eBay seems to be the only real competitor, and does non-shippable goods poorly (Ebay Classifieds has never really taken off). For #2, I don't really know of any (AirBnB and Couchsurfing are good for trips, but not really for finding somewhere to live).

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#46

Post by mikiem » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 12:04 AM UTC

Don't underestimate the beauty that is the cash cow.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#47

Post by jarek » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 12:13 AM UTC

nfriedly wrote: post #39

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.

Take a look at padmapper - it's craigslist apartments data with filtering and on a map.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#48

Post by datasink » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 12:16 AM UTC

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…

Jeremy Zawodny is implementing some interesting tech at Craigslist. It looks like they're doing a lot of development with MongoDB, Redis, and Sphinx. He drops tech notes on his twitter feed (@jzawodn) occasionally.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#49

Post by rick888 » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 12:20 AM UTC

bigwally wrote: post #19

Dealing with Craigslist in NY I found it to be full of scammers and spammers. Buying from people listing on craigslist is very much a buyer beware experience. Plenty of bait and switch. And my personal favorite "It's currently in pieces, you can pay me and take the pieces away. All the pieces are there but you have to pay cash first." Craigslist has a lot of room for improvement and it would great to see useful chang…

This is one of the biggest problems: no feedback system for accounts. Since there is almost no barrier to entry, it's really easy for scammers.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#50

Post by kristofferR » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 12:27 AM UTC

The sad thing is that it would be quite easy to drastically improve Craigslist. First, a simple CSS and design cleanup like this one: http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1709/ff_craigsl...

No drastic changes, just a cleanup. Then you add an advanced search tool with maps and filtering based on some criterias like distance and price.

Then there's issue of spam. Solve these three issues, and CL is basically "fixed".