Craigslist has been disrupted • Hacker News Board

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#101

Post by 18pfsmt » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 12:37 PM UTC

danilocampos wrote: post #52

Klinky wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

A nit to pick, since elai has already provided some good examples. > Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier... None of these gripes are about appearance except inasmuch as appearance reflects functionality. craigslist is ugly, but that's not the problem. craigslist doesn't work well . I don't want it to look different. I want it to work differently. A competing site could look much prettier than craigslist…

My buddy is 40 years old, not very technical, but he's one hell of a mechanic. He's been making his living off buying and selling cars off of CL since the recession started. Just an anecdote. I'm not sure an "improved UI" would help him. So many entrepreneurs are mad at CL for whatever reason, but the main one seems to be jealousy. They would rather ruin it than allow it to continue.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#102

Post by gregkidd » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 12:44 PM UTC

The site may be retro, but we think the data is great. Historically, its been hard to get and build on -- but we think it doesn't have to be that way because exchange postings are public facts and thus should be public propert that anyone can build on. Yahoo pipes was in theory a way of making this available for 3,000 developers -- but the RSS feeds were very incomplete and missed huge chunks of data becuase they are updated only every 15 minutes at most, and only for 100 postings at a time. When thousands of postings are streaming by, that's impossible to build something rigorous on top of.

We've focused on creating a Craigslist firehose equivalent to the Twitter firehose so that the good data can be enjoyed by all, regardless of how you feel about the site. Its developer accessible at 3taps.com/developers, and the fruits of that access can be seen at craiggers.com. Bottom line is that regardless of how you feel about the site (which grosses MUCH more than $50M a year based on the stream of data we see), the data itself is pretty darned interesting.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#103

Post by huuleon » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 1:40 PM UTC

Yes I totally agree why craigslist dominates the industry because of simplicity and ease of use for users. Craigslist has always been the place where i go first to look for used products especially cars. But there are two things i dislike about craigslist. One is sometimes you'll receive fishing emails asking you to reset password where you later noticed your computer is contain with viruses. Second, buying stuff on craigslist can be very time consuming especially with cars. You'll definitely have to travel multi times to different sellers before finding your ideal item. Plus the photos on craigslist are so low quality, you barely can see any scratches or damages. One time i had to traveled 2 hours to check out a car posted on craigslist then realized the seller lied to me which wasted 4 hrs of my time driving back and forth. So i started a website to help people buy and sell used stuff via videos instead of photos. I believe video is the best way to showcase something second hand online. It can save people so much time traveling to many places when they can instead watch it online without leaving the comfort of their homes. Although there are some disadvantages of using video to advertise your products but it can go a long way in the future as technologies increasingly advance. What do you think about the video concept? Can video replace photos for second hand market sometime in the near future?

Leon- http://www.123exchanges.com

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#104

Post by reedlaw » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 2:46 PM UTC

18pfsmt wrote: post #101

danilocampos wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nit to pick, since elai has already provided some good examples. > Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier... None of these gripes are about appearance except inasmuch as appearance reflects functionality. craigslist is ugly, but that's not the problem. craigslist doesn't work well . I don't want it to look different. I want it to work differently. A competing site could look much prettier than craigslist…

My buddy is 40 years old, not very technical, but he's one hell of a mechanic. He's been making his living off buying and selling cars off of CL since the recession started. Just an anecdote. I'm not sure an "improved UI" would help him. So many entrepreneurs are mad at CL for whatever reason, but the main one seems to be jealousy. They would rather ruin it than allow it to continue.

I found that nearly every used car I looked at on CL was either being resold by small-time "car dealers" or bought up by these same people. It was nearly impossible to find a good used car so I finally leased a new one instead.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#105

Post by jarrett » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 4:43 PM UTC

dedward wrote: post #76

jarrett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've done a fine job of keeping the site responsive, but that's only a small part of what we normally demand from web apps. I don't fault them for spam. It's a very, very difficult problem, and since I don't have a magical solution to propose, I'm not going to complain. But there are a few areas where CL could have made major improvements at a reasonable cost, especially considering their revenue. They could have…

There also seems to clearly be enough usage and revenue, and profit, for the owners not to want to take it any further and be happy with what they have rather than risk change. They are under no obligation to do anything with the site other than what they want to. They don't have to monetize it, or go public, or improve anything. If they're happy with what they've got, it's theirs to be happy with. The only thing tha…

All good points, and I agree with them in the abstract. However, in this specific case, I don't entirely agree. The post was about how various other sites were taking aim at individual Craigslist categories, and this might be a good reason for CL to change in the long run.

"The only thing that would drive change would be an exodus of people - not just people complaining about how things could be better, but an actual clear, obvious drop in usage with a clear cause and a need for redesign." Maybe, or maybe the perception that an exodus is impending would be enough. In any case, that exodus may very well happen. Which, I think, is what the post is suggesting. I for one have stopped using CL for almost everything, due to the very reasons under discussion.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#106

Post by MatthewDP » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 4:45 PM UTC

This argument relies on Quantcast data that's not directly measured. When sites such as Compete, Quantcast and Alexa take a stab at measuring site traffic without direct measurement (like Google Analytics), the estimates they come up with are always way, way off. Unless there's better evidence that Craigslist traffic is declining, I don't buy it.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#107

Post by notJim » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 4:46 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #45

notJim wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

I agree with you that none of these sites actually tackle the main uses of craigslist. I was merely questioning your assertion that you'd never heard of any of them :).

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#108

Post by rhizome » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 5:44 PM UTC

georgieporgie wrote: post #71

rhizome wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," and there is a flag help forum on Craigslist to help explain how your ad might have trammeled your area's standards.

It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," As far as I'm aware, nobody knows what logic or thresholds are used by CL. Common wisdom is that it's "lots" but there seems to be no reason whatsoever to think that.

As someone who actually does flag ads (as we all agree to do by using Craigslist), I can say that it's more than "a few." Just because they don't verify the numbers doesn't mean it's low. What purpose would that serve them?

Look at it this way: read the comments here. Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#109

Post by jacoblyles » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 5:46 PM 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…

Craigslist wastes millions of hours of people's time every year by being a monopoly that provides a bad product in an industry with strong network effects. When I go to a site like padmapper, I am reminded of just how horrible Craigslist is and how happy it would make me to see them go and allow room for new firms to take their place.

Re: Craigslist has been disrupted

#110

Post by ericd » Sat, Apr 02, 2011, 5:49 PM UTC

This post is an example of the Silicon Valley echo chamber at its finest.

With regards to the vertical sites eating their base, I call BS. Regular users who don't live on the internet can't/don't want to remember 50 different sites. The halo effect for a marketplace site like this is very strong.

Craigslist is fighting extremely hard against spam, to the point where they're starting to make people jump through hoops by requiring phone numbers and texting confirmation codes for certain categories. They've even resorted to silent "hellban" style hiding for posts called "ghosting", which affects a lot of innocent posters in the housing categories. There's unfortunately a lot of money in scamming, so the scams keep coming despite all of this.

The dip in traffic is pretty easily explainable by the banning of adult content, and I've never known Compete/Quantcast to be even within 3x of actual numbers, so using those as proof of anything is pretty dubious. This may be different on a site as large as CL, but even on sites with millions of monthly visitors, I've seen some laughably wrong numbers.

RE: Craigslist not being "Social", what is more social than person-to-person selling? Does he just mean that they haven't put ugly buttons for x different social networks that their main constituency has never heard of?

Craigslist is all about being useful and accessible, fad of the week be damned. Their design decisions have made it harder to do quality control, but it has made it accessible to people to whom posting on many of the sites you take for granted would be confusing. It's a tradeoff, and it has worked out wonderfully for them on the whole.