Thanks for sharing. I’m about to rent out a house so this helps a lot. One thing I don’t get is why someone else would copy your listing? Do they somehow get a slice of the pie if a respondent rents?
> One thing I don’t get is why someone else would copy your listing? Do they somehow get a slice of the pie if a respondent rents? Usually this is a scam. You advertise someone else's vacant property, break in to conduct tenant tours, collect fees/deposits/first month's rent, then bail.
Well that’s just evil. I never gave that possibility a thought.
Although unfortunately, it doesn't understand the fairly typical non-urban "yes, you found something that's less than 10 miles from me as the crow flies, but is about 80 miles away if I need to actually drive there because of the fact that my car can't cross a river/strait/lake on its own". Even after 25 years, that part can still do with improvement.
They wouldn't have to update the interface to do that, but they could give you 'crow-flies' and 'driving' distances for sure.
Not really: the search parameter is "km/miles from location", not "within a radius of..." (the circle is just a visual estimate). The distance in km/miles from A to B is not as the crow flies, it's the number found in any of quite a lot of datasets that gives you all the real world distances between two places so you can do proper distance filtering.
* I far, far, far prefer Craigslist interface to anything else in that space. It's clear and focused Its search engine too - I get things I search for in the area I search for. For me, Kijiji and Facebook marketplace are awful UI, awful distractions, and give me 10,000 "suggested" or "fuzzy searched" things in random order, suppressing things I'm actually looking for. And I've completely given up on eBay over last de…
CL lost Canada to Kijiji a few years ago. Now FB is taking over. I'll probably eventually stop looking for classified ads because of that.
Oddly enough, Kijiji never took off in Vancouver. We just went straight from CL to FB.
My problem with Craigslist isn't that it looks old, the problem is that they seemingly refuse to modernize anything else about the site. Craigslist is chock full of spam and people abusing the search feature. I'm no anti-spam guru, but surely there is a way to cut down on people submitting the same thumbnail dozens of times using as many keywords as they can so their cellphone screen repair service shows up when look…
> and actively goes after any competition to his site What do you mean by this? Is he acquiring the competition or is there another way he's going after them?
"Craigslist has sued or issued cease-and-desist letters to dozens of startups in recent years. A New York Times technology blog last year complained that the site "has dug an effective moat by cultivating an exaggerated image of 'doing good' that keeps its customers loyal, while behind the scenes, it bullies any rivals that come near and it stifles innovation."
The article itself is a little old, but it still holds true.
* I far, far, far prefer Craigslist interface to anything else in that space. It's clear and focused Its search engine too - I get things I search for in the area I search for. For me, Kijiji and Facebook marketplace are awful UI, awful distractions, and give me 10,000 "suggested" or "fuzzy searched" things in random order, suppressing things I'm actually looking for. And I've completely given up on eBay over last de…
CL isn't as useful as it once was, but the interface is still very straightforward.
Can you provide a concrete example? IME any online platform is going to be a staircase into the bowels of human nature. It's all about being aware you need to protect yourself online. If you're encountering things like child porn or prostitution, or anything illegal really, it's your responsibility to at least report it.
> Can you provide a concrete example? Sure. I spent a few weeks looking for an Xbox Series X, and I don't believe that I'm exaggerating when I say that 90%+ of the listings were scams. For about half of those, the scammers just weren't very good, and automated or semi-automated checks should've flagged those listings before anyone saw them. The other half were various scams documented in thousands of articles by a co…
Yeah, for a while I would flag any listing I felt violated the ToS. but I started to notice that THE SAME LISTING would come up shortly (if any action was taken on the initial listing to begin with). I'm not going to bother wasting my energy trying to flag listings when CL isn't doing their part to _learn_ and improve their detection of blatantly-obvious fraud or ToS violations. I mean I'm talking like blatant keyword spam (which is against ToS) that's even prefaced by "Keywords:", the same listing made in every possible nearby jurisdiction, stuff like that. It's so obvious and and easy to detect. The worst are car ads. You search for a really specific model, of a specific year, and somehow you get like 500+ results. Because every car listing is just a wall of keyword spam, of completely unrelated makes/models. Cool.
Facebook Marketplace has completely taken over in most parts of the US. It sucks.
Any idea about Boston? Boston Craigslist has seemed a bit stale, but I'm not on Facebook to see how that compares.
I've found it pretty rare to _not_ find something I'm looking for on Boston Craigslist. As something of an "out there" example, I found ten old tube TVs for my Halloween decorations just a few weeks ago. Also: I got an absolutely great deal on a car through Craigslist about five years ago.
That said, I've definitely had less success on the sales side than I did in years prior, but I can't tell if that's what I'm selling being worth less used these days (desktop computers?), or if Facebook Marketplace is the de-facto place to check.