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Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

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Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#111

Post by tomtheelder »

aresant wrote: post #6

An aged but still relevant article - "Increase your conversion rate by making your site ugly" is a good parallel read particularly with regard to accessibility https://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increase-your-...

I agree totally with the accessibility bit, but overall I think this article is based on a totally flawed premise. For starters most sites that gain traction look very good, and they are just citing the extremely small number of exceptions and acting like they represent some sort of trend. Second, almost all those sites gained traction in an era when their designs looked good or at least fine compared to their contemporaries and then lived off familiarity and network effects.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#113

Post by hedora »

anarticle wrote: post #29

I would say because it is a tool, and tools should stay relatively the same. It's ok to make a new tool! I have this discussion with people who make physical objects all the time, and their frustrations with the software world. Imagine learning to use a Heidelberg offset press 20y ago, and if you enter your workshop, it performs the same as before. Now imagine you are a painter who uses photoshop elements once in awh…

My aging German automobile's radio failed to display an ö that a cloud service sent it yesterday. I really wonder how that regression slipped through. It has been able to display German in the past, along with all sorts of other unicode characters.

The only thing I can figure is the band that named the song is Mongolian, so maybe they used a U-1803 (Mongolian full stop ᠃) as a modifier on the o?

But then why did my phone display it correctly?

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#114

Post by nonethewiser »

I remember watching a Harvard System Design intro lecture by David Milan on YouTube. He was talking about tradeoffs and said that craigslist stored all their listings as static html. which was extremely cheap and performant but made it harder to edit and stuff like that.

I wonder if they have changed since then.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#115

Post by lotsofpulp »

hedora wrote: post #95
xahrepap wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A local media company runs a "classifieds" on their online site. It dominates locally. Craigslist has been worthless for ages here because of it. However, Facebook Marketplace seems to be slowly gaining traction. Which I hate for all the reasons you mention. I dread the day it takes over :(

In fairness, the only valid complaint I've heard about Craigslist is that it diverted classified ad revenue away from reporters, destroying local newspapers, and then local elections. With Craigslist, this always felt like an unintended consequence. With facebook, it seems like one of their top ten strategies for getting us to devolve into mineshaft dwelling mole people that live in the metaverse.

Blaming technology for obviating business models is not a valid complaint.

In this case, I would say the participants of the local society are responsible for paying for journalism and working to support local elections. But even then, you could come up with arguments such as so and so population was too poor and had to work two jobs and did not have time to attend city/county/state meetings, or were not sufficiently educated or literate to understand them, etc.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#118

Post by adolph »

inanutshellus wrote: post #106

I hate FB Marketplace. It's actively hostile to buyers. Like, try to find a "kinda nice" bicycle. You can't find the bicycle category (though it does exist as a sub-group of Sporting Goods), you can't just say "show me bikes" unless you hack the URL, you can search for the word "bicycle" but for some reason people selling a "Specialized Rockhopper" think you know it's a bicycle so don't use that word. Oh, and when se…

Dammit Jim, I'm a cyclist, not an ontologist!

[edit to correct snowclone]

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#119

Post by spookthesunset »

SL61 wrote: post #94
NikolaNovak wrote: post #3

* 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…

Craigslist is basically unusable in my area if you're selling something. 90%+ of the people who respond to you will express interest, chat about the item, set up a time to meet, and then no-show and ghost you. I don't know what they're getting out of it. It's not worth the time for me to go through 5-6 of those people for everything I want to sell. Maybe Facebook, etc., have this problem too, but I gave up on selling…

Dunno why the downvotes when this is something I experience too.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#120

Post by exhilaration »

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #24

I rent a couple of properties out in the bay area and up until this year I've always relied on craigslist to get new tenants, but this year we tried out Zillow and we got tons of applicants, and the whole application process including vetting and setting up a lease and everything was done through Zillow. On the other hand someone noticed our Zillow listing and created a fraudulent listing of my property on Craigslist…

Did Zillow charge for this service? You mentioned "vetting" - does that include background and credit checks?
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