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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

#251

Post by dvzk »

amatecha wrote: post #89
CharlesW wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 keywor…

That's the buyer's perspective of flagging. The other side is having your listings deleted because they compete with another product or violate people's incorrect expectations. If people think it's a fake, and it's not, or if it is rule bound to a category, but people aren't used to seeing it there, it gets flagged and removed. There is no one to appeal to, and sellers aren't told why their listings are removed. As someone who sells high-end stuff occasionally on the side, I would rather deal with Ebay or Facebook.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#252

Post by raisin_churn »

This is an awful lot of words to say "it works fine." I love craigslist, and use it both for listing and buying quite regularly. There's plenty of fair criticisms of craigslist, but the UI is one of the strongest features. Maybe turn it around and ask why most other websites have loud, jarring, complicated interfaces and copious 3rd party JavaScript from dozens of other domains?

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#253

Post by cookie_monsta »

technion wrote: post #233
martyvis wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. In the late 1960s in Australia a classifieds-only paper called the Trading Post grew and absolutely dominated this space by the 1990s. My Dad would buy it every week to look for bargain junk, cars, etc. I'm sure the main newspapers took a hit because of it. They had local versions for each region. It was eventually bought in 2004 by Sensis (they were part of the main telco Telstra) for $636M which also o…

I will never be able to look marketplace or even Craig's list without wondering whether the great Australian joke about buying jousting sticks from the trading post would work in their place.

In case anybody out there missed the most faithful reproduction of Australian culture to be captured on film:

https://youtu.be/dik_wnOE4dk

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#255

Post by jimt1234 »

debaserab2 wrote: post #69
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…

The killer feature that Facebook marketplace has is the fact that you can do some basic verification of the person you are selling or buying an item from.

My sister does a fair amount of Craigslist-like transactions, but she abandoned Craigslist years ago, in favor of Facebook Marketplace, for this exact reason. She had a few scary situations from sketchy people via Craigslist, says that never happens with Facebook Marketplace.

(My sister flips baby strollers as a side-hustle. Seriously. She makes money with it, too. Not enough to retire, but enough to keep her home, raising her kids. She's been doing it since her first child was born 12 years ago, when she realized how expensive decent strollers are. She buys broken strollers for near-nothing, keeps an inventory of her own replacement parts, fixes them herself, then sells them. New mothers love it, because, once again, baby strollers are friggin' expensive.)

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#256

Post by dahfizz »

> Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day.

Web developers have this twisted idea that if code wasn't written in the past 6 months, it's legacy and un-modern and bad and needs to be refreshed. Stop.

Just because something was fun for you to build doesn't mean it's fun for me to use.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#257

Post by ggm »

I think it's very likely UX would tell any developer to leave it alone, and if it didn't it would be suspicious. Minor changes only.

Amazon on the other hand.. or aws console. I'd be amazed if UX said "leave it alone"

Real UX. No leading questions.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#259

Post by adolph »

behnamoh wrote: post #143
adolph wrote: post #116

In an alternative universe Yahoo! also kept a 1997 interface and the world was a bit nicer than it really turned out.

But then how could they justify hiring an inexperienced ex-google woman? (nothing wrong with being a woman, but she tried to make a celebrity out of herself, look at her cover magazine photoshoot).

"... not that there's anything wrong with that" Is another fine product of the nineties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outing

Marissa Meyer was certainly not the old hand CEO type that had already run Yahoo into the ditch but hardly inexperienced.

She oversaw the layout of Google's well-known, unadorned search homepage. She was also on the three-person team responsible for Google AdWords, which is an advertising platform that allows businesses to show their product to relevant potential customers based on their search terms. AdWords helped deliver 96% of the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#260

Post by forgetfreeman »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #115
hedora wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a thing that happened in the world and the outcomes of it have been continuously documented for over 20 years now. Regardless of intent the results have been execrable. The complaint is absolutely valid.
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