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Bye Bye Craigslist

blog.padmapper.com

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Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#221

Post by MartinCron »

phaus wrote: post #183
kylelibra wrote: post #156

For those wishing to take action: jim@craigslist.org – Jim Buckmaster, CEO craig@craigslist.org – Craig Newmark, Founder @jimbuckmaster on twitter - http://twitter.com/jimbuckmaster @craignewmark on twitter - http://twitter.com/craignewmark Simple email to copy and paste: Jim and Craig, I'm a longtime user of Craigslist, but I'm really disappointed in your decision regarding PadMapper. It would be great if you could…

Good luck, but I doubt it will work. My first experience with craigslist was trying to figure out why they had the capability to block my wife's ad for a free dog that contained a mispelled word while the site's creator was busy trying to tell the government that there was nothing he could do about the many child prostitution ads that appeared on craigslist.

It sounds like you ran afoul of the fickle community moderation. The last time I checked, CL doesn't block ads, they just get flagged off by regular users.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#223

Post by user49598 »

bermanoid wrote: post #125
mtrimpe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their magic recipe is that an amazing amount of non-technical people have figured out how to work with the site. The Dutch version of Craigslist (Marktplaats, owned by eBay) is in a similar predicament. They have a very sucky UI and have experimented with new and improved versions, but every improvement was quickly reverted after large drops in engagement. It's almost surreal to look at their site ( http://marktplaat…

Yup, there's a catch-22 here: when your site has shitty usability but is the only source of information, people hit more pages and spend more time there. When you fix your UI mistakes, they're in and out quicker because they actually get what they need efficiently. Because you're optimizing for engagement by measuring time on site or something like that, you end up making sure never to make your site easy to use. Thi…

Haha, I see what you did there. You confused UI with Usability. Craigslist is incredibly usable. Have you taken a look at Ebay lately? Does it look familiar? That's cos it hasn't significantly changed in 10 years. Is that because they don't care? Nope, it's because gradients and drop shadows make your product look better, but don't make it more usable.

Craigslist is a utility, not a website. They care about keeping it useful not only for users today, but for users in 10 years. That's not something startups care about at all. Startups are looking to amass users and then sell. Craigslist cares not about such goals.

Go ahead, get mad at their inflexibility. But then take a step back and think about what craigslist represents. And then wonder if you yourself would have the cajones to stick to your guns in todays startup market. I for one commend their ability to keep their product strong in the face of all the bells and whistles of web 2.0 or whatever it's called these days.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#224

Post by jacoblyles »

citricsquid wrote: post #19

I decided to consider moving to the US on a whim about 6 months back (in the end I didn't) and decided to try and find an apartment and guage the cost of living. People recommended craigslist as apparently the US doesn't have a rightmove ( http://www.rightmove.co.uk/ ) type site. Craigslist was probably the worst experience I've had trying to find an apartment... I can't believe that people actually use it, why would…

Because Craigslist is a monopolist with no real competitive pressures. Their CEO and founder are also crunchy anti-capitalists who take pride in being luddites. This endears them to much of the left-wing, San Francisco tech crowd, but their shitty UI combined with monopoly power wastes dozens of human lives worth of user hours every year.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#225

Post by intended »

mappu wrote: post #150
jamiequint wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magic recipe that keeps people coming back is that Craigslist has a large network. I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that adding a map to search results and letting me put an upper limit on the number of bedrooms I'm looking for would not make people less likely to use Craigslist.

Other good examples of these content-over-form sites are 2ch.net in japan, and 4chan for the western world. (4chan recently updated its HTML for the first time in something like eight years.) I suppose network effects (and the posting model) make up a large part of their popularity, but there's something to be said for a reliable and functional interface that works well and doesn't change on a whim.

There's a lot to be said for it.

It's constant in hn discourse to put great UI up there and to give advice on it.

Yet if anyone here has sat on a Bloomberg terminal, used Craigslist, or even games like net hack or dwarf fort, it's pretty clear that interface can be damned.

Not in all cases perhaps, agreed. But in these cases, after a while of using it people get faster and develop the muscle memory to become efficient on the site, so the UI fades into the background anyway.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#226

Post by genwin »

victoro wrote: post #192
kylelibra wrote: post #156

For those wishing to take action: jim@craigslist.org – Jim Buckmaster, CEO craig@craigslist.org – Craig Newmark, Founder @jimbuckmaster on twitter - http://twitter.com/jimbuckmaster @craignewmark on twitter - http://twitter.com/craignewmark Simple email to copy and paste: Jim and Craig, I'm a longtime user of Craigslist, but I'm really disappointed in your decision regarding PadMapper. It would be great if you could…

I for one, commend Craigslist for their commitment to maintaining a strict, consistent, well-defined UI and moreover, for choosing to maintain a relatively modest operation to the benefit of their core users instead of succumbing to the promises of riches that so often end up ruining great services created by the Tech Community. Many of you are saying this is detrimental to consumers, and it may be in the short term,…

Great thoughts. Is > $100 million annual revenue really "relatively modest" though?

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#227

Post by genwin »

marquis wrote: post #127
alister wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the very basic UI, the Dutch version of Craigslist seems to be doing well based on the hundreds of apartment listings in, for example, Amsterdam: http://amsterdam.craigslist.org/apa/ But if I might inject an opposing data point, nobody seems to use the Brazilian version of Craigslist. Check out Sao Paulo: http://saopaulo.craigslist.org/apa/ Can you believe that there are just 5 apartment listings for a metrop…

There are various examples of Craiglist just simply not working in various countries. In fact I'm going to go out on a limb and posit that Craigslist really only had a monopoly in the U.S. Brazil uses olx (I think?), Argentina and Mexico among other Latin American countries use mercadolibre where Craigslist is more for baiting foreigners with higher rent prices and international shared accomodation. Australia has gum…

I suspect CL doesn't fly in some countries mainly because other companies got the jump on them there.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#228

Post by genwin »

samstave wrote: post #91
binaryorganic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Craig Newmark has said that he's scared to make drastic changes to the UX specifically because he doesn't know what magic recipe keeps people coming back. Do I like the CL layout? Nope. Does that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it? Probably not.

What utter bs - padmapper is not "stealing" anything - padmapper is the best method of viewing cl housing listings there is. I berated Craig over on Quora about this a while back - to say that he doesn't want to break it is bullshit - he is scared and lazy to better the site through even the smallest of updates. The fact that "this posting has been deleted by its author" and "this post has been flagged for removal" s…

> [Craig] is scared and lazy to better the site through even the smallest of updates.

I'd be the same. Why mess with a goose that's already laying more gold eggs than you can use? For public service reasons maybe, but I'm confident CL is a (highly profitable) business foremost.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#229

Post by felixchan »

ericd wrote: post #218
felixchan wrote: post #186

Can you open source padmapper so we can run it ourselves? That way, no matter what Craigslist does, people would still be able to use the great service.

Hm, that's kind of an interesting idea. I'd be pretty embarrassed at all the hacks I've added over the years, but I'll definitely keep that in mind.

hah! I have the same feeling with my stuff.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#230

Post by briandear »

jonxu wrote: post #66
binaryorganic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Craig Newmark has said that he's scared to make drastic changes to the UX specifically because he doesn't know what magic recipe keeps people coming back. Do I like the CL layout? Nope. Does that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it? Probably not.

Wow, if this is true I've lost a lot of respect for CL. Being scared to make forward changes because one doesn't know the source of success is such a terrible excuse to stop innovating.

You may have lost respect for them but you're still going to use CL. Which kind of proves the point.
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