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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

#321

Post by As_You_Wish »

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…

>Nothing is on Craigslist anymore in my area (Greater Toronto Area). Until about... 5-6 years ago, I could find comparable number of photography, computer, music & kids stuff on Craigslist and Kijiji. Today, Craigslist is a desert, a void, an oasis of empty search results.

I totally agree. There are a few areas where it is still good. Stuff for sale is actually quite good. For example, I got a great microwave oven, almost brand new, for $15.

But everything else is garbage. For example, I go on craigslist to look for an office space, and it is complete and total spammed for Regus, Bannister and other executive office suites. There's utterly no owners renting out space.

The job placements are shit. Everyone is on indeed, or linkedin or anything else.

Advertising...I went to advertise my services a month or so ago on craigslist. I listed multiple times, and all I get is spam from people pretending to be interested. I did that 3 or 4 times before I finally caught on.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#322

Post by asdff »

acchow wrote: post #151
defterGoose wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CL is still alive and well here in LA. It's possible it's just in the markets I'm looking in (tools, machinery, cars, etc), but I've always preferred it over things like FB, OfferUp etc. I feel like the people I meet from CL are generally much more knowledgeable about what they have and its value. Other platforms often feel like a relative selling grandpa's stuff and have done the bare minimum of research to find a p…

Try to find a used computer or phone or really any other electronic. FB Marketplace has 5x the inventory.

seems like when there are no local results they just flood it with global listings

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#323

Post by asdff »

behnamoh wrote: post #107
soperj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why anyone would want to attach their name and everything to stuff they are selling.

It helps buyers to know who the seller is. FB suffers from bot sellers and scams. I check the person’s profile before proceeding and it gives me a sense of confidence in my purchase/sale.

Honestly craigslist is a lot better moderated

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#324

Post by asdff »

philovivero wrote: post #126
QuarterReptile wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered: what is the mechanism keeping people honest about being owner vs dealer?

Nothing. Dealers know to check the owner button. Whenever I'm buying something on CL, like say a car, I always ask the person who answers the phone: "I'm calling about the car. Tell me X about it." If they reply "Which car?" then you've reached a dealer, not an owner.

The photos will be obvious enough if its a dealer car or being sold out of a driveway

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#325

Post by asdff »

kd0amg wrote: post #287
TheRealPomax wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then, of course, you go back to CL and flag their post, right? ...You do report abuse on this free platform so that everyone's experience can be improved, right?

Does that button... do anything?

https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/flags_and_community_mo...

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#326

Post by asdff »

elcritch wrote: post #196
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…

It surprises me how much companies fail at the basics of online shopping.. FB market is a garbage fire. They’re more interested in selling ads than making a market place. For new stuff Amazon is huge and cluttered yet still manages to run circles around almost every other online store for similar reasons to what you listed. The only exception I’ve found is BH Photo and Video. But all the others like Walmart/Jet, Home…

Amazon suffers from this a little as well to be honest. Search something and pull up a page, search again and you are in this obscure category that has like 20% of the Thing A you are interesed on Amazon because some stuff is listed in other categories. Sometimes it also doesn't seem to respect my price ceilings on search filters.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#327

Post by asdff »

snowwrestler wrote: post #147
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…

My experience with Craigslist has been that there are a lot of keyword-stuffed scam listings in search results, but they are generally sorted below more useful results, and generally easy to spot and ignore. It makes sense to me as a strategy for leveraging fuzzy automation. Sorting is less risky than hiding or deleting. If the system gets it wrong, there is a still an opportunity for motivated users to dig down and…

A lot of real estate management companies seem to use software that just spams craigslist with legitimate ads, but spam nonetheless because its 40 hits for the same apartment complex.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#328

Post by water-your-self »

RunSet wrote: post #141
frankharv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it and I despise the fact that they pulled down personal ads. It was like a virtual clipboard in the laundromat. Then the feds came and kicked in the doors.

I'm on a mission to keep encounters casual. https://lokilist.com/about.php It's slow going but fortunately text is cheap to host so I can keep this up indefinitely. Edit: If you like it make a post. Even better share the link to the post. Network effect is real.

You realize that FOSTA can come for you too right?

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#329

Post by sph »

Eisenstein wrote: post #317
dash2 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d politely suggest that you have interesting points here, and you could get them across much better if you wrote shorter sentences with shorter words.

Can you explain what the poster above you was writing? I have trouble parsing it, since it seems they are from some academic discipline I am unfamiliar in.

No they're not from any academic discipline. They were ranting about useless search features but trying very hard to incorporate the most flowery and elaborate sentence construction for some reason. It reads like they replaced every single word of their original comment with a synonym or idiom off the thesaurus.

They're trying as hard to sound smart and going too far so it's just incomprehensible.

"the unbroken and never deviated from practice in every industry and field of making the method and techniques used for search as unique inviolable individual apotheoses of a imaginary USP"

Who the hell speaks or even writes like this?

EDIT: looks like their whole posting history is like this. Someone fed postgrad literature to GPT-3 and created a bot from it.

Re: Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

#330

Post by inanutshellus »

dvzk wrote: post #237
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…

For bicycles in particular, most of the Facebook activity and impressions come from local buy and sell groups dedicated to cycling and MTB. If you live within a populated region a lot of these groups will exist. It's where much of the enthusiast market is still located, sadly.

I should've included this in my rant. If you have anything of value, instead of posting it on Marketplace (because it's a dumpster fire), people make these obscure fb groups you're just supposed to magically know about and hock their wares there. It's really infuriating.

Just sell on Craigslist, people.

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