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Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

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Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#41

Post by phil21 »

smallgovt wrote: post #31
phil21 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now it's lazy and selfish to not take every ounce of surplus you can out of a market? Some folks just want to lay back and enjoy life. If I were Craig I'd sit on that goldmine for the rest of my life - most likely it will finance a very decent lifestyle until the day he dies. Why bother with the stress of expanding and doing what everyone else is doing? I'm completely convinced that strategy makes for miserable peopl…

This is sort of my point... Don't get me wrong, he has every right to run his business in any way he so desires. And, who am I to pass judgement on him for this? I'm just saying that we shouldn't see this sort of decision making as 'honorable' or 'selfless' in any sense. It's the opposite, in a way.

I think it's a lot more honorable and selfless than trying to blow it up with a huge round of VC funding and turn it into the next ad-funded unicorn. Why found a company just to turn into the same exact companies you tried to get away from?

But I also completely agree that's subjective, and there really is no morality here. It's simple personal preference.

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#42

Post by erik »

codingdave wrote: post #7

It isn't universal, though. One of the things you find if you move to Utah is, "Don't bother with Craigslist." I mean, it exists here. It gets some use. But most people use the online classifieds from ksl.com, the local TV station. At least, I think it is a TV station. I've never watched it, but everyone uses their online classifieds instead of craigslist. Their site also is ugly, and full of difficult buyers and poo…

Similarly, Kijiji actually found success in Canada, and has quite a bit more traffic than Craigslist for most cities here.

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#43

Post by SN76477 »

ulkram wrote: post #34
grapevines wrote: post #3

Network effect, reliability, free, anonymous, ability to run without JavaScript. If Craigslist decided to modernize today, they could potentially disrupt the state of things on the internet. Facebook is trying to move in on their territory for sure. Unfortunately, I don't think they will. If a new-kid-on-the-block could offer anonymity, reliability, and free regional market based transactions, with preferably integra…

I'm not sure anonymous is always a good thing for CL. When I'm buying/selling stuff on CL, I wish I had more info on who I'm dealing with.

But that responsibility shouldn't fall on Craigslist who is a simple service provider.

Im sure that you can ask people on craigslist for a phone number, meet in a public place, etc.

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#44

Post by GoodbyeEarl »

grapevines wrote: post #3

Network effect, reliability, free, anonymous, ability to run without JavaScript. If Craigslist decided to modernize today, they could potentially disrupt the state of things on the internet. Facebook is trying to move in on their territory for sure. Unfortunately, I don't think they will. If a new-kid-on-the-block could offer anonymity, reliability, and free regional market based transactions, with preferably integra…

I'd really like to know how to deal with users input, forms and other stuff without JS. Every tutorial we see today is like "throw tons of JS to this problem and it shall work".

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#45

Post by tsm »

GoodbyeEarl wrote: post #44
grapevines wrote: post #3

Network effect, reliability, free, anonymous, ability to run without JavaScript. If Craigslist decided to modernize today, they could potentially disrupt the state of things on the internet. Facebook is trying to move in on their territory for sure. Unfortunately, I don't think they will. If a new-kid-on-the-block could offer anonymity, reliability, and free regional market based transactions, with preferably integra…

I'd really like to know how to deal with users input, forms and other stuff without JS. Every tutorial we see today is like "throw tons of JS to this problem and it shall work".

Vanilla forms just GET or POST to some server endpoint with all of the s passed in as query parameters. Frameworks (e.g., Rails) put some syntactic sugar on it, but that's really all that's happening. If the form submission contains invalid input, it's customary to return to the form page (with all the values already filled out) and show a server-generated message about what went wrong.

JS is absolutely not required for any of it.

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#46

Post by wazanator »

The main problem Craigslist still has is that it does not have an official mobile app which is actually why I started using a competitors service. It's a lot easier on a phone to endlessly scroll through items via an app then it is to go to the CL website. CL is fine when I'm sitting down in front of a computer but if I'm on the bus I want to just be able to use my thumb to quickly flip through.

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#47

Post by CaptSpify »

GoodbyeEarl wrote: post #44
grapevines wrote: post #3

Network effect, reliability, free, anonymous, ability to run without JavaScript. If Craigslist decided to modernize today, they could potentially disrupt the state of things on the internet. Facebook is trying to move in on their territory for sure. Unfortunately, I don't think they will. If a new-kid-on-the-block could offer anonymity, reliability, and free regional market based transactions, with preferably integra…

I'd really like to know how to deal with users input, forms and other stuff without JS. Every tutorial we see today is like "throw tons of JS to this problem and it shall work".

Is this what you mean: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp ?

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#49

Post by ska »

smallgovt wrote: post #8

I find it interesting that there's a general undertone that CL is being "honorable" by choosing to not make more profit. I have no doubt Craig's intentions were honorable, but in reality, his refusal to make money to fund the site's innovation is hurting society. His users are screaming "TAKE MY MONEY AND MAKE THE SITE (MY LIFE) BETTER", but he refuses to do so and everyone is worse off because of it! In a way, it's…

Moving a product in the direction of higher profit, and even more starkly, more revenue, is not at all the same thing as moving in the direction of higher value. This is often mistakenly conflated.

Another possibility is that CL has reached a local maxima and they can't see an easy way out of it that isn't actually reducing (globally) value to their customers. I'm somewhat playing devils advocate but it is plausible.

After all, many of the "innovations" suggested in the comments here have actually been tried by other services - ones that on average have not succeeded nearly as well as CL. Some of which were pretty terrible.

You can interpret this as due to network effect, or due to CL just providing more value, or some mix. But you have to at least accept the possibility that the other views are correct. It's easy to point at feature "A" in something like CL and say "I can make that better by just doing B". It's a lot harder to understand the effect of "B" across a large, diverse, heterogeneous user population.

Maybe CL just hasn't seen a compelling improvement yet?

Re: Craigslist Is Ugly, Janky, Old School, and Unbeatable

#50

Post by xyzzy4 »

stephancoral wrote: post #33
37 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If Craigslist decided to modernize today I misread this as "decided to monetize today" and interpreted an IPO. Has Craigslist ever thought about this? Any thoughts?

Craigslist has nearly $300 million in profit and only around 30 employees. Why on earth would they ever want to go public?

Public stock is much more liquid.
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