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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

#81

Post by pilom »

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…

On the contrary, I think they have literally made the perfect site for what they do. I like it ugly because it is also FAST!!! I have no UI qualms at all about it. Any change they made would make me less likely to use the site. What exactly would you like them to spend $300 million a year on "improving?"

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

#82

Post by pilom »

bargh1920 wrote: post #21
fnovd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps Craig simply understands his business better than you do. Are the loudest users the ones providing him with the most profit? If not, then why not ignore them? Would being involved as a true middleman leave them more open to liability when things go south? If so, why open yourself to that risk if you are already making profit? If you really think CL is so under-utilized, why hasn't a larger company bought t…

Take a look at Ebay's acquisition attempt on CL. CL wasn't interested. Also, it's not about listening to loud users. It's about understanding whether your users (any of them) are willing to pay you to improve the site. And, the answer to that is a resounding yes.

I have seen no proof that users are willing to pay to improve craigslist. I like it just the way it is. It's like a unix tool, it does one thing and does it really well. If you wanted it prettier, you could make a browser extension to change the UI. What other changes could they make that wouldn't decrease it's value for other current users?

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

#83

Post by joe_the_user »

20years wrote: post #63

Am I the only one who doesn't think Craigslist is "Ugly or Janky"? It's one of the only places left on the web where I can go and not be bombarded by ads, pop ups, crazy amount of JavaScript and slow loading. It just works and is intuitive to use. The only major thing I feel is missing is the ability to search through multiple locations at the same time.

It seems like most of the complaints about craigslist (including those in the article) are ultimately complaints about what it's like to buy stuff from a random person in your area. People are messy, arbitrary and annoying if you don't know them and you only want to buy something from them. People are part of all sorts of social groups with all sorts of standards of behavior.

The dream of creating an app that can shield a person from all the uncertainty of buying from an individual is appealing - but I don't see how you could really offer a better deal. The problem is that however smoothly you put two people in touch, those two people will have to do lots of annoying work coming to an agreement and it's hard to see a lot saved by this initial increased smoothness. Oh, and if you filter out the annoying people, you filter out a lot of people who actually have stuff to sell too.

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

#84

Post by pilom »

tempestn wrote: post #55
ska wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

One improvement they could make that seems like an unambiguous win for society would be an open API. That way they could continue to run the site however they like, but people interested in other experiences could seek them out as well. I can see why a business might prefer to keep a monopoly on their data (although there are business advantages to providing an API as well), but I can't see any argument from a purely…

This seems like a bad example. There is no money at all for them to make an API and it wouldn't get more people coming to craigslist.com. At the same time it would require additional server resources. So why bother?

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

#85

Post by walterbell »

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?

What's their annual revenue?

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

#86

Post by cc439 »

tempestn wrote: post #55
ska wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

One improvement they could make that seems like an unambiguous win for society would be an open API. That way they could continue to run the site however they like, but people interested in other experiences could seek them out as well. I can see why a business might prefer to keep a monopoly on their data (although there are business advantages to providing an API as well), but I can't see any argument from a purely…

I think there's a reasonable argument for Craigslist's aversion to offering an API and it's all down to performance and operating costs.

Craigslist manages to offer what may be the last free webservice that hasn't been forced to sell the personal information of its users and/or turn into an ad-infested mess. It manages to make a modest profit by running incredibly lean in terms of manpower and server resources. The incredibly quick and clean interface is a huge appeal for users.

The problem with building an API is that you have now exposed your efficiently minimized infrastructure to the insatiable demand of content scrapers. The resources demanded by a search on a site like Padmapper are greater than those demanded by the same search made on CL. While a smart API implementation isn't the equivalent to loading every relevant listing, some data must be pulled from every one of those listings in order to populate the Padmapper map and provide filters for its users.

My point is that an API would not only increase the demand for resources which CL must pay for, it would break their minimized monetization strategy that keeps the site cleaner and more usable than any other rival. While they could charge for access to the API, the amount they would have to charge would likely break the business model of sites like Padmapper. Padmapper was also relatively clean and ad free but require them to pay any sort of fee for access to Craigslist's data and they'd have to ruin their user experience in order to stay afloat.

Craigslist is minimal for more reasons than simplicity for the developers and users. It's minimal because that's the only way their business model works.

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

#87

Post by jameshart »

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…

Does craigslist's UI work really well without JS? I mean, sure, it looks lo-fi, but there's still a ton of script on most pages, and the submission process is definitely pretty dynamic. If anything, CL looks more like a relic of the DHTML era of 'designed for IE4' web design.

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

#89

Post by thunderstrike »

aantix wrote: post #76
20years wrote: post #63

Am I the only one who doesn't think Craigslist is "Ugly or Janky"? It's one of the only places left on the web where I can go and not be bombarded by ads, pop ups, crazy amount of JavaScript and slow loading. It just works and is intuitive to use. The only major thing I feel is missing is the ability to search through multiple locations at the same time.

But if they just wrote an SPA and overrode the back button behavior and displayed a little spinner icon while html was loaded via json, your experience would be so much better.

/s

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

#90

Post by dlwj »

There's an interesting series of tweets here: http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa59...

It outlines a model of "supernova" companies. Companies that initially earmark such a large market that they implode, creating the materials for many other companies. AirBnB for example is just a small chunk of craigslist. Twitter may be in the process of exploding, being unable to capture or tame the reaction.

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