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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

#91

Post by Arcsech »

pcwalton wrote: post #32
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…

> ability to run without JavaScript I highly doubt more than 1% of Craigslist's userbase cares about this. The reasons are simple: first mover advantage and network effects.

If you said it that way, yeah. But it means that the site is nice to use on very low-end devices - you know, the sort used by people to whom the second-hand market is very important, because they can't afford high-end devices.

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

#92

Post by adventured »

dlwj wrote: post #90

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 reactio…

Disappointing article. This for example:

> Twitter "failing" to own the revolutions it obviously took mainstream (messaging, chatbots) isn't a failure really if viewed that way

Twitter in no way made messaging mainstream. It had absolutely nothing to do with it. Twitter's peer to peer messaging system being so horrific is one of the reasons it failed (WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc. took advantage of that screw-up). ICQ, AOL, MSN messengers, MySpace and Facebook, all did drastically more to take messaging concepts mainstream (the messengers had hundreds of millions of users before Twitter even existed). Twitter was late to the party and showed up with the wrong solution.

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

#94

Post by quasse »

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".

Where is your user input going in the end? If it's going to a server, I sure hope you're validating it there.

Anything you do on the client side via JavaScript can be bypassed by the end user and provides no guarantees about the input you receive.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

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".

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by whack »

Let's be honest, Craigslist is a horrible product and the only reason it's so popular, is because of network effects. Never underestimate the power of incumbency, and getting in on the ground floor of a rocket. The same thing can also be said for half the monopoly-companies out there, and half the politicians currently in office.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

phil21 wrote: post #41
smallgovt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by teddyh »

CaptSpify wrote: post #47
GoodbyeEarl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Please don’t ever link to w3schools.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Forms

https://www.w3.org/TR/html51/sec-forms.html#sec-forms

http://caniuse.com/#feat=forms

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

#99

Post by csharpminor »

1_2__3 wrote: post #77
csharpminor wrote: post #19

I actually think that Craigslist will come to see tough competition from Facebook Marketplace. Facebook has the existing user base to get a network effect, has a much better UI, notifications, and solves for the worry of meeting someone who is a complete unknown. Will be interesting to see if Facebook chips away at the Craigslist user-base over the next few years.

I'm skeptical FB will make inroads here. One of the bedrocks of FB, positive or negative, is that it connects together people who already know each other in some way. Craigslist is the polar opposite of that.

I don't think that argument it applicable to Facebook Marketplace. It allows you to see anything for sale in your region, not by friend circles. You may be thinking of Facebook groups that are used to buy and sell items?

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

#100

Post by csharpminor »

quadrangle wrote: post #40
csharpminor wrote: post #19

I actually think that Craigslist will come to see tough competition from Facebook Marketplace. Facebook has the existing user base to get a network effect, has a much better UI, notifications, and solves for the worry of meeting someone who is a complete unknown. Will be interesting to see if Facebook chips away at the Craigslist user-base over the next few years.

You're probably right, but that would be tragic.

Agreed that it would be tragic. After completing a few marketplace transactions though I think the writing's on the wall that Facebook's out to unseat CL. They've even put the app center-stage on the native nav bar.

CL has the benefit (and costs) of anonymity, as well as more diverse content. Hopefully they can keep the network effect going.

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