Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all

by raju • 17 years ago

58 29 17 years ago

The real question is why are people so pissed off that Craigslist does it's thing and does it well.

The noise seems mainly that people want to make more money on classifieds and they can't because Craigslist nailed it and you can't knock them out of the spot.

Their UI is dead simple and it saves them unimaginable amounts of bandwidth. They are more like Google than anything else in that respect.

nir2• 17 years ago

The thing is, people aren't pissed off. People made Craigslist a huge success. This article is like these "I've been doing LAMP for 2 years now. So, here's what Google should do.." blog posts, except that Wired doesn't have the excuse of being young and naive.

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

Actually, the article mentions that people aren't pissed off and that Craigslist is a huge success:

>>""I hear this all the time," Buckmaster says. "You guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen. Don't you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post—we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right."

>>"The truth is that a lot of people complain about craigslist. Buckmaster is correct that few of them complain about the design. They complain about spam, they complain about fraud, they complain about the posting rules, they complain about the search, they complain about uploading images. They complain about every way a classified transaction can go wrong. They seldom complain about amazing new features they imagine they might possibly want to use, because they are too busy complaining about the simple features they depend on that don't work as well as they'd like. By eliminating marketing, sales, and business development, craigslist's programmers have cut out all the cushioning layers that separate them from the users they serve, and any right they have to teach lessons in public service comes from the odd situation of running a company that is directly subservient only to the public. "

dan_the_welder2• 17 years ago

I meant certain people.

wglb• 17 years ago

"Be yourself because everybody else is taken." Good for him that he does what he feels is right regardless whatever is the judgment of the pundits.

timmaah• 17 years ago

My only compliant is categories and searching.

For example my side hobby is old Volkswagens. Since they have no way to categorize vehicles that are for sale, I have a few bookmarks with crazy search strings. VW + (1951|1952|1953.. etc)

Add to that fact that you can only search one section of craigslist at a time, I have crazy search string bookmarks for like 5 sections of craigslist. I'd like to see a craigslist central where my searches span states and regions.

Other then that I love the dead simple UI and no ads.

warfangle• 17 years ago

They pretty much ignore the simple tenant of web design:

make it dead simple for new users

and powerful enough for the power-users*

It's sad, but it's the best place for apartments in nyc.. and the listings are incredibly polluted: apartments listed in the wrong neighborhoods, without a location, lies about nearness to subways ("steps from the subway!" - but when you look up the intersection they list [if they list it], it's a 10 minute bus-ride away from the nearest train).. flagging doesn't seem to help any, either - they just repost the same ad, over and over again...

*In Craigslist terms, this of course is the peruser, not the poster.

uiygbouybv3• 17 years ago

And would the sleazy realtor problem be solved by flash content and banner ads?

nfriedly• 17 years ago

This might help you somewhat, it allows you to search multiple sections: http://craigslist.remixedby.us/

raheemm• 17 years ago

Good for CL for sticking to its guns. It may sound ironic, but profit maximization does not have to be the sole purpose of a business.

iamwil2• 17 years ago

As a business philosophy, I've always found this difficult to explain to people. One could do profit maximization, but often at the expense of something else less measurable, such as customer loyalty.

misuba2• 17 years ago

There are cases where asking for money would actually make the site deliver more value to everyone - personal ads, for example.

chops• 17 years ago

..such as customer loyalty

...the result of which is usually more profit.

hop• 17 years ago

Wired's editorials have fallen off a cliff. It'S sad, they used to be the best.

Craigslist make $100+M and growing with almost no overhead. Their UI works great, is very functional, and iconic. They have made it possible for millions to connect and saved consumers billions in classifieds. What has Conde Nast done?

uiygbouybv3• 17 years ago

>What has Conde Nast done? Lost a lot of money trying to sell ads in glossy magazines.

raganwald• 17 years ago

> What has Conde Nast done?

They bought reddit. Have a look and tell me what you think they've done with the place.

uiygbouybv3• 17 years ago

Can anyone else think of a site with very simple text content. No social net beyond a login, no popup games for friends?

Perhaps one that lists news stories for hackers?

tom_rath• 17 years ago

4chan. Even more spartan and insanely popular.

die_sekte• 17 years ago

AnonTalk is even simpler. But it's also filled with pedophiles and its admin is a spammer and a dick.

The concept is great. But the execution? Ugh.

njharman• 17 years ago

I might be wrong a bit cause I use adblock (for instance I was surprised when someone told me reddit has ads)

google.com and most other search engines.

twitter.com

wikipedia.com

most "we're a list of links possibly with voting/commenting sites".

tvon• 17 years ago

Craigslist is a mess because people like it that way.

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

Did the negative commenters here even read the article? It acknowledges the success of the Craigslist model and evenhandedly states opinions from Craigslist critics and Craigslist insiders. The site's quirkiness makes the author puzzled, not angry. The article is written as an exploration of a mystery, not a Jeremiad. Moreover, it is only part I in a series.

From the comments here, I get the impression that many people just read the title. For shame! Hacker News is supposed to have higher standards.

fnid• 17 years ago

It's almost September.

sehender• 17 years ago

Another wildly successful example of simplicity dominating an industry can be found at Plenty of Fish, where they are doing the same thing to the online dating world.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...

"Today, according to the research firm Hitwise, his creation is the largest dating website in the U.S. and quite possibly the world. Its traffic is four times that of the dating pioneer Match, which has annual revenue of $350 million and a staff that numbers in the hundreds. Until 2007, Frind had a staff of exactly zero. Today, he employs just three customer service workers, who check for spam and delete nude images from the Plenty of Fish website while Frind handles everything else."

Eliezer• 17 years ago

I'm not in any web startup, nor selling ads to anyone. I am an ordinary Craigslist user. And spam has rendered many categories nearly unusable for me.

I want them to charge a one-time registration fee of $10 to post apartments for rent in the Bay Area. Might be a good idea to do it in cars, too. This would be revoked for people who posted the same ad more than once a week, and they'd have to pay another $10.

I want to be able to see a Google map of classifieds' locations.

I want feedback, eBay style.

I actually resent Craigslist for having a dominant market position and being so dedicated to simplicity, because it means that there aren't Hacker News types to try out different things and maybe give me some of the features I want. This is a user speaking, Craig! If you won't complicate things yourself, then please put up an API so that other people can do it!

Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess

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