Craigslist is the most UNBROKEN site on the web. It works flawlessly. Just yesterday I bought a cell phone from a local guy on Craigslist.
Scrolled down the page. Found the phone I wanted in the city I wanted for the price I wanted. Called him, met at a restaurant, paid for the phone, and we went on our way.
"if I'm looking to rent an apartment, it would be nice not to see the same listing reposted every day, and having to re-read it and figure out if I've called them before. It might be even nicer to view them on a map, or god forbid have new and relevant listing emailed to me."
Is that not broken? Sure sounds it to me.
I had my first experience of using AirBNB today. From start to finish it was an absolute pleasure; a real example of using some of theis "web 2.0" tech to provide a better experience to the user, and ultimately connect buyer to seller more efficiently. Excellent search experience, great integration with maps, ajax where it made sense, crowd sourcing was useful (feedback).
I don't know too much about the space but by the popularity of airbnb it certainly seems like it is disrupting at least one part of the space craigslist has historically occupied.
It's not broken, the apartment shopper is broken for not taking their own notes! Jeez, does Craigslist have to make up for everybody's personal failings?
I've heard of PLENTY of frustrated attempts to use Airbnb, enough that I would not use them without a Craigslist-level of (caveat-) emptorial vigilance. I wouldn't call your experience with them to be unbelievable, but Airbnb has not solved the Craigslist "random scammer" problem by any means.
And that is how most of my interactions with Craigslist have gone off.
However, there have been some more frustrating experiences. My friend getting his ad ghosted, when he was trying to post his mom's guest house for rent. And it costing them 3 months of rent because Craigslist didn't let on a peep that his ad was ghosted. And there really isn't any clue on how to find help, I got lucky and found the forums via a Google search for something like "Craigslist ad not showing up". Then there was the merry-go-round of pathetic employees I was trying to hire for the unskilled jobs in my warehouse. But that was back in 2008, before the bubble burst. The quality of the applicants I found in my more recent go at it was greatly improved. But the frustration now was 300 resumes showing up in my inbox in 12 hours, and sifting that down to 10 people to interview I guess I should not complain about that, it is a little frustrating though.
The bottom line is Craigslist will always be around because it works, and it works anywhere. There isn't any limited deployment like some of these startups that are piloting in 2 cities. And probably won't go nationwide for a long time, if at all. From what I read here on HN, the name of the game is for the startups to make the big sale and founders glide away on their golden parachutes, then the buyer crashes the company into the ground.
Click on Help and then click Help Desk at the bottom of the Help page. You have to be logged in. The discussions about ghosting are ongoing every 24 hours, someone usually posts a link to the "good" post that helps you out of the situation. But it's not guaranteed.
I've been trying to find summer housing on craigslist, and it's been mostly a failure. The biggest issue is the lack of semantic information in the listings. For example, every listing has a price, but it's mostly useless for filtering because some people list per day, some per week and some per month. There is also no place for listers to put the dates of availability (crucial information for temporary housing) except within the text itself.
Providing richer semantic information would alleviate many of the issues, but the very structure (taken directly from newspaper classifieds) seems unsuited to the web. In particular, why must people re-post every day in order to be seen? Why can't they have a single post which they can keep current and remove when it's been taken?
There are dozens obvious improvements, which could maintain the flavor while vastly improving the experience. Unfortunately, Craigslist still seems like the last word in the housing market, but hopefully that will change soon.
Scrolled down the page. Found the phone I wanted in the city I wanted for the price I wanted. Called him, met at a restaurant, paid for the phone, and we went on our way.
It was perfect.