
Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess - raju
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all
======
dan_the_welder
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.

~~~
nir
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.

~~~
jacoblyles
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. "

~~~
nir
Wired isn't ambiguous in the way it chooses to package this article: a title
like "Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess" and an "Extreme Makeover" section showing
how it _should_ look like (at least one of the suggestions resides firmly in
Designerland, where users upload nice little arty photos of their bikes, all
in the correct size and never a goatse image..)

As for the text itself, I'm still not sure if it's an intentional self-parody
or whether Wired seriously claims CL is closed and distrustful for letting
anyone post anonymously rather than requiring them to register and partake in
some "networking features", or that it has less value for not having tags.

I find the conclusion that all this has to do with "Newmark and Buckmaster's
wariness about what humans" particularly weird. Personally CL's approach of
getting out of the user's way seems a lot more humane to me than forcing the
latest UI trend on your users because the CEO read about it in last month's
Wired.

------
jacoblyles
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
It's almost September.

------
timmaah
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
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.

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

~~~
misuba
Well, that's one possible solution down. Maybe there are some others?

CL seems to feel that doing anything at all to fight the asshats just results
in giving the asshats more toys to play with... and for the obvious solutions,
that's true. What they need are some non-obvious solutions - which might
require them to spend a little more money than they're making today.

~~~
jongraehl
What possible solution would require spending more than the $100m/yr they're
making? Thousands of highly paid expert moderators?

------
hop
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?

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

------
raheemm
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.

~~~
iamwil
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.

~~~
chops
_..such as customer loyalty_

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

~~~
iamwil
Yes in the long run, but it's one step removed from something more immediate
like cutting cost or selling more. Immediate financial benefits Cutting cost
in general sounds good, but I think it should be taken in context of
everything else. Sometimes, business decisions are made without looking that
one step ahead.

If St. Exupery is right at all about longing for the immenseness of the sea, I
think just because you can profit max your customer, doesn't mean that you
should. Especially if you inspire to something your customers can believe in,
and if profit maximizing would take away from that belief.

------
uiygbouybv
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
4chan. Even more spartan and insanely popular.

~~~
die_sekte
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.

------
wglb
"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.

------
Eliezer
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!

------
sehender
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...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-
in.html)

"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."

------
tvon
Craigslist is a mess because people like it that way.

