
Why the Web Hasn't Birthed a Prettier Craigslist - danso
http://mashable.com/2013/02/17/prettier-craigslist/
======
robomartin
One nice thing about CL: They get out of the way.

I haven't sold anything on eBay in probably two years because they are (or can
be and have been) down-right horrible to sellers. Imagine having your entire
Paypal account embargoed for a month because some guy complained about
shipping costs. And this after having fifteen opportunities to NOT bid, each
of which --and the listing-- clearly disclosed shipping costs.

On CL you get back to a truer buyer-seller relationship. If you don't have
social problems (meaning you actually like engaging with people in person) CL
is fantastic. I like shaking someone's hand after closing a win-win deal.

Yes, the CL site sucks. Obviously utility trumps design by a longshot. I love
nice design but I always remind myself of CL when stressing over "pixel
perfect design" (a tendency I have). people don't use a service because they
are in awe of the design, they use it because of what they get out of it.

~~~
dfrankow
I hate selling things on craigslist. When I tried to sell a comforter, I had
to correspond via email with 9 different people before someone would actually
come and pick up the damn thing. They kept dropping out silently. When I would
ping them, they'd say, "Oh, I bought a different one." or "I decided to buy it
from <blah website>."

The problem is there is no reputation on craigslist, so people can be as bad
as they want.

I can't compare that to ebay, tho. Maybe ebay is worse for a seller.

------
rm999
I've long considered CL one of the biggest tragedies of the internet age. The
problem is it's _just_ good enough to prevent competitors from gaining
critical mass, but it's not good enough to consistently do an adequate job.
There's a huge pent-up demand for what CL provides, including local person-to-
person commerce, sublets, apartment hunting, job hunting etc. I probably use
CL about 2-3 times a year, and I end up regretting it about half the time.

I think the primary thing that is missing is a system to establish the
reputation of both parties. CL could tie accounts to real identities, and let
users rate each other. But CL has no need to innovate. I agree with the
article that it acts like a monopoly.

~~~
arbitrage
In your opinion, what job is it that CL fails to address adequately in a
consistent fashion?

Ignore the real identity / account reputation issue, which nobody has managed
to solve in an adequate fashion. What is it that CL promises, that it fails to
follow through on?

~~~
crazygringo
Um, OK. How about the fact that apartment listings in NYC are basically 95%
spam, with brokers advertising apartments that don't exist, to pull a bait and
switch when you call -- including on the specifically non-broker pages?

Searching by price is broken (look for $500 listings and it will return $500
daily, $500 weekly, $500 monthly, all mixed up together). Searching by
neighborhood is broken, since it relies on keywords (which can vary, and are
full of spam besides) instead of actual lat/lon.

I could probably write a book on everything that is broken, and that's just on
the apartment stuff alone. (I understand it's better outside of NYC, but since
NYC is the largest city in the US, that doesn't really matter.)

~~~
scarecrowbob
"(I understand it's better outside of NYC, but since NYC is the largest city
in the US, that doesn't really matter.)"

I always think it's funny that the most cosmopolitan cities can breed the most
parochial attitudes.

~~~
crazygringo
Maybe I worded it badly -- there's no attitude, I'm just saying that if a site
has something broken for its largest domestic group of customers, but it works
for everyone else, it doesn't matter -- it's broken period, and not an edge
case.

~~~
18pfsmt
I've always thought of CL as a community/local site, meaning it is up to the
community to really shape it. CL can provide guidance and tools, but it is
still up to the community; for example, if your community actively uses the
flagging feature to cut down on posts that make the site worse, those posts
will decrease in occurrence. NYC has ~14M people, so it is just harder to
create a community that agrees on what is and isn't appropriate.

------
danso
FYI, for people who have not been on Craigslist in awhile...it's also been a
long time for me since I've used the service...I was just about to complain
that CL doesn't need a radical redesign, it just needs features grafted on
that users could _choose_.

For example, whenever I do apartment/furniture searching, I'll write a script
to pull down the links so I can create my own webview of the links juxtaposed
with the images...but I just checked the site and I guess CL has created a
number of different views for the traditional list, including thumbnail-
listings, a grid-layout, and mapping:

[http://nyc.craigslist.org/search/sya?zoomToPosting=&altV...](http://nyc.craigslist.org/search/sya?zoomToPosting=&altView=imggrid&query=&srchType=A&minAsk=&maxAsk=)

I guess this was just added recently?

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/03/craigslist-finally-gets-
mor...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/03/craigslist-finally-gets-more-
pinteresting-adds-photo-grid-view-for-visual-browsing/)

~~~
revorad
I just realised that craigslist map view is a burglar's dream tool.

------
vyrotek
There's actually a fast growing trend to use Facebook groups to sell things.
They call them "24/7 Yardsales". They'll make a group for each city and then
people bid through the comments. Some of the groups have over 8000 members.
The experience is a bit different though compared to normal classifieds. The
reason they refer to them as yardsales is because the members of the groups
usually aren't looking for something specific. They're all just 'window
shopping' for deals and Facebook notifies them instantly when something new is
available.

My wife was pretty active in these groups and eventually came to me saying
that a lot of people wished there was a better way to do this. So, I did what
any good husband would do and spent a few weeks putting a site together for
them. I combined her two favorite things. Pinterest & Yardsales.
<http://yardable.com> (It was a nice excuse to play with some new tech too :P)
All the items and users on the site are legit. I found some humor in the fact
that the first items officially sold on Yardable were my old CS college books.
I felt as if I had passed on the torch.

I wish I had more time to work on this. I got as far as building an API for a
few people who wanted to build the mobile app for me. It seems like there's
some interest in something better than Craigslist with more 'browsing' type
features. There are a few startups out there working on this I believe. One of
them is a YC company called <http://www.getyardsale.com> which went with the
mobile approach first. Monetizing these ideas through something besides ads
seems a bit challenging though.

~~~
revorad
Surely making money on these ideas is straightforward - take a cut of the
transaction. The hard part is solving the chicken-and-egg problem.

The Yardsale app seems quite good, but no one uses it here in London. Is it
popular in SF or other parts of America?

~~~
vyrotek
You can't take a part of the transaction since they all happen in-person with
cash.

Not sure about Yardsale. None of the people around here knew about it. There's
definitely a chicken & egg problem in this space. But I could see these things
spread through small communities first. I had hundreds of registered users in
a couple of weeks from Utah and watched it spread to Idaho and Arizona pretty
quickly.

~~~
revorad
_You can't take a part of the transaction since they all happen in-person with
cash._

Ebay proves otherwise.

~~~
vyrotek
Well, eBay allows people to sell things to each other across the world/country
which solves a different problem. Most of the people selling things on
classifieds have no interest in having to go to the post office to ship your
item and deal with paypal or something to get money. The items on these
yardsale groups sell within minutes and someone comes to your door with cash
in hand and the item is gone. People really like and trust the community
aspect of selling things this way.

~~~
revorad
Plenty of people buy and sell on ebay within small local communities with a
pickup only option. The trust factor comes from being in the same community
and doing at least one good transaction. The mode of payment has nothing to do
with it. In fact, it would be better if you didn't have to deal with cash.

Just because things have been done in a certain way doesn't mean they can't be
done better.

------
mcargian
Replace "Craigslist" with "Classified Ads" and the same thing can be said for
over 100 years. ugly, spammy time waster calls for your ads, fake apartment
listings (or worse scams), sex trafficking and more. I don't see how any of
those things (other than perhaps "ugly") are immediately fixable on CL or any
other site.

Personally I've done dozens of local CL transactions safely, securely and with
a minimum of inconvenience.

------
jsdalton
The conversation here reminds me of the discussions last week around Microsoft
Excel: Craigslist is a tool that techies seem to universally deplore, but
every non-techie I know uses it regularly and without much complaint.

~~~
geoka9
I'm a techie and I like to use craigslist. I like that it's fast and to the
point. I couldn't care less about the lack of fancy design.

(Not every techie is a web design aficionado.)

------
antirez
There is worse than that. In Italy several companies tried to establish as the
"Italian Craigslist", using a lot of money too, and nobody succeeded so we
have a fragmentation of small sites but no one is really used enough, updated
enough, ... basically is all useless outdated stuff.

------
niggler
The problem is that the target audience, as a whole, doesn't necessarily care
about prettiness. It's functional, it works, and the users are comfortable
with the design, so there's no _need_ to fix it.

I am reminded of Digg's redesign and descension.

~~~
lh7777
I think the title of this article is a little misleading. It's easy to bash
Craigslist over their dated (or lack of) style, but the problem with
Craigslist really comes down to usability, which is not the same thing as
prettiness.

Craigslist _could_ make lots of feature and UI improvements to their site to
make it easier to find and post, but they choose not to for the most part. If
they did, sites like PadMapper probably wouldn't exist. Instead of innovating
themselves, they've focused on trying to kill other companies innovating in
this space.

------
hartator
I think this article miss an important point, Craiglist does the job. It's not
fancy and the content is poorly written and it's the reason why people want to
post to it. They don't want to understand a new system with reputation or
painful other features, you just take your add, throw 2/3 lines, a dirty
picture and it's done. There is scam but in the other it's easy to post or to
reply, it's about free market and responsibility (mainly my point is: we are
not babies). Moreover, Craiglist is cheap or free so why caring? I mean your
are using obviously using Hacker News and maybe reddit, we can say the same
about them.

Though, I totally agree about the law suits. They shouldn't do that. I think
it hurts their businesses for gaining only short term partnerships. This is
the real issue, not UI.

I am interested in knowing what people are missing from the UI perspective?
Reputation is bullshit for individuals and Favorites is gadget, so what else?

~~~
rgbrgb
Here's one example:

If I'm looking for an apartment close to work, I'd much rather pull up a map
centered on my workplace and see the listings on the map. That's what
padmapper (<https://www.padmapper.com/>) was allowing me to do. With the
unchanging Craigslist, I choose a neighborhood (which could be huge and I
could be on the border of) and hunt through a long list, clicking on every
post to check where it really is.

It would definitely be nice if it was a bit prettier but there are usability
issues that they don't address (and prevent others from addressing) because
they have a monopoly on a certain network.

~~~
drstewart
Craigslist has a map feature now.

------
taylonr
It's not that it hasn't been tried before.

I would guess it's similar to Atwood and his new Discourse platform. It looks
nice, and developers & designers get excited about it. But one reason forum
software hasn't been dramatically overhauled in the last 10-15 years is
because it's working for most people.

I've sold plenty of junk on craigslist and I've bought a few things from there
as well. I did the same thing with Freecycle and Cheapcycle when we lived in a
town that did those. None of those were glamorous. In addition, the people I
met there were from all walks of life.

I get why startups think CL is ugly and not useful, but go do a UI overhaul
and sit back for the barrage of hate that is going to come from the core
users.

------
jonknee
The design is the least of Craigslist's problems. The scams and spam are what
turn me off.

------
stcredzero
For the some of the same reasons why somewhat crummy, but still more or less
serviceable student apartments exist. It has sufficient utility. The landlords
make enough money. And in the end, what choice is there, really? Then on top
of that, add the network effect.

------
xradionut
Because CL works well enough. My spouse and I found a virtually new wheelchair
for a friend with MS in two days with no middleman fee or hassle.

For niches, there's alternatives. My family and friends use other sites estate
sales, radio gear, land sales, apartments, handymen, etc...

------
ibudiallo
I found all my jobs on Craigslist . I love it just the way it is.

If those people are so frustrated with CL design they should make their own
and build their own community.

------
eri
It has.

But prettier full-featured CLs exist in specific verticals (e.g. AirBNB), so
we don't compare them to CL.

To do what CL aims to do, the simple directory style is necessary, I think.

------
fudged71
In Canada a lot of people use Kijiji instead of Craigslist. It's a bit better,
and there are mobile apps as well.

------
forgotAgain
tl;dr

Don't know. It really was to long and I didn't finish reading it.

