

Ask HN: Is it time for Craigslist to improve?  - lbrdn

I have been consumed lately with Craigslist in terms of how it has a stranglehold on the online classified marketplace, how many millions of people they serve, and how they have done little to improve the experience, in terms of protections, from that of the newspaper. Regularly, people are defrauded, products are misrepresented, and gigs/jobs turn out to be bogus.<p>Do these type of interactions have to occur in the existing anonymous, buyer beware, as-represented kind of world, or could craigslist still serve its invaluable purpose while protecting its users at the same time?<p>(I am only considering the housing, for sale, services, jobs, and gig sections in this inquiry. It’s probable that most, if not all, of the allure in the personals section is the uncertainty and anonymity of the interaction. However, I don’t think this is true of the sections to be considered above.)
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DanielStraight
Improve to what? Craigslist is ranked 29th in the world. I think the real
problem is that we don't know what "improve" really means. Apparently,
Craigslist has already improved to be better than all but 28 other websites in
the world (and a substantial portion of those are just various Google sites).
Why do we think we could do better?

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unalone
There's a difference between popular and better.

I'm not saying that Craigslist isn't good. I'm saying that if it wants to
redesign, it should redesign because its creators want it to be different.

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kirpekar
Craigslist is the epitome of simplicity. _Any_ change would complicate it and
reduce it's usefulness.

I think the guys at CL understand that.

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brk
Craigslist is a good indicator of the world at large in regards to fraud and
such.

You could make it "better", but you would find the overhead required to make
it better would also require a lot more resources to operate properly.

So, you'd have to charge for more things, which would likely lead to decreased
usage and accessibility to society at large, which ends up with the exact
inverse of what you were trying to do.

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lbrdn
brk, thanks for the response.

What do you mean by "a good indicator ... to fraud and such?" Are you implying
that fraud should be accepted as just something inherent in society and
shouldn't be something we try and prevent? Also, I would contend that the
facebook marketplace has less fraud than the craigslist marketplace, thus
giving craigslist something they could shoot for.

Also, I'd like to refine "better" to "safer". General feel and aesthetics are
subjective where as safety is objective.

Craigslist leaves millions, if not billions, of dollars on the table every
year, it would only take the inclusion of one or two more markets in their
pay-to-post-real-estate stream in order to hire some really smart developers
to come up with smart and subtle fraud prevention mechanisms. It's possible
for them to raise some dough for this issue without harming the culture, so
why shouldn't they?

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brk
Craigslist is a fairly unfiltered portal into society. It is not based on
relationships like facebook, it does not require more extensive seller
verification like ebay. It is basically the newspaper classifieds in an online
format with only a twinge of technology sprinkled in.

Craigslist is easy to use and the primarily text-driven approach means it is
accessible to even users on dial-up connections (and although you might think
this rare, I still know people in the US who have no viable high-speed
Internet options and are using dial-up).

Fraud is, IMO, inherent in society. Manipulative and creative people have been
taking advantage of trusting or less educated people since man first
implemented a monetary instrument.

I think part of the make-a-better-Craigslist camp is similar to some of the
confusion around the mint.com sale... Not everybody has the same
motivations... I don't think Craigslist wants to be the best/safest/most-
diverse online classifieds system. I think they want to be the easiest,
simplest, I-can-go-home-at-night-and-not-be-bothered online classifieds
system. There are many things they could do to be "better", but I don't
believe the cost and complexity is worth the impact on the lives of the
employees and the business overall.

There is a market opportunity for an improved Craigslist, but it's a little
bit of an end-of-the-rainbow pursuit.

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pg
It's time for Airbnb, Listia, and RentHop! (And one other, as yet
unannounced.)

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fossuser
[http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_...](http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all)

A decent article discussing why Craigslist won't change.

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byoung2
I think craigslist would offer a better experience if it had user ratings, but
that would definitely cut down usage, because anonymity is a big draw.

