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.
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?
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.)
Eh, I sorta agree. But applying some basic math to this page[1], we find that 4% of American households that rent, are renting an NYC apartment. That's a pretty sizable chunk.
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.
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.
I've been dealing with this for the last few weeks. It's not just NYC that suffers from this problem, I've been apartment hunting on CL in San Antonio and it's all spam.
I've been thinking about writing a short script to filter listings by phone number—that seems to be the common element between brokerage listings.
Two issues. The first is the most important to me: I simply can't trust the other party a priori. I've had so many poor experiences on craigslist, including scams, clearly stolen items for sale, misleading descriptions, no-shows. This is why I think the identity/reputation issue is so important. If ebay needs a reputation system, craigslist needs it even more (CL is inherently more dangerous because you meet in-person and exchange cash). It's not just safety, I also value my time and every issue is wasted time.
The second isn't as big to me, but I do think searching craigslist is annoying and suboptimal. CL is a solution that worked great in 1998, but 15 years later it lags behind the standard web experience. Worse yet, as the article discusses, CL isn't just refusing to improve their user experience, they are refusing to let other people do so too.
Ask yourself this: how long did it take craigslist to deliver a basic feature, maps? Every scrappy web startup has had some kind of maps mash-up since 2004.
Craigslist only recently added maps, seemingly because padmapper was so useful that craigslist had no choice but to momentarily wake up from its 10 year coma and actually improve the site for once.
The article misses the point of specialist companies competing with subsections of CL. It's not just what's happening to CL, it's what's happening to every dominant classified site around the world.
Classified sites used to be the dominant player in all of the markets they covered, but the profitable ones (housing, dating, jobs, etc.) have been taken over by companies specializing in those sectors leaving the classified sites with mostly the dregs of the market.
Sure some people might use CL for jobs and dating, but by and large those are the people who don't want to pay. Which is why CL's annual revenue is less than what sites like Monster and Match.com make in a few months.
Agreed. Craigslist masquerades as some kind of pseudo non-profit (".org") like it's doing the world a favor being a barebones piece of crap. But the reality is that it's an entrenched monopoly squatting on a huge piece of economic land and letting it languish. There are so many features and services that could be useful in this space that just aren't getting created.
I sincerely hope that the courts demolish craigslist's attempts to block smaller players from creating actual utility in the classifieds market.
I appreciate a minimalist UI design. I really do. But I don't see it as mutually exclusive to providing genuinely useful features. IMO craigslist could add a number of features w/o sacrificing its core minimalism. Case in point: would you prefer Craigslist to drop the new maps feature?
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.