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Two very different user bases though. Craigslist is more of a, 'Go there to accomplish specific task' end point. Reddit is more of a, 'hang out here when your
by w0m 9y ago
Two very different user bases though.
Craigslist is more of a, 'Go there to accomplish specific task' end point.
Reddit is more of a, 'hang out here when your bored!' type of thing.
The former just has to work and work cleanly. The latter needs to hold it's users interest over time while staying 'hip' enough to gain users from potential competitors to stay relevant overtime.
- Jtsummers 9y agoFark, like Reddit, is a place people go to to "hang out", and its design doesn't seem to have substantially changed over the years.
- tyleraldrich 9y agoReddit is also the 6th most popular website in the world, and likely gets thousands of potential new users daily that are turned off by the design and don't become Reddit addicts.
- TremendousJudge 9y agoThis puts them just below Google, Youtube, Facebook, Baidu and Wikipedia[1]. That's absolutely huge. If the interface was so bad surely they wouldn't have been able to get there now, would they? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites
- what_ever 9y agoHow would you know if it's not holding them back?
- sli 9y agoSo, bear with me on this, because I'm certain a lot of us have tech-illiterate parents and will understand what I'm getting at here. I'm not sure Fark is the best example, given that their demographic seems to be middle-aged folks (or at least older than the Millennial age range). You can't really (or simply shouldn't) do sweeping design changes if your demographic is aging. Every time I wander over to that site, it becomes very clear that a lot of the users are at least a decade older than me (likely in their 40s and 50s). If it were a tech site, that's one thing, but Fark is more of a site for just anyone. Targeting that wider demo is going to attract less tech-minded and likely less-adaptable users compared to, say, a similar site where the userbase throws around a lot of lingo. reddit on the other hand can more or less assume that the users that stick around will figure out the new site. They're probably right, or at least not horribly wrong, and are instead banking on retaining just a majority of users, not all of them.
- tomtheelder 9y agoSort of posted this elsewhere, but I think Craigslist is suffering from this as well. It seems to be losing market share from what I can tell. I showed up on their site for the first time about a year ago to buy and sell furniture, and was so turned off by it. Ended up using a different platform. Visual appeal is extremely powerful, and it's valuable to virtually any product.
- volkl48 9y agoIf it is suffering from anything, I'd suggest Craigslist is suffering more from the number of scam/spam/low-effort posts ("Honda for sale." No model, mileage, photos, etc in the post) that you have to sort through or the tricks you have to use to avoid them. ex: When searching for an apartment, I always have to put a price floor in place because everything more than ~25% below market is pure spam and there's a ton of it. It wouldn't occur to the average person that they could filter a bunch of spam out by putting a lower limit on the price of the thing they're looking for, for example. So they get an even worse experience than me, and it's pretty painful to sort through even with various tricks like that in the filtering.
- sli 9y agoI went there recently for the first time in a while and was denied entry because I was using a VPN. Oh well.