9 ms·

>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site" Not sure about the definition of "improving the

• georgieporgie 16y ago
  Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. How about some sort of reputation system? And decent moderation? As it stands, CL is a great way to (not) meet flaky people, and to have your posts taken down on the indecipherable whims of a few obsessive users. I've gotten one job, bought a few things, sold one motorcycle, and gave away most of my possessions via CL, and it was consistently an awful, frustrating experience.
  • rhizome 16y ago
    It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," and there is a flag help forum on Craigslist to help explain how your ad might have trammeled your area's standards.
    • brianpan 16y ago
      I'd say the flag help forum (and the help forums in general) are prime examples of "consistently awful, frustrating experience".
    • georgieporgie 16y ago
      It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," As far as I'm aware, nobody knows what logic or thresholds are used by CL. Common wisdom is that it's "lots" but there seems to be no reason whatsoever to think that.
      • rhizome 16y ago
        As someone who actually does flag ads (as we all agree to do by using Craigslist), I can say that it's more than "a few." Just because they don't verify the numbers doesn't mean it's low. What purpose would that serve them? Look at it this way: read the comments here. Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible.
        • potatolicious 16y ago
          > "Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible." No, both are possible, and in fact both are true. Look at apartment listings - in any major city full of spam, obviously posting far more frequently than is allowed. I've tried flaggin these posts - but it looks like the flag threshold is proportionate to the category's traffic level. Which is to say, for something like apts/housing, very high. Makes sense on paper until you realize there aren't enough dedicated users policing to actually make the flags a working feature on these categories. So yes, shitty experience for browsers, chock full of spam. Turn around, look at smaller categories where the flag threshold seems to become very low (say, anything outside the realm of selling/renting physical goods), and it becomes a terrible place to sell. Perfectly innocuous posts are flagged off for inexplicable reasons (believe me, I've sat through the flag-help posts and seen plenty of these), and incredibly common for competing advertisers to use the flag feature offensively against similar postings. So yes, too easy to flag and terrible place to sell. You can insist all you like, and pretend that anyone who gets posts flagged is obviously doing something wrong - you'd be right there with the rest of flag-help after all, but that doesn't change the fact that the flag system is routinely abused and seriously compromises the credibility of CL. It's simultaneously too strict to filter to spam, and too lenient that it generates mass numbers of false positives. It's an utter failure of an abuse-detection scheme. Craigslist is ripe for being disrupted - it's already happened in some categories, and there is a lot of ache in the market for the others. For me it's been relatively little loss - I've been using the craigslist-disruptor-equivalent to gigs/creative and it works great, much better than CL.
    • potatolicious 16y ago
      Having had an ad inexplicably flagged, the flag help forum is no help at all, unless you consider random, uninformed speculation a form of help. For one thing, the tone of the flag help forum is that of a hazing circle. It's just a lot of people sitting around being snarky, making rude comments at relative novices and calling them names. Which might be easier to swallow if they actually provided any real help - but unless your post is bog-standard flag-bait the advice given is usually off the mark. I sat through a number of threads besides my own and it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements. Personally, I was looking for collaborative help in a photography project, and posted to gigs - but according to the great wisdom to flag-help I really should've been posting to services-creative instead (???) The problem here is also that there is no safeguard against other posters flagging each other's content. Using the flag feature to push competing postings off the page is depressingly common, and the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves.
      • rhizome 16y ago
        the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves. Correct, it's up to the poster to construct an ad that can stay up. Community standards are different from city to city, but it's not Craigslist's job to keep ads up that the community doesn't want to see. Where is the "accountability and reliability" in your newspaper's classifieds? You think some editor at the Star Tribune is double-checking that that muscle car being advertised isn't actually a bucket of bolts? The dominant "mechanism" or thought process I see getting thwarted on Craigslist is that since time-immemorial, classified ads (and really, ads in general) operated by the ethic of "Here it is, if you don't like it then you don't have to buy it (also: shut up)." Craigslist inverts this relationship and puts the power into the readers' hands: "You don't like getting flagged? Feel free to post your ad on some other website." This, I feel, is the most political thing that Craigslist has done: instead of forcing readers to overlook bad ads, it tries to motivate sellers not to write bad ads in the first place. That so many here are angry about having gotten flagged off in the past tells me that they were doing the bare minimum in writing their ad anyway. Good riddance, I say. It's not like Craigslist will die without whiners complaining about them. By and large the people most frustrated with their Craigslist posting experience are those who just barf out a self-serving ad and expect the invisible hand of Adam Smith to protect their "right" to get $1200 for a Britney Spears ticket. it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements. If this was your experience, I'd look to the attitude of the person asking for help. There is a certainly an amount of "RTFM" in the flag forums, but so few RTFM. Lots and lots of people get "real help" in the flag forums. Unfortunately, lots and lots of other people have a "don't like it? don't buy it." attitude.
• rhizome 16y ago
  Craigslist runs something like 50MM ads every month without a leak of personal information and a user-driven moderation system, all the while fending off myriad abusers for whom free (or nearly free) advertising isn't enough and think Craigslist should be their personal global spam shitbucket. When the only thing people have to criticize you for is your appearance, I think that says a lot.
  • bradleyjoyce 16y ago
    Craigslist is so full of spam and reposts it's practically useless for major categories. Take for example Dallas apartments/rentals... hardly a single legitimate posting in there. There is A LOT more to complain about than appearance.
    • cgs 16y ago
      In my experience, the quality level of ads has dropped considerably. My last two Craigslist experiences: I recently tried looking for a used car in the Chicago area. It turns out almost all the postings in the "by owner only" area are actually dealers in disguise. I found this out the hard way after driving an hour to see a car at what turned out to be some kind of sketchball dealership. Another time, someone posted an ad for a musical instrument. I go to the guys house and he turns out to be some type of dealer/wholesaler. He didn't even have the actual instrument from the ad and was pulling some bait-and-switch crap. All of this has pretty much soured me on Chicago Craigslist, but I will say that the experience is probably still a bit better in smaller metropolitan areas.
      • VladRussian 16y ago
        > are actually dealers in disguise. I found this out the hard way after driving an hour to see a car at what turned out to be some kind of sketchball dealership. before driving you should have run the search for their number. Serial postings for various cars is definitely not FSBO.
      • rhizome 16y ago
        Read their TOU. By using Craigslist you agree to help flag bad ads. Yet from driving an hour to see one car you arrive at the conclusion that "almost all" of the by-owner car ads in Chicago Craiglist are dealers. OK.
• phlux 16y ago
  There is a strong difference between UI and UX, for example, when looking through postings for stuff for sale, or places for rent - filtering by HAS IMAGE is really the only way Ill look at an ad - yet there has NEVER been a way to expand and see images. The FLAG FOR REMOVAL is and has been abused for YEARS. The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been used to effectively block competition in the buyers market. They should simply have a ticker to how many flags a post has been given. Posting has been built upon, but made very cumbersome. And shows that they employ mediocre critical thinking when developing the UX. Sure, the site is amazing, its a gem of the valley and I use it daily when looking for work, stuff, places to live, and weekly/monthly otherwise. But to defend this is the same as Quora trying to convince the world they have incredible design, which they dont. The fact that sites like padmapper can even exist proves that CL is broken in certain areas. Everybody likes the site, but everyone is also constantly defending poor design as if its some sort of hipster notion that we just wouldn't understand.
  • lukeschlather 16y ago
    Craigslist is designed to make communication easier. If different people have differing ability to communicate, this makes it more difficult to communicate. Mediocre UX makes for a better meeting ground, because when you start making things easier beyond a certain point, you start to do so at the expense of outliers. For a site like Craigslist, making 90% of people feel twice as comfortable and 10% feel less comfortable is a bad thing.
    • phlux 16y ago
      Your comment says nothing about the UX functions I mentioned. I agree with your statement, but it does not rebut the fact that image display is non-existent and actually works against you comment as it hinders people's ability to smoothly transact private sales... List-jacking vi the FLAG is just retarded and makes me want to punch the screen.
  • rhizome 16y ago
    The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been used to effectively block competition in the buyers market You misunderstand the flagging mechanism, and it's never "the competition." The competition isn't united against you and there aren't enough of them anyway. You probably just used a hit counter or external images or some other commonly-abused or community-hated posting trope.
• danilocampos 16y ago
  The fact that they haven't done the things you describe doesn't change the fact that craigslist is a terrible product. It is clogged with spam. Clever types of spam, often ones that crowdsource their content by mining previously legit posts. Since there are no reputation mechanisms to speak of, it's far too easy to waste your time with stuff that's either spam or a scam. Meanwhile, data visualization has progressed dramatically in the last decade. craigslist remains in 2001. Wading through apartment listings, for example, is miserable, and there are almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very basic information is communicated by people listing their properties. craigslist can keep its hideous, serifed-out visual design as long as it wants. The big beef here isn't how craigslist looks – it's how it works. The fact your dog doesn't shit on your pillow doesn't excuse his taking a dump in your shoes every day.
  • nir 16y ago
    Not sure if reputation mechanisms would work in a site where people often post just once, and that doesn't require creating a user account in order to post. I would love it if CL's sublet section would take some hints from AirBnB. That said, CL has a much higher volume of traffic and more pressing problems - and my experience is that ABB works great in smaller markets but is as almost bad as CL in a market like NYC. CL isn't perfect. But if most of the dogs hyped in the various dog blogs would be shitting on pillows on a regular basis, the ones that wouldn't would stand out.
    • danilocampos 16y ago
      > Not sure if reputation mechanisms would work in a site where people often post just once, and that doesn't require creating a user account in order to post. That's a weird premise to me. If you post an apartment, you could just as easily also want to find a girlfriend or buy a used bike or avail yourself of any of craigslist's other categories. That's their big value, after all – everything under one roof. The fact that craigslist doesn't require a user account to post is an extremely dubious product decision at this stage.
      • ricarr 16y ago
• datasink 16y ago
  Jeremy Zawodny is implementing some interesting tech at Craigslist. It looks like they're doing a lot of development with MongoDB, Redis, and Sphinx. He drops tech notes on his twitter feed (@jzawodn) occasionally.
• jarrett 16y ago
  They've done a fine job of keeping the site responsive, but that's only a small part of what we normally demand from web apps. I don't fault them for spam. It's a very, very difficult problem, and since I don't have a magical solution to propose, I'm not going to complain. But there are a few areas where CL could have made major improvements at a reasonable cost, especially considering their revenue. They could have at least experimented with some of these ideas, and tossed them out later if they turned out to be bad. Here are some of the main opportunities I think CL has missed: -Richer data, tailored to each category. CL started down this road, e.g. by adding the rent field. But there's so much more they could do in every category. -Better searching. With the huge volume of posts to sort through--and the large number of duplicate posts--the basic search features currently implemented fall flat. Improvements in this area would probably have to tie in with the richer data set mentioned above. -Abandon the serial model, where the database is just a chronological list of posts. This model creates an arms race to be the person who posts the most frequently without getting flagged. In other words, it incentivizes the fine art of sneaking what amounts to spam just below the radar. The core problem, as I see it, is that CL still views their service as an extension of its original incarnation: a mailing list. In the CL model, a listing is just arbitrary text and maybe some metadata if you're lucky, and the listings simply appear in reverse chronological order. Sounds like a mailing list archive to me. Sure, that's how CL got started, but why not grow into something better? There's clearly enough usage and revenue to justify a realignment. Rather than "sticking with what works," I think this is a case of inertia.
  • dedward 16y ago
    There also seems to clearly be enough usage and revenue, and profit, for the owners not to want to take it any further and be happy with what they have rather than risk change. They are under no obligation to do anything with the site other than what they want to. They don't have to monetize it, or go public, or improve anything. If they're happy with what they've got, it's theirs to be happy with. The only thing that would drive change would be an exodus of people - not just people complaining about how things could be better, but an actual clear, obvious drop in usage with a clear cause and a need for redesign. (Look how well Digg's redesign worked out for them... it all but killed the site overnight.)
• mise 16y ago
  Perhaps I'm seeing it too much from the perspective of the little guy, but harvesting that much money into your own pockets over a number of years may not be such a bad decision.
• jacoblyles 16y ago
  Craigslist wastes millions of hours of people's time every year by being a monopoly that provides a bad product in an industry with strong network effects. When I go to a site like padmapper, I am reminded of just how horrible Craigslist is and how happy it would make me to see them go and allow room for new firms to take their place.