16 ms·

Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

492 points by simonebrunozzi 4y ago

ggm 4y ago
I think it's very likely UX would tell any developer to leave it alone, and if it didn't it would be suspicious. Minor changes only. Amazon on the other hand.. or aws console. I'd be amazed if UX said "leave it alone" Real UX. No leading questions.
DesiLurker 4y ago
I wish more sites maintained that sort of minimalism and stayed away from selling out as much as possible. Great job CL!
- jethro_tell 4y ago
  Man, just 10 people working there, couldn't have done that with vc backed funding. Have to grow, then have to add people to grow, then have to add features to try to pay for the people. But man, if you think about every $25 car/apartment/job post, it's plenty of money for 10 people. Pretty insane.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >plenty of money for 10 people I'm guessing a lot of people here wouldn't consider it plenty of money.
    - xapata 4y ago
      Craig Newmark has roughly $1B.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I doubt if he’s typical of people working at Craigslist.
        thfuran 4y ago
        A billion split ten ways is still a decent chunk of pocket change. Clearly there's money in Craigslist, regardless of how it has been apportioned.
        adolph 4y ago
        has != earns Makes me wonder: if people were offered a lump sum up front which represented their lifetime take-home pay + fringe for the job they will do for the rest of their life, what would people's number be? Or another way, a choice of a 10 year contract to do X worth 100k/annual take-home with 1m delivered at start, or an unchanging biweekly paycheck. Would the biweekly need to be higher to make it more attractive than the one-time payment or could it be lower yet still be the favored choice.
        thfuran 4y ago
        >has != earns Yes, and? >a choice of a 10 year contract to do X worth 100k/annual take-home with 1m delivered at start, or an unchanging biweekly paycheck. Would the biweekly need to be higher to make it more attractive than the one-time payment or could it be lower yet still be the favored choice. You can only make the up front payment so large before employees start quitting early and moving to Montenegro.
        adolph 4y ago
        >>> Craig Newmark has roughly $1B. >> I doubt if he’s typical of people working at Craigslist. > A billion split ten ways is still a decent chunk of pocket change. The difference being that Newmark has an equity stake of some hypothetical value and the people working there would receive some fixed value per unit of time. If Newmark were to pay each of 10 workers $1B/10 then: * their paychecks afterward would be much smaller * their next tax period would be much larger * someone else would control Craigslist since the equity stake would have been liquidated (probably causing it to be worth less than $1B) Thus `has != earns` > quitting early and moving to Montenegro I'm of the thought that there is only so much leisure a person can take before there is a drive to contribute toward the betterment of humanity. If someone trusted you and you were trustable, would you take a large lump sum and work for work's sake? Would it make a difference if the sum was an equity stake in the work's environment? https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1501096-let-s-suppose-that-you-were-able-every-night-to-dream https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1501096-let-s-suppose-that-...
  - neonscribe 4y ago
    He said "in the 10s", so I guess it could be up to a couple hundred. Still, a remarkably small number for a business like that.
    - layer8 4y ago
      I think “in the 10s” means less than a hundred. Probably not close to a hundred as well in this instance.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
* I far, far, far prefer Craigslist interface to anything else in that space. It's clear and focused Its search engine too - I get things I search for in the area I search for. For me, Kijiji and Facebook marketplace are awful UI, awful distractions, and give me 10,000 "suggested" or "fuzzy searched" things in random order, suppressing things I'm actually looking for. And I've completely given up on eBay over last decade. However. * Nothing is on Craigslist anymore in my area (Greater Toronto Area). Until about... 5-6 years ago, I could find comparable number of photography, computer, music & kids stuff on Craigslist and Kijiji. Today, Craigslist is a desert, a void, an oasis of empty search results. So network effect wins, as always :-/
- greenie_beans 4y ago
  you gotta search other locales to find what you want. search nashville craigslist for guitars, search rural areas for agricultural equipment, search lake areas for boats, etc
- rcpt 4y ago
  Used to feel this way but I really like OfferUps built in chat. With Craigslist you end up with people who expect phone calls or emails or texts and it's never clear which is which
- xahrepap 4y ago
  A local media company runs a "classifieds" on their online site. It dominates locally. Craigslist has been worthless for ages here because of it. However, Facebook Marketplace seems to be slowly gaining traction. Which I hate for all the reasons you mention. I dread the day it takes over :(
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Facebook Marketplace has completely taken over in most parts of the US. It sucks.
    - defterGoose 4y ago
aresant 4y ago
An aged but still relevant article - "Increase your conversion rate by making your site ugly" is a good parallel read particularly with regard to accessibility https://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increase-your-conversion-rate-by-making-your-site-uglier/ https://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increase-your-...
- HWR_14 4y ago
  I feel like that article misses the biggest differentiator. "Be early enough that this looked reasonable at the time - win - rely on network effects to never need to upgrade your site."
- malikNF 4y ago
  Thank you for posting this gem. I really enjoyed it. For anyone wondering, there's a previous discussion on this article on HN[1] [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338459
- badwolf 4y ago
  I feel like Nilay Patel and the designers at The Verge take this article as their mantra...
- tomtheelder 4y ago
  I agree totally with the accessibility bit, but overall I think this article is based on a totally flawed premise. For starters most sites that gain traction look very good, and they are just citing the extremely small number of exceptions and acting like they represent some sort of trend. Second, almost all those sites gained traction in an era when their designs looked good or at least fine compared to their contemporaries and then lived off familiarity and network effects.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
My problem with Craigslist isn't that it looks old, the problem is that they seemingly refuse to modernize anything else about the site. Craigslist is chock full of spam and people abusing the search feature. I'm no anti-spam guru, but surely there is a way to cut down on people submitting the same thumbnail dozens of times using as many keywords as they can so their cellphone screen repair service shows up when looking for just about anything. Craig is no saint, and actively goes after any competition to his site. That, coupled with the complacency or refusal to go after spammers leaves me with a very sour opinion of the platform and Craig himself.
- frankharv 4y ago
  I love it and I despise the fact that they pulled down personal ads. It was like a virtual clipboard in the laundromat. Then the feds came and kicked in the doors.
  - RunSet 4y ago
    I'm on a mission to keep encounters casual. https://lokilist.com/about.php https://lokilist.com/about.php It's slow going but fortunately text is cheap to host so I can keep this up indefinitely. Edit: If you like it make a post. Even better share the link to the post. Network effect is real.
    - water-your-self 4y ago
      You realize that FOSTA can come for you too right?
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    It was like a virtual clipboard in the laundromat. The corkboard is still there. If you start using it again, others will. Same way CL, FBM, and the others got traction.
  - joegahona 4y ago
    I thought they pulled their personal ads because people were getting murdered -- the Phillip Markoff interrogation is a must-listen for fans of that genre; it's a shame there's only audio available. According to this QZ article from 2018 though, it was for human-trafficking reasons. > In March, Craigslist pulled its personals section in response to a sex-trafficking bill that holds platforms liable if they are found to be facilitating sex trafficking and prostitution. The reaction was not without merit: over the years, websites like Craigslist and Backpage had become online marketplaces for illegal sexual activity. https://qz.com/1310350/what-we-lost-when-craigslist-shut-down-its-personals-section/ https://qz.com/1310350/what-we-lost-when-craigslist-shut-dow...
sojournerc 4y ago
Rock Auto is another such site. Looks old but is so much more effective than modern sites for finding the right car parts. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
- brokenodo 4y ago
  I love Rock Auto. The way they make it easy to see which warehouse your items are shipping from and choose other items from the same warehouse is super cool too.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    Just ordered something from them earlier this week. They got my repeat business because the last time I ordered something from them it was effortless (other than their kinda poor UI lol) and the item arrived super fast. I guess the shipping was a bit pricy, but that's fine. They had the part and got it to me promptly, and charged a fair price for it. Works for me!
system16 4y ago
I don't particularly like Craigslist's UI, but I still prefer it to other online marketplaces because it's fast and simple. I do find it cluttered and not very nice to navigate, but I'll gladly take a bit of clutter and clunkiness over MBs of hideous banner ads shoved in my face, and god-knows what trackers and scripts are being used on the other sites. Similarly, I still use old.reddit and will continue to do so until they force that new monstrosity on me.
- defterGoose 4y ago
  See, I completely equate "clutter" with things like banner ads. CL is amongst the least "cluttered" sites I use. It absolutely doesn't live up to the latest trends in UI/UX design, but the fact that it feels more like basic HTML forms with little styling is a feature, not a bug.
  - tomtheelder 4y ago
    > It absolutely doesn't live up to the latest trends in UI/UX design I'd have to disagree pretty strongly here. It is- excluding the homepage- a paragon of modern UX design, and I think many other sites have taken a lot of inspiration. Search oriented, minimalist design elements that stay out of the way of the user, key filters to narrow search, saved searches, alerts, etc. It's even almost entirely flat aesthetically! You could do a completely surface level reskin of Craigslist and it would appear, from a UX/UI perspective, to be a totally modern interface. I think people see the older visual aesthetic and assume that it's not in line with modern UX best practices, but it largely is! Again home page is excluded here. I think that's still the way it is for familiarity/nostalgia reasons, because they have made tons of changes to the main search UI but left the home page basically untouched. The trends that it doesn't keep up with are mostly technological rather than UX/UI.
layer8 4y ago
> Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day. […] It’s fast and easy for people, and that’s a big deal. […] For me as an engineer, simple is beautiful. Functional is beautiful.
Ken_At_EM 4y ago
It's because it prints money. Is just a straight money printing machine. Of all the Golden Goose's, it's best to just leave it alone and let it do it's thing.
- laundermaf 4y ago
  Facebook prints money too but that didn’t stop them from turning the clean perfect interface they had in 2010 into the steaming pile of eggs it is now.
  - Ken_At_EM 4y ago
    I mean, yeah, that was a huge mistake. They should have left it alone entirely, they would have had so much more money to build the Meta-verse with!
  - wildzzz 4y ago
    It's because Facebook has to constantly "innovate" to raise the share price. I'm sure Craigslist makes some decent income for it's owners and can pay it's bills every month but it's never going to explode in growth. They don't need new investors constantly because they don't do anything new. Their whole site is basically LAMP except for Perl instead of PHP. The latest part of their tech stack is a mail server that's 10 years old.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    I think this is intentional. The more you scroll their ugly interface to find what you are looking for, the more ads you see.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Article says it has "10s" of employees. They are just maintaining the money printer.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alberth 4y ago
Why hasn't HN design changed in last 15 years ... because it works.
rosywoozlechan 4y ago
I rent a couple of properties out in the bay area and up until this year I've always relied on craigslist to get new tenants, but this year we tried out Zillow and we got tons of applicants, and the whole application process including vetting and setting up a lease and everything was done through Zillow. On the other hand someone noticed our Zillow listing and created a fraudulent listing of my property on Craigslist. I'm pretty much never going back to Craigslist. Apartments.com is also good for creating leases and managing properties, but Zillow seems to be the place to get high quality tenants.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I’m about to rent out a house so this helps a lot. One thing I don’t get is why someone else would copy your listing? Do they somehow get a slice of the pie if a respondent rents?
  - jstarfish 4y ago
    > One thing I don’t get is why someone else would copy your listing? Do they somehow get a slice of the pie if a respondent rents? Usually this is a scam. You advertise someone else's vacant property, break in to conduct tenant tours, collect fees/deposits/first month's rent, then bail.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      Well that’s just evil. I never gave that possibility a thought.
      - jstarfish 4y ago
        I tried to find a succinct name for this scheme but failed. I did find a blog where a retired attorney discusses this and some variations on it (and learned something new in the process: pulling this stunt on multiple prospective tenants at the same time makes this a hell of a lot more lucrative): https://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2017/07/house-rental-scams.html https://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2017/07/house-rental-scams...
anarticle 4y ago
I would say because it is a tool, and tools should stay relatively the same. It's ok to make a new tool! I have this discussion with people who make physical objects all the time, and their frustrations with the software world. Imagine learning to use a Heidelberg offset press 20y ago, and if you enter your workshop, it performs the same as before. Now imagine you are a painter who uses photoshop elements once in awhile. For some reason, your printer is printing all your pictures with a red tinge. You buy a new version of photoshop elements, and the problem is gone. The moving targets of saas and other remote updated software changes the perspective on tools, especially for production purposes. Many people who produce physical objects with software run into these problems. I fix up motorcycles in my spare time, and I dread the day my torque wrench needs an update!
- hedora 4y ago
  My aging German automobile's radio failed to display an ö that a cloud service sent it yesterday. I really wonder how that regression slipped through. It has been able to display German in the past, along with all sorts of other unicode characters. The only thing I can figure is the band that named the song is Mongolian, so maybe they used a U-1803 (Mongolian full stop ᠃) as a modifier on the o? But then why did my phone display it correctly?
moolcool 4y ago
Craigslist is one of my favorite tech companies. They have a fantastic product which they don't sabotage in the interest of growth. Huge respect to them for quietly being the best.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  I don't think craigslist is a tech company.
  - mrweasel 4y ago
    That's honestly fair enough, but then neither is AirBNB, Instagram and Uber.
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      I would agree.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I feel like there is a risk of sabotage through complacency and a refusal to adapt to competition. People looking for rentals and homes to buy don't go to craigslist first, they do to sites like Zillow and Redfin. As I've mentioned in a different response, the spam and junk listings are a persistent problem and none of the spam seems particularly sophisticated or hard to stop - most are literally the same image and content with a ton of tags posted under different categories.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    To be honest, I've never even thought about going to Craigslist for rentals in the decades I've been using it. But I use it a lot for other things.
strangattractor 4y ago
Because it works?
orsenthil 4y ago
I had a need for AC repair, and 3 CL service men let me down. Nextdoor of all places seem to have landed me with right service man in my locality.
seydor 4y ago
I dont think craigslist has a nice look. It's just stuck because it was the first in the world. I don't mean he needs to make it look like another cookiecutter bootstrap rounded-edges website, but he can reorganize to make it be more functional
hammock 4y ago
No better outlet to write this story than "PC Magazine."
ihsoj 4y ago
We need more sites like HN and Craigslist. primarily text based but fully functional. And most importantly no ads.
- jerrybender 4y ago
  HN has ads
wly_cdgr 4y ago
Cos it ain't broke and the people running it are a very rare breed who know better than to fix it. Same with McMaster Carr website and a very few others
snowwrestler 4y ago
Not to be “that guy,” but Craigslist has changed a lot over the years. They’ve kept the same coat of paint on it (visual design) but the way it works evolves continuously. For one obvious example, search results come up in cards now by default and you can use hover arrows to go through the photos on each one. It is far more visual experience today than it was when search results were a compact list of text titles. And depending on what you search, there are tons of specific filters that show up in the left column. Search “sailboat” and you can filter on make/model, propulsion, length overall, year manufactured, price, miles from location, etc. It works a lot more like eBay or other modern e-commerce sites than the blue links and default fonts let on. Keeping the old fonts and colors seems sort of like the famous door-desks at Amazon. It looks like a functional decision, but really the main point is to represent a particular viewpoint of the job.
- spoils19 4y ago
  That sounds like a regression to me. A more visual experience isn't necessarily better - I and most people on this site probably prefer the compact list of text titles, since the information is easier to parse. Filtering also limits search, not enhances it, as you are prevented from generically finding things, and now have to sort by filter.
  - Psyladine 4y ago
    >I and most people on this site probably prefer the compact list of text titles, since the information is easier to parse. When the topics are as diverse & nuanced as hn feed, sure. When searching for lawnmower or car, 300 text listings of vehicles not so much.
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    One of the defining characteristics of filters is that, unlike categories, you can just not select any if you want to see everything. This is true on craigslist, ebay, and every other website I can think of that has filtered product listings.
- kepler1 4y ago
danjoredd 4y ago
Simple answer: its enough. Long answer: Its good enough
onemoresoop 4y ago
Craigslist works fine, I'm okay with the older UI. Yes, there are scammers but there are scammers on FB marketplace as well. Now it's lost it's users to FB but it's possible it may see a resurgence after a bad move by FB or some trend change.
bluedino 4y ago
Craigslist is basically dead in my area.
JJMcJ 4y ago
Another site that has changed little is the Drudge Report. I don't agree with the somewhat right-wing political bias of the site, but it's clear and easy to use.
- MatthewORyan 4y ago
  There is little if anything that is still "right-wing" about Drudge today. If you doubt me, load it a few times every week and see what is featured. It's not the Drudge of 5 or 10 or 15 years ago.
  - JJMcJ 4y ago
    I did a visit before posting and have to agree with you. Though even in the early days there would be links to leftish news sources.
yboris 4y ago
Craigslist might work well in large metro area like SF, but when your state is carved up into numerous non-overlapping regions and you're 60 minutes away from the center of either one to your side - it's just a sad roulette to see if you have to drive an hour to pick something up. With a simple distance-from-zipcode search implementation Craigslist could still be useful. Sadly I'm stuck with Facebook Marketplace for now (which has been amazing for distance searches).
- s0rce 4y ago
  Its also annoying when its the opposite, if I want to search for a car in California, I just stick myself centrally in Frenso and click all the adjacent areas since you can get SF, Sac, LA, Vegas.
creeble 4y ago
It's odd that this article came out only a few months after CL did a semi-significant change in the way they display listings -- the "gallery view" now lays out the screen differently, and it's fairly broken on mobile, pushing the left menu in and out randomly as you scroll (iOS Firefox and Safari anyway). FWIW, I still use CL quite a lot in the SF Bay area. The cars listings are full of spam and scams, probably double what they were 5 or 6 years ago. This, despite the fact that they started charging for cars/trucks listings.
amatecha 4y ago
I still use CL frequently. I actually have a few search terms I literally search every day. I have got SO MANY amazing deals because of this. Yeah, you have to be patient, but stuff does come up. I have both bought and sold over CL and never once been scammed, but then again I do my due diligence and trust my gut. Anyway, one of the best things about it is that it has stayed the same and you know what to expect. No insane UI overhaul that makes it all "latest trend", no scummy user-exploitation dark patterns (that I've noticed), no animated video ads covering 1/3 of the screen... Yeah, it has some flaws, but for me it's still the optimal "local buy/sell" service.
inanutshellus 4y ago
I hate FB Marketplace. It's actively hostile to buyers. Like, try to find a "kinda nice" bicycle. You can't find the bicycle category (though it does exist as a sub-group of Sporting Goods), you can't just say "show me bikes" unless you hack the URL, you can search for the word "bicycle" but for some reason people selling a "Specialized Rockhopper" think you know it's a bicycle so don't use that word. Oh, and when selling, they just suggest random categories instead of letting you choose from their heirarchy. So you get bicycles in Hobbies. You get them in Sporting Goods. You get them in Bicycles. But... You can't search for them by type. That's not even complaining about the lack of attributes, like "type=BMX" or "type=Mountain" or "Size=Large" or "Frame Material=Carbon Fiber"... all of which are in Craigslist and eBay. And! when searching, they actively work to inject ebay-like selling (non-local) into the mix by resetting my distance preferences every time I change the search. "Find bicycles" -> "Find bicycles in 30 miles" -> "Find 'Specialized Rockhopper'" -> Why am I getting "Ships To You" results?! Why am I getting non-bicycle results?! Oh. They reset my distance again. ^-- BTW they do this because they actually make money when the sale happens through FB. If you just buy it in-person with cash they don't get a cut. Misaligned incentives, as they say. And! even if I do find the bicycle category, if narrow the category by searching with a word in there, like "Rockhopper" it takes me out of the bicycle category to do the search! G. A. R. B. A. G. E.
- adolph 4y ago
  Dammit Jim, I'm a cyclist, not an ontologist! [edit to correct snowclone]
- latchkey 4y ago
  Is this still available?
- shabbatt 4y ago
  Sellers too. Not to mention harassment/racism/phobia when the price isnt "right". Facebook usage seems to be correlated with reduced cognition, it invites the bottom rung of society
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
sigmonsays 4y ago
in light of "Updating the UI to be modern just because", my 4yr old says "because" is not a reason. Even she knows, yet so many choose to have a modern look for no gain (likely the opposite). I'm happy he left the UI the same
nonethewiser 4y ago
I remember watching a Harvard System Design intro lecture by David Milan on YouTube. He was talking about tradeoffs and said that craigslist stored all their listings as static html. which was extremely cheap and performant but made it harder to edit and stuff like that. I wonder if they have changed since then.
- FearlessNebula 4y ago
  I recalled the same, and was hoping to read some more information about that in the article.
adolph 4y ago
In an alternative universe Yahoo! also kept a 1997 interface and the world was a bit nicer than it really turned out.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  But then how could they justify hiring an inexperienced ex-google woman? (nothing wrong with being a woman, but she tried to make a celebrity out of herself, look at her cover magazine photoshoot).
  - adolph 4y ago
    "... not that there's anything wrong with that" Is another fine product of the nineties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outing Marissa Meyer was certainly not the old hand CEO type that had already run Yahoo into the ditch but hardly inexperienced. She oversaw the layout of Google's well-known, unadorned search homepage. She was also on the three-person team responsible for Google AdWords, which is an advertising platform that allows businesses to show their product to relevant potential customers based on their search terms. AdWords helped deliver 96% of the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer
- chenster 4y ago
  You really meant "Japanese Yahoo" https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ welcome back to 1990
hedora 4y ago
People used to complain that Craigslist's accessibility support was abysmal. Has that changed? I like the aesthetic of the site, and see no reason why it would cause havoc with screen readers. However it was a common complaint in the past.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Craigslist >> NextDoor >> OfferUp >> eBay >> FB But definitely YMMV depending on the city you're in. I'm glad it's stayed the way it is. Arguably the best marketplace website, period. Simple to post, simple to use, local pickup only. Not infested with ad/promoted listings.
- PaulBGD_ 4y ago
  Agreed, although the sad thing is that eBay/FB have a large audience.. so if I fail to sell something elsewhere I'll usually have to switch to one of those two :(
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    I closed by FB account 10 years, not opening it up again even if it's to access their Marketplace. Was big on eBay back in the day when bidding was fun (before sniper bots took over), you could find good deals, and wasn't full of scams. Used it just this week probably for the first time in 10 years to find an obscure part that I needed replacing--still good for that.
mindprism 4y ago
Extreeeeeemely careful regression testing.
scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
When I lived in the US, at a certain point I realized literally every major aspect of my life in some way could be worked back to a craigslist ad - cars, places to live in and jobs. We don't have craigslist where I live in Europe, and I miss it. Instead it's an endless parade of for-profit services like olx. I tell people about craigslist and it's alien to them, this idea that something on the internet could be managed to be run by a dozen people and not be changed. It's not even the simplicity that is so appealing to me, but that you get this feeling that it is a totally neutral platform. Like air, you don't see it but it's there. And nobody is trying to put perfume in it.
- cdaringe 4y ago
  sounds like opportunity
bilsbie 4y ago
There’s nothing wrong with how it looks. They just needed to fix the scams and let people set up alerts.
ravenstine 4y ago
People use (or at least used) Craigslist because they like it when websites and apps actually work. I never encountered bugs or bizarre UI problems when using Craigslist. It turns out the only people who care about flashy animations, fancy drop shadows, "native" looking UI elements, Material/Human design principles, etc., are developers and designers. Normal people only care about those things when functionality is solved first. If it functions like crap, but it looks good, you're just putting lipstick on a pig, and lipstick might not have even been called for in the first place.
- ddejohn 4y ago
  Not disagreeing at all. I get irrationally angry when a website shits the bed because of flashy UI BS. One thing I will say is that I personally appreciate "modern" UIs (when they work) because I have ADHD and the visual clutter of "old fashioned" websites is a serious problem for me. I have old reddit set to 200% magnification just to keep the amount of content on the screen to a minimum, and to minimize the width of lines of text. Again though, I do still prefer snappy and functional over 'elegant' and sluggish, even if it's more difficult for me to focus.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    I also have ADHD and have an adoration for old-style website design. Not necessarily the 2008 - 2013 era (which I like to call the 1970's of the web), but websites before that which were more cluttered and unrefined. Websites from the old days surface far more relevant information on the first fold than do contemporary sites, which I believe have gone overboard with Swiss Style design inspiration such that they think empty space is always preferable. The fact that many websites today use extremely large fonts in order to pass accessibility tests also doesn't help, but this is partly subjective because I personally hate reading text greater than 16px. Maybe I would think differently if I did lots of heavy reading, but that's hard to do these days because most prose on the internet is filler and total rubbish. If I want to just find something, a website being designed like a magazine cover really doesn't help. Allow me to illustrate my perspective. This website, which has been online since 1994, would today be considered one of the most poorly designed sites of all time. http://amasci.com/ http://amasci.com/ Bask in the dark repeating background, the neon colors, and the quirky use of font size. And yet, unlike 95% of sites online today, it loads instantly, and is organized such that I can find what I might be looking for without distraction. The author provides a header guiding new users to categories, and underneath is a list of links to pages the author thinks I might be interested in. And that's it. No Fontawesome, no TypeKit, no box shadows, no hover animations, no hover dropdowns, no sticky headers, no scroll jacking, no transparencies, no accordions, no hamburger menus, no bullshit. A "modern" website would make the first fold into a glorified billboard, hide anything interesting in horizontal navigation of categories that have to be expanded out, use 19px font for prose because The Google, a masonry type layout because CSS grid bro, a sticky header that annoyingly animates in/out, and one to three popup modals asking me to give them my email.
AlbertCory 4y ago
I still use CL, after I try NextDoor (and less often, eBay). Many of the scammers are pretty easy to spot: they say "my agent will pick it up and give you a cashier's check (or money order)." I think CL could easily make it harder for the scammers, with minimal effort. For the ghosting buyers: this isn't just limited to CL. On the last item, I was giving something away on NextDoor, and still had around 8 ghosts. What I finally resorted to was asking for the exact time they were coming, and making it clear that I was not holding it for them if they didn't show up. If there were several on the same day, I'd tell the later ones that someone was (supposedly) coming before them, and it might be gone so they should double check before coming.
- sojournerc 4y ago
  I've found better success with asking for something insignificant like 10$ when I just want to get rid of something. It weeds out the flakes and maybe gets the "buyer" more invested in the deal
scelerat 4y ago
Craigslist to me, beyond something I still use regularly to hunt for musical instruments, electronics, bikes, furniture, garage sales, etc, is an enduring shibboleth when it comes to "design." When someone says "Craigslist design sucks," I can probably guess how that person thinks about design and what it means to them. IMO Craigslist has survived as long as it has, in spite of no promotion, no advertising, no partner deals, no api integrations, yadda yadda, precisely because it is designed very well for its purpose and its users. I would never claim that CL is the most aesthetically pleasing site to look at, but when it comes to posting, searching and browsing classified ads (and even participating in its message boards), it does the job quite well and with minimum hassle. For the first three weeks after I moved to San Francisco, more than sixteen years ago, I couch surfed at my boss's place on Stanyan street in Cole Valley. At the time, Craig also lived nearby. My boss and he were friends and would frequently meet at a coffee shop, and I would often join them. When I was first introduced to Craig, I quipped that I had recently moved, and did he know a good place to search for apartments? He gave me a gentle smirk and a merely mildly condescending roll of the eyes. Very pleasant, intelligent, and unassuming person.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Agreed. > I would never claim that CL is the most aesthetically pleasing site to look at Which, I think, is a good thing. Experience has taught me that if a web site obviously put a lot of effort into being aesthetically appealing, it's probably not a great website.
- jlukic 4y ago
  Nice vignette, thanks for sharing this.
z9znz 4y ago
I gave up on CL years ago when the apartment rental lists for Amsteram became overrun with obvious scams. I would flag them, but it never seemed to matter. Then also because of the Backpage disaster they stopped all the person to person (dating or hookup) groups. It's a shame too, because I actually met some good people in the past on those groups. So on one hand, they over-moderated by eliminating whole segments of their site while apparently ignoring other segments which became rife with garbage ads or outright scams. And once the real audience finds wading through garbage to be too much effort, we leave and the site becomes irrelevant.
egberts1 4y ago
And none of those ad-filled crapola too! Craigslist. Short and simple. Find all my spare parts to most anything there
Waterluvian 4y ago
Craigslist is proof that you do not need to occasionally “refresh the look and feel” of your website or app. I have a real chip on my shoulder for the occasional design team that seems intent on justifying their own existence and nothing more. I’d love to learn about big user studies that concluded with, “don’t change a thing. It’s good as is.” Surely that case must be appropriate some % of the time. But I think when you’ve got a hammer you just see nails and work for you.
aeharding 4y ago
Craigslist has an awesome UI. But I really wish they'd switch out their clunky JS-based gallery component for pure CSS scroll snapping!
gernb 4y ago
I would argue the biggest reason craigslist is doing well it it's free and semi anonymous (it forwards all emails though generated addresses) The UX has areas clearly neglected. For example in apartments there is a trashcan icon to hide a listing. But, it's inserted at the end of the description. If the description is long then the button does not appear. Another is the categories. In SF, SOMA and Mission Bay arguably need to be separated but craigslist only lists SOMA and groups Mission Bay in with it. That's one of several areas that need to be split I used it a ton over the last 6 months trying to find an apartment but in the end I found the apartment on apartments.com ... which is far from perfect but has some features arguably more suited to apartment hunting. That I think might be the point. Different products can benefit from unique features
JohnFen 4y ago
I'm glad Cragislist hasn't changed. It's pretty much ideal as it is.
kazinator 4y ago
Craigslist superficially looks the same if you don't care about the removal of RSS.
paxys 4y ago
I have no problem with Craigslist's interface, but the site is pretty much Scamlist at this point. I often simultaneously list stuff on Craigslist, FB Marketplace and Nextdoor. The latter two have a near perfect success rate. Craiglist replies are all the most obvious scams in the world. This is becoming more and more the case for apartments as well. The majority of listings in my area are scams with pictures stolen from Redfin or elsewhere. Reporting will remove them but five more will show up the next day. Zillow Rentals, Strerteasy, Hotpads are a lot more reputable. Craigslist needs to take all the money they have saved in design and put it towards anti spam and fraud detection tools.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
1970-01-01 4y ago
A: Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day. That mindset is worth more than anything else Web 3.0 can throw-up. (pun intended)
princevegeta89 4y ago
Still works well for the little functionality it has. Having a great UX and UI is always a good thing but at the same time if it only means putting a lot of new cognitive load on the user I would rather not have it.
zasdffaa 4y ago
I (here in the UK) did have occasional luck meeting others for sex in the 'personals' section. Until that was shut down. Thanks, American prudes!
ugh123 4y ago
CL wins on a lot of fronts but they need to do something about the spam and for-sale bloat submitted by stores.
alanwreath 4y ago
I used to blame eBay for the lack of updates to Craigslist - but it seems that Craigslist is now back in the hands of the original creator…so the reason is probably that he’s got his and is doing something else while it runs on fumes.
nocman 4y ago
If only retail stores had websites like Craigslist! Just last night I was in one trying to do a simple search for a fairly common item (on my phone). After waiting between 20 seconds to a minute for search results to return, then trying to click the "search in store inventory" checkbox 12 times (sometimes because I wasn't sure the tap had registered, sometimes because I thought the page hadn't finished loading before I tapped it, etc), I finally just gave up after 5 or 10 minutes of struggling with it. I had a decent signal (3 or 4 bars, I believe -- about as good as I ever expect to get in a store), but the web pages on so-called "modern" websites are so bloated and inefficient, sometimes it's a miracle to get anything done on a normal residential home internet service, let alone on a phone. And before someone suggests it, NO, I am NOT going to install a stinking app from every store I visit (not that they'd be any better, most of the one's I've seen I would describe as "barely functional -- sometimes"). It would be interesting to know how many sales stores have lost because a customer was trying to search for something in their store via their website, but the experience was so miserable they just gave up.
- qDnbBcCnsZneEJg 4y ago
  There are examples in retail: https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/
  - nocman 4y ago
    Yeah, that's nice. Too bad the examples are so few and far between (especially among national chains). I've seen one or two good examples before I'm sure, just none that I can think of that I shop at now.
hamiltonians 4y ago
the site is very complicated actuaĺly, especially the backend. it looks simple but anything but. same for wikiedia
raisin_churn 4y ago
This is an awful lot of words to say "it works fine." I love craigslist, and use it both for listing and buying quite regularly. There's plenty of fair criticisms of craigslist, but the UI is one of the strongest features. Maybe turn it around and ask why most other websites have loud, jarring, complicated interfaces and copious 3rd party JavaScript from dozens of other domains?
SMAAART 4y ago
I had no idea that PC Magazine is still alive.
dahfizz 4y ago
> Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day. Web developers have this twisted idea that if code wasn't written in the past 6 months, it's legacy and un-modern and bad and needs to be refreshed. Stop. Just because something was fun for you to build doesn't mean it's fun for me to use.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  There's a joke that the Oscar for best editing usually goes to the movie with the most editing. Design seems the same way, where simplicity is underrated and things have change constantly or it's "dated".
flerchin 4y ago
The page loads in 670ms. They're clearly profitable. My new tech darling.
kortex 4y ago
Wow, all this talk about Craigslist's (and Craig's) minimalist approaches really makes pcmag's experience all the more jarring. - Pcmag wants to push notifications (deny) - give us your email! (full page sudden popover, tiny "no thanks" text) - ads every paragraph (big enough to disrupt reading flow) - ads in floating banner at the top - browser creaks and groans trying to paint as I scroll, white blocks if I go too fast. It's almost like they are trying to demonstrate why Craigslist looks the same by giving a vivid counter-example.
scaredginger 4y ago
I really respect this philosophy. I know the HN crowd hates when Reddit is brought up, but its redesign is a great example here. I find the old interface's technical simplicity serves me far better since it loads fast and can be extended with RES. Similarly, I love that HN still looks like a site from 2007, it functions beautifully
- victor22 4y ago
  Wow that's so true. You're right on the money. They fucked and prostituted reddit.
inamberclad 4y ago
I've been scoring amazing antique furniture here in SF for much less than a half decent thing from IKEA costs.
agumonkey 4y ago
Why does chopin sounds the same after 250 years
marcus_holmes 4y ago
I think the counterpoint to this attitude is Figma. Figma looks great, and designers love it, but as a casual user it's a nightmare to use or find anything in. There is the old "function over form" and "form over function" dichotomy. I'm a huge "function over form" fan; I like things simple and easily understood. But I understand that I'm in a minority and most people prefer "form over function"
beshrkayali 4y ago
One of the reason that finally got me to drop Spotify is their constant (and usually very small) tinkering with their interface. I used to use it in specific ways and not very often so when I needed to find or edit a playlist it was very annoying to discover that a button moved or even its text changed. Same for Slack, which I’m very thankful I don’t have to use anymore. Slack and Spotify design teams really need to appreciate the purse: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
brunojppb 4y ago
Because it’s effective and works.
0x445442 4y ago
It probably looks the same because it doesn’t need to look different. And it seems CL wasn’t enticed by the cult of money that is Silicon Valley. Thus, their organization was not taken over by countless layers of middle management attempting to justify their own existence by adding a bunch of useless features.
kumarsw 4y ago
Like most people here, I love the minimalist 90s UI and the lack of need to create an account. Unfortunately it's a ghost town of scammers now in my area. Craigslist really dropped the ball on policing their site and let competitors take over. Facebook is terrible, but the closed yard-sale groups really cut down the number of scammer responses.
b06timmer 4y ago
I loved the old Compaq web site, as everything was easy to find. It may have been the merge with HP that made things more difficult. CL is like a breath of fresh air.
dusted 4y ago
"The current Craigslist site upholds its unmistakable '90s look and feel." <-- Text below screenshots of website that looks nothing like a 90s website :/

ggm 4y ago

I think it's very likely UX would tell any developer to leave it alone, and if it didn't it would be suspicious. Minor changes only. Amazon on the other hand.. or aws console. I'd be amazed if UX said "leave it alone" Real UX. No leading questions.

DesiLurker 4y ago

I wish more sites maintained that sort of minimalism and stayed away from selling out as much as possible. Great job CL!

jethro_tell 4y ago
Man, just 10 people working there, couldn't have done that with vc backed funding. Have to grow, then have to add people to grow, then have to add features to try to pay for the people. But man, if you think about every $25 car/apartment/job post, it's plenty of money for 10 people. Pretty insane.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >plenty of money for 10 people I'm guessing a lot of people here wouldn't consider it plenty of money.
  - xapata 4y ago
    Craig Newmark has roughly $1B.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I doubt if he’s typical of people working at Craigslist.
      - thfuran 4y ago
        A billion split ten ways is still a decent chunk of pocket change. Clearly there's money in Craigslist, regardless of how it has been apportioned.
        adolph 4y ago
        has != earns Makes me wonder: if people were offered a lump sum up front which represented their lifetime take-home pay + fringe for the job they will do for the rest of their life, what would people's number be? Or another way, a choice of a 10 year contract to do X worth 100k/annual take-home with 1m delivered at start, or an unchanging biweekly paycheck. Would the biweekly need to be higher to make it more attractive than the one-time payment or could it be lower yet still be the favored choice.
        thfuran 4y ago
        >has != earns Yes, and? >a choice of a 10 year contract to do X worth 100k/annual take-home with 1m delivered at start, or an unchanging biweekly paycheck. Would the biweekly need to be higher to make it more attractive than the one-time payment or could it be lower yet still be the favored choice. You can only make the up front payment so large before employees start quitting early and moving to Montenegro.
        adolph 4y ago
        >>> Craig Newmark has roughly $1B. >> I doubt if he’s typical of people working at Craigslist. > A billion split ten ways is still a decent chunk of pocket change. The difference being that Newmark has an equity stake of some hypothetical value and the people working there would receive some fixed value per unit of time. If Newmark were to pay each of 10 workers $1B/10 then: * their paychecks afterward would be much smaller * their next tax period would be much larger * someone else would control Craigslist since the equity stake would have been liquidated (probably causing it to be worth less than $1B) Thus `has != earns` > quitting early and moving to Montenegro I'm of the thought that there is only so much leisure a person can take before there is a drive to contribute toward the betterment of humanity. If someone trusted you and you were trustable, would you take a large lump sum and work for work's sake? Would it make a difference if the sum was an equity stake in the work's environment? https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1501096-let-s-suppose-that-you-were-able-every-night-to-dream https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1501096-let-s-suppose-that-...
- neonscribe 4y ago
  He said "in the 10s", so I guess it could be up to a couple hundred. Still, a remarkably small number for a business like that.
  - layer8 4y ago
    I think “in the 10s” means less than a hundred. Probably not close to a hundred as well in this instance.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

* I far, far, far prefer Craigslist interface to anything else in that space. It's clear and focused Its search engine too - I get things I search for in the area I search for. For me, Kijiji and Facebook marketplace are awful UI, awful distractions, and give me 10,000 "suggested" or "fuzzy searched" things in random order, suppressing things I'm actually looking for. And I've completely given up on eBay over last decade. However. * Nothing is on Craigslist anymore in my area (Greater Toronto Area). Until about... 5-6 years ago, I could find comparable number of photography, computer, music & kids stuff on Craigslist and Kijiji. Today, Craigslist is a desert, a void, an oasis of empty search results. So network effect wins, as always :-/

greenie_beans 4y ago
you gotta search other locales to find what you want. search nashville craigslist for guitars, search rural areas for agricultural equipment, search lake areas for boats, etc
rcpt 4y ago
Used to feel this way but I really like OfferUps built in chat. With Craigslist you end up with people who expect phone calls or emails or texts and it's never clear which is which
xahrepap 4y ago
A local media company runs a "classifieds" on their online site. It dominates locally. Craigslist has been worthless for ages here because of it. However, Facebook Marketplace seems to be slowly gaining traction. Which I hate for all the reasons you mention. I dread the day it takes over :(
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Facebook Marketplace has completely taken over in most parts of the US. It sucks.
  - defterGoose 4y ago

aresant 4y ago

An aged but still relevant article - "Increase your conversion rate by making your site ugly" is a good parallel read particularly with regard to accessibility https://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increase-your-conversion-rate-by-making-your-site-uglier/ https://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/increase-your-...

HWR_14 4y ago
I feel like that article misses the biggest differentiator. "Be early enough that this looked reasonable at the time - win - rely on network effects to never need to upgrade your site."
malikNF 4y ago
Thank you for posting this gem. I really enjoyed it. For anyone wondering, there's a previous discussion on this article on HN[1] [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338459
badwolf 4y ago
I feel like Nilay Patel and the designers at The Verge take this article as their mantra...
tomtheelder 4y ago
I agree totally with the accessibility bit, but overall I think this article is based on a totally flawed premise. For starters most sites that gain traction look very good, and they are just citing the extremely small number of exceptions and acting like they represent some sort of trend. Second, almost all those sites gained traction in an era when their designs looked good or at least fine compared to their contemporaries and then lived off familiarity and network effects.

BitwiseFool 4y ago

My problem with Craigslist isn't that it looks old, the problem is that they seemingly refuse to modernize anything else about the site. Craigslist is chock full of spam and people abusing the search feature. I'm no anti-spam guru, but surely there is a way to cut down on people submitting the same thumbnail dozens of times using as many keywords as they can so their cellphone screen repair service shows up when looking for just about anything. Craig is no saint, and actively goes after any competition to his site. That, coupled with the complacency or refusal to go after spammers leaves me with a very sour opinion of the platform and Craig himself.

frankharv 4y ago
I love it and I despise the fact that they pulled down personal ads. It was like a virtual clipboard in the laundromat. Then the feds came and kicked in the doors.
- RunSet 4y ago
  I'm on a mission to keep encounters casual. https://lokilist.com/about.php https://lokilist.com/about.php It's slow going but fortunately text is cheap to host so I can keep this up indefinitely. Edit: If you like it make a post. Even better share the link to the post. Network effect is real.
  - water-your-self 4y ago
    You realize that FOSTA can come for you too right?
- reaperducer 4y ago
  It was like a virtual clipboard in the laundromat. The corkboard is still there. If you start using it again, others will. Same way CL, FBM, and the others got traction.
- joegahona 4y ago
  I thought they pulled their personal ads because people were getting murdered -- the Phillip Markoff interrogation is a must-listen for fans of that genre; it's a shame there's only audio available. According to this QZ article from 2018 though, it was for human-trafficking reasons. > In March, Craigslist pulled its personals section in response to a sex-trafficking bill that holds platforms liable if they are found to be facilitating sex trafficking and prostitution. The reaction was not without merit: over the years, websites like Craigslist and Backpage had become online marketplaces for illegal sexual activity. https://qz.com/1310350/what-we-lost-when-craigslist-shut-down-its-personals-section/ https://qz.com/1310350/what-we-lost-when-craigslist-shut-dow...

sojournerc 4y ago

Rock Auto is another such site. Looks old but is so much more effective than modern sites for finding the right car parts. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

brokenodo 4y ago
I love Rock Auto. The way they make it easy to see which warehouse your items are shipping from and choose other items from the same warehouse is super cool too.
- amatecha 4y ago
  Just ordered something from them earlier this week. They got my repeat business because the last time I ordered something from them it was effortless (other than their kinda poor UI lol) and the item arrived super fast. I guess the shipping was a bit pricy, but that's fine. They had the part and got it to me promptly, and charged a fair price for it. Works for me!

system16 4y ago

I don't particularly like Craigslist's UI, but I still prefer it to other online marketplaces because it's fast and simple. I do find it cluttered and not very nice to navigate, but I'll gladly take a bit of clutter and clunkiness over MBs of hideous banner ads shoved in my face, and god-knows what trackers and scripts are being used on the other sites. Similarly, I still use old.reddit and will continue to do so until they force that new monstrosity on me.

defterGoose 4y ago
See, I completely equate "clutter" with things like banner ads. CL is amongst the least "cluttered" sites I use. It absolutely doesn't live up to the latest trends in UI/UX design, but the fact that it feels more like basic HTML forms with little styling is a feature, not a bug.
- tomtheelder 4y ago
  > It absolutely doesn't live up to the latest trends in UI/UX design I'd have to disagree pretty strongly here. It is- excluding the homepage- a paragon of modern UX design, and I think many other sites have taken a lot of inspiration. Search oriented, minimalist design elements that stay out of the way of the user, key filters to narrow search, saved searches, alerts, etc. It's even almost entirely flat aesthetically! You could do a completely surface level reskin of Craigslist and it would appear, from a UX/UI perspective, to be a totally modern interface. I think people see the older visual aesthetic and assume that it's not in line with modern UX best practices, but it largely is! Again home page is excluded here. I think that's still the way it is for familiarity/nostalgia reasons, because they have made tons of changes to the main search UI but left the home page basically untouched. The trends that it doesn't keep up with are mostly technological rather than UX/UI.

layer8 4y ago

> Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day. […] It’s fast and easy for people, and that’s a big deal. […] For me as an engineer, simple is beautiful. Functional is beautiful.

Ken_At_EM 4y ago

It's because it prints money. Is just a straight money printing machine. Of all the Golden Goose's, it's best to just leave it alone and let it do it's thing.

laundermaf 4y ago
Facebook prints money too but that didn’t stop them from turning the clean perfect interface they had in 2010 into the steaming pile of eggs it is now.
- Ken_At_EM 4y ago
  I mean, yeah, that was a huge mistake. They should have left it alone entirely, they would have had so much more money to build the Meta-verse with!
- wildzzz 4y ago
  It's because Facebook has to constantly "innovate" to raise the share price. I'm sure Craigslist makes some decent income for it's owners and can pay it's bills every month but it's never going to explode in growth. They don't need new investors constantly because they don't do anything new. Their whole site is basically LAMP except for Perl instead of PHP. The latest part of their tech stack is a mail server that's 10 years old.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  I think this is intentional. The more you scroll their ugly interface to find what you are looking for, the more ads you see.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Article says it has "10s" of employees. They are just maintaining the money printer.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

alberth 4y ago

Why hasn't HN design changed in last 15 years ... because it works.

rosywoozlechan 4y ago

I rent a couple of properties out in the bay area and up until this year I've always relied on craigslist to get new tenants, but this year we tried out Zillow and we got tons of applicants, and the whole application process including vetting and setting up a lease and everything was done through Zillow. On the other hand someone noticed our Zillow listing and created a fraudulent listing of my property on Craigslist. I'm pretty much never going back to Craigslist. Apartments.com is also good for creating leases and managing properties, but Zillow seems to be the place to get high quality tenants.

tomcam 4y ago
Thanks for sharing. I’m about to rent out a house so this helps a lot. One thing I don’t get is why someone else would copy your listing? Do they somehow get a slice of the pie if a respondent rents?
- jstarfish 4y ago
  > One thing I don’t get is why someone else would copy your listing? Do they somehow get a slice of the pie if a respondent rents? Usually this is a scam. You advertise someone else's vacant property, break in to conduct tenant tours, collect fees/deposits/first month's rent, then bail.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Well that’s just evil. I never gave that possibility a thought.
    - jstarfish 4y ago
      I tried to find a succinct name for this scheme but failed. I did find a blog where a retired attorney discusses this and some variations on it (and learned something new in the process: pulling this stunt on multiple prospective tenants at the same time makes this a hell of a lot more lucrative): https://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2017/07/house-rental-scams.html https://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2017/07/house-rental-scams...

anarticle 4y ago

I would say because it is a tool, and tools should stay relatively the same. It's ok to make a new tool! I have this discussion with people who make physical objects all the time, and their frustrations with the software world. Imagine learning to use a Heidelberg offset press 20y ago, and if you enter your workshop, it performs the same as before. Now imagine you are a painter who uses photoshop elements once in awhile. For some reason, your printer is printing all your pictures with a red tinge. You buy a new version of photoshop elements, and the problem is gone. The moving targets of saas and other remote updated software changes the perspective on tools, especially for production purposes. Many people who produce physical objects with software run into these problems. I fix up motorcycles in my spare time, and I dread the day my torque wrench needs an update!

hedora 4y ago
My aging German automobile's radio failed to display an ö that a cloud service sent it yesterday. I really wonder how that regression slipped through. It has been able to display German in the past, along with all sorts of other unicode characters. The only thing I can figure is the band that named the song is Mongolian, so maybe they used a U-1803 (Mongolian full stop ᠃) as a modifier on the o? But then why did my phone display it correctly?

moolcool 4y ago

Craigslist is one of my favorite tech companies. They have a fantastic product which they don't sabotage in the interest of growth. Huge respect to them for quietly being the best.

LegitShady 4y ago
I don't think craigslist is a tech company.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  That's honestly fair enough, but then neither is AirBNB, Instagram and Uber.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    I would agree.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
I feel like there is a risk of sabotage through complacency and a refusal to adapt to competition. People looking for rentals and homes to buy don't go to craigslist first, they do to sites like Zillow and Redfin. As I've mentioned in a different response, the spam and junk listings are a persistent problem and none of the spam seems particularly sophisticated or hard to stop - most are literally the same image and content with a ton of tags posted under different categories.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  To be honest, I've never even thought about going to Craigslist for rentals in the decades I've been using it. But I use it a lot for other things.

strangattractor 4y ago

Because it works?

orsenthil 4y ago

I had a need for AC repair, and 3 CL service men let me down. Nextdoor of all places seem to have landed me with right service man in my locality.

seydor 4y ago

I dont think craigslist has a nice look. It's just stuck because it was the first in the world. I don't mean he needs to make it look like another cookiecutter bootstrap rounded-edges website, but he can reorganize to make it be more functional

hammock 4y ago

No better outlet to write this story than "PC Magazine."

ihsoj 4y ago

We need more sites like HN and Craigslist. primarily text based but fully functional. And most importantly no ads.

jerrybender 4y ago
HN has ads

wly_cdgr 4y ago

Cos it ain't broke and the people running it are a very rare breed who know better than to fix it. Same with McMaster Carr website and a very few others

snowwrestler 4y ago

Not to be “that guy,” but Craigslist has changed a lot over the years. They’ve kept the same coat of paint on it (visual design) but the way it works evolves continuously. For one obvious example, search results come up in cards now by default and you can use hover arrows to go through the photos on each one. It is far more visual experience today than it was when search results were a compact list of text titles. And depending on what you search, there are tons of specific filters that show up in the left column. Search “sailboat” and you can filter on make/model, propulsion, length overall, year manufactured, price, miles from location, etc. It works a lot more like eBay or other modern e-commerce sites than the blue links and default fonts let on. Keeping the old fonts and colors seems sort of like the famous door-desks at Amazon. It looks like a functional decision, but really the main point is to represent a particular viewpoint of the job.

spoils19 4y ago
That sounds like a regression to me. A more visual experience isn't necessarily better - I and most people on this site probably prefer the compact list of text titles, since the information is easier to parse. Filtering also limits search, not enhances it, as you are prevented from generically finding things, and now have to sort by filter.
- Psyladine 4y ago
  >I and most people on this site probably prefer the compact list of text titles, since the information is easier to parse. When the topics are as diverse & nuanced as hn feed, sure. When searching for lawnmower or car, 300 text listings of vehicles not so much.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  One of the defining characteristics of filters is that, unlike categories, you can just not select any if you want to see everything. This is true on craigslist, ebay, and every other website I can think of that has filtered product listings.
kepler1 4y ago

danjoredd 4y ago

Simple answer: its enough. Long answer: Its good enough

onemoresoop 4y ago

Craigslist works fine, I'm okay with the older UI. Yes, there are scammers but there are scammers on FB marketplace as well. Now it's lost it's users to FB but it's possible it may see a resurgence after a bad move by FB or some trend change.

bluedino 4y ago

Craigslist is basically dead in my area.

JJMcJ 4y ago

Another site that has changed little is the Drudge Report. I don't agree with the somewhat right-wing political bias of the site, but it's clear and easy to use.

MatthewORyan 4y ago
There is little if anything that is still "right-wing" about Drudge today. If you doubt me, load it a few times every week and see what is featured. It's not the Drudge of 5 or 10 or 15 years ago.
- JJMcJ 4y ago
  I did a visit before posting and have to agree with you. Though even in the early days there would be links to leftish news sources.

yboris 4y ago

Craigslist might work well in large metro area like SF, but when your state is carved up into numerous non-overlapping regions and you're 60 minutes away from the center of either one to your side - it's just a sad roulette to see if you have to drive an hour to pick something up. With a simple distance-from-zipcode search implementation Craigslist could still be useful. Sadly I'm stuck with Facebook Marketplace for now (which has been amazing for distance searches).

s0rce 4y ago
Its also annoying when its the opposite, if I want to search for a car in California, I just stick myself centrally in Frenso and click all the adjacent areas since you can get SF, Sac, LA, Vegas.

creeble 4y ago

It's odd that this article came out only a few months after CL did a semi-significant change in the way they display listings -- the "gallery view" now lays out the screen differently, and it's fairly broken on mobile, pushing the left menu in and out randomly as you scroll (iOS Firefox and Safari anyway). FWIW, I still use CL quite a lot in the SF Bay area. The cars listings are full of spam and scams, probably double what they were 5 or 6 years ago. This, despite the fact that they started charging for cars/trucks listings.

amatecha 4y ago

I still use CL frequently. I actually have a few search terms I literally search every day. I have got SO MANY amazing deals because of this. Yeah, you have to be patient, but stuff does come up. I have both bought and sold over CL and never once been scammed, but then again I do my due diligence and trust my gut. Anyway, one of the best things about it is that it has stayed the same and you know what to expect. No insane UI overhaul that makes it all "latest trend", no scummy user-exploitation dark patterns (that I've noticed), no animated video ads covering 1/3 of the screen... Yeah, it has some flaws, but for me it's still the optimal "local buy/sell" service.

inanutshellus 4y ago

I hate FB Marketplace. It's actively hostile to buyers. Like, try to find a "kinda nice" bicycle. You can't find the bicycle category (though it does exist as a sub-group of Sporting Goods), you can't just say "show me bikes" unless you hack the URL, you can search for the word "bicycle" but for some reason people selling a "Specialized Rockhopper" think you know it's a bicycle so don't use that word. Oh, and when selling, they just suggest random categories instead of letting you choose from their heirarchy. So you get bicycles in Hobbies. You get them in Sporting Goods. You get them in Bicycles. But... You can't search for them by type. That's not even complaining about the lack of attributes, like "type=BMX" or "type=Mountain" or "Size=Large" or "Frame Material=Carbon Fiber"... all of which are in Craigslist and eBay. And! when searching, they actively work to inject ebay-like selling (non-local) into the mix by resetting my distance preferences every time I change the search. "Find bicycles" -> "Find bicycles in 30 miles" -> "Find 'Specialized Rockhopper'" -> Why am I getting "Ships To You" results?! Why am I getting non-bicycle results?! Oh. They reset my distance again. ^-- BTW they do this because they actually make money when the sale happens through FB. If you just buy it in-person with cash they don't get a cut. Misaligned incentives, as they say. And! even if I do find the bicycle category, if narrow the category by searching with a word in there, like "Rockhopper" it takes me out of the bicycle category to do the search! G. A. R. B. A. G. E.

adolph 4y ago
Dammit Jim, I'm a cyclist, not an ontologist! [edit to correct snowclone]
latchkey 4y ago
Is this still available?
shabbatt 4y ago
Sellers too. Not to mention harassment/racism/phobia when the price isnt "right". Facebook usage seems to be correlated with reduced cognition, it invites the bottom rung of society
- zelphirkalt 4y ago

sigmonsays 4y ago

in light of "Updating the UI to be modern just because", my 4yr old says "because" is not a reason. Even she knows, yet so many choose to have a modern look for no gain (likely the opposite). I'm happy he left the UI the same

nonethewiser 4y ago

I remember watching a Harvard System Design intro lecture by David Milan on YouTube. He was talking about tradeoffs and said that craigslist stored all their listings as static html. which was extremely cheap and performant but made it harder to edit and stuff like that. I wonder if they have changed since then.

FearlessNebula 4y ago
I recalled the same, and was hoping to read some more information about that in the article.

adolph 4y ago

In an alternative universe Yahoo! also kept a 1997 interface and the world was a bit nicer than it really turned out.

behnamoh 4y ago
But then how could they justify hiring an inexperienced ex-google woman? (nothing wrong with being a woman, but she tried to make a celebrity out of herself, look at her cover magazine photoshoot).
- adolph 4y ago
  "... not that there's anything wrong with that" Is another fine product of the nineties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outing Marissa Meyer was certainly not the old hand CEO type that had already run Yahoo into the ditch but hardly inexperienced. She oversaw the layout of Google's well-known, unadorned search homepage. She was also on the three-person team responsible for Google AdWords, which is an advertising platform that allows businesses to show their product to relevant potential customers based on their search terms. AdWords helped deliver 96% of the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer
chenster 4y ago
You really meant "Japanese Yahoo" https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ welcome back to 1990

hedora 4y ago

People used to complain that Craigslist's accessibility support was abysmal. Has that changed? I like the aesthetic of the site, and see no reason why it would cause havoc with screen readers. However it was a common complaint in the past.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Craigslist >> NextDoor >> OfferUp >> eBay >> FB But definitely YMMV depending on the city you're in. I'm glad it's stayed the way it is. Arguably the best marketplace website, period. Simple to post, simple to use, local pickup only. Not infested with ad/promoted listings.

PaulBGD_ 4y ago
Agreed, although the sad thing is that eBay/FB have a large audience.. so if I fail to sell something elsewhere I'll usually have to switch to one of those two :(
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  I closed by FB account 10 years, not opening it up again even if it's to access their Marketplace. Was big on eBay back in the day when bidding was fun (before sniper bots took over), you could find good deals, and wasn't full of scams. Used it just this week probably for the first time in 10 years to find an obscure part that I needed replacing--still good for that.

mindprism 4y ago

Extreeeeeemely careful regression testing.

scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago

When I lived in the US, at a certain point I realized literally every major aspect of my life in some way could be worked back to a craigslist ad - cars, places to live in and jobs. We don't have craigslist where I live in Europe, and I miss it. Instead it's an endless parade of for-profit services like olx. I tell people about craigslist and it's alien to them, this idea that something on the internet could be managed to be run by a dozen people and not be changed. It's not even the simplicity that is so appealing to me, but that you get this feeling that it is a totally neutral platform. Like air, you don't see it but it's there. And nobody is trying to put perfume in it.

cdaringe 4y ago
sounds like opportunity

bilsbie 4y ago

There’s nothing wrong with how it looks. They just needed to fix the scams and let people set up alerts.

ravenstine 4y ago

People use (or at least used) Craigslist because they like it when websites and apps actually work. I never encountered bugs or bizarre UI problems when using Craigslist. It turns out the only people who care about flashy animations, fancy drop shadows, "native" looking UI elements, Material/Human design principles, etc., are developers and designers. Normal people only care about those things when functionality is solved first. If it functions like crap, but it looks good, you're just putting lipstick on a pig, and lipstick might not have even been called for in the first place.

ddejohn 4y ago
Not disagreeing at all. I get irrationally angry when a website shits the bed because of flashy UI BS. One thing I will say is that I personally appreciate "modern" UIs (when they work) because I have ADHD and the visual clutter of "old fashioned" websites is a serious problem for me. I have old reddit set to 200% magnification just to keep the amount of content on the screen to a minimum, and to minimize the width of lines of text. Again though, I do still prefer snappy and functional over 'elegant' and sluggish, even if it's more difficult for me to focus.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  I also have ADHD and have an adoration for old-style website design. Not necessarily the 2008 - 2013 era (which I like to call the 1970's of the web), but websites before that which were more cluttered and unrefined. Websites from the old days surface far more relevant information on the first fold than do contemporary sites, which I believe have gone overboard with Swiss Style design inspiration such that they think empty space is always preferable. The fact that many websites today use extremely large fonts in order to pass accessibility tests also doesn't help, but this is partly subjective because I personally hate reading text greater than 16px. Maybe I would think differently if I did lots of heavy reading, but that's hard to do these days because most prose on the internet is filler and total rubbish. If I want to just find something, a website being designed like a magazine cover really doesn't help. Allow me to illustrate my perspective. This website, which has been online since 1994, would today be considered one of the most poorly designed sites of all time. http://amasci.com/ http://amasci.com/ Bask in the dark repeating background, the neon colors, and the quirky use of font size. And yet, unlike 95% of sites online today, it loads instantly, and is organized such that I can find what I might be looking for without distraction. The author provides a header guiding new users to categories, and underneath is a list of links to pages the author thinks I might be interested in. And that's it. No Fontawesome, no TypeKit, no box shadows, no hover animations, no hover dropdowns, no sticky headers, no scroll jacking, no transparencies, no accordions, no hamburger menus, no bullshit. A "modern" website would make the first fold into a glorified billboard, hide anything interesting in horizontal navigation of categories that have to be expanded out, use 19px font for prose because The Google, a masonry type layout because CSS grid bro, a sticky header that annoyingly animates in/out, and one to three popup modals asking me to give them my email.

AlbertCory 4y ago

I still use CL, after I try NextDoor (and less often, eBay). Many of the scammers are pretty easy to spot: they say "my agent will pick it up and give you a cashier's check (or money order)." I think CL could easily make it harder for the scammers, with minimal effort. For the ghosting buyers: this isn't just limited to CL. On the last item, I was giving something away on NextDoor, and still had around 8 ghosts. What I finally resorted to was asking for the exact time they were coming, and making it clear that I was not holding it for them if they didn't show up. If there were several on the same day, I'd tell the later ones that someone was (supposedly) coming before them, and it might be gone so they should double check before coming.

sojournerc 4y ago
I've found better success with asking for something insignificant like 10$ when I just want to get rid of something. It weeds out the flakes and maybe gets the "buyer" more invested in the deal

scelerat 4y ago

Craigslist to me, beyond something I still use regularly to hunt for musical instruments, electronics, bikes, furniture, garage sales, etc, is an enduring shibboleth when it comes to "design." When someone says "Craigslist design sucks," I can probably guess how that person thinks about design and what it means to them. IMO Craigslist has survived as long as it has, in spite of no promotion, no advertising, no partner deals, no api integrations, yadda yadda, precisely because it is designed very well for its purpose and its users. I would never claim that CL is the most aesthetically pleasing site to look at, but when it comes to posting, searching and browsing classified ads (and even participating in its message boards), it does the job quite well and with minimum hassle. For the first three weeks after I moved to San Francisco, more than sixteen years ago, I couch surfed at my boss's place on Stanyan street in Cole Valley. At the time, Craig also lived nearby. My boss and he were friends and would frequently meet at a coffee shop, and I would often join them. When I was first introduced to Craig, I quipped that I had recently moved, and did he know a good place to search for apartments? He gave me a gentle smirk and a merely mildly condescending roll of the eyes. Very pleasant, intelligent, and unassuming person.

JohnFen 4y ago
Agreed. > I would never claim that CL is the most aesthetically pleasing site to look at Which, I think, is a good thing. Experience has taught me that if a web site obviously put a lot of effort into being aesthetically appealing, it's probably not a great website.
jlukic 4y ago
Nice vignette, thanks for sharing this.

z9znz 4y ago

I gave up on CL years ago when the apartment rental lists for Amsteram became overrun with obvious scams. I would flag them, but it never seemed to matter. Then also because of the Backpage disaster they stopped all the person to person (dating or hookup) groups. It's a shame too, because I actually met some good people in the past on those groups. So on one hand, they over-moderated by eliminating whole segments of their site while apparently ignoring other segments which became rife with garbage ads or outright scams. And once the real audience finds wading through garbage to be too much effort, we leave and the site becomes irrelevant.

egberts1 4y ago

And none of those ad-filled crapola too! Craigslist. Short and simple. Find all my spare parts to most anything there

Waterluvian 4y ago

Craigslist is proof that you do not need to occasionally “refresh the look and feel” of your website or app. I have a real chip on my shoulder for the occasional design team that seems intent on justifying their own existence and nothing more. I’d love to learn about big user studies that concluded with, “don’t change a thing. It’s good as is.” Surely that case must be appropriate some % of the time. But I think when you’ve got a hammer you just see nails and work for you.

aeharding 4y ago

Craigslist has an awesome UI. But I really wish they'd switch out their clunky JS-based gallery component for pure CSS scroll snapping!

gernb 4y ago

I would argue the biggest reason craigslist is doing well it it's free and semi anonymous (it forwards all emails though generated addresses) The UX has areas clearly neglected. For example in apartments there is a trashcan icon to hide a listing. But, it's inserted at the end of the description. If the description is long then the button does not appear. Another is the categories. In SF, SOMA and Mission Bay arguably need to be separated but craigslist only lists SOMA and groups Mission Bay in with it. That's one of several areas that need to be split I used it a ton over the last 6 months trying to find an apartment but in the end I found the apartment on apartments.com ... which is far from perfect but has some features arguably more suited to apartment hunting. That I think might be the point. Different products can benefit from unique features

JohnFen 4y ago

I'm glad Cragislist hasn't changed. It's pretty much ideal as it is.

kazinator 4y ago

Craigslist superficially looks the same if you don't care about the removal of RSS.

paxys 4y ago

I have no problem with Craigslist's interface, but the site is pretty much Scamlist at this point. I often simultaneously list stuff on Craigslist, FB Marketplace and Nextdoor. The latter two have a near perfect success rate. Craiglist replies are all the most obvious scams in the world. This is becoming more and more the case for apartments as well. The majority of listings in my area are scams with pictures stolen from Redfin or elsewhere. Reporting will remove them but five more will show up the next day. Zillow Rentals, Strerteasy, Hotpads are a lot more reputable. Craigslist needs to take all the money they have saved in design and put it towards anti spam and fraud detection tools.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

1970-01-01 4y ago

A: Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day. That mindset is worth more than anything else Web 3.0 can throw-up. (pun intended)

princevegeta89 4y ago

Still works well for the little functionality it has. Having a great UX and UI is always a good thing but at the same time if it only means putting a lot of new cognitive load on the user I would rather not have it.

zasdffaa 4y ago

I (here in the UK) did have occasional luck meeting others for sex in the 'personals' section. Until that was shut down. Thanks, American prudes!

ugh123 4y ago

CL wins on a lot of fronts but they need to do something about the spam and for-sale bloat submitted by stores.

alanwreath 4y ago

I used to blame eBay for the lack of updates to Craigslist - but it seems that Craigslist is now back in the hands of the original creator…so the reason is probably that he’s got his and is doing something else while it runs on fumes.

nocman 4y ago

If only retail stores had websites like Craigslist! Just last night I was in one trying to do a simple search for a fairly common item (on my phone). After waiting between 20 seconds to a minute for search results to return, then trying to click the "search in store inventory" checkbox 12 times (sometimes because I wasn't sure the tap had registered, sometimes because I thought the page hadn't finished loading before I tapped it, etc), I finally just gave up after 5 or 10 minutes of struggling with it. I had a decent signal (3 or 4 bars, I believe -- about as good as I ever expect to get in a store), but the web pages on so-called "modern" websites are so bloated and inefficient, sometimes it's a miracle to get anything done on a normal residential home internet service, let alone on a phone. And before someone suggests it, NO, I am NOT going to install a stinking app from every store I visit (not that they'd be any better, most of the one's I've seen I would describe as "barely functional -- sometimes"). It would be interesting to know how many sales stores have lost because a customer was trying to search for something in their store via their website, but the experience was so miserable they just gave up.

qDnbBcCnsZneEJg 4y ago
There are examples in retail: https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/
- nocman 4y ago
  Yeah, that's nice. Too bad the examples are so few and far between (especially among national chains). I've seen one or two good examples before I'm sure, just none that I can think of that I shop at now.

hamiltonians 4y ago

the site is very complicated actuaĺly, especially the backend. it looks simple but anything but. same for wikiedia

raisin_churn 4y ago

This is an awful lot of words to say "it works fine." I love craigslist, and use it both for listing and buying quite regularly. There's plenty of fair criticisms of craigslist, but the UI is one of the strongest features. Maybe turn it around and ask why most other websites have loud, jarring, complicated interfaces and copious 3rd party JavaScript from dozens of other domains?

SMAAART 4y ago

I had no idea that PC Magazine is still alive.

dahfizz 4y ago

> Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day. Web developers have this twisted idea that if code wasn't written in the past 6 months, it's legacy and un-modern and bad and needs to be refreshed. Stop. Just because something was fun for you to build doesn't mean it's fun for me to use.

AlexandrB 4y ago
There's a joke that the Oscar for best editing usually goes to the movie with the most editing. Design seems the same way, where simplicity is underrated and things have change constantly or it's "dated".

flerchin 4y ago

The page loads in 670ms. They're clearly profitable. My new tech darling.

kortex 4y ago

Wow, all this talk about Craigslist's (and Craig's) minimalist approaches really makes pcmag's experience all the more jarring. - Pcmag wants to push notifications (deny) - give us your email! (full page sudden popover, tiny "no thanks" text) - ads every paragraph (big enough to disrupt reading flow) - ads in floating banner at the top - browser creaks and groans trying to paint as I scroll, white blocks if I go too fast. It's almost like they are trying to demonstrate why Craigslist looks the same by giving a vivid counter-example.

scaredginger 4y ago

I really respect this philosophy. I know the HN crowd hates when Reddit is brought up, but its redesign is a great example here. I find the old interface's technical simplicity serves me far better since it loads fast and can be extended with RES. Similarly, I love that HN still looks like a site from 2007, it functions beautifully

victor22 4y ago
Wow that's so true. You're right on the money. They fucked and prostituted reddit.

inamberclad 4y ago

I've been scoring amazing antique furniture here in SF for much less than a half decent thing from IKEA costs.

agumonkey 4y ago

Why does chopin sounds the same after 250 years

marcus_holmes 4y ago

I think the counterpoint to this attitude is Figma. Figma looks great, and designers love it, but as a casual user it's a nightmare to use or find anything in. There is the old "function over form" and "form over function" dichotomy. I'm a huge "function over form" fan; I like things simple and easily understood. But I understand that I'm in a minority and most people prefer "form over function"

beshrkayali 4y ago

One of the reason that finally got me to drop Spotify is their constant (and usually very small) tinkering with their interface. I used to use it in specific ways and not very often so when I needed to find or edit a playlist it was very annoying to discover that a button moved or even its text changed. Same for Slack, which I’m very thankful I don’t have to use anymore. Slack and Spotify design teams really need to appreciate the purse: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

brunojppb 4y ago

Because it’s effective and works.

0x445442 4y ago

It probably looks the same because it doesn’t need to look different. And it seems CL wasn’t enticed by the cult of money that is Silicon Valley. Thus, their organization was not taken over by countless layers of middle management attempting to justify their own existence by adding a bunch of useless features.

kumarsw 4y ago

Like most people here, I love the minimalist 90s UI and the lack of need to create an account. Unfortunately it's a ghost town of scammers now in my area. Craigslist really dropped the ball on policing their site and let competitors take over. Facebook is terrible, but the closed yard-sale groups really cut down the number of scammer responses.

b06timmer 4y ago

I loved the old Compaq web site, as everything was easy to find. It may have been the merge with HP that made things more difficult. CL is like a breath of fresh air.

dusted 4y ago

"The current Craigslist site upholds its unmistakable '90s look and feel." <-- Text below screenshots of website that looks nothing like a 90s website :/