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Disagree. Craig Newmark has said that he's scared to make drastic changes to the UX specifically because he doesn't know what magic recipe keeps people coming
by binaryorganic 14y ago
Disagree. Craig Newmark has said that he's scared to make drastic changes to the UX specifically because he doesn't know what magic recipe keeps people coming back. Do I like the CL layout? Nope. Does that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it? Probably not.
- jamiequint 14y agoThe magic recipe that keeps people coming back is that Craigslist has a large network. I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that adding a map to search results and letting me put an upper limit on the number of bedrooms I'm looking for would not make people less likely to use Craigslist.
- juiceandjuice 14y agoTo be fair to Craigslist, since everyone and their grandma uses it, I'd imagine a lot of users have underpowered computers, outdated browsers, and low bandwidth connections. I've seen padmapper slow wayyyy down on my i7 macbook with 8GB ram, I can't imagine what it'd be like on grandma's 5 year old budget PC.
- psc 14y agoFeatures can be added without alienating users with outdated tech. Just conditionally show the improved site only to users who can run it. It's a poor excuse, especially since Craigslist hasn't even tried to improve the layout of the site, which has no effect on load speed and compatibility.
- olog-hai 14y agoThe same is true of Facebook. That hasn't stopped them from evolving their design.
- jonny_eh 14y agoI don't see how the existence of padmapper could hurt the grandmas that use craigslist.org
- markerdmann 14y agoDon't discount the speed. Every Craigslist page loads and renders very quickly. The simple, text-only UI helps keep it fast, and that matters.
- jamiequint 14y agoWhile the pageload speed may be faster the total speed to find what I'm looking for is drastically slower due to the fact that the interface sucks.
- aheilbut 14y agoWhich paradoxically, seems to be an advantage, because it puts people in a feedback loop where they stay on the site, and every new search provides a tiny bit of reinforcement that builds the habit.
- nottombrown 14y agoFailing to find what you're looking for because of a frustrating UI is not positive reinforcement. People stay on the site because it is the largest marketplace and they have no alternatives.
- nemo 14y agoThat's weird, I've never had any trouble finding what I was looking for on Craigslist. There definitely are ways that they could improve the search interface, but the current implementation works fine for me, and given their user base it works well enough for a lot of people.
- jaggederest 14y agoIt's actually much more variable reinforcement - of course, the most addictive kind. Each individual search has a low probability of success, but occasionally you'll succeed.
- mtrimpe 14y agoTheir magic recipe is that an amazing amount of non-technical people have figured out how to work with the site. The Dutch version of Craigslist (Marktplaats, owned by eBay) is in a similar predicament. They have a very sucky UI and have experimented with new and improved versions, but every improvement was quickly reverted after large drops in engagement. It's almost surreal to look at their site (http://marktplaats.nl http://marktplaats.nl) and realize that there's tons of highly talented people behind it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- alister 14y agoDespite the very basic UI, the Dutch version of Craigslist seems to be doing well based on the hundreds of apartment listings in, for example, Amsterdam: http://amsterdam.craigslist.org/apa/ http://amsterdam.craigslist.org/apa/ But if I might inject an opposing data point, nobody seems to use the Brazilian version of Craigslist. Check out Sao Paulo: http://saopaulo.craigslist.org/apa/ http://saopaulo.craigslist.org/apa/ Can you believe that there are just 5 apartment listings for a metropolitan area of 19.9 million! It's incomprehensible to me why Craigslist doesn't work there, especially since all the alternatives involve paying some middleman for listing. The same goes for job sites and "things for sale" sites as well. Brazilians prefer to use some scammy-looking sites loaded with graphics and eye candy and often charging a fee, rather than the vanilla Craigslist. I'm going to venture a guess that this has much more to do with trust (Brazilians want to feel that someone has vetted the data) than with good/bad UI or web design.
- marquis 14y agoThere are various examples of Craiglist just simply not working in various countries. In fact I'm going to go out on a limb and posit that Craigslist really only had a monopoly in the U.S. Brazil uses olx (I think?), Argentina and Mexico among other Latin American countries use mercadolibre where Craigslist is more for baiting foreigners with higher rent prices and international shared accomodation. Australia has gumtree, New Zealand has trademe (and they both use Seek for jobs) and I would use marktplaats in the Netherlands as mentioned above. I forget the one for Spain. The list goes on..
- moreorless 14y ago> I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that adding a map to search results and letting me put an upper limit on the number of bedrooms I'm looking for would not make people less likely to use Craigslist. So when can we expect to see your show HN: Craiglist done right?
- nottombrown 14y agoFor the housing vertical. It looked like this. http://www.padmapper.com/ http://www.padmapper.com/
- jamiequint 14y agoBuilding the right interface is simple. The real problem of building any marketplace is solving the chicken/egg problem of having a lot of buyers and sellers. Craigslist does not avoid disruption because it has the best product, it avoids disruption because it has a huge marketplace with a lot of buyers and sellers.
- mappu 14y agoOther good examples of these content-over-form sites are 2ch.net in japan, and 4chan for the western world. (4chan recently updated its HTML for the first time in something like eight years.) I suppose network effects (and the posting model) make up a large part of their popularity, but there's something to be said for a reliable and functional interface that works well and doesn't change on a whim.
- intended 14y agoThere's a lot to be said for it. It's constant in hn discourse to put great UI up there and to give advice on it. Yet if anyone here has sat on a Bloomberg terminal, used Craigslist, or even games like net hack or dwarf fort, it's pretty clear that interface can be damned. Not in all cases perhaps, agreed. But in these cases, after a while of using it people get faster and develop the muscle memory to become efficient on the site, so the UI fades into the background anyway.
- wallflower 14y ago> after a while of using it people get faster and develop the muscle memory to become efficient on the site, so the UI fades into the background anyway. Jared Spool has said that when you change the user interface - fairly dramatically - you frustrate your regular users because they are now unfamiliar with it and have to restart their learning/experience curve. "At eBay, they learned the hard way that their users don't like dramatic change. One day, the folks at eBay decided they no longer liked the bright yellow background on many of their pages, so they just changed it to a white background. Instantly, they started receiving emails from customers, bemoaning the change. So many people complained, that they felt forced to change it back." http://www.uie.com/articles/death_of_relaunch/ http://www.uie.com/articles/death_of_relaunch/
- intended 14y ago"If it works, its good enough?" Honestly thinking about other sites, digg died because of content, reddit survives because of content; even if someone could improve the interface, its not really going to matter.
- jonxu 14y agoWow, if this is true I've lost a lot of respect for CL. Being scared to make forward changes because one doesn't know the source of success is such a terrible excuse to stop innovating.
- briandear 14y agoYou may have lost respect for them but you're still going to use CL. Which kind of proves the point.
- MartinCron 14y agoDoes that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it? Craigslist is unwilling to let Padmapper buy a license to use their content. This isn't as black and white as "stealing content".
- trotsky 14y agoContent not available for licensing is a justification for infringement? That doesn't ring true at all for me - exclusive content is often much more valuable to a business than content that's licensed. I doubt anyone would think that goldman sachs coverage being distributed by morgan stanley would fit under some "no harm, no foul" ethos even if Morgan significantly improved on the layout of the pages.
- MartinCron 14y agoI don't agree with the infringement, I just think that boiling it down to "stealing" is too reductionist. The reality here is a bit more complicated. Seriously, I think I am the only person who doesn't think it is OK to torrent Game of Thrones. :)
- ryguytilidie 14y agoIs there a rock bottom hackernews will reach for leaning on shockingly bad analogies to make a point?
- trustfundbaby 14y agoIts their content, just because they won't let you use it doesn't mean you can break in and grab it.
- huckleberries21 14y agoIf they don't want to change their layout, why not let sites like PadMapper build on it the way that it has been doing? That way, old-fashioned users can keep using just CL and people in need of something slicker can use PM+CL. I also don't understand why classifieds content is proprietary? Aren't they just facts? Please can someone explain?
- anewguy 14y agoBecause that would endanger their monopoly.
- samstave 14y agoWhat utter bs - padmapper is not "stealing" anything - padmapper is the best method of viewing cl housing listings there is. I berated Craig over on Quora about this a while back - to say that he doesn't want to break it is bullshit - he is scared and lazy to better the site through even the smallest of updates. The fact that "this posting has been deleted by its author" and "this post has been flagged for removal" still show up in results is down right infuriating. Providing simply no way to browse items by picture is also laughable. The content on CL is what is valuable, and Craig has been rumored to make 25 million per year off the site, and he doesn't want to muck with it because he doesn't want to hurt that income - but while doing so, he is keeping the content locked up in an abhorrent UX.
- genwin 14y ago> [Craig] is scared and lazy to better the site through even the smallest of updates. I'd be the same. Why mess with a goose that's already laying more gold eggs than you can use? For public service reasons maybe, but I'm confident CL is a (highly profitable) business foremost.
- swalkergibson 14y agoYou just answered your own question. If your project made 25 million per year, would you change it? I know I wouldn't... Additionally, he is keeping the data locked up because that is his prerogative. Why should he go through the time and expense of developing some kind of API if he does not want to do that? If he is happy with how the website looks and works right now, why in the blue blazes should he change it?
- ssebro 14y agoIf this is true, then he (Craig Newmark) really needs to read the innovator's dilemma (http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business/dp/0062060244/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340411028&sr=8-1&keywords=innovator%27s+dilemma http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B...). TLDR: If you allow yourself to become a prisoner to your success, you're actually making your continued success unlikely. You can solve the dilemma by spinning out a smaller, irreverant version of yourself & giving them what they need to destroy the old company. In craigslist's case, he could include a link on the old site that allows users to upgrade to a more modern version, and have the modern site basically consume an api/scrape the old CL till it gained momentum.
- iamwil 14y agoPadmapper doesn't make money from Craigslist listings. It also sends traffic back to CL. It shows the summary of the listing, and then when the user is interested, they can click through the pin to the actual Craigslist listing.
- eupharis 14y agoMost landlords probably never even realize the traffic first got to CL through Padmapper at all. Whenever I'm asked, I automatically just say CL. Bringing up Padmapper is just likely to confuse. CL is deliberately making its service less useful both to its paying customers and the public at large. And the sole justification for this is fear that Padmapper could grow to be a bigger, better competitor someday in the distant future. Leveraging a monopoly to destroy technological progress for fear of future competition is irksome. It's almost certainly not illegal, and maybe not even morally wrong. But it still sucks. Yet for all that, I'm moving on July 15th, and I think there's about a 95% chance I'll find the place through CL. That's where the market is.
- poppew 14y agoHow does "Leveraging a monopoly to destroy technological progress" not fall under some antitrust laws? Is it just because Craigslist is free? I definitely feel the consumer is potentially losing out due to Craigslist's monopolistic practices.
- eupharis 14y agoCL isn't US Steel. I doubt Craigslist even has a straight 40% of rental market share. But for urban 20-somethings looking for cheap living situations and roommates? It feels like it has 95% market share. At least in Portland. This is all theorycraft though. If anyone had hard numbers on CL's market share for rentals I'd love to see them!
- webwright 14y agoBah. Just because improve a web site is hard doesn't mean that you don't have a responsibility to your users to TRY. Craigslist has not. There are ways to experiment in a low-impact way. Hell, they could offer a "plugin" system, so that users could add the padmapper plugin. People keep building things using Craigslist data that users LOVE and Craigslist keeps shutting them down. Craigslist is one of the great squandered opportunities for awesomeness on the internet.
- toddmorey 14y agoI would still conjecture that Craigslist succeeded in spite of their design, not because of it. That's the problem with these things, it's really hard to reverse engineer a success like Craigslist and figure out which of the moving pieces were real contributors.
- jacoblyles 14y agoPeople come back because craigslist has monopoly power. Craigslist knows this. They are afraid to release an API that would allow people to experiment with UI because they know that would train people to go to sites other than craigslist (I save hours using padmapper over Craigslist).
- arnorhs 14y agoYou would think that they'd be able to measure these things. How hard can your flavor of a/b testing (or bandit testing for the bros) be to implement for a company like Craig's list. It's just pure laziness and I'm sure the right talented team could make a product that beats Craig's list
- PythonDeveloper 14y agoThen open an API and let OTHERS do it at their expense...
- benjaminsull 14y ago>he's scared to make drastic changes to the UX specifically a/b test