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The 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 s

The 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 ago
To 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 ago
  Features can be added without alienating users with outdated tech.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 ago
  The same is true of Facebook. That hasn't stopped them from evolving their design.
- jonny_eh 14y ago
  I don't see how the existence of padmapper could hurt the grandmas that use craigslist.org
markerdmann 14y ago
Don'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 ago
  While 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 ago
    Which 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 ago
      Failing 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 ago
        That'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 ago
      It'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 ago
Their 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 ago
  Despite 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 ago
    There 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 ago
  For the housing vertical. It looked like this. http://www.padmapper.com/ http://www.padmapper.com/
- jamiequint 14y ago
  Building 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 ago
Other 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 ago
  There'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.

juiceandjuice 14y ago

To 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 ago
Features 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 ago
The same is true of Facebook. That hasn't stopped them from evolving their design.
jonny_eh 14y ago
I don't see how the existence of padmapper could hurt the grandmas that use craigslist.org

markerdmann 14y ago

Don'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 ago
While 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 ago
  Which 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 ago
    Failing 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 ago
      That'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 ago
    It'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 ago

Their 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 ago
Despite 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 ago
  There 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 ago
For the housing vertical. It looked like this. http://www.padmapper.com/ http://www.padmapper.com/
jamiequint 14y ago
Building 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 ago

Other 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 ago
There'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.