7 ms·

The unbundling of Craigslist and Reddit

101 points by alexshye 13y ago

timcederman 13y ago
This is a reach. If anything Reddit is consolidating previous verticals - e.g. standalone forums.
- Torrents 13y ago
  Definitely...there are lots of forums I used to visit that I've now abandoned, since the subreddit for that topic is so strong, active, useful or well moderated. Additionally I've heard this complaint so many times, but I don't find Reddit ugly at all. What do people want? Tag clouds, gradients and flash everywhere, or what? What's a less ugly forum/comment layout than Reddit?
  - rhizome 13y ago
    there are lots of forums I used to visit that I've now abandoned, since the subreddit for that topic is so strong, active, useful or well moderated Not to mention commonly being saddled with a 10yr old model of PHPbb style boards.
  - MitziMoto 13y ago
    I will probably get eviscerated for this, but I've always been confused why Reddit was so ugly. I am absolutely NOT a designer in any sense of the word, but here's some things I would change. 1. Change the #0000FF links. Something, anything, slightly desaturated from pure blue would look better IMO. <Insert contrast comments here> 2. Whitespace. I can feel the function over form guys typing away furiously from here! BUT YOU CAN FIT MORE CATZ WITH LESS WHITESPACE! I like a little bit of extra whitespace, so sue me. I think an extra 20 pixels between submissions would go a long way. Maybe even a light HR too? 3. The "tabs" at the top are just flat ugly and dated. In fact, everything within the blue header just looks dated. http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus for example does a nice job of making Reddit look better without drastic changes. Although I think their titles could be slightly larger and I hate text-decoration: underline;
  - ufmace 13y ago
    I have to agree with that. There's real value in going to one site to see all of your threads and replies on 20 topics, rather than going to 20 different sites. Plus, the sheer size of the site and core quality of their engine makes it possible for lots of relatively tiny communities to thrive that are too small, devoid of tech skill, and undercapitalized to create forums of their own. As for the ugly, I think it looks fine. At least, I'd rather have it be a bit on the plain side than have megabytes of garish colors everywhere like a 2003 Myspace page that takes 30 seconds for each page to load.
- baddox 13y ago
  Not to mention that the article just uses "craiglist" to mean "selling any goods or services locally." It's silly to consider all those startups as "competing within verticals of craiglist" simply because they are involved in selling goods or services locally.
thetrumanshow 13y ago
Actually HN itself is experiencing some 'unbundling', I believe. Boot-strappers, for example, have long been carving out their own communities away from HN. I can only imagine this is also true for valley startups.. There's no way HN is still the center of this world for long. Its where you invited all your friends and co-workers to, and now its a mess. Now you have to move upmarket to find better information, and getting into those other communities is harder. They don't just let anyone in. They watched what happened to HN and they're scared of killing quality. If you want into those communities, you better have created something, and you better be willing to contribute in a positive way. They won't tolerate many Jeremiahs.
- jmduke 13y ago
  My favorite Internet community is Something Awful, and I'm surprised nobody's followed its curation model: put your money where your mouth is. Accounts cost $10, and you get banned (meaning you have to spend another $10) if you do dumb things.
  - PhasmaFelis 13y ago
    For starters, when most forums ban people it's because they want them to leave. Allowing trolls and assholes free rein as long they're rich kind of runs counter to the whole point.
    - ioddly 13y ago
      Having to get out your credit card to swear at people on the internet seems to do a good job of getting people to stop and reconsider. Not always, but it helps.
    - jmduke 13y ago
      You can still get permanently banned after a certain number of violations.
    - bcoates 13y ago
      The trolls and assholes are still cleaned up after. There are people who spend a few hundred bucks trolling but they're essentially invisible unless you go looking for them.
jmduke 13y ago
I disagree with the foundations of the argument (Etsy and AirBnB aren't attacking craiglist) but I agree with the conclusions: if all you have is a massive reputation and a massive user base (which I think is pretty much true of Reddit/Craigslist; obviously there are technical innovations there but the marketing/product innovations that they pioneered are now very mainstream) then you're sitting on a tenuous position.
willvarfar 13y ago
You can understand people chasing craiglist verticals because users pay to list stuff. Whereas its harder to see how reddit can monetise on any scale, let alone how there can be money in individual verticals.
- jmduke 13y ago
  Craigslist only monetizes housing and job listings, which are probably its two most competitive verticals. Reddit's monetization issue is ironic, because it's incredibly valuable to marketers: organic/viral growth via Reddit is easy and lucrative. The problem is that Reddit's platform is designed in such a way that there's really no need to go through advertising channels: why pay money to get off on the wrong foot with your audience when you could go through the normal means of the site? (I'm not sure what the admin's stance is on subreddit takeovers, but I'd imagine those would be an avenue worth going down.)
basicallydan 13y ago
I like what you're getting at, but I'm not sure you're correct. Yes, Reddit is being unbundled, but not necessarily for replacement of its verticals. They may be indirectly inspiring the startups you mention but will not be replaced. For instance, Quora is not /r/AskReddit. AskReddit is much more casual, full of opinion and silly questions, whereas Quora is a lot more serious and formal and values quality and factuality much more than AskReddit does. As for why CL and Reddit don't move with the times "Why is this the case? I don’t know. But, my guess is that this leaves both Craigslist and reddit more vulnerable to unbundling effect, and this is a good sign for startups building within their verticals." Simply, they haven't needed to yet. The threats haven't been obviously very strong, and they continue to have a lot of users and make strides (especially Reddit) in popularity, despite the apparent drawbacks. Reddit's UX isn't actually that terrible, it's just a bit ugly-looking. It works quite well, in general, and isn't completely unintuitive.
duggieawesome 13y ago
Jeez... 9gag is nowhere close to /r/funny.
- xanderstrike 13y ago
  And /r/funny isn't even that great, really.
  - phildeschaine 13y ago
    The content in /r/funny tends to remind me of mid-Aughts chain emails.
- OGC 13y ago
  Of course not, it's always lagging behind, because 9gag gets all of its content from reddit. It can never get close because it isn't an actual source of content.
md224 13y ago
I feel like there's a fundamental difference between CL and Reddit: the sense of community. CL is community-based in the sense that it allows users to broadcast via posts and receive private e-mail replies. (There are forum areas, but I haven't gotten involved with those. I assume they're not as popular as Reddit, but feel free to correct this assumption. Regardless, they're a contained area of the site, rather than embedded in the underlying structure.) Reddit, on the other hand, is a huge community of users openly engaged with each other. This is a fundamentally different dynamic, one which I believe cannot easily be separated into individually-operated platforms.
- danielweber 13y ago
  It's been a long time since I looked at them, but the forums of CL were around the level of YouTube comments.
  - skeletonjelly 13y ago
    In fairness the frontpage (/r/all) community is often worse than YouTube. It's only when you delve into interest groups that the discussion smarts up a little (probably due to numbers)
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  CL doesn't have community in proportion to its size but that's not the point. The mental overhead of looking on twenty random for the twenty things one would commonly do on craigslist would still be huge. The thing about craigslist is it's about doing stuff that most people aren't sophisticates, afficionados or specialists in. Most people who look for rooms for rent don't have a complex or even a well-defined set of criteria for what a good search would involve. Even landlords tend to be pretty adhoc. Similarly with people selling cars or household items. Craigslist is where people exchange good-enough information about some incidental commodity between each other. Neither person is going to make the investment of providing more information because it's not the specialty of either person. Add to that the way people have currently learned to prefer good-enough and Craigslist looks unbeatable.
- 13y ago
djrogers 13y ago
The idea that CL is 'vulnerable' to unbundling is kinda funny, given that almost none of the hundreds of vertical startups have proven to be more successful than the original (can't actually think of any). CL provides the easiest, most frictionless way to engage in a local transaction with another individual or entity. The other verticals may be slicker, more targeted, and backed my big corporate $$, but they haven't attracted the mindshare or provided the utility to the average person that CL does.
officemonkey 13y ago
The last criticism, that CL and reddit are slow to change, I don't think is particularly valid. Digg, which was the first post-Slashdot favorite, positively churned compared to reddit. People like reddit and CL because they don't change. These forums have been popular since the 1980s BBSs. They don't change it because it works.
jonsterling 13y ago
Except Hacker News is even worse at r/programming than r/programming.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  That wasn't always true. For a while, the quality and quantity of programming links on hn were superior to /r/programming. That hasn't been true lately: For whatever reason, in the few years I've been following both, hn and /r/programming have maintained an inverse relationship on the level of code hacking goodness.
jpatapoff 13y ago
I think he has a good point but I don't totally agree. I created http://audiour.com http://audiour.com which could be seen as facilitator of /r/Music (or other similar subreddits), but there is no sense of 'community' like there is on /r/Music.
bdcravens 13y ago
The graphic identifying "startups" that compete with Craigslist has some companies that are 12+ years old, not much younger than Google (the company that is, which was formed in 1998)
drum 13y ago
Reddit has a more defensible position than Craigslist in relation to verticals because of its karma system. Karma carries over from sub-reddit to sub-reddit and people obsess over it. In my opinion, this is the 'drug' that keeps people around. Craigslist on the other hand has no karma. A good seller or good buyer is completely anonymous. People will post to Craigslist if they can sell just as easily they'll post to another site if they can sell there. Reddit is not the same. A redditor will more readily post to reddit because of the sweet, sweet karma.
phildeschaine 13y ago
The difference with reddit (and the real genius of the initial vision) is that any user can create a subreddit. Compare this to craigslist where the admins defined the 50 or so static categories at the outset. Reddit, on the other hand, has interesting (and not so interesting) subreddits pop up every day. Some of my favorites of the last year or two are http://reddit.com/r/ExplainLikeIAmA http://reddit.com/r/ExplainLikeIAmA, http://reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting http://reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting, http://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful http://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful, http://reddit.com/r/futurology http://reddit.com/r/futurology, http://reddit.com/r/outside http://reddit.com/r/outside, and http://reddit.com/r/hwstartups http://reddit.com/r/hwstartups. To name just a few. There is basically no way the reddit founders could have envisioned any of those categories, but thankfully, they had the foresight to create a generic, make-your-own-category platform. The community of reddit certainly has shifted quite a bit, but this ability to evolve organically will keep it from unraveling in the same way as Craigslist has. I think it's a bad comparison anyway.
davemel37 13y ago
This is nature. Branding. Evolution. Things Diverge.
- hobs 13y ago
  Yeah, as soon as I read that reddit is going to be afraid from competition of the entire internet, my first thought was "You know, reddit isnt the entire internet..." This article makes it seem like 9gag is targeting reddit users to split them off and make their own community. This is so "huh?" I could barely understand it. Websites existed before craigslist and reddit, and people move between many websites, not visit one exclusively.
iblaine 13y ago
>my guess is that this leaves both Craigslist and reddit more vulnerable to unbundling effect, and this is a good sign for startups building within their verticals. What the author is trying to say is as subreddits become more popular, exclusive website will be created in their image. He gives success stories like 9gag & hacker news. So it comes as no surprise that the author has his own website which he claims is a result of a subreddit (which one I have no clue). Basically this guy is drinking his own koolaid. The problem with this argument is it is not clear if reddit came before 9gag or hacker news. Surely hacker news & 9gag are successful despite what is on reddit, not because the idea may have spawned from a subreddit.
D9u 13y ago
I've never really been much of a Reddit fan so I rarely visit, but I've always liked reading the classified ads in my local newspaper, and Craigslist is infinitely better than my local daily newspaper, plus the ads are free. As for ugly sites, you can use your own CSS to theme sites to your liking, so ugliness is pretty much a non-issue for me. There may be validity in the "unbundling" notion, but I still seem to use my preferred sites after giving the new sites a spin for a short time.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
johnvschmitt 13y ago
Craigslist & Reddit are WORKSAFE. Yes, really. Most internet use is during business hours. Craigslist & Reddit look, from ~10 feet away (by passing coworkers) to look closer to "work", as it's text-based, with very few graphics. It doesn't look like the Huffington Post, ESPN, Netflix, or Facebook. So, coworkers or bosses passing by either don't register it as "goofing off", or, if they do recognize it, they are "in the club" & not going to call you on it. And, by having a minimalist UI (compact, informational), they know they MUST focus on content to succeed. This makes content king, like it should be, for user-generated content sites like this.

101 points by alexshye 13y ago

timcederman 13y ago

This is a reach. If anything Reddit is consolidating previous verticals - e.g. standalone forums.

Torrents 13y ago
Definitely...there are lots of forums I used to visit that I've now abandoned, since the subreddit for that topic is so strong, active, useful or well moderated. Additionally I've heard this complaint so many times, but I don't find Reddit ugly at all. What do people want? Tag clouds, gradients and flash everywhere, or what? What's a less ugly forum/comment layout than Reddit?
- rhizome 13y ago
  there are lots of forums I used to visit that I've now abandoned, since the subreddit for that topic is so strong, active, useful or well moderated Not to mention commonly being saddled with a 10yr old model of PHPbb style boards.
- MitziMoto 13y ago
  I will probably get eviscerated for this, but I've always been confused why Reddit was so ugly. I am absolutely NOT a designer in any sense of the word, but here's some things I would change. 1. Change the #0000FF links. Something, anything, slightly desaturated from pure blue would look better IMO. <Insert contrast comments here> 2. Whitespace. I can feel the function over form guys typing away furiously from here! BUT YOU CAN FIT MORE CATZ WITH LESS WHITESPACE! I like a little bit of extra whitespace, so sue me. I think an extra 20 pixels between submissions would go a long way. Maybe even a light HR too? 3. The "tabs" at the top are just flat ugly and dated. In fact, everything within the blue header just looks dated. http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus for example does a nice job of making Reddit look better without drastic changes. Although I think their titles could be slightly larger and I hate text-decoration: underline;
- ufmace 13y ago
  I have to agree with that. There's real value in going to one site to see all of your threads and replies on 20 topics, rather than going to 20 different sites. Plus, the sheer size of the site and core quality of their engine makes it possible for lots of relatively tiny communities to thrive that are too small, devoid of tech skill, and undercapitalized to create forums of their own. As for the ugly, I think it looks fine. At least, I'd rather have it be a bit on the plain side than have megabytes of garish colors everywhere like a 2003 Myspace page that takes 30 seconds for each page to load.
baddox 13y ago
Not to mention that the article just uses "craiglist" to mean "selling any goods or services locally." It's silly to consider all those startups as "competing within verticals of craiglist" simply because they are involved in selling goods or services locally.

thetrumanshow 13y ago

Actually HN itself is experiencing some 'unbundling', I believe. Boot-strappers, for example, have long been carving out their own communities away from HN. I can only imagine this is also true for valley startups.. There's no way HN is still the center of this world for long. Its where you invited all your friends and co-workers to, and now its a mess. Now you have to move upmarket to find better information, and getting into those other communities is harder. They don't just let anyone in. They watched what happened to HN and they're scared of killing quality. If you want into those communities, you better have created something, and you better be willing to contribute in a positive way. They won't tolerate many Jeremiahs.

jmduke 13y ago
My favorite Internet community is Something Awful, and I'm surprised nobody's followed its curation model: put your money where your mouth is. Accounts cost $10, and you get banned (meaning you have to spend another $10) if you do dumb things.
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
  For starters, when most forums ban people it's because they want them to leave. Allowing trolls and assholes free rein as long they're rich kind of runs counter to the whole point.
  - ioddly 13y ago
    Having to get out your credit card to swear at people on the internet seems to do a good job of getting people to stop and reconsider. Not always, but it helps.
  - jmduke 13y ago
    You can still get permanently banned after a certain number of violations.
  - bcoates 13y ago
    The trolls and assholes are still cleaned up after. There are people who spend a few hundred bucks trolling but they're essentially invisible unless you go looking for them.

jmduke 13y ago

I disagree with the foundations of the argument (Etsy and AirBnB aren't attacking craiglist) but I agree with the conclusions: if all you have is a massive reputation and a massive user base (which I think is pretty much true of Reddit/Craigslist; obviously there are technical innovations there but the marketing/product innovations that they pioneered are now very mainstream) then you're sitting on a tenuous position.

willvarfar 13y ago

You can understand people chasing craiglist verticals because users pay to list stuff. Whereas its harder to see how reddit can monetise on any scale, let alone how there can be money in individual verticals.

jmduke 13y ago
Craigslist only monetizes housing and job listings, which are probably its two most competitive verticals. Reddit's monetization issue is ironic, because it's incredibly valuable to marketers: organic/viral growth via Reddit is easy and lucrative. The problem is that Reddit's platform is designed in such a way that there's really no need to go through advertising channels: why pay money to get off on the wrong foot with your audience when you could go through the normal means of the site? (I'm not sure what the admin's stance is on subreddit takeovers, but I'd imagine those would be an avenue worth going down.)

basicallydan 13y ago

I like what you're getting at, but I'm not sure you're correct. Yes, Reddit is being unbundled, but not necessarily for replacement of its verticals. They may be indirectly inspiring the startups you mention but will not be replaced. For instance, Quora is not /r/AskReddit. AskReddit is much more casual, full of opinion and silly questions, whereas Quora is a lot more serious and formal and values quality and factuality much more than AskReddit does. As for why CL and Reddit don't move with the times "Why is this the case? I don’t know. But, my guess is that this leaves both Craigslist and reddit more vulnerable to unbundling effect, and this is a good sign for startups building within their verticals." Simply, they haven't needed to yet. The threats haven't been obviously very strong, and they continue to have a lot of users and make strides (especially Reddit) in popularity, despite the apparent drawbacks. Reddit's UX isn't actually that terrible, it's just a bit ugly-looking. It works quite well, in general, and isn't completely unintuitive.

duggieawesome 13y ago

Jeez... 9gag is nowhere close to /r/funny.

xanderstrike 13y ago
And /r/funny isn't even that great, really.
- phildeschaine 13y ago
  The content in /r/funny tends to remind me of mid-Aughts chain emails.
OGC 13y ago
Of course not, it's always lagging behind, because 9gag gets all of its content from reddit. It can never get close because it isn't an actual source of content.

md224 13y ago

I feel like there's a fundamental difference between CL and Reddit: the sense of community. CL is community-based in the sense that it allows users to broadcast via posts and receive private e-mail replies. (There are forum areas, but I haven't gotten involved with those. I assume they're not as popular as Reddit, but feel free to correct this assumption. Regardless, they're a contained area of the site, rather than embedded in the underlying structure.) Reddit, on the other hand, is a huge community of users openly engaged with each other. This is a fundamentally different dynamic, one which I believe cannot easily be separated into individually-operated platforms.

danielweber 13y ago
It's been a long time since I looked at them, but the forums of CL were around the level of YouTube comments.
- skeletonjelly 13y ago
  In fairness the frontpage (/r/all) community is often worse than YouTube. It's only when you delve into interest groups that the discussion smarts up a little (probably due to numbers)
joe_the_user 13y ago
CL doesn't have community in proportion to its size but that's not the point. The mental overhead of looking on twenty random for the twenty things one would commonly do on craigslist would still be huge. The thing about craigslist is it's about doing stuff that most people aren't sophisticates, afficionados or specialists in. Most people who look for rooms for rent don't have a complex or even a well-defined set of criteria for what a good search would involve. Even landlords tend to be pretty adhoc. Similarly with people selling cars or household items. Craigslist is where people exchange good-enough information about some incidental commodity between each other. Neither person is going to make the investment of providing more information because it's not the specialty of either person. Add to that the way people have currently learned to prefer good-enough and Craigslist looks unbeatable.
13y ago

djrogers 13y ago

The idea that CL is 'vulnerable' to unbundling is kinda funny, given that almost none of the hundreds of vertical startups have proven to be more successful than the original (can't actually think of any). CL provides the easiest, most frictionless way to engage in a local transaction with another individual or entity. The other verticals may be slicker, more targeted, and backed my big corporate $$, but they haven't attracted the mindshare or provided the utility to the average person that CL does.

officemonkey 13y ago

The last criticism, that CL and reddit are slow to change, I don't think is particularly valid. Digg, which was the first post-Slashdot favorite, positively churned compared to reddit. People like reddit and CL because they don't change. These forums have been popular since the 1980s BBSs. They don't change it because it works.

jonsterling 13y ago

Except Hacker News is even worse at r/programming than r/programming.

twoodfin 13y ago
That wasn't always true. For a while, the quality and quantity of programming links on hn were superior to /r/programming. That hasn't been true lately: For whatever reason, in the few years I've been following both, hn and /r/programming have maintained an inverse relationship on the level of code hacking goodness.

jpatapoff 13y ago

I think he has a good point but I don't totally agree. I created http://audiour.com http://audiour.com which could be seen as facilitator of /r/Music (or other similar subreddits), but there is no sense of 'community' like there is on /r/Music.

bdcravens 13y ago

The graphic identifying "startups" that compete with Craigslist has some companies that are 12+ years old, not much younger than Google (the company that is, which was formed in 1998)

drum 13y ago

Reddit has a more defensible position than Craigslist in relation to verticals because of its karma system. Karma carries over from sub-reddit to sub-reddit and people obsess over it. In my opinion, this is the 'drug' that keeps people around. Craigslist on the other hand has no karma. A good seller or good buyer is completely anonymous. People will post to Craigslist if they can sell just as easily they'll post to another site if they can sell there. Reddit is not the same. A redditor will more readily post to reddit because of the sweet, sweet karma.

phildeschaine 13y ago

The difference with reddit (and the real genius of the initial vision) is that any user can create a subreddit. Compare this to craigslist where the admins defined the 50 or so static categories at the outset. Reddit, on the other hand, has interesting (and not so interesting) subreddits pop up every day. Some of my favorites of the last year or two are http://reddit.com/r/ExplainLikeIAmA http://reddit.com/r/ExplainLikeIAmA, http://reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting http://reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting, http://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful http://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful, http://reddit.com/r/futurology http://reddit.com/r/futurology, http://reddit.com/r/outside http://reddit.com/r/outside, and http://reddit.com/r/hwstartups http://reddit.com/r/hwstartups. To name just a few. There is basically no way the reddit founders could have envisioned any of those categories, but thankfully, they had the foresight to create a generic, make-your-own-category platform. The community of reddit certainly has shifted quite a bit, but this ability to evolve organically will keep it from unraveling in the same way as Craigslist has. I think it's a bad comparison anyway.

davemel37 13y ago

This is nature. Branding. Evolution. Things Diverge.

hobs 13y ago
Yeah, as soon as I read that reddit is going to be afraid from competition of the entire internet, my first thought was "You know, reddit isnt the entire internet..." This article makes it seem like 9gag is targeting reddit users to split them off and make their own community. This is so "huh?" I could barely understand it. Websites existed before craigslist and reddit, and people move between many websites, not visit one exclusively.

iblaine 13y ago

>my guess is that this leaves both Craigslist and reddit more vulnerable to unbundling effect, and this is a good sign for startups building within their verticals. What the author is trying to say is as subreddits become more popular, exclusive website will be created in their image. He gives success stories like 9gag & hacker news. So it comes as no surprise that the author has his own website which he claims is a result of a subreddit (which one I have no clue). Basically this guy is drinking his own koolaid. The problem with this argument is it is not clear if reddit came before 9gag or hacker news. Surely hacker news & 9gag are successful despite what is on reddit, not because the idea may have spawned from a subreddit.

D9u 13y ago

I've never really been much of a Reddit fan so I rarely visit, but I've always liked reading the classified ads in my local newspaper, and Craigslist is infinitely better than my local daily newspaper, plus the ads are free. As for ugly sites, you can use your own CSS to theme sites to your liking, so ugliness is pretty much a non-issue for me. There may be validity in the "unbundling" notion, but I still seem to use my preferred sites after giving the new sites a spin for a short time.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

johnvschmitt 13y ago

Craigslist & Reddit are WORKSAFE. Yes, really. Most internet use is during business hours. Craigslist & Reddit look, from ~10 feet away (by passing coworkers) to look closer to "work", as it's text-based, with very few graphics. It doesn't look like the Huffington Post, ESPN, Netflix, or Facebook. So, coworkers or bosses passing by either don't register it as "goofing off", or, if they do recognize it, they are "in the club" & not going to call you on it. And, by having a minimalist UI (compact, informational), they know they MUST focus on content to succeed. This makes content king, like it should be, for user-generated content sites like this.