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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

by 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.
seanalltogether 13y ago
True, and I think some of the examples of the unbundled sites reflect this. For instance there is good documentation of the fact that sites like 9gag and imgfave just scrape reddit for content and automatically host it. So they've maybe stolen eyeball traffic away from reddit, but not the community itself.

by md224 13y ago

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.

seanalltogether 13y ago

True, and I think some of the examples of the unbundled sites reflect this. For instance there is good documentation of the fact that sites like 9gag and imgfave just scrape reddit for content and automatically host it. So they've maybe stolen eyeball traffic away from reddit, but not the community itself.