Ask HN: Is it time for Craigslist to improve?

5 points by lbrdn 16 years ago | 9 comments

I have been consumed lately with Craigslist in terms of how it has a stranglehold on the online classified marketplace, how many millions of people they serve, and how they have done little to improve the experience, in terms of protections, from that of the newspaper. Regularly, people are defrauded, products are misrepresented, and gigs/jobs turn out to be bogus.

Do these type of interactions have to occur in the existing anonymous, buyer beware, as-represented kind of world, or could craigslist still serve its invaluable purpose while protecting its users at the same time?

(I am only considering the housing, for sale, services, jobs, and gig sections in this inquiry. It’s probable that most, if not all, of the allure in the personals section is the uncertainty and anonymity of the interaction. However, I don’t think this is true of the sections to be considered above.)

DanielStraight 16 years ago |

Improve to what? Craigslist is ranked 29th in the world. I think the real problem is that we don't know what "improve" really means. Apparently, Craigslist has already improved to be better than all but 28 other websites in the world (and a substantial portion of those are just various Google sites). Why do we think we could do better?

unalone 16 years ago | |

There's a difference between popular and better.

I'm not saying that Craigslist isn't good. I'm saying that if it wants to redesign, it should redesign because its creators want it to be different.

kirpekar 16 years ago |

Craigslist is the epitome of simplicity. Any change would complicate it and reduce it's usefulness.

I think the guys at CL understand that.

brk 16 years ago |

Craigslist is a good indicator of the world at large in regards to fraud and such.

You could make it "better", but you would find the overhead required to make it better would also require a lot more resources to operate properly.

So, you'd have to charge for more things, which would likely lead to decreased usage and accessibility to society at large, which ends up with the exact inverse of what you were trying to do.

lbrdn 16 years ago | |

brk, thanks for the response.

What do you mean by "a good indicator ... to fraud and such?" Are you implying that fraud should be accepted as just something inherent in society and shouldn't be something we try and prevent? Also, I would contend that the facebook marketplace has less fraud than the craigslist marketplace, thus giving craigslist something they could shoot for.

Also, I'd like to refine "better" to "safer". General feel and aesthetics are subjective where as safety is objective.

Craigslist leaves millions, if not billions, of dollars on the table every year, it would only take the inclusion of one or two more markets in their pay-to-post-real-estate stream in order to hire some really smart developers to come up with smart and subtle fraud prevention mechanisms. It's possible for them to raise some dough for this issue without harming the culture, so why shouldn't they?

brk 16 years ago | | |

Craigslist is a fairly unfiltered portal into society. It is not based on relationships like facebook, it does not require more extensive seller verification like ebay. It is basically the newspaper classifieds in an online format with only a twinge of technology sprinkled in.

Craigslist is easy to use and the primarily text-driven approach means it is accessible to even users on dial-up connections (and although you might think this rare, I still know people in the US who have no viable high-speed Internet options and are using dial-up).

Fraud is, IMO, inherent in society. Manipulative and creative people have been taking advantage of trusting or less educated people since man first implemented a monetary instrument.

I think part of the make-a-better-Craigslist camp is similar to some of the confusion around the mint.com sale... Not everybody has the same motivations... I don't think Craigslist wants to be the best/safest/most-diverse online classifieds system. I think they want to be the easiest, simplest, I-can-go-home-at-night-and-not-be-bothered online classifieds system. There are many things they could do to be "better", but I don't believe the cost and complexity is worth the impact on the lives of the employees and the business overall.

There is a market opportunity for an improved Craigslist, but it's a little bit of an end-of-the-rainbow pursuit.

pg 16 years ago |

It's time for Airbnb, Listia, and RentHop! (And one other, as yet unannounced.)

gonehome 16 years ago |

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_...

A decent article discussing why Craigslist won't change.

byoung2 16 years ago |

I think craigslist would offer a better experience if it had user ratings, but that would definitely cut down usage, because anonymity is a big draw.