I would love it if CL's sublet section would take some hints from AirBnB. That said, CL has a much higher volume of traffic and more pressing problems - and my experience is that ABB works great in smaller markets but is as almost bad as CL in a market like NYC.
CL isn't perfect. But if most of the dogs hyped in the various dog blogs would be shitting on pillows on a regular basis, the ones that wouldn't would stand out.
That's a weird premise to me. If you post an apartment, you could just as easily also want to find a girlfriend or buy a used bike or avail yourself of any of craigslist's other categories. That's their big value, after all – everything under one roof.
The fact that craigslist doesn't require a user account to post is an extremely dubious product decision at this stage.
One major contributor to craiglist becoming so successful as a website is essentially the ease of posting content. That lead to lots of content and not coincidentally lots of traffic, but it also means that much of the data is unstructured. Creating more intelligent ways to interact with data requires some structure, but the easiest way to structure data is to complicate the listing creation process. When someone figures out a great balance and has enough search traffic to keep listers coming back, craigslist will have a real competitor.
and can she bold the important words in the ad? even the newspaper classifieds, as dumb as they were, made that easy for the most basic user.
Where is a good place to look for apartments? Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier than CL usually are cluttered with a high ads to info ratio, inaccurate info and/or are slow to load/navigate...
> Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier...
None of these gripes are about appearance except inasmuch as appearance reflects functionality. craigslist is ugly, but that's not the problem. craigslist doesn't work well. I don't want it to look different. I want it to work differently.
A competing site could look much prettier than craigslist and still work no better.
They could mine the data they have a bit more, but where do they stop? Should they let you select computers for sale by CPU type(newegg)? Cars by model/make/warrant/color(autotrader.com)? Dates by body measurements/race/religion/compatibility questions(okcupid.com)? Should their forums have a karma system(hacker news)? There is a reason they are called "Craig's List" & not "Craig's Apartments", "Craig's Cars", "Craig's Dating" or "Craig's Computers".
Perhaps they should try harder on the spam, but redesigning how they operate could alienate a considerable portion of their community who like the simplicity & popularity of the site.
I wish I had a shitty product like that.
And I even use it regularly to find stuff I want, locally, and cheap. The bastards.
> And I even use it regularly to find stuff I want, locally, and cheap.
Are you really successful at that, though? 9 times out of 10 when I use craigslist the transaction is a horrible experience--for example:
- the buyer of an item claims it, then flakes out
- the seller of an item jacks up the price at the last
minute, when I'm there in person, saying, "oh well
there are 5 other people that want it"
- potential rideshare flakes out, or changes plans at
the last minute
- potential landlord turns out to be unreliable
In the last month, for instance, I've purchased:
-- a pressure washer (had it in my garage within 90 mins of searching) -- an industrial grade hedge trimmer -- 4 dock floats -- a folding swimming ladder
The first three I found looking, the fourth I found by placing a "looking for" add myself.
Sure, I've had shitty experiences with Craigslist, by far the worst was when I was selling a truck. I had a lot of moronic callers and a couple of no-shows, but I also ended up selling it for good cash to a respectful guy.
The best bet in handling the bad parts was basically saying "sorry, not interested in selling it to you" when I get the sense that the other end of the call was a flake or not worth wasting time on. Sure, pissed off some of them, but I like to think I have a reasonable ability to read people, and wasn't desperate enough to sell the truck that I felt obligated to follow through with every potential buyer.
In the end, I'd rather deal with that crap than a dealership any day.
Sure, a tool that requires skillful end-users isn't one destined for great things and world domination (example: emacs) but that doesn't mean it has no value.
It's obviously a highly successful product. The model is simple, IIRC from articles past, the operating cost is minimal for the size of the userbase, it takes very little staff to actually run it, microscopically little compared to other sites that do far, far less.
If everyone is so keen on saying there's a better way to do property listings - go build it.
It is clogged with spam. Clever types of spam, often ones that crowdsource their content by mining previously legit posts. Since there are no reputation mechanisms to speak of, it's far too easy to waste your time with stuff that's either spam or a scam.
Meanwhile, data visualization has progressed dramatically in the last decade. craigslist remains in 2001. Wading through apartment listings, for example, is miserable, and there are almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very basic information is communicated by people listing their properties.
craigslist can keep its hideous, serifed-out visual design as long as it wants. The big beef here isn't how craigslist looks – it's how it works.
The fact your dog doesn't shit on your pillow doesn't excuse his taking a dump in your shoes every day.