> These guys are doing a disservice to the American public.

This comment blows my mind. How quickly we take things for granted is astounding.

CL is a largely FREE site – I for one have sold around $1k of stuff I didn't want on there in the last decade or so – not much, but I paid exactly $0 for that. Try that with eBay or, even better, your local newspaper classifieds.

The entitlement that lurks behind comments like the one above – or at least the hyperbole within it is amusing, at best.

CL works – it's far from perfect, sure, but it's perfectly free for most users and most things – the change it has brought about and the value its given to its users makes it a textbook case for service to the American public in my book.

Now, if we want to talk about how it can be made better, sure, there's a lot there, but don't blow it up to be a crime against humanity, or God, King or Country...

Totally agreed, the level of entitlement among the public is really amazing, especially when it comes to online/free services. CL is not a charity, it is not a non-profit. They can do anything they want, as long as it is legal. Of course their interface is bad etc. But they've got the biggest audience, the site is fast/predictable/never down, they also do their best to keep spammers/scammers out. What else could we ask from a totally free (for the most part) service?

Keep in mind this was a rant. Craigslist is awesome in many ways and has provided tremendous value over the years. All I am saying is their stubbornness to not improve has left a lot of value on the table. If someone else, maybe more capitalistic, was running craigslist we would probably be benefiting from it more at this point. Their monopoly of the local marketplace allows them to be complacent. The fact that they use their monopoly to not improve or let anyone else improve their platform is a crime in my mind. Just because it is free does not justify not improving it. There is huge a market inefficiency here that they are using to their advantage at the cost of the consumer...

Why aren't you exploiting the market failure you see? Could it be that you're overestimating the amount of "value" left on the table by disallowing users to run riot over the site?

?Beautiful.

Does that really matter? Take a bloomberg terminal - its literally arcane. If you don't know the specific commands to type, and the stock naming system they and only they use, you won't be getting anywhere.

You would never have someone make an interface like that today. At the same time - it works. Once people get learn it, it moves into muscle memory. Since it obeys internally consistent rules, its also possible to uncover more functionality once the first beach head is made.

If you want more brutal examples - think of DwarfFortress, nethack and other ascii based games. Once you know the command structure, it becomes second nature.

You may not need a beautiful interface. The interface is just a wrapper.

It works, but what I am saying is it works for a fraction of the population. Those that have time to hunt for deals and deal with flakes and last minute hagglers. There is a ton of people like this, but I argue that there are even more people that would use it if it were cleaner. Why force people to develop "muscle memory"? The rate of recycling of used goods would be much higher if craigslist was more open to either improvement of their platform or to startups building features for their community. Maybe the folks that want to develop "muscle memory" to fish out deals can do so at the cost of their time and score the best deals, but the value of time varies a lot from person to person and even from year to year. For example I sold a bunch of stuff on craigslist in college, but now that I have a job I don't bother with anything less than $200. I usually just donate it to the salvation army and write it off my taxes or let crap pile up in my garage. If I had an app that I could use to post and sell objects quickly and easily I would use it. I'd even be happy to pay someone to make this simple and easy. I am not saying to make a new service a paid service, but let free markets and innovative entrepreneurs figure out how to justify the costs of improvement. I definitely think craigslist has generated an insane amount of value, but I the bar can be set higher. They have definitely done net good, but if they continue to use their monopoly of the local online marketplace as a justification for not improving their site, I think it is bogus.

Either improve craigslist or let others build value added tools on top of craigslist. Why stop an app like Bazaar that helped people post things easily? Let people make up their own mind. Using smartphones as an example again, people will trade int their iPhone 3GS for $80, when they can get $160 for it on CL. So there is definitely demand somewhere in the massive gap of services that retailers and B2C companies offer and what exists on craigslist. Making consumer to consumer commerce smoother and easier is a huge opportunity in my mind that is not only lucrative, but fills in a big gap that exists because craigslist is still stuck in 1995.

Any variant of my answer will boil down to being built around "well... people".

Maybe ease of use is the weak point - I personally doubt it - go for fixing it.

At the same time, I do suggest that there is something more complex bubbling under the surface.

GO for building your alternative. Nothing works better to figure out whats going on than an example that can be tested against. Good luck! Interface isn't everything!