I was trying to come up with alternate titles to “Craigslist sucks”; that was the best I could come up with.
Craigslist, as you have probably heard of, is a thriving online forum-based community which happens to include a huge classifieds as well as dating section, and supports itself by charging for job listings at a discount – something that only works because of its enormous size and readership. If you’ve ever used Craigslist, though, you were probably looking at or posting at the classifieds.
I’ve found the Craigslist listings to be, well, a bit lacking. It’s like Craigslist took the worst elements of the Internet and traditional classifieds and mushed them together – terrible pre-1997 layout and design, free and unlimited postings inviting spam, limited 10-day run with no opportunity to reorder postings, no system whatsoever to validate the user’s identity, etc.
I’m sure this worked in ’99, when the site launched and the Internet was a simpler, more barren place, but it seems like all they’re interested to do lately is expand their site to every single city in the world. I’m sure it’s well-intentioned and that Craigslist is simple and barren by design, but I can’t help but feel its setup is outdated, not having kept up while the rest of the Internet evolved; much like the retrospectively idiotic Berkeley pedestrian flag program, people have found alternate uses, designed or otherwise, that prove to be far more amusing.
Craigslist, of course, continues to exist and thrive, I think largely because of its enormous user base which trumps anything I’ve said here. A lot of people visit the site, but it’s now basically a collection of personal rants, quickie buy/sell postings, and lots of cheap/free crap that’s always fun to browse if only to check out what people are asking others to dispose for them.
It’s interesting, though, that they haven’t had any real competition for their entire package, while parts of it like job listings (Monster), buy/sell listings (eBay), housing (Rent.com), and so forth are done much better by others. I suppose “free” is the keyword here, but with price usually comes quality and I’ve found myself willing to pay just to filter out the spam and irrelevant crap on CL.
For computer and gadget buying/selling/trading, though, I’ve found a great place on the Anandtech forums, and I’m sure specialized forums exist for other subject matters as well. The people are friendlier, usually aren’t as cheap as Craigslist regulars (1), and they use a free system called Heatware to establish a centralized reputation system, thus solving almost all of the issues with Craigslist’s buy/sell implementation.
At least CL has a “best of” list that makes for an interesting read.
- fewer lowball-to-the-point-of-laughable offers (↩)