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Comment by arbitrage | Hacker News Reader

In your opinion, what job is it that CL fails to address adequately in a consistent fashion?

Ignore the real identity / account reputation issue, which nobody has managed to solve in an adequate fashion. What is it that CL promises, that it fails to follow through on?

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Um, OK. How about the fact that apartment listings in NYC are basically 95% spam, with brokers advertising apartments that don't exist, to pull a bait and switch when you call -- including on the specifically non-broker pages?

Searching by price is broken (look for $500 listings and it will return $500 daily, $500 weekly, $500 monthly, all mixed up together). Searching by neighborhood is broken, since it relies on keywords (which can vary, and are full of spam besides) instead of actual lat/lon.

I could probably write a book on everything that is broken, and that's just on the apartment stuff alone. (I understand it's better outside of NYC, but since NYC is the largest city in the US, that doesn't really matter.)

"(I understand it's better outside of NYC, but since NYC is the largest city in the US, that doesn't really matter.)"

I always think it's funny that the most cosmopolitan cities can breed the most parochial attitudes.

Eh, I sorta agree. But applying some basic math to this page[1], we find that 4% of American households that rent, are renting an NYC apartment. That's a pretty sizable chunk.

[1] http://www.nmhc.org/Content.cfm?ItemNumber=55508

Maybe I worded it badly -- there's no attitude, I'm just saying that if a site has something broken for its largest domestic group of customers, but it works for everyone else, it doesn't matter -- it's broken period, and not an edge case.

If the largest group is less than 3% of the total then it could very well be an edge case.

I've always thought of CL as a community/local site, meaning it is up to the community to really shape it. CL can provide guidance and tools, but it is still up to the community; for example, if your community actively uses the flagging feature to cut down on posts that make the site worse, those posts will decrease in occurrence. NYC has ~14M people, so it is just harder to create a community that agrees on what is and isn't appropriate.

I've been dealing with this for the last few weeks. It's not just NYC that suffers from this problem, I've been apartment hunting on CL in San Antonio and it's all spam.

I've been thinking about writing a short script to filter listings by phone number—that seems to be the common element between brokerage listings.

In reality, Craigslist has hundreds of competitors across all the verticals they serve. For example, StreetEasy[1] for NYC apartment listings.

[1]: http://streeteasy.com/

Two issues. The first is the most important to me: I simply can't trust the other party a priori. I've had so many poor experiences on craigslist, including scams, clearly stolen items for sale, misleading descriptions, no-shows. This is why I think the identity/reputation issue is so important. If ebay needs a reputation system, craigslist needs it even more (CL is inherently more dangerous because you meet in-person and exchange cash). It's not just safety, I also value my time and every issue is wasted time.

The second isn't as big to me, but I do think searching craigslist is annoying and suboptimal. CL is a solution that worked great in 1998, but 15 years later it lags behind the standard web experience. Worse yet, as the article discusses, CL isn't just refusing to improve their user experience, they are refusing to let other people do so too.

I don't want to divulge my identity to the creeper that buys my old TV.

Ask yourself this: how long did it take craigslist to deliver a basic feature, maps? Every scrappy web startup has had some kind of maps mash-up since 2004.

Craigslist only recently added maps, seemingly because padmapper was so useful that craigslist had no choice but to momentarily wake up from its 10 year coma and actually improve the site for once.

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