>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site"
Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and keeping the site working under the huge traffic it's handling.
I don't remember seeing CL down or even slow - no cutesy "site is down" pages - which says to me they're improving the site constantly, just not in the way that gets the hypeosphere excited.
The fact that they haven't done the things you describe doesn't change the fact that craigslist is a terrible product.
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.
Not sure if reputation mechanisms would work in a site where people often post just once, and that doesn't require creating a user account in order to post.
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.
> Not sure if reputation mechanisms would work in a site where people often post just once, and that doesn't require creating a user account in order to post.
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.
Data visualizations have progressed in almost all craigslist competitors (and mashups), but visualizations won't be the death of craigslist. The battleground is content. Sure there's plenty of spam and scams, but people love craiglist listings because there is so much unique content.
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.
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.
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...
A nit to pick, since elai has already provided some good examples.
> 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.
I'm not sure how you use Craigslist but I've primarily used the site to sell a few big ticket items - and it flat out works. After listing a couple of cars on some larger, more feature rich sites for several weeks without any traction, I listed on Craigslist, received multiple inquiries from day one, and sold within 10 days. Granted, this has more to do with the scale of the user base than the actual product, but I'm not sure you can completely separate those two aspects in this business space.
My buddy is 40 years old, not very technical, but he's one hell of a mechanic. He's been making his living off buying and selling cars off of CL since the recession started. Just an anecdote. I'm not sure an "improved UI" would help him. So many entrepreneurs are mad at CL for whatever reason, but the main one seems to be jealousy. They would rather ruin it than allow it to continue.
I found that nearly every used car I looked at on CL was either being resold by small-time "car dealers" or bought up by these same people. It was nearly impossible to find a good used car so I finally leased a new one instead.
i don't think it's just envy that makes entrepreneurs mad. CL is also quite litigious (but in a hypocritical capricious way), which is generally out of step with the rest of data-is-free, api-driven world.
It sounds like you want CL to specialize in a niche, which is something they're not really setup to do, nor is it their claim to fame. They are a firehouse of classifieds information, that's why a lot of people like them.
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"m partial to apartmentratings.com. Most rental sites earn their money from the apartments so they are not allowed to show you any negative info, meaning no user generated content. apartmentratings.com is a pariah in the industry because they actually let real people give their opinions.
Yelp is also good. I've read the reviews for my building and they are basically correct -- the staff used to be idiots, the walls are paper-thin, and the appliances are pieces of shit. Yup, pretty much.
i have a friend who worked there. he said they had a foot high stack of letters from apartments threatening to sue them because they refused to delete reviews.
I too wish I had a shitty product like that. However:
> 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
The one area where I have had great success with craigslist is hiring, which I suspect is due to craigslist charging for job listings (which keeps the bar high).
Like I said, I'm successful at finding things I'm looking for.
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.
Just use an RSS reader and do some data processing. It's a small price to pay when the content (listings) come free. I think we begin to take that for granted, and start to get upset when our free cake isn't ALSO 6 tiers and made of exotic Swiss chocolates.
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.
Right - it's so terrible nobody uses it -all those other awesome sites out there are just taking over then, right?
Craigslist is doomed?
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.
Craigslist runs something like 50MM ads every month without a leak of personal information and a user-driven moderation system, all the while fending off myriad abusers for whom free (or nearly free) advertising isn't enough and think Craigslist should be their personal global spam shitbucket.
When the only thing people have to criticize you for is your appearance, I think that says a lot.
Craigslist is so full of spam and reposts it's practically useless for major categories. Take for example Dallas apartments/rentals... hardly a single legitimate posting in there.
There is A LOT more to complain about than appearance.
Craigslist has done a lot LOT of harm to the plight of the renter. Realtors have incentive to spam, post bait-and-switch, or flag the FSBOs when they are significantly < "market price".
Problem: locked down rental listings (can't search) + free advertising for Realtors = the leeches in the NAR controlling market prices w/nobody stopping them.
</soapbox>
Rather than that "beta testing" charge for companies to post jobs, craigslist should charge for posting in the rentals / housing, category imho.
In my experience, the quality level of ads has dropped considerably. My last two Craigslist experiences:
I recently tried looking for a used car in the Chicago area. It turns out almost all the postings in the "by owner only" area are actually dealers in disguise. I found this out the hard way after driving an hour to see a car at what turned out to be some kind of sketchball dealership.
Another time, someone posted an ad for a musical instrument. I go to the guys house and he turns out to be some type of dealer/wholesaler. He didn't even have the actual instrument from the ad and was pulling some bait-and-switch crap.
All of this has pretty much soured me on Chicago Craigslist, but I will say that the experience is probably still a bit better in smaller metropolitan areas.
> are actually dealers in disguise. I found this out the hard way after driving an hour to see a car at what turned out to be some kind of sketchball dealership.
before driving you should have run the search for their number. Serial postings for various cars is definitely not FSBO.
Jeremy Zawodny is implementing some interesting tech at Craigslist. It looks like they're doing a lot of development with MongoDB, Redis, and Sphinx. He drops tech notes on his twitter feed (@jzawodn) occasionally.
They've done a fine job of keeping the site responsive, but that's only a small part of what we normally demand from web apps.
I don't fault them for spam. It's a very, very difficult problem, and since I don't have a magical solution to propose, I'm not going to complain.
But there are a few areas where CL could have made major improvements at a reasonable cost, especially considering their revenue. They could have at least experimented with some of these ideas, and tossed them out later if they turned out to be bad. Here are some of the main opportunities I think CL has missed:
-Richer data, tailored to each category. CL started down this road, e.g. by adding the rent field. But there's so much more they could do in every category.
-Better searching. With the huge volume of posts to sort through--and the large number of duplicate posts--the basic search features currently implemented fall flat. Improvements in this area would probably have to tie in with the richer data set mentioned above.
-Abandon the serial model, where the database is just a chronological list of posts. This model creates an arms race to be the person who posts the most frequently without getting flagged. In other words, it incentivizes the fine art of sneaking what amounts to spam just below the radar.
The core problem, as I see it, is that CL still views their service as an extension of its original incarnation: a mailing list. In the CL model, a listing is just arbitrary text and maybe some metadata if you're lucky, and the listings simply appear in reverse chronological order. Sounds like a mailing list archive to me.
Sure, that's how CL got started, but why not grow into something better? There's clearly enough usage and revenue to justify a realignment. Rather than "sticking with what works," I think this is a case of inertia.
There also seems to clearly be enough usage and revenue, and profit, for the owners not to want to take it any further and be happy with what they have rather than risk change.
They are under no obligation to do anything with the site other than what they want to. They don't have to monetize it, or go public, or improve anything. If they're happy with what they've got, it's theirs to be happy with.
The only thing that would drive change would be an exodus of people - not just people complaining about how things could be better, but an actual clear, obvious drop in usage with a clear cause and a need for redesign.
(Look how well Digg's redesign worked out for them... it all but killed the site overnight.)
All good points, and I agree with them in the abstract. However, in this specific case, I don't entirely agree. The post was about how various other sites were taking aim at individual Craigslist categories, and this might be a good reason for CL to change in the long run.
"The only thing that would drive change would be an exodus of people - not just people complaining about how things could be better, but an actual clear, obvious drop in usage with a clear cause and a need for redesign." Maybe, or maybe the perception that an exodus is impending would be enough. In any case, that exodus may very well happen. Which, I think, is what the post is suggesting. I for one have stopped using CL for almost everything, due to the very reasons under discussion.
Craigslist wastes millions of hours of people's time every year by being a monopoly that provides a bad product in an industry with strong network effects. When I go to a site like padmapper, I am reminded of just how horrible Craigslist is and how happy it would make me to see them go and allow room for new firms to take their place.
Perhaps I'm seeing it too much from the perspective of the little guy, but harvesting that much money into your own pockets over a number of years may not be such a bad decision.
There is a strong difference between UI and UX, for example, when looking through postings for stuff for sale, or places for rent - filtering by HAS IMAGE is really the only way Ill look at an ad - yet there has NEVER been a way to expand and see images.
The FLAG FOR REMOVAL is and has been abused for YEARS. The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been used to effectively block competition in the buyers market. They should simply have a ticker to how many flags a post has been given.
Posting has been built upon, but made very cumbersome. And shows that they employ mediocre critical thinking when developing the UX.
Sure, the site is amazing, its a gem of the valley and I use it daily when looking for work, stuff, places to live, and weekly/monthly otherwise. But to defend this is the same as Quora trying to convince the world they have incredible design, which they dont.
The fact that sites like padmapper can even exist proves that CL is broken in certain areas.
Everybody likes the site, but everyone is also constantly defending poor design as if its some sort of hipster notion that we just wouldn't understand.
Craigslist is designed to make communication easier. If different people have differing ability to communicate, this makes it more difficult to communicate.
Mediocre UX makes for a better meeting ground, because when you start making things easier beyond a certain point, you start to do so at the expense of outliers. For a site like Craigslist, making 90% of people feel twice as comfortable and 10% feel less comfortable is a bad thing.
Your comment says nothing about the UX functions I mentioned. I agree with your statement, but it does not rebut the fact that image display is non-existent and actually works against you comment as it hinders people's ability to smoothly transact private sales...
List-jacking vi the FLAG is just retarded and makes me want to punch the screen.
The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been used to effectively block competition in the buyers market
You misunderstand the flagging mechanism, and it's never "the competition." The competition isn't united against you and there aren't enough of them anyway. You probably just used a hit counter or external images or some other commonly-abused or community-hated posting trope.
> "You probably just used a hit counter or external images or some other commonly-abused or community-hated posting trope."
Your insistence on the purity of flaggers is puzzling, but is in line with what all of flag-help believes. There is never the assumption that the post was flagged wrongly, and instead the assumption that that poster must have done something against the TOU. Except this assumption seems to be wrong more than it is right (based on the couple of hours I spent digging through flag-help postings anyhow).
In my case it seems that there are a contingent of users who are allergic to any unpaid gigs, and will flag just about any ad in the unpaid category. This is despite the fact that CL specifically has an unpaid category, and the posts I saw pass through were not TOU-violating in any way. Flag-help's best response for me was that, hey, that's the way it is, just live with it. This seems to put the kibosh on any assumptions that all flags are legitimate (or even most flags are legitimate). The funny thing is, during the short time that my posts stayed up, I got an incredible number of contacts expressing interest... so clearly I'm not advertising something unwanted to a brick wall.
Unpaid = volunteers. Yes, gigs has a "No Pay" option, but readers hate it (as I'm sure you gleaned from your forum scan). The readers make the final decision, it's pretty much as simple as that. Unpaid jobs are basically illegal, taxwise, and deferred compensation ("equity," usually) is prohibited by Craiglist elsewhere.
I agree that there's a learning curve in posting ads to gigs, but the number of flags required to bring an ad down puts the math on the poster violating community standards.
It's axiomatic that people who complain about flags never flag ads themselves, yet are convinced that there is a cabal focussed on them. This results in aggression proceeding from ignorance, where people who pretend Craigslist is a typical classified ad venue complain that posting whatever they feel like isn't having the intended effect.
No, but there's a large internal inconsistency that you have (that the rest of flag-help shares). There's on the one hand the assumption that the flag is used for good (a.k.a. flagging things that violate the TOU).
On the other hand there's the acceptance that users will flag whatever the hell they feel like, TOU be damned.
Which forms the standard path that a flag-help post travels through:
- Help!
- You must be violating the TOU.
- But... there's nothing in here violating the TOU!
- Sure you did, nub. I bet you had external pics too.
- But no, I didn't!
- Oh well, then, who knows, shrug people will flag what they will.
Which is why I keep saying flag-help is just about no help at all. It's just a lot of newbie-hazing, but very rarely do I see any real productivity out of it. It's only when the post is obviously TOU-violating or offensive that the flag-help users have anything tangible to add.
If the flag-help forum is anything even close to a representative sample of what users are flagging, I'd say that the main uses of the flag feature have nothing to do with violations of CL TOU, despite the site's repeated warnings in the UI that the flag feature is for TOU violations only.
> "I agree that there's a learning curve in posting ads to gigs"
That's the problem. There isn't. When everything no-pay gets flagged off in short order, there isn't a learning curve. There is a brick wall.
> "but the number of flags required to bring an ad down puts the math on the poster violating community standards."
This is an assumption, and a particularly false one at that. Craigslist has never released any documentation on how many flags it takes to bring down an ad. The only thing we know for sure is that it is higher than one. From my own observations on low-traffic categories, this number is likely < 5. An unsophisticated troll/griefer can easily issue five flags in short order and take something down single-handedly.
The fact that a post got flagged is not at all evidence that the poster has done something the community does not appreciate. In fact, from my own observations in gigs/creative is that my ads consistently get a strong interested response... as long as they stay up. From the looks of it from other posters posting ads similar to mine, there is a single dedicated troll who griefs the entire category. CL does nothing to solve this.
tl;dr: My ads are well-written, conform to all guidelines, and get a consistently strong response (at least 3/hour that the post stays up). Yet, what looks like a single griefer (or a small group of griefers) ruins the category for everyone - not only myself but other people posting similar ads. That a single griefer can take down this sort of functionality is part of why CL is fundamentally broken.
> "Unpaid jobs are basically illegal, taxwise"
Oh here we go. Now I know with good confidence you're one of the flag-help users :) When a perfectly innocuous-looking post is submitted to flag-help that seems to conform to TOU and is otherwise inoffensive, flag-help users will go to great lengths, make tenuous connections, and make assumptions about the poster in order to maintain their false belief that the flag feature is largely used properly by users, despite overwhelming evidence that it is abused.
So when an artist is seeking collaborators, flag-help will falsely associate this with "unpaid job", then link this to tax law, in order to convince themselves that somehow this post must violate TOU. Otherwise, why would the fine, upstanding CL community flag it? Surely there are no trolls and griefers in our midst!
This falls in line with my own experience. Flag-help insisted that, because I'm a photographer looking to collaborate, I should be posting to services/creative (despite the fact that I was looking for collaborators on a specific project, therefore am not offering myself up in general). The insistence was that I was miscategorized, and thus flagged. The notion of a troll was never acknowledged. After bringing this up, flag-help changed their tune, and at the end of the day settled on "well, some users just don't like no-pay gigs, tough".
tl;dr: Craigslist apologists have the incompatible dual beliefs that: flags are for the most part used as they are designed/intended (i.e. enforcing community guidelines)... and people will also flag whatever they want because they don't like it, even if it doesn't violate any community guidelines. This leads to the false belief that the CL flagging system is infallible, at the same time encouraging people to gloss over or construct elaborate stories to maintain the illusion that there doesn't exist an epidemic of false flagging.
Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here.
How about some sort of reputation system? And decent moderation? As it stands, CL is a great way to (not) meet flaky people, and to have your posts taken down on the indecipherable whims of a few obsessive users.
I've gotten one job, bought a few things, sold one motorcycle, and gave away most of my possessions via CL, and it was consistently an awful, frustrating experience.
It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," and there is a flag help forum on Craigslist to help explain how your ad might have trammeled your area's standards.
Having had an ad inexplicably flagged, the flag help forum is no help at all, unless you consider random, uninformed speculation a form of help.
For one thing, the tone of the flag help forum is that of a hazing circle. It's just a lot of people sitting around being snarky, making rude comments at relative novices and calling them names.
Which might be easier to swallow if they actually provided any real help - but unless your post is bog-standard flag-bait the advice given is usually off the mark. I sat through a number of threads besides my own and it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements.
Personally, I was looking for collaborative help in a photography project, and posted to gigs - but according to the great wisdom to flag-help I really should've been posting to services-creative instead (???)
The problem here is also that there is no safeguard against other posters flagging each other's content. Using the flag feature to push competing postings off the page is depressingly common, and the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves.
the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves.
Correct, it's up to the poster to construct an ad that can stay up. Community standards are different from city to city, but it's not Craigslist's job to keep ads up that the community doesn't want to see. Where is the "accountability and reliability" in your newspaper's classifieds? You think some editor at the Star Tribune is double-checking that that muscle car being advertised isn't actually a bucket of bolts?
The dominant "mechanism" or thought process I see getting thwarted on Craigslist is that since time-immemorial, classified ads (and really, ads in general) operated by the ethic of "Here it is, if you don't like it then you don't have to buy it (also: shut up)." Craigslist inverts this relationship and puts the power into the readers' hands: "You don't like getting flagged? Feel free to post your ad on some other website." This, I feel, is the most political thing that Craigslist has done: instead of forcing readers to overlook bad ads, it tries to motivate sellers not to write bad ads in the first place. That so many here are angry about having gotten flagged off in the past tells me that they were doing the bare minimum in writing their ad anyway. Good riddance, I say. It's not like Craigslist will die without whiners complaining about them.
By and large the people most frustrated with their Craigslist posting experience are those who just barf out a self-serving ad and expect the invisible hand of Adam Smith to protect their "right" to get $1200 for a Britney Spears ticket.
it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements.
If this was your experience, I'd look to the attitude of the person asking for help. There is a certainly an amount of "RTFM" in the flag forums, but so few RTFM. Lots and lots of people get "real help" in the flag forums. Unfortunately, lots and lots of other people have a "don't like it? don't buy it." attitude.
> "Craigslist inverts this relationship and puts the power into the readers' hand"
No, it doesn't - it puts powers into other advertisers' hands as much as it does the users. You are also forgetting that time is not a fundamentally equal resource - in my case it seems like there are griefers on the subcategory who consistent (and around the clock, it seems) flag posts that rub them the wrong way. Perhaps it's other regular posters trying to push competing posts out of the way (very, very likely, and in fact a common tactic), or maybe a disgruntled user with a beef against a subcategory and too much time on his hands. The problem here is griefers - and there is no mechanism to stop them.
Compare this with MMORPGs - players with a lot of time on their hands can stand to be incredibly powerful in ways that normal players cannot. Most games balance for this by nerfing extreme regulars and boosting infrequent players to lessen the gap. It doesn't remove the incentive of playing more, but it prevents situations where a bunch of Lv. 100 wizards are just constantly destroying a bunch of Lv. 10 noobs. CL faces the same problem - the morality police, griefers, and other obsessive users gum up the entire system.
> "That so many here are angry about having gotten flagged off in the past tells me that they were doing the bare minimum in writing their ad anyway."
This is an attitude I saw a lot on the flag-help forum, but I read through a large number of threads and I'd wager 95% of them were just fine - neither violating the TOU, nor being offensive, nor being illegal... There are many lower-traffic subcategories where the flag threshold for being pulled is absurdly low.
That's the problem with flag-help. Most posts submitted there don't have anything obviously wrong with them, and the flag-helpers are either there to flog the newbie for daring to have a post that got flagged, or speculate on various non-obvious reasons why a post was flagged. In the end nobody gets anywhere except in the 5% of cases where the questionable nature of the post is obvious, this is pointed out, and everyone goes on their merry ways.
> "By and large the people most frustrated with their Craigslist posting experience are those who just barf out a self-serving ad and expect the invisible hand of Adam Smith to protect their "right" to get $1200 for a Britney Spears ticket."
Citation required. I hung out on the flag-help forum for a couple of hours after posting my own, digging through past posts. The vast majority of the posts that go through there are neither self-serving nor entitled. They're just normal ads that get pulled for seemingly inexplicable reasons. The flag feature is neither accountable nor does it come with context. All there is is speculation on maybe, kind of, probably why something was flagged, where really this information needs to come from the flaggers themselves. The usage of the flag as an offensive feature between posters is also almost trivially easy to stop, but yet CL has done nothing.
The flag-help forum posters are also ill-qualified for the job, since they don't have any data on why posts get flagged either! All they can do is speculate - but without any input from real flaggers their speculation is about as reliable as anyone else's. For obvious offensiveness this works, but from what I saw the vast majority of posts that pass through there were flagged for anything but obvious reasons, and the responses are not informed.
> "If this was your experience, I'd look to the attitude of the person asking for help."
I gather from the tone of this sentence that you're a flag-help poster yourself. I saw dozens of puzzled people come into the forum, be perfectly respectful and polite, only to be faced with snark and derision from the "old boys club" of flag-help users. The prevailing attitude was "how dare you post something that got flagged, you sketchy sleazebag you! Here's some random speculation from me because there's nothing obviously wrong with your post, and your confusion and bewilderment as a result will only be further proof that you are not only posting shite content to the site, but clueless to boot!"
I've given up on Craigslist entirely from both a user and advertiser perspective. Mass-posters routinely flout the minimum-post-frequency guidelines, with nobody seemingly policing this abuse. Large advertisers will routinely flag competing posts to weed out competition. Griefers make the smaller, low-traffic subcategories impossible to use. Craigslist used to be a reliable way to just find simple classifieds, but the griefers and spammers have gotten more savvy and are exploiting the system straight to hell, and CL is still operating in the bubble of "the users know what's best" when their main audience has little to no say at all.
It always takes more than "a few obsessive users,"
As far as I'm aware, nobody knows what logic or thresholds are used by CL. Common wisdom is that it's "lots" but there seems to be no reason whatsoever to think that.
As someone who actually does flag ads (as we all agree to do by using Craigslist), I can say that it's more than "a few." Just because they don't verify the numbers doesn't mean it's low. What purpose would that serve them?
Look at it this way: read the comments here. Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible.
> "Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible."
No, both are possible, and in fact both are true.
Look at apartment listings - in any major city full of spam, obviously posting far more frequently than is allowed. I've tried flaggin these posts - but it looks like the flag threshold is proportionate to the category's traffic level. Which is to say, for something like apts/housing, very high. Makes sense on paper until you realize there aren't enough dedicated users policing to actually make the flags a working feature on these categories. So yes, shitty experience for browsers, chock full of spam.
Turn around, look at smaller categories where the flag threshold seems to become very low (say, anything outside the realm of selling/renting physical goods), and it becomes a terrible place to sell. Perfectly innocuous posts are flagged off for inexplicable reasons (believe me, I've sat through the flag-help posts and seen plenty of these), and incredibly common for competing advertisers to use the flag feature offensively against similar postings. So yes, too easy to flag and terrible place to sell.
You can insist all you like, and pretend that anyone who gets posts flagged is obviously doing something wrong - you'd be right there with the rest of flag-help after all, but that doesn't change the fact that the flag system is routinely abused and seriously compromises the credibility of CL. It's simultaneously too strict to filter to spam, and too lenient that it generates mass numbers of false positives. It's an utter failure of an abuse-detection scheme.
Craigslist is ripe for being disrupted - it's already happened in some categories, and there is a lot of ache in the market for the others. For me it's been relatively little loss - I've been using the craigslist-disruptor-equivalent to gigs/creative and it works great, much better than CL.
How can you say that? How does your personal experience of flagging postings in any way give you insight into the closed CL system?
I agree that flagging/community moderation is a good and necessary thing, I just think CL does it in an absolutely terrible way.
For example, if people find your post annoying, there is no "flag as annoying," or "flag and leave a comment." Instead, someone inadvertently offends someone else, and their post is taken down as spam. This example has netted only irritation for all parties involved, with no learning or progress. To me, that is simply a bad system.
Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and keeping the site working under the huge traffic it's handling.
I don't remember seeing CL down or even slow - no cutesy "site is down" pages - which says to me they're improving the site constantly, just not in the way that gets the hypeosphere excited.