I went to Craigslist in my local area for the first time in awhile. I used to like “best of” Craigslist because some of them were great, there still are some, but its just not the same. A community I used to visit had about half the number of posts as I remember, and of jobs and things for sale, I would say roughly half the posts are just bottom feeding companies autoposting one post a day.
Is Craigslist going to be another web 1.0 app that just dies off? Is it the same in your area?
Craig himself is long since retired from doing stuff and they never seemed to be interested in working with other apps because most of them just scrape and don’t add value to CL, but the Fediverse can, if there was a filter for the spam. What do you think?
#craigslist #fediverse #federation
Facebook marketplace is killing it for classifieds
I wish this wasn’t the case. There’s no way I’ll ever create a FB account even for classifieds alone.
But how? It fuckin sucks!
Critical mass
Why you gotta be so critical about that mass? So negative.
Critical mass is an expression in social network saying you have a sufficient population that the network is now self-sustaining. And you don’t have to grow it externally. It’s an expression borrowed from nuclear where critical mass of reactive material could self-sustain a reaction without any external stimulation
To put a finer point on it… Everyone is using FB marketplace, including old ladies, rednecks, and the local illegals who barely speak english.
I hate FB, but I use it to buy, repair, and flip cars cuz it’s the only place that has a broad view into things. Just as many scams as CL, but the UI is a little better.
And I hate every one of you for jacking used car prices way the hell up for everyone so you can play half legal car dealer, while also making it hard as hell to even find a used car from a real owner of a vehicle instead of guys like you who owned it for a week and adding $2k to the price.
Last one I tried buying a guy listed it on a Sunday night. Like 7pm. I arranged to meet him Monday morning. But guess what? Guy showed up 7:45 pm with cash and bought it. Then re-listed it out of my price range.
Not where I’m at. Less young people have Facebook so will use other services like Craigslist. Yard sales are also popular.
Really? I thought facebook martketplace was the big one.
Young people don’t use Facebook because it’s full of old people just like what happened to MySpace and young people moving to Facebook because it was… full of old people.
TikTok went from being a Gen Z hangout to being filled with millennials who wanted to stay hip and young, and now young people are bailing on TikTok, too.
It always goes: Youth find cool space. Older youth want to stay hip and young and so populate youth space. Older youth quickly age up, soon making it a non-youth space. Younger youth leave to find a new cool space for youth. Some kind of Samsara.
i think millenials are one of the main demographics along with genz since the beginning no?
Yeah maybe, but we’re 40 now.
Facebook is mostly scamers where I am. So I stopped using it.
At least as far as apartment listings in California go, in my experience most of them are scams and phishing schemes. So yeah, 5-10 years ago most were legit postings, now it’s flipped.
Where are real listings found, instead?
Good question, I wish I knew. The closest I’ve found is sometimes Zillow, but it’s pretty different, not really comparable.
I’m not on Facebook, but from what I hear they’ve got the monopoly on this kind of thing now.
In the northeast U.S. Zillow and their related sites (they own a few real estate sales/rentals sites) is where the majority of rental listings show up. Though keep in mind those are also markets with tons of real estate brokers doing the listings & whatnot. Plenty of owner/landlords also use those sites but I’m not too sure if it’s the same in other parts of the U.S.
Those Zillow sites also have room / roommate search listings but a lot of people tend to join local Facebook groups for that or maybe use apps for that.
Marketplace killed it. Thanks zucc
TIL: Craigslist still existed.
Fighting off bots and scrapers has become a huge problem for every site on the internet.
It’s not surprising that a site that has kept a web 1.0 ethos and style hasn’t updated the back-end to more appropriately deal with these types of attacks.
Further, craigslist functioned on not needing a ton of moderators for the whole shebang. Keeping it simple allowed costs to be low.
The bot armies have changed that calculus, now you need a ton of well-paid moderators to make it functional, and I would suspect a site like Craigslist simply doesn’t pull enough income to be able to justify those sort of costs.
So instead, it will wither and rot on the vine.
Craigslist was one of the examples of the potential of the early internet, where we could have nice things because all the users valued it. Its falling victim to enshittification even with no ads and no connection to big tech.
The story of how we went from couchsurfing.com to airbnb.com
Couchsurfing became a for-profit company in 2011, after having been a volunteer-outfit since 1999.
You have to pay to sell things on there now as well. Might as well use ebay or letgo or something like that.
Craigslist died in my area the minute Marketplace opened up. It’s a shame too because Marketplace is hot garbage for browsing cars. You can select what color you want but not engine or drivetrain for example.
Craigslist has been spam for quite a while at this point. Even for me in my thirties, I don’t know anyone who has used it legitimately for at least a decade.
Nah I like to go through Craigslist. I live in the Orange County area and lots of people use it.
I saw the same when I lived in OC. It’s pretty lively up here in Seattle too.
Seems mostly dead for apt rentals / roommate wanted type stuff. I used to use it years ago but nowadays it’s mostly scam posts and no one I know would use Craigslist for finding roommates / looking for rooms. The site itself has a reputation for having shady posters so people tend to avoid it.
In my experience yes. The Facebook marketplace killed it. Which sucks because I refuse to use facebook.
Craigslist in my area is at least 90% spam, FB Marketplace is also not super active. OfferUp is pretty popular though.
It would be nice to have a decentralized or federated buy/sell platform that replaces craigslist. Facebook marketplace has absolutely eaten craigslist for lunch, and I hate that I have to use it to sell stuff, but there are few viable alternatives for local sales.
eBay is great until you want to sell a $300 iPhone and don’t want to mess with buyer return fraud which is rampant on that platform (and most custodial payment services like PayPal). I don’t sell anything on eBay for over >$100, got burned too many times.
As weird as it sounds, Facebook Marketplace is actually really good last I checked for a lot of the buying and selling aspect that Craigslist used to be good for
I think it still exists within a happy medium wherein the site owners are paying enough attention that most of the blatant scammers can get chased away, but not so much attention that they start trying to make money off it and ruin it
