Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by IgorPartola 1591 days ago
Facebook had a multimillion dollar business (yes, million, not trillion, but this was solid) in the form of FB marketplace. That was the one part of FB that was super useful and if they hooked it up with a secure payment system that worked with these kinds of transactions it could have been amazing. Instead they squandered it on ads, as they always do. The platform is now unusable.
2 comments

FB marketplace is pretty much the goto place for most people. For the most parts its valid users.
Users are. Listings aren’t. Most of my feed is ads for online stores masquerading as local listings. Like legit 10 out of 12 are this. You can search but you can’t just see “what has been listed lately” and their AB testing keeps changing the UI slightly so you can’t always find the right filters anyways.
I`m a big fan.
Is there any good alternative to FB MarketPlace these days? Craigslist is just too old fashioned and most people I know don't use it anymore.
I suspect a lot of the alternatives are pretty regional, for example tori.fi in Finland.
There's Gumtree[0], which is owned by eBay. Pretty popular over here in the UK.

[0]: https://www.gumtree.com

Offerup is probably the only other alternative but the network effects of Craigslist and FB are hard to beat.
Freecycle[0]?

[0]: https://freecycle.org