[jacobolus]

> The product is an embarrassment and yet it has users simply because it has users

The product is bare bones, but it works just as well as it ever has, which is a heck of a lot better than many web applications from the last 10 years, loaded down with animations and piles of tracking javascript and auto-playing video ads and broken reimplementations of standard browser features.

Personally I find it works better for me than most google web properties since about 2008 (e.g. the new versions of gmail and google maps), better than recent versions of facebook, better than yelp, better than a lot of current newspaper websites, etc. There’s something to be said for plain html websites.

I do wish craigslist would let other people scrape their pages and provide alternative user interfaces though. Pad mapper was a great help when I needed to look for an apartment several years ago.

[methehack]

I'll grant you that the basic functionality works. It ought to given that they've barely changed it in like 15 years. It's fine if they don't want to change it, but they've stifled -- through legal channels -- many frustrated attempts to enhance the product -- like cease and desists to dude's doing simple mapping visualizations for example. I think they're bullies with their position and it has served no one but craigslist. The network effects they wield create monopoly-like conditions and they use the court's to retain them.

[edit for grammar which alas is not quite perfect yet]

[snowwrestler]

When I hear people say that Craigslist hasn't changed in 15 years, I have to wonder how much they actually use Craigslist.

The functionality has changed (improved) dramatically since 15 years ago. For example there is now a map view for many search results. Searches of "for sale" listings now default to a gallery view. In fact the entire infrastructure for accepting and displaying images is new; Craigslist launched as a text-only website, and embedding images was a messy hack for years.

In general the data structure has been enhanced to collect more and more finely grained pieces of information by which searchers can filter their results. To name on example I've used, selling a boat on Craigslist now has its own set of dedicated fields for attributes like length, manufacturer, model, power source, even the number of hours on the engine.

The one thing that hasn't changed is the visual aesthetic. It's still plain-Jane HTML. But there are plenty of ugly-but-functional websites that do very well: Wikipedia, Google, and even Facebook are boring designs on top of really rich server-side content.

[JustSomeNobody]

Interesting. The product belongs to CN. If he doesn't want to "enhance" it, what gives anyone else the right to think they can step in and do it? If Toyota didn't offer a red Camry, do you think someone should be able to set up their own robot at Toyota to paint certain Camrys red?

If people are not satisfied with CL, they should build a better CL from scratch and stay away from CN's product.

[tptacek]

Yes, people should be able to set up their own Camry-painting factories. You can in fact get cars repainted.

The problem is that Padmapper saw that there were no red Camry's and decided to build and sell their own red Camry's, using Toyota's parts.

[JustSomeNobody]

You basically made my same point. I in no way said that people should not be able to paint red Camrys. I said they shouldn't be able to do it in Toyota's factory (by installing their own robot).