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
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.
Oddly enough I’ve had the most success selling things on craigslist in the past few years. When I list things on OfferUp I get some messages but everyone is super flaky. People are still flaky on craigslist but I almost always end up closing the sale there instead of OfferUp
Facebool marketplace did a number on Craigslist. Also you need to pay five dollars to post a car ad now which sucks.
I was going to post something to CL a month or two ago, but was shunned away by new & intrusive PII collection… seemed offensive and discordant with the original spirit of CL, and I ended up “nope’n out” instead. RIP another internet era/icon.
I still like it. But it does have two problems:
-
Post spam. There is no enforcement of the posting rules, and nobody reacts if they are reported. For example, I’m looking for a Volvo, and people post a Dodge but put every car manufacturer name in the listing so they show up in every search.
-
Scam fucking overload. Every time I post anything for sale, the scam traffic is overwhelming. I listed a car and got like 12 similar scam responses. Most appeared to be chat bots with no human behind it. Some surprised me by responding to my sarcastic replies.
But I still look there. The site works for the most part, especially if you use the search modifiers. And selling stuff works too. Sometimes you get murdered, but it’s rare.
-
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.
Facebook marketplace is killing it for classifieds
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.
