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
Like others here, facebook took over the market …market in my area as well.
However, I think we can all agree Craigslist really died the second they removed the casual encounters section.
You mean the “totally not prostitution, for real you guys, I mean it, don’t arrest me” section? Because that’s why all the hookup and dating sections vanished. It was even in the news at the time.
The one time I went on that site for that reason was in the early 2010s, pre-tinder. The other person was real, but substantially less female than advertised. At least they were polite when I told them I wasn’t interested?
At what point did you get the reveal? Did you have to meet in person first?
We meet in person, thankfully in a very public place.
Oh wow! That’s rough. Least you got a good story out of it!
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 posted several large wood working machines for sale there in the past year and every one was bought within 24 hours.
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.
Long since dead here. Nothing but scams and data harvesting.
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.
You have to pay to sell things on there now as well. Might as well use ebay or letgo or something like that.
When did that happen? I sold several pieces of woodshop equipment there in the past year and didn’t pay anything.
Might just be for cars and farm equipment? Went to sell a lawn mower and it asked me for money.
I hear ebay is testing no selling fees for individual sellers on most items, so there’s that possibility. They did it in Germany and it was a hit, so it’s slowly coming stateside I think.
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.
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.
Marketplace killed it. Thanks zucc
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.
I still use Craigslist, but it does seem like fewer other people do. I’ve never really cared to get top dollar for whatever I list, I mostly just want to avoid tossing it in the garbage or hauling it to a donation drop off, and it’s worked well for that. I’m currently browsing for a few items, and it does feel cluttered with dealers, even when supposedly limiting it for sale by owner only.
I tried Offer Up once a few years ago, and for some reason, it didn’t notify me of any responses, so by the time I thought to check it again, I had already sold the item through CL. I refuse to use any Meta products, so FB Marketplace effectively doesn’t exist to me.
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
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 in my area is at least 90% spam, FB Marketplace is also not super active. OfferUp is pretty popular though.
Everyone here uses Kijiji or Facebook Markeplace. Craigslist isn’t on anyone’s radar because it has a reputation for being sketchy.
