Is Craigslist Dying?

CRUMBGRABBER@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 141 points –

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

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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.

Just as many scams as CL, but the UI is a little better.

What a remarkable statement. Meta UI being better than bog standard Web 1.0. huh.

Because the Zuck was like

right, so we’ve got this huge captive audience. If we copy Craigslist and add like 1% more functionality, we can steal that whole market, and also have a decent shot at taking a bunch of the eBay (et al) market share too

Because all the normies are on there

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 is mostly scamers where I am. So I stopped using it.

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 still like it. But it does have two problems:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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.

My pet peeve with Facebook listings, although it happens on craigslist too, is people advertising as if it's a rental for an apartment to yourself but then it turns out it's a share housing situation

Yeah there are a ton of these on Craigs List lately too. It’ll be a whole listing that appears to be a standalone separate unit, but it turns out to be shared. Sometimes there will be hints like “private entrance” or something, but it’s still pretty deceptive.

On CL there's a dedicated place to seek roommates and no shortage of people seeking that arrangement. Not clear why people spam the apartment rental section

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.

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.

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.

Nah I like to go through Craigslist. I live in the Orange County area and lots of people use it.

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.

I posted several large wood working machines for sale there in the past year and every one was bought within 24 hours.

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.

Everyone here uses Kijiji or Facebook Markeplace. Craigslist isn't on anyone's radar because it has a reputation for being sketchy.

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.

In my experience yes. The Facebook marketplace killed it. Which sucks because I refuse to use facebook.

Facebool marketplace did a number on Craigslist. Also you need to pay five dollars to post a car ad now which sucks.

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.

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

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.

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

Craigslist in my area is at least 90% spam, FB Marketplace is also not super active. OfferUp is pretty popular though.

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.

Still sell and give away things all the time on Craigslist. Bought a cool sleek table for my patio. People use NextDoor too.