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
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.
i think millenials are one of the main demographics along with genz since the beginning no?
Yeah maybe, but we’re 40 now.
not all of us
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.
I still like it. But it does have two problems:
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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.
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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.
Sometimes you get murdered, but it’s rare.
Yeah, I hate when that happens to me, its so inconvenient
I don’t believe you, because you can only get murdered once, and after that you wouldn’t be able to post comments on the internet.
Didn’t you know? Everything on the internet is true!
Trust me 😉
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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.
TIL: Craigslist still existed.
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 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.
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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.
Everyone here uses Kijiji or Facebook Markeplace. Craigslist isn’t on anyone’s radar because it has a reputation for being sketchy.
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.
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.
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.
Facebool marketplace did a number on Craigslist. Also you need to pay five dollars to post a car ad now which sucks.
In my experience yes. The Facebook marketplace killed it. Which sucks because I refuse to use facebook.
