Craigslist is lazy

Part 1: the Mountain View bug

Aug-26-09, 7:02 pm by Hanford
File under: Misc.

Close friends of mine know that I don't think Craigslist does a very good job at what it does, considering how much far of a lead it has above all the other sites out there. Here's one of the reasons why: The Mountain View bug.

For years now, Craigslist has had two entries for Mountain View, CA. One listed in the Peninsula:

Mountain View Craigslist

And one in the South Bay:

Mountain View Craigslist

If you post in one, it does not show up in the other. Let me repeat that: if you post in one Mountain View, it does not show up in the other Mountain View. This means that people checking Mountain View areas have to either check both sections, or they're unknowingly missing out on a bunch of stuff. Likewise, if you're posting to Mountain View, you have to post to both, or risk that a good portion of people don't see it.

Imagine how this has probably affected people looking for a place to move in Mountain View. Many are simply not seeing all the Mountain View listings. Think of it, you've got an apartment search going in an expensive neighborhood, in a tough economy, and probably with a time limit, and unless you know about this bug, you're seeing only half of the listings (330 vs 332 when I checked it today).

The sad thing is Craigslist knows about this

I alerted one of the employees to it close to a year ago. And they replied. And they acknowledged that people at CL already knew about it. And they even said, and I quote:

In the short term there's probably no fix

So, there you go. They know about it, and they know it's not going to get fixed anytime soon. There's no notification built in to simply warn you. There's no redirect. There's nothing. From everything I can tell, it's like CL knows the bug exists, knows it's been that way for years, and simply doesn't care enough to fix it. Oh well.

Add onto this the other 1990s-set-of-features and problems that CL seems completely content with (spam listings, spam replies, lack of a reputation system, lack of image thumbnails, I could go on and on) and it seems pretty clear to me that Craigslist feels no pressure whatsoever to improve their site.

Sad, really.

I'm using "they" in this post as a gender-neutral description of the employee I talked to; meaning one person, not all of Craigslist.

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Logan wrote: Jan-15-10, 5:48 pm

I reckon there are enough geeks using Craigslist that if they open sourced their website these problems would be fixed in short order. It would take less time to actually fix the problems than it does to constantly work around the brokenness by hand. (BetaComment)

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