There’s a recent piece in Wired entitled, “Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess”. The answer according to the article is that Craig Newmark is a pretty weird dude. But while it’s an interesting profile, the real question about Craigslist isn’t “why is it such a mess” but “why, given that it’s a mess, is it so widely used?” And as the article mentions, people use it because (a) it’s free, and (b) everyone else is using it, so it’s the best place to find what you’re looking for. But “Craigslist is widely used because it’s widely used” isn’t terribly satisfying as an answer.
What I really want to know is: how do people find anything at all on Craigslist? Because I just can’t do it, but it certainly wouldn’t be popular if everyone else was in the same position. And indeed, the comments on the Wired article are overwhelmingly people objecting to the title alone, protesting that Craigslist isn’t a mess. So lots of people find it a useful tool.
Nevertheless, every time I’ve tried to use it (and I’ve looked at it at various times for apartments, job hunting, and dating) I’ve given up after encountering a spectacularly low signal-to-noise ratio. Because there’s no cost to posting, and it lacks sophisticated filters, I end up with a huge and unmanageable stream of nearly-undifferentiated posts. And while there’s something to be said for its free-form character, this seems to lead to listings that are either unhelpfully vague or hyper-specific.
So I feel like I’m doing it wrong. There must be some techniques out there to using Craigslist successfully (hopefully some Craigslist power users in the readership can tell me what they are). I have some guesses as to what might work:
- Liberal use of the search box. I always feel like my search terms narrow the field either too little or too much. But maybe a clever selection of search terms, applied in lots of variations, would improve things.
- Less reading, more skimming. Just because it doesn’t filter for me doesn’t mean I have to read every post. If I learn to recognize useless items and move on quickly, I could move much more quickly through the stream.
- Persistence. I know that some people read Craigslist painstakingly every day, looking for the perfect bargain. (From the Wired article, this seems well suited to Craig Newmark’s style.) I don’t have the patience for it, though, and I generally don’t believe the perfect bargain exists. (Or rather, when they do appear they get snapped up immediately.)
Any other advice? Anyone else find Craigslist unusable?