I read a well-reasearched (but unfortunately titled) article about Craigslist this morning that re-hashed many of the typical criticisms of the service that have been kicking around the internets for the past several years. The article itself does a pretty fair job of representing both sides of the argument, and I encourage you to read it. If you have any experience working in or around customer service, there are a number of things that will surely resonate. Example:
By eliminating marketing, sales, and business development, craigslist’s programmers have cut out all the cushioning layers that separate them from the users they serve, and any right they have to teach lessons in public service comes from the odd situation of running a company that is directly subservient only to the public. Here’s the lesson: The public is a motherfucker.
Anyway, in this response, I just wanted to offer some of my *own* thoughts on the subject, presented in the format of a Socratic(?) dialog between myself and a hypothetical marketing dweeb. Enjoy!
(Disclosure: I write extremely nerdy folk music which derives all it’s lyrical content from “Missed Connections” posts on Craigslist.”)
Marketing Dweeb: OMG U need to leverage the “social graph” for great justice 2.0!
Me: Sites like Facebook, MySpace & Friendster derive a huge portion of their value from persuading individuals to document & maintain a wide array of personal information. Where you work, where you live, who your friends colleagues are, what music you like, etc. In return, these sites add value by analysing & presenting this data in a variety of ways that are useful to their members.
Similarly, eBay keeps detailed stats on each of their users. Number of transactions, positive & negative feedback, length of membership and so on. In effect, when you make a purchase on eBay, you’re not so much bidding on a rare, pornographic Mickey Mouse comic book as you are on the reputation of the person offering it for sale.
Couldn’t Craigslist add value to *their* offering in a similar way, by documenting the relationship between buyers and sellers, keeping tabs on transaction histories, and using this data to discourage spam and fraud? Well, aside from being an obvious example of “Shit’s Easy” Syndrome, I’d argue that taking such measures might actually be counter-productive, in the grand scheme of things, to the purposes of the site.
Consider a dude looking to rent an apartment. Aside from the obvious considerations of price & neighborhood, he probably wants to cast his net as widely as possible at first before narrowing his search based on the unique merits or drawbacks of the individual properties. Is he concerned with his future landlord’s taste in music, or whether they share any mutual acquaintances? Most likely not, and any attempt to narrow results by such criteria can only limit the reach and effectiveness of the search.
The issue of eBay-style reputation is a bit thornier, since who *wouldn’t* be interested in knowing what past tenants have to say about a particular landlord’s scruples (or lack thereof) before signing a lease? But the fact remains that in spite of eBay’s best efforts to prevent it, both buyers and sellers on their service are still routinely the victims of fraud. Why? Because, in the absence of any real, reliable way to establish and verify identity online, eBay’s reputation system, like all reputation systems, is subject to trivial manipulation and gaming. Fortunately, Craigslist already has an elegant solution to this issue, and it’s called “meeting face-to-face.” Curious as to why the rent for an apartment is suspiciously reasonable? Go take a look at the building and see whether it might be in danger of falling apart in the next 12 months. Can’t figure out why some dude is charging $500 above blue book value for a 94 Honda Civic? Go check out his meticulous collection of oil-change receipts and tire-rotation records dating back to the Clinton administration. Lonely and looking for some companionship, but you’ve got a thing against burly transvestites? Meet her at a coffee shop before going back to the hotel.
Marketing Dweeb: Shit dude, you could make so much money by charging for “premium” ads or “sponsored” search results!
Me: Aside from the fact that it seems like Craigslist just really isn’t all that interested in “monetizing” their “clickstream” it actually makes a huge amount of sense that they don’t engage in this type of thing. Consider sponsored results on Google. You know, those links in the light-grey box that you never click on? Exactly. Well, but somebody must be clicking on them! Otherwise, why would people be paying for them! OK, fine… *somebody* is clicking on them. Your mom. Your Uncle Ralph. The kid who works at Safeway. Point is, the quality of those “sponsored” links is almost *always* going to be lower than the “real” search results located directly below them. In Google’s case, this is an acceptable evil because… what are you going to do? Email Google and complain? Probably not. Either you’ll quickly develop a Pavlovian tendency to avoid clicking on things that appear on a light-grey background, or you’ll just continue on your way, blissfully unaware of the (slightly) better life that could be yours.
On Craiglist, however, the stakes are a bit different. Whereas 99% of Google searches don’t end in a financial transaction, a pretty large number of Craigslist searches do. And while your mom, Uncle Ralph and the Safeway kid probably won’t be too butthurt about clicking through a bunch of dumb teeth-whitening ads before reading Chewbacca’s biography on starwars.about.com instead of getting the *real* story from Wookiepedia, you can be damn sure they’ll be considerably more aggrieved when they find out that the apartment they just rented is managed by the EvilBastard Property Co. and that furthermore, Craigslist deliberately put EvBaProCo at the top of all their search results, simply because they were willing to pay $10 a click for the privilege.
And as to the suggestion that charging more for premium placement would provide Craigslist with some additional revenue to improve the overall quality of search results, as well as improving the UI and signup process for the site? I’ll ask that you take a quick look at the Gamasutra jobs site (for game industry jobs) which charges up to $750 for a single job listing, and yet is still able to deliver one of the shittiest user interfaces known to modern man. Not to say that Craigslist wouldn’t spend their money more wisely than Gamasutra, but in any case, I think it’s important to note that increased revenue does not necessarily lead to an improved user experience.
Which brings me to my final point…
Marketing Dweeb: Come on you guys! The UI… What is this 1997?
Me: First of all, you know what? The internet was pretty fucking sweet in 1997. So don’t talk trash about it! Secondly, it’s just a damn list. A plain-text list, with a full-text search. What else do you want? You know what other website is just a plain-vanilla text entry field that searches a big “list” of useful content?
Google.
Anyway, look… I’m a geek. I love flashy interfaces and whiz-bang visualizations as much as the next guy, but as a geek I’m still a reader more than anything else. For a while around the turn of the century, it seemed like being a reader was going to become a quaint and lonely affectation of days gone by, but I’m pleased to report that this has not come to pass. Thanks to stuff like instant messaging, RSS and Twitter (i.e. “The Hipster RSS”), the written word has come back with a vengeance. To put it another way, “Text is the Internet’s Payload” and I think Craigslist can take pride in having reminded us of this fact all along.
(written on an Acer netbook in notepad.exe, August 2009)
