I feel like there's a fundamental difference between CL and Reddit: the sense of community. CL is community-based in the sense that it allows users to broadcast via posts and receive private e-mail replies.
(There are forum areas, but I haven't gotten involved with those. I assume they're not as popular as Reddit, but feel free to correct this assumption. Regardless, they're a contained area of the site, rather than embedded in the underlying structure.)
Reddit, on the other hand, is a huge community of users openly engaged with each other. This is a fundamentally different dynamic, one which I believe cannot easily be separated into individually-operated platforms.
In fairness the frontpage (/r/all) community is often worse than YouTube. It's only when you delve into interest groups that the discussion smarts up a little (probably due to numbers)
CL doesn't have community in proportion to its size but that's not the point.
The mental overhead of looking on twenty random for the twenty things one would commonly do on craigslist would still be huge.
The thing about craigslist is it's about doing stuff that most people aren't sophisticates, afficionados or specialists in. Most people who look for rooms for rent don't have a complex or even a well-defined set of criteria for what a good search would involve. Even landlords tend to be pretty adhoc. Similarly with people selling cars or household items.
Craigslist is where people exchange good-enough information about some incidental commodity between each other. Neither person is going to make the investment of providing more information because it's not the specialty of either person. Add to that the way people have currently learned to prefer good-enough and Craigslist looks unbeatable.
True, and I think some of the examples of the unbundled sites reflect this. For instance there is good documentation of the fact that sites like 9gag and imgfave just scrape reddit for content and automatically host it. So they've maybe stolen eyeball traffic away from reddit, but not the community itself.
Actually HN itself is experiencing some 'unbundling', I believe. Boot-strappers, for example, have long been carving out their own communities away from HN. I can only imagine this is also true for valley startups..
There's no way HN is still the center of this world for long. Its where you invited all your friends and co-workers to, and now its a mess. Now you have to move upmarket to find better information, and getting into those other communities is harder. They don't just let anyone in. They watched what happened to HN and they're scared of killing quality.
If you want into those communities, you better have created something, and you better be willing to contribute in a positive way. They won't tolerate many Jeremiahs.
For starters, when most forums ban people it's because they want them to leave. Allowing trolls and assholes free rein as long they're rich kind of runs counter to the whole point.
Having to get out your credit card to swear at people on the internet seems to do a good job of getting people to stop and reconsider. Not always, but it helps.
The SA account cost and moderation work very well and do not result in a forum full of rich trolls. I've seen other forums use similar tactics (small cost of entry and strong moderation) to preserve a high signal to noise ratio.
The trolls and assholes are still cleaned up after. There are people who spend a few hundred bucks trolling but they're essentially invisible unless you go looking for them.
MetaFilter has this model too, though I feel like it emphasizes stopping trolls getting in more than it does stopping banned trolls from returning. You must pay $5 to get a MetaFilter account.
"They watched what happened to HN and they're scared of killing quality."
What did happen to HN, exactly? Maybe the bloom just hasn't worn off for me yet, but discussion here is about a million times more high-quality and productive than, say, Slashdot.
I have been around HN for about 4 years now (I lurked before I created my account) -- there used to be all sorts of interesting articles on the front page (not just about programming, but genuinely interesting things like music, biology, psychology etc). Now, every third story is about NSA/Snowden, Openness, or someone's blog about how XYZ is bad and we should all do ABC instead. The front page typically has maybe one post that I care about these days.
Comments similarly started lacking in quality, or maybe the really vocal minority are just louder than everyone else. You're right that slashdot comments are way worse (jokes aren't frowned-upon as they on HN, so a lot of discussions degrade to cheap jokes), but the articles are moderated by a handful of people and are typically more interesting.
It's simply a function of a user-run moderation system that reaches a critical point, after which is it logistically impossible for the "good few" to moderate out all the bad ones because their votes count the same. We saw it in Slashdot comments, Digg and Reddit, and now we are seeing it here.
>Comments similarly started lacking in quality, or maybe the really vocal minority are just louder than everyone else. You're right that slashdot comments are way worse (jokes aren't frowned-upon as they on HN, so a lot of discussions degrade to cheap jokes), but the articles are moderated by a handful of people and are typically more interesting.
It'd be interesting to see some statistics on who comments on what articles. (And who doesn't.)
As it stands I sort of feel like I'm crashing a party, and would serve you all best by leaving.
I've found that articles with a bunch of comments have inevitably devolved into trolls shrieking at each other. But historically I've gotten as much or more out of the comments as the articles.
Could this be because the crowd is getting older and becoming more aware of this ever increasing political and social issues that affect the industry? You could have confirmation bias. I don't see too many political/social posts, maybe that's because I have confirmation bias the other way - I look for the interesting articles you talk about. Maybe the site needs to go full Lisp articles once a month to flush out the jokers (can't remember the language, haven't seen one in a while sorry)
I think it's more to do with the largest tech-based scandal since stuxnet, except with a vast litany of content of trickling leaks is going on right now. People may have topic fatigue, but it's not like some manufactured sideshow - things are really being shaken up, and it's paramount that folk in the industry follow it to know the state of play. Perhaps it's easier for non-US readers to maintain an interest and opinion on the topic, both due to being overtly targetted and being immune to the defensiveness we can all feel when our institutions are taking a hammering (even if we essentially agree in the fact they have made mistakes).
Aside from political posts, I think there is still a broad range of content on here that spans far more than myopic coding/entrepreneurial blogs etc.
The core problem with HN seems to be the tendency for people to lambast ideas before we've given them a chance to germinate. PG gets fiery mad at this behavior. Scoffing at ideas adds nothing, in fact it reduces the value of the conversation to the point that it has less-than-zero value.
To use a (poorly constructed) analogy: if I want to laugh at nerds and their nerdy ideas, I should go join the ranks of nerd-scoffers at any local high-school, where I'd be a better fit. If you want to be part of the conversion here, you should bring a positive or constructive voice and try to improve on ideas, rather than tear them down.
The S/N ratio and discussion here is better, but I think Slashdot is very competitive in peak comment quality. In the midst of a crap Slashdot discussion there will often be one to three very good comments from knowledgeable people. And the moderation is not too bad at highlighting these, if you browse at +3 or +4.
Great comments happen here too, but I feel (possibly incorrectly, haven't done a survey or anything) that they come on a smaller range of subjects. You can count on tptacek for very good crypto comments, grellas for law, there are some old-school Lisp hackers around, and on a lot of web-related stuff you have the people who wrote the system in question around to comment. But we don't seem to have as many non-computer technologists around: pilots, nuclear engineers, chemists, etc. I think Slashdot has a userbase that averages somewhat older, somewhat less Silicon Valley, and somewhat less startuppy, which has its pros and cons.
Personally I still haven't found any comment section better than pre-2003 or so Slashdot. Lots of people who knew what they were talking about, trolls were quickly hidden, not much in the way of stupid politics, some humor without going overboard, etc.
Or maybe it's just rose-colored glasses to some extent; certainly there was the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" type stuff.
Indeed, a good place to start. Ian Landsman is very well connected to the community. However, keep in mind that the best kind of knowledge exchange is probably happening 1-on-1. Just like when attending conferences (Microconf, Business of Software, BaconBizConf, etc): there is a lot more value being exchanged in the hallways than in the auditoriums.
If it feels a bit like networking... thats because it is.
If you're at ground-level and just starting out, you can buy your way into a few (as jmduke pointed one out). I highly recommend joining Rob Walling's (rwalling) Micropreneur Academy and branching out from there. The cover charge is a bit pricey at ~$50 a month, but if you contribute to discussions and look for ways to help other people (this is key), you'll find your way forward into some other great communities.
If you're at ground-level and just starting out, you can buy your way into a few (as jmduke pointed one out). I highly recommend joining Rob Walling's (rwalling) Micropreneur Academy and branching out from there. The cover charge is a bit pricey at ~$50 a month, but if you contribute to discussions and look for ways to help other people (this is key), you'll find your way forward into some great communities.
At $50 per month, it certainly seems like a good way to keep the owners employed, at least.
It's interesting to me that discussion forums are now considered "startups." I suppose the distinction depends on whether the founders' primary goal is to stimulate discussion or to make money.
Assuming one has created something that they are attempting to bootstrap, how does one go about finding these communities? Can they be found just by searching, or is it more difficult than that?
Definitely...there are lots of forums I used to visit that I've now abandoned, since the subreddit for that topic is so strong, active, useful or well moderated.
Additionally I've heard this complaint so many times, but I don't find Reddit ugly at all. What do people want? Tag clouds, gradients and flash everywhere, or what? What's a less ugly forum/comment layout than Reddit?
I will probably get eviscerated for this, but I've always been confused why Reddit was so ugly. I am absolutely NOT a designer in any sense of the word, but here's some things I would change.
1. Change the #0000FF links. Something, anything, slightly desaturated from pure blue would look better IMO. <Insert contrast comments here>
2. Whitespace. I can feel the function over form guys typing away furiously from here! BUT YOU CAN FIT MORE CATZ WITH LESS WHITESPACE! I like a little bit of extra whitespace, so sue me. I think an extra 20 pixels between submissions would go a long way. Maybe even a light HR too?
3. The "tabs" at the top are just flat ugly and dated. In fact, everything within the blue header just looks dated.
http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus for example does a nice job of making Reddit look better without drastic changes. Although I think their titles could be slightly larger and I hate text-decoration: underline;
I have to agree with that. There's real value in going to one site to see all of your threads and replies on 20 topics, rather than going to 20 different sites. Plus, the sheer size of the site and core quality of their engine makes it possible for lots of relatively tiny communities to thrive that are too small, devoid of tech skill, and undercapitalized to create forums of their own.
As for the ugly, I think it looks fine. At least, I'd rather have it be a bit on the plain side than have megabytes of garish colors everywhere like a 2003 Myspace page that takes 30 seconds for each page to load.
Not to mention that the article just uses "craiglist" to mean "selling any goods or services locally." It's silly to consider all those startups as "competing within verticals of craiglist" simply because they are involved in selling goods or services locally.
I like what you're getting at, but I'm not sure you're correct. Yes, Reddit is being unbundled, but not necessarily for replacement of its verticals. They may be indirectly inspiring the startups you mention but will not be replaced.
For instance, Quora is not /r/AskReddit. AskReddit is much more casual, full of opinion and silly questions, whereas Quora is a lot more serious and formal and values quality and factuality much more than AskReddit does.
As for why CL and Reddit don't move with the times
"Why is this the case? I don’t know. But, my guess is that this leaves both Craigslist and reddit more vulnerable to unbundling effect, and this is a good sign for startups building within their verticals."
Simply, they haven't needed to yet. The threats haven't been obviously very strong, and they continue to have a lot of users and make strides (especially Reddit) in popularity, despite the apparent drawbacks.
Reddit's UX isn't actually that terrible, it's just a bit ugly-looking. It works quite well, in general, and isn't completely unintuitive.
The difference with reddit (and the real genius of the initial vision) is that any user can create a subreddit. Compare this to craigslist where the admins defined the 50 or so static categories at the outset. Reddit, on the other hand, has interesting (and not so interesting) subreddits pop up every day.
The community of reddit certainly has shifted quite a bit, but this ability to evolve organically will keep it from unraveling in the same way as Craigslist has. I think it's a bad comparison anyway.
The idea that CL is 'vulnerable' to unbundling is kinda funny, given that almost none of the hundreds of vertical startups have proven to be more successful than the original (can't actually think of any).
CL provides the easiest, most frictionless way to engage in a local transaction with another individual or entity. The other verticals may be slicker, more targeted, and backed my big corporate $$, but they haven't attracted the mindshare or
provided the utility to the average person that CL does.
I've never really been much of a Reddit fan so I rarely visit, but I've always liked reading the classified ads in my local newspaper, and Craigslist is infinitely better than my local daily newspaper, plus the ads are free.
As for ugly sites, you can use your own CSS to theme sites to your liking, so ugliness is pretty much a non-issue for me.
There may be validity in the "unbundling" notion, but I still seem to use my preferred sites after giving the new sites a spin for a short time.
Craigslist only monetizes housing and job listings, which are probably its two most competitive verticals.
Reddit's monetization issue is ironic, because it's incredibly valuable to marketers: organic/viral growth via Reddit is easy and lucrative. The problem is that Reddit's platform is designed in such a way that there's really no need to go through advertising channels: why pay money to get off on the wrong foot with your audience when you could go through the normal means of the site? (I'm not sure what the admin's stance is on subreddit takeovers, but I'd imagine those would be an avenue worth going down.)
Of course not, it's always lagging behind, because 9gag gets all of its content from reddit. It can never get close because it isn't an actual source of content.
I disagree with the foundations of the argument (Etsy and AirBnB aren't attacking craiglist) but I agree with the conclusions: if all you have is a massive reputation and a massive user base (which I think is pretty much true of Reddit/Craigslist; obviously there are technical innovations there but the marketing/product innovations that they pioneered are now very mainstream) then you're sitting on a tenuous position.
>my guess is that this leaves both Craigslist and reddit more vulnerable to unbundling effect, and this is a good sign for startups building within their verticals.
What the author is trying to say is as subreddits become more popular, exclusive website will be created in their image. He gives success stories like 9gag & hacker news. So it comes as no surprise that the author has his own website which he claims is a result of a subreddit (which one I have no clue). Basically this guy is drinking his own koolaid. The problem with this argument is it is not clear if reddit came before 9gag or hacker news. Surely hacker news & 9gag are successful despite what is on reddit, not because the idea may have spawned from a subreddit.
Most internet use is during business hours. Craigslist & Reddit look, from ~10 feet away (by passing coworkers) to look closer to "work", as it's text-based, with very few graphics. It doesn't look like the Huffington Post, ESPN, Netflix, or Facebook.
So, coworkers or bosses passing by either don't register it as "goofing off", or, if they do recognize it, they are "in the club" & not going to call you on it.
And, by having a minimalist UI (compact, informational), they know they MUST focus on content to succeed. This makes content king, like it should be, for user-generated content sites like this.
Reddit has a more defensible position than Craigslist in relation to verticals because of its karma system. Karma carries over from sub-reddit to sub-reddit and people obsess over it. In my opinion, this is the 'drug' that keeps people around.
Craigslist on the other hand has no karma. A good seller or good buyer is completely anonymous. People will post to Craigslist if they can sell just as easily they'll post to another site if they can sell there. Reddit is not the same. A redditor will more readily post to reddit because of the sweet, sweet karma.
The last criticism, that CL and reddit are slow to change, I don't think is particularly valid.
Digg, which was the first post-Slashdot favorite, positively churned compared to reddit. People like reddit and CL because they don't change. These forums have been popular since the 1980s BBSs. They don't change it because it works.
That wasn't always true. For a while, the quality and quantity of programming links on hn were superior to /r/programming. That hasn't been true lately: For whatever reason, in the few years I've been following both, hn and /r/programming have maintained an inverse relationship on the level of code hacking goodness.
The graphic identifying "startups" that compete with Craigslist has some companies that are 12+ years old, not much younger than Google (the company that is, which was formed in 1998)
Yeah, as soon as I read that reddit is going to be afraid from competition of the entire internet, my first thought was "You know, reddit isnt the entire internet..."
This article makes it seem like 9gag is targeting reddit users to split them off and make their own community. This is so "huh?" I could barely understand it. Websites existed before craigslist and reddit, and people move between many websites, not visit one exclusively.
I think he has a good point but I don't totally agree. I created http://audiour.com which could be seen as facilitator of /r/Music (or other similar subreddits), but there is no sense of 'community' like there is on /r/Music.
(There are forum areas, but I haven't gotten involved with those. I assume they're not as popular as Reddit, but feel free to correct this assumption. Regardless, they're a contained area of the site, rather than embedded in the underlying structure.)
Reddit, on the other hand, is a huge community of users openly engaged with each other. This is a fundamentally different dynamic, one which I believe cannot easily be separated into individually-operated platforms.