There is a strong difference between UI and UX, for example, when looking through postings for stuff for sale, or places for rent - filtering by HAS IMAGE is really the only way Ill look at an ad - yet there has NEVER been a way to expand and see images.
The FLAG FOR REMOVAL is and has been abused for YEARS. The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been used to effectively block competition in the buyers market. They should simply have a ticker to how many flags a post has been given.
Posting has been built upon, but made very cumbersome. And shows that they employ mediocre critical thinking when developing the UX.
Sure, the site is amazing, its a gem of the valley and I use it daily when looking for work, stuff, places to live, and weekly/monthly otherwise. But to defend this is the same as Quora trying to convince the world they have incredible design, which they dont.
The fact that sites like padmapper can even exist proves that CL is broken in certain areas.
Everybody likes the site, but everyone is also constantly defending poor design as if its some sort of hipster notion that we just wouldn't understand.
Craigslist is designed to make communication easier. If different people have differing ability to communicate, this makes it more difficult to communicate.
Mediocre UX makes for a better meeting ground, because when you start making things easier beyond a certain point, you start to do so at the expense of outliers. For a site like Craigslist, making 90% of people feel twice as comfortable and 10% feel less comfortable is a bad thing.
Your comment says nothing about the UX functions I mentioned. I agree with your statement, but it does not rebut the fact that image display is non-existent and actually works against you comment as it hinders people's ability to smoothly transact private sales...
List-jacking vi the FLAG is just retarded and makes me want to punch the screen.
The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been used to effectively block competition in the buyers market
You misunderstand the flagging mechanism, and it's never "the competition." The competition isn't united against you and there aren't enough of them anyway. You probably just used a hit counter or external images or some other commonly-abused or community-hated posting trope.
> "You probably just used a hit counter or external images or some other commonly-abused or community-hated posting trope."
Your insistence on the purity of flaggers is puzzling, but is in line with what all of flag-help believes. There is never the assumption that the post was flagged wrongly, and instead the assumption that that poster must have done something against the TOU. Except this assumption seems to be wrong more than it is right (based on the couple of hours I spent digging through flag-help postings anyhow).
In my case it seems that there are a contingent of users who are allergic to any unpaid gigs, and will flag just about any ad in the unpaid category. This is despite the fact that CL specifically has an unpaid category, and the posts I saw pass through were not TOU-violating in any way. Flag-help's best response for me was that, hey, that's the way it is, just live with it. This seems to put the kibosh on any assumptions that all flags are legitimate (or even most flags are legitimate). The funny thing is, during the short time that my posts stayed up, I got an incredible number of contacts expressing interest... so clearly I'm not advertising something unwanted to a brick wall.
Unpaid = volunteers. Yes, gigs has a "No Pay" option, but readers hate it (as I'm sure you gleaned from your forum scan). The readers make the final decision, it's pretty much as simple as that. Unpaid jobs are basically illegal, taxwise, and deferred compensation ("equity," usually) is prohibited by Craiglist elsewhere.
I agree that there's a learning curve in posting ads to gigs, but the number of flags required to bring an ad down puts the math on the poster violating community standards.
It's axiomatic that people who complain about flags never flag ads themselves, yet are convinced that there is a cabal focussed on them. This results in aggression proceeding from ignorance, where people who pretend Craigslist is a typical classified ad venue complain that posting whatever they feel like isn't having the intended effect.
No, but there's a large internal inconsistency that you have (that the rest of flag-help shares). There's on the one hand the assumption that the flag is used for good (a.k.a. flagging things that violate the TOU).
On the other hand there's the acceptance that users will flag whatever the hell they feel like, TOU be damned.
Which forms the standard path that a flag-help post travels through:
- Help!
- You must be violating the TOU.
- But... there's nothing in here violating the TOU!
- Sure you did, nub. I bet you had external pics too.
- But no, I didn't!
- Oh well, then, who knows, shrug people will flag what they will.
Which is why I keep saying flag-help is just about no help at all. It's just a lot of newbie-hazing, but very rarely do I see any real productivity out of it. It's only when the post is obviously TOU-violating or offensive that the flag-help users have anything tangible to add.
If the flag-help forum is anything even close to a representative sample of what users are flagging, I'd say that the main uses of the flag feature have nothing to do with violations of CL TOU, despite the site's repeated warnings in the UI that the flag feature is for TOU violations only.
> "I agree that there's a learning curve in posting ads to gigs"
That's the problem. There isn't. When everything no-pay gets flagged off in short order, there isn't a learning curve. There is a brick wall.
> "but the number of flags required to bring an ad down puts the math on the poster violating community standards."
This is an assumption, and a particularly false one at that. Craigslist has never released any documentation on how many flags it takes to bring down an ad. The only thing we know for sure is that it is higher than one. From my own observations on low-traffic categories, this number is likely < 5. An unsophisticated troll/griefer can easily issue five flags in short order and take something down single-handedly.
The fact that a post got flagged is not at all evidence that the poster has done something the community does not appreciate. In fact, from my own observations in gigs/creative is that my ads consistently get a strong interested response... as long as they stay up. From the looks of it from other posters posting ads similar to mine, there is a single dedicated troll who griefs the entire category. CL does nothing to solve this.
tl;dr: My ads are well-written, conform to all guidelines, and get a consistently strong response (at least 3/hour that the post stays up). Yet, what looks like a single griefer (or a small group of griefers) ruins the category for everyone - not only myself but other people posting similar ads. That a single griefer can take down this sort of functionality is part of why CL is fundamentally broken.
> "Unpaid jobs are basically illegal, taxwise"
Oh here we go. Now I know with good confidence you're one of the flag-help users :) When a perfectly innocuous-looking post is submitted to flag-help that seems to conform to TOU and is otherwise inoffensive, flag-help users will go to great lengths, make tenuous connections, and make assumptions about the poster in order to maintain their false belief that the flag feature is largely used properly by users, despite overwhelming evidence that it is abused.
So when an artist is seeking collaborators, flag-help will falsely associate this with "unpaid job", then link this to tax law, in order to convince themselves that somehow this post must violate TOU. Otherwise, why would the fine, upstanding CL community flag it? Surely there are no trolls and griefers in our midst!
This falls in line with my own experience. Flag-help insisted that, because I'm a photographer looking to collaborate, I should be posting to services/creative (despite the fact that I was looking for collaborators on a specific project, therefore am not offering myself up in general). The insistence was that I was miscategorized, and thus flagged. The notion of a troll was never acknowledged. After bringing this up, flag-help changed their tune, and at the end of the day settled on "well, some users just don't like no-pay gigs, tough".
tl;dr: Craigslist apologists have the incompatible dual beliefs that: flags are for the most part used as they are designed/intended (i.e. enforcing community guidelines)... and people will also flag whatever they want because they don't like it, even if it doesn't violate any community guidelines. This leads to the false belief that the CL flagging system is infallible, at the same time encouraging people to gloss over or construct elaborate stories to maintain the illusion that there doesn't exist an epidemic of false flagging.
The FLAG FOR REMOVAL is and has been abused for YEARS. The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been used to effectively block competition in the buyers market. They should simply have a ticker to how many flags a post has been given.
Posting has been built upon, but made very cumbersome. And shows that they employ mediocre critical thinking when developing the UX.
Sure, the site is amazing, its a gem of the valley and I use it daily when looking for work, stuff, places to live, and weekly/monthly otherwise. But to defend this is the same as Quora trying to convince the world they have incredible design, which they dont.
The fact that sites like padmapper can even exist proves that CL is broken in certain areas.
Everybody likes the site, but everyone is also constantly defending poor design as if its some sort of hipster notion that we just wouldn't understand.