Craigslist is a mess. It’s chock full of scams, porn and trolls. To try to browse it efficiently is to be frustrated. It drives designers crazy because of its homely looks. It drives developers crazy with its deliberate lack of open APIs. “If they would just…” But they wont, and that drives designers and developers nuts.
Designers strive to create systems that are beautiful in their entirety. Developers strive to create systems that are beautiful in their organization. Both those things are great. But neither of those things is the point. Real community will trump design and technology every time. That’s because designers and developers are both just building systems; if they aren’t building those systems for people, the people won’t care. No matter how beautiful, no matter how cutting edge, people will only care about a system to the extent that it gets out of their way and helps them be human.
This is the Craigslist secret:
Last year Newmark got about 195,000 email messages. He estimates that roughly 60 percent were spam. He read all the rest and replied to many.
Customer service is public service
This is why Craigslist works: it’s a community. It’s a place for people. That doesn’t happen on it’s own. Craig is the catalyst.
Want to know how little technology matters in the face of community? Craigslist started life as a simple mailing list run out of a guy’s house. The site had no way of searching listings or even editing them. Did that stop it?
Next time you’re building a system, ask yourself “at the end of the day, am I building this system to help people?”. If you aren’t, you may want to re-think things.