Messy simplicity in Craigslist

Good (longish) article from Wired on Craigslist: Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess.

It's enduringly strange to me that people want to "improve" Craigslist. Here's a news flash to everybody involved in the Web except for Craig Newmark: People basically want something simple that works without having to learn anything new.

We don't necessarily want something beautiful that works. We definitely don't want something complex that only works if you understand the mindset of the programmer who coded it, and if you're willing to put up with a couple of things that don't work very well. Here's the order we want things:

1. Works
2. Simple
3. Other stuff you might think is neat

Craigslist is notably unconcerned with anything past 2 on that list.

A quote from the article:

It is the same reason that craigslist has never done any of the things that would win approval among Web entrepreneurs, the same reason he has never updated its 1999-era Web design. The reason is that craigslist's users are not asking for such changes.

"I hear this all the time," Buckmaster says. "You guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen. Don't you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post—we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right."

I frequently get crap from people for my pseudo-Luddite ways -- as though I prefer to do things the hard way. That is the entire opposite of what I want. What I want is a thing that works like I expect it to work, and some built-in accountability in case it doesn't. And I want to maintain some control over the process, and be able to extract myself from it when I'm done. The number of "simplifiers" that actually complicate is so much larger than people want to believe.

I hear people bitch about how their iPhone doesn't work like they want it to. I never hear anyone complain about an iPhone they don't even have. That seems deeply simple to me. And maybe to Craig Newmark?

Update: See the related article in the same issue of Wired, The Good Enough Revolution.