Marketplace Chris Coyier

I just recently bitched about Facebook Marketplace, but then found myself lightly pleased at Facebook for allowing me to remove it from the mobile app navigation entirely. At the time, I’ve never used it aside from clicking that navigation item once in a while to be shown a random smattering of junk I’d never buy.

But, of course, thinking about it at all lodged it in my brain.

Shortly afterward I found myself wanting to get rid of a few things. I had a PlayStation 4 I haven’t touched in over a year and it was just taking up cabinet space. What I really wanted to do was give it to some local kid who would get a massive kick out of it. So I figured I’d find one of those “local & free” groups on Facebook and post it there with my little caveat that I prefer it goes to a kid who would use it. I did that, but while I was posting to a Facebook “Group”, it suggested automatically posting it to Facebook Marketplace too, so I was like eh why not. Honestly, it worked great. I got lots of messages from actually local people. I picked the fastest response that met my parameters, and they came and got it and seemed glad to get it.

The UX for posting was very clean. It made communicating with people really easy. When it was all over, it was easy to mark as sold and bundle up all the related messages and whoosh them away.

The minimalism of Craigslist, while for a long time was something of a virtue, has finally lost. If it was just a gross UX mess, yet had a large and trustable user base, that would be one thing, but Craigslist is also full of spammers and scams making it a burden to deal with. I mean, it’s cool Craigslist is free, presumably doesn’t track the living bejesus out of you, and they don’t need my permission to exist, but for general practicality, it’s done for me.

I’m no big Facebook lover, mostly for many serious moral missteps, but it certainly gets the job done sometimes. Craigslist could be considered to have some moral issues too maintaining a platform absolutely mired in spammers and scammers.

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