- there aren't great ways for people to offer multiple items apart from making one listing with all the stuff (And having to update all the time)
- You have to do the whole "negotiate payment mechansim and shipping" thing every time. They could easily provide a sort of flow for when an agreement has happened
- On the buyer side you gotta basically just go in and delete your listing when it's done
There's an alternate universe in craigslist where you could somehow signal "I have a potential buyer" to put the thing in hold, and a single-button finalisation step when its done. Similarly, sellers could be able to register certain info to just plop it into a message.
I understand that the existing UX (mainly e-mail forwarding) makes this hard. But... well maybe they can change their UX
These are valid issues but I think they aren't a big deal. Every other platform I've seen that tries to be "smart" and offer these features ends up overdoing it and making it way too complicated & time consuming to post an ad for the first time.
CL in contrast is easy & understandable. You post an ad, post a price, and done. No "profile" or "account" to manage, etc.
In every dropdown menu you've ever used, the currently selected item pops up in the center of the control. The other items are arranged above and below the currently selected item.
Craigslist's view selector instead lays out the items below the control. "List" is always placed within the control, despite not being active. To select "List" you need to click what should be the currently selected item.
This is subjective, and also wrong. It's wrong because I use dropdowns all the time that always extend the entire list downward. I just double checked gmail and feedly for my own sanity. It's subjective because there is an advantage to static positioning: it allows the mind to develop a map of where each item is in non-relativistic terms, so selecting a given value is always the same two clicks.
Feedly and Gmail drop the entire menu down below the control. You're right, those kind of custom menus work fine. Note that the currently selected item is still always shown within the custom control.
Craigslist positions the first item of the static list within the control, forcing you to awkwardly select the control itself to select the first item. I have to think about it literally every time I use that drop down.
The Craigslist UX is FAR superior than almost any other mobile UX.
I use craigslist literally every day, and I praise its mobile design. If I could disagree with you on your assessment any more strongly, I would.
The Web 1.0 look is fine.
But if you use CL a lot you'll know how bad the UX is, especially on mobile, especially compared to mobile-first camera-focused apps.
I can think of 5-10 incredibly annoying non-standard Craigslist UX elements off the top of my head.