I feel like there's a fundamental difference between CL and Reddit: the sense of community. CL is community-based in the sense that it allows users to broadcast via posts and receive private e-mail replies.<p>(There are forum areas, but I haven't gotten involved with those. I assume they're not as popular as Reddit, but feel free to correct this assumption. Regardless, they're a contained area of the site, rather than embedded in the underlying structure.)<p>Reddit, on the other hand, is a huge community of users <i>openly engaged with each other</i>. This is a fundamentally different dynamic, one which I believe cannot easily be separated into individually-operated platforms.
Actually HN itself is experiencing some 'unbundling', I believe. Boot-strappers, for example, have long been carving out their own communities away from HN. I can only imagine this is also true for valley startups..<p>There's no way HN is still the center of this world for long. Its where you invited all your friends and co-workers to, and now its a mess. Now you have to move upmarket to find better information, and getting into those other communities is harder. They don't just let anyone in. They watched what happened to HN and they're scared of killing quality.<p>If you want into those communities, you better have created something, and you better be willing to contribute in a positive way. They won't tolerate many Jeremiahs.
I like what you're getting at, but I'm not sure you're correct. Yes, Reddit is being unbundled, but not necessarily for replacement of its verticals. They may be indirectly inspiring the startups you mention but will not be replaced.<p>For instance, Quora is not /r/AskReddit. AskReddit is much more casual, full of opinion and silly questions, whereas Quora is a lot more serious and formal and values quality and factuality much more than AskReddit does.<p>As for why CL and Reddit don't move with the times<p>"Why is this the case? I don’t know. But, my guess is that this leaves both Craigslist and reddit more vulnerable to unbundling effect, and this is a good sign for startups building within their verticals."<p>Simply, they haven't needed to yet. The threats haven't been obviously very strong, and they continue to have a lot of users and make strides (especially Reddit) in popularity, despite the apparent drawbacks.<p>Reddit's UX isn't actually that terrible, it's just a bit ugly-looking. It works quite well, in general, and isn't completely unintuitive.
The difference with reddit (and the real genius of the initial vision) is that any user can create a subreddit. Compare this to craigslist where the admins defined the 50 or so static categories at the outset. Reddit, on the other hand, has interesting (and not so interesting) subreddits pop up every day.<p>Some of my favorites of the last year or two are <a href="http://reddit.com/r/ExplainLikeIAmA" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/ExplainLikeIAmA</a>, <a href="http://reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting</a>, <a href="http://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful</a>,
<a href="http://reddit.com/r/futurology" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/futurology</a>,
<a href="http://reddit.com/r/outside" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/outside</a>, and
<a href="http://reddit.com/r/hwstartups" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/hwstartups</a>. To name just a few. There is basically no way the reddit founders could have envisioned any of those categories, but thankfully, they had the foresight to create a generic, make-your-own-category platform.<p>The community of reddit certainly has shifted quite a bit, but this ability to evolve organically will keep it from unraveling in the same way as Craigslist has. I think it's a bad comparison anyway.
The idea that CL is 'vulnerable' to unbundling is kinda funny, given that almost none of the hundreds of vertical startups have proven to be more successful than the original (can't actually think of any).<p>CL provides the easiest, most frictionless way to engage in a local transaction with another individual or entity. The other verticals may be slicker, more targeted, and backed my big corporate $$, but they haven't attracted the mindshare or
provided the utility to the average person that CL does.
I've never really been much of a Reddit fan so I rarely visit, but I've always liked reading the classified ads in my local newspaper, and Craigslist is infinitely better than my local daily newspaper, plus the ads are free.<p>As for ugly sites, you can use your own CSS to theme sites to your liking, so ugliness is pretty much a non-issue for me.<p>There may be validity in the "unbundling" notion, but I still seem to use my preferred sites after giving the new sites a spin for a short time.
You can understand people chasing craiglist verticals because users pay to list stuff.<p>Whereas its harder to see how reddit can monetise on any scale, let alone how there can be money in individual verticals.
I disagree with the foundations of the argument (Etsy and AirBnB aren't attacking craiglist) but I agree with the conclusions: if all you have is a massive reputation and a massive user base (which I think is pretty much true of Reddit/Craigslist; obviously there are technical innovations there but the marketing/product innovations that they pioneered are now very mainstream) then you're sitting on a tenuous position.
>my guess is that this leaves both Craigslist and reddit more vulnerable to unbundling effect, and this is a good sign for startups building within their verticals.<p>What the author is trying to say is as subreddits become more popular, exclusive website will be created in their image. He gives success stories like 9gag & hacker news. So it comes as no surprise that the author has his own website which he claims is a result of a subreddit (which one I have no clue). Basically this guy is drinking his own koolaid. The problem with this argument is it is not clear if reddit came before 9gag or hacker news. Surely hacker news & 9gag are successful despite what is on reddit, not because the idea may have spawned from a subreddit.
Craigslist & Reddit are WORKSAFE. Yes, really.<p>Most internet use is during business hours. Craigslist & Reddit look, from ~10 feet away (by passing coworkers) to look closer to "work", as it's text-based, with very few graphics. It doesn't look like the Huffington Post, ESPN, Netflix, or Facebook.<p>So, coworkers or bosses passing by either don't register it as "goofing off", or, if they do recognize it, they are "in the club" & not going to call you on it.<p>And, by having a minimalist UI (compact, informational), they know they MUST focus on content to succeed. This makes content king, like it should be, for user-generated content sites like this.
Reddit has a more defensible position than Craigslist in relation to verticals because of its karma system. Karma carries over from sub-reddit to sub-reddit and people obsess over it. In my opinion, this is the 'drug' that keeps people around.<p>Craigslist on the other hand has no karma. A good seller or good buyer is completely anonymous. People will post to Craigslist if they can sell just as easily they'll post to another site if they can sell there. Reddit is not the same. A redditor will more readily post to reddit because of the sweet, sweet karma.
The last criticism, that CL and reddit are slow to change, I don't think is particularly valid.<p>Digg, which was the first post-Slashdot favorite, positively churned compared to reddit. People like reddit and CL because they don't change. These forums have been popular since the 1980s BBSs. They don't change it because it works.
The graphic identifying "startups" that compete with Craigslist has some companies that are 12+ years old, not much younger than Google (the company that is, which was formed in 1998)
I think he has a good point but I don't totally agree. I created <a href="http://audiour.com" rel="nofollow">http://audiour.com</a> which could be seen as facilitator of /r/Music (or other similar subreddits), but there is no sense of 'community' like there is on /r/Music.