I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and keeping the site working under the huge traffic it's handling. I don't remember seeing CL down or even slow - no cutesy "site is down" pages - which says to me they're improving the site constantly, just not in the way that gets the hypeosphere excited.
The fact that they haven't done the things you describe doesn't change the fact that craigslist is a terrible product. It is clogged with spam. Clever types of spam, often ones that crowdsource their content by mining previously legit posts. Since there are no reputation mechanisms to speak of, it's far too easy to waste your time with stuff that's either spam or a scam.
Meanwhile, data visualization has progressed dramatically in the last decade. Wading through apartment listings, for example, is miserable, and there are almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very basic information is communicated by people listing their properties. The big beef here isn't how craigslist looks β it's how it works. The fact your dog doesn't shit on your pillow doesn't excuse his taking a dump in your shoes every day.
Not sure if reputation mechanisms would work in a site where people often post just once, and that doesn't require creating a user account in order to post. That said, CL has a much higher volume of traffic and more pressing problems - and my experience is that ABB works great in smaller markets but is as almost bad as CL in a market like NYC. CL isn't perfect. But if most of the dogs hyped in the various dog blogs would be shitting on pillows on a regular basis, the ones that wouldn't would stand out.
That's a weird premise to me. If you post an apartment, you could just as easily also want to find a girlfriend or buy a used bike or avail yourself of any of craigslist's other categories. That's their big value, after all β everything under one roof.
