Facebook Marketplace: How a single button and textbox ruins the service
6 pointsby robomartin3 days ago7 comments
  • jotux3 days ago
    I just add something like this to every listing:

        If this listing is up, the item is still available. I will ignore all "Is this still available?" messages. Send your offer or time you would like to pick-up in the message.
    And then I ignore all those other messages.
  • pestaa3 days ago
    There are a million ways to improve this pile of garbage called Facebook marketplace.

    But make no mistake, they don't care about your experience in the slightest.

    The textbox and the button were always there to drive user engagement. Number go up!

    • robomartin3 days ago
      Yet, that isn't engagement at all.

      Here's a likely bad parallel (well, maybe not so).

      The "safety" on a Glock pistol is a little lever on the trigger itself. You squeeze and it unlocks, squeeze some more and it fires. In other words, it has no safety. A five year old can accidentally fire a Glock. On a normal firearm it's a little lever on the side that you have to rotate. Without that, the trigger does nothing.

      This idea that users are "engaging" on FBM is just as fake as Glock saying they have a safety.

      Weird parallel, I know. It's what came to mind because that's one of my all-time favorite stupid designs to point out.

      • pestaa3 days ago
        But it is engagement to their product managers, and in turn, stakeholders.

        Not genuine engagement, mind you, but measurable nonetheless.

  • muzani3 days ago
    I'm not American, but curious how many people use FB marketplace there? It's a joke here, people still prefer to use the local equivalent of Craigslist. There's plenty of other startups that are more useful. Our housing WhatsApp has a marketplace channel too which works very well; often it's just easier to buy something from someone right behind the house.
    • auxym2 days ago
      I'm in eastern Canada, and unfortunately, FBM has completely overtaken the previous leader for online classifieds, which was kijiji (owned by ebay). So if you want to to buy/sell used goods, FBM is pretty much your only option around here.
  • achempion2 days ago
    I think they wanted to solve a different problem with this, to make sellers delete the ad after the item is sold.
  • zlagen3 days ago
    in Argentina some people call facebook marketplace the "deep web", not sure if it has that reputation in other countries. Lots of stolen things being sold and also scams
  • nextn3 days ago
    I want to see a marketplace that makes it non-free to send a message to the seller and non-free to ghost a buyer.
  • auxym2 days ago
    The other infuriating thing is that the search filters appear to be deliberately non-functional and interpreted as mere suggestions. Distance, price and listing date, for example. Try filtering for new listings in the past week and you will get plenty of old stuff.