It's free and easily accessible. Compare to the costs involved in getting an ad listed in a dead tree.

Yes, the site is awful. But it is less awful than the alternatives. Therefore, people use it. Please, on behalf of all apartment hunters everywhere, (but especially in high tech/high rent places like the Bay area or Boston), tell us what the better option is! I say this in all seriousness. The idea that PadMapper was saving vast amount of man hours was not an exaggeration. I wasted many hours clicking on craigslist ads to find my current apartment.

> Why are people using craigslist?

Because everyone else is.

The funny thing is -- PadMapper and 3Taps and the like are actually perpetuating the usefulness of Craigslist:

"everyone scrapes Craigslist, so if you just post it on Craigslist it will be pulled into all those other services automatically"

Ads migrated there because it was free, and a lot more agile than newspaper ads (wait a week for my ad to go live??). They stay because of network effects. And because it's good enough.

I feel like they snagged the community of online classifieds first and have been able to hold on pretty tightly, as people like my dad love that almost nothing has changed.