Ask HN: Since when does Craigslist's front page have emojis?
Now, Craigslist, as a legacy of the 1990s web, has for a long time stubbornly maintained its minimalist style, to the point where several "modern" startups have popped up to try and offer Craigslist-like services to new generations.
So why this change? And what's with the timing? It's coinciding with the wanton proliferation of emojis everywhere courtesy of everyone's favorite GPT. At a time where people are beginning to feel emoji fatigue, Craigslist, of all places, has decided to put them front and center.
Has Craigslist succumbed to the modern algorithmic context of competing for attention? Is this a small concession so they can largely keep their legacy look while still participating in the zeitgeist?
When and with what intention was this emoji introduction initiated?
And most importantly, how do you feel about the entire thing?
26 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 56.1 ms ] threadI think OP is reading into it too much , it seems like a minor embellishment and I never personally correlated emojis with LLMs.
Good user experience isn't about dogmatically sticking to "text only", but about making a useful, understandable, navigable site.
Emojis seem to help section the dozens of links on the homepage without adding unnecessary visual distraction or page payload.
If you design an interface when some actions are only behind icons/emojis (no text, no hover title), expect users like me to click on them just to see what they do.
I feel about as strongly as I do about the font that Google use
I will never understand this visceral reaction that emojis provoke in some people
It's shocking that a 1 bedroom apartment now rents for $4-5k/month....
All five of the listings I found were scams.
That website is dead.
Are they? News to me. I like them. Do they show up in Lynx or whatever terminal-based browser the hip kids are using these day are using?
[...]
"When we renewed our FCC amateur radio license in May, 2025, we wondered what the consequences would be of publishing our physical address.
"Less than 90 days later, someone at that address died, suspiciously.
"We think it is not impossible that we were the target of an attempted murder; but, if so, they killed the wrong person.
"Please think about this as you view these dozens of images that were posted repeatedly on Craigslist over a span of several years, in articles that attacked us, specifically, by name."
ObURL: https://salanave-runyon.org/herbie.html#08jdl
1: How many people don’t delete Facebook because of it? When I left Facebook for good, losing access to Marketplace felt like a real sacrifice.
It was worse in a rural village here in Alaska, where everything was on Facebook, much to my dismay. But the upside of a small community is that I heard about things anyway via word-of-mouth.
Language has shifted. It’s ridiculous to try to pretend it’s upsetting it even novel at this point.
What’s really odd is places that specifically don’t support emojis nowadays.