Ask HN: Since when does Craigslist's front page have emojis?
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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?
Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Prior to that, they had already introduced emojis to draw attention to their Craigslist charitable fund: that probably made this a much easier decision.
I think OP is reading into it too much , it seems like a minor embellishment and I never personally correlated emojis with LLMs.
Without seeing how it looked before I think this just gives a little bit more of clue about what each category is about. They are still being used sparsely.
The only thing where it irks me to find emojis is in cli apps. They use to not be the same character width as the monofont I use so they either look chopped or they displace their nearing text.
I would say it's actually exactly the kind of thing they would do - stick with plain text over things that load slower like images.
Emojis are great for that, they're plain unicode text!
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.
I think I personally see emojis used in this manner as unnecessary visual distraction, because it detracts from whatever self-consistent design system you had going on (when used for high visibility items like front page headings). Emojis don't even render the same on every platform, so its a move that dilutes your design language.
Even if it's a useful visual guide, I would wager nine times out of ten you'd be better off with a self-consistent icon set...depending on what you're going for, of course.