People who know me know that I love a good deal, whether it is $1000 dollar office chairs I found on the street, or surprisingly well made Chinese fountain pens. Thrifting is in my blood, and there are few resources for deals quite as robust as Facebook Marketplace. It is also one of the single worst shopping experiences ever devised by god or man. There is no incentive for Meta to fix it, and at this point it should either be destroyed or heavily regulated by the government, because it has taken the ambient flow of good deals and funneled them into an evil, impossible to navigate labyrinth.
Before I got into Marketplace, my Facebook account had been largely dormant for the better part of a decade. As a platform, Facebook has deteriorated so aggressively that it has become supremely irritating to use. Everyone under the age of 40 moved over to Instagram. Though the endless fountain of AI slop grabs the most headlines, the bigger issue is that you are constantly forced to interact with feeds you do not subscribe to. In addition to the feeds of your grandma and a guy from high school you don’t talk to anymore because he moved to New Hampshire to become more racist, you now have a random assortment of strangers, niche fan groups, influencers, and an endless stream of content that even TikTok would not touch. While this deterioration – a forced intrusion into your digital life by strangers and grifters to juice interaction – is not unique to Facebook, Facebook manages to take all of the worst algorithmic choices from other platforms and somehow deliver them to you with none of their benefits.
That Facebook can have any redeeming qualities given its precipitous slide is a testament to how good Facebook Marketplace can potentially be. What makes this possible is that the best deals are often from people who are either clueless or apathetic about what their belongings are worth. This usually takes the form of bored rich people, who are either too lazy or old to use Google. What makes Facebook Marketplace an engine for finding those people is that those are the exact demographic who still actively use Facebook. Putting a big button on it that says “sell that stuff you’ve been meaning to donate to Goodwill” is an incredible engine of commerce, because nobody involved in the process has to register a new account.
Unfortunately it is a Meta product, and as a result the process of using it is like an ironically designed torture in hell. I loathe it deeply for the following reasons.
I do not want to buy a couch in Salem.
The process of using Facebook Marketplace is a lot like Craigslist if Craigslist lied to you constantly. If you ask Facebook Marketplace for results for “Milo Baughman couch” within a 20 mile radius of your house, you will get whatever results match that, plus several other listings hundreds of miles away, plus a bunch of stuff you were searching before that are unrelated to what you are currently searching for. This is not unique to Facebook, but it is the core of the experience that Facebook helped usher in. The modern internet abhors a void, and so any product designed by an evil tech startup will never say “sorry, we don’t have any of those.” Instead it will provide an endless stream of OK results mixed with slightly imprecise suggestions algorithmically tailored to your online profile.
You can technically narrow this down by distance, price or date listed, but the second you do any other search, it will reset these suggestions. Mercifully, you can save searches with filters, but this feature is nowhere near as intuitive or exact as Craigslist’s.
Most infuriating of all, it will almost always ignore any distance parameters you give it, insisting that all of its out-of-the-way listings are “worth the trip”! Really, Facebook? Is it “worth the trip” to drive to Philly to pick up an OKish bookcase I would need to refinish? No other app like this (like Craigslist, Mercari and Offerup) manages to so aggressively fight and attempt to bamboozle the user every step of the way, and I hope that one day government regulators decide that this behavior is illegal, because it feels like the shit that would cause you to get a class action check in the mail for 25 cents eight years from now.
You have to go on Facebook to use it.
When and if government regulators finally break up Google, I need them to come for Facebook Marketplace next. This is because Facebook Marketplace itself requires that you interact with the Facebook app or website in order to use it. Unlike Messenger, there is no dedicated app that lets you ignore every other part of the site. And while there are some shockingly useful Facebook groups, having to go through the worst skinner box on the internet to get to the deals feels like going into a particularly dead mall because there’s one solid thrift store sandwiched between the shell of a Suncoast Video and a TJ Maxx that looks like it just survived a flood. There are many unpleasant ways to buy things from the internet, but nothing crawls in your gut and dies like logging into Facebook. This is also exacerbated by the fact that contacting strangers for deals is not just done in Facebook Messenger, but in an easy to miss sub-tab of Facebook Messenger, thus confusing any person you would theoretically wish to contact. Even though Meta owns Instagram and WhatsApp, it boggles my mind that such a clearly broken site as Facebook still has perceived value and is allowed to operate the way it is.
It makes me realize how much I miss what Craigslist and junk stores used to be.
In an ideal world, none of us would have ever left Craigslist, but unfortunately Craigslist as an ecosystem can be a mixed bag. This is a shame, because the actual experience of using Craigslist rocks – it doesn’t lie to you (although the people do) and it treats you like an adult, allowing you to have precise control over what you are searching for. There are still deals to be had, but a lot of the time if you are on Craigslist you probably know what your stuff is worth. The golden years of Craigslist feel distant. Perhaps some of this is the convenience of not just Facebook Marketplace, but also competing marketplaces like Mercari and Offerup. Part of it feels like they never got over the loss of the personals section following the passing of FOSTA-SESTA, an ineffective bill package that did nothing except make the lives of sex workers actively more dangerous.
Facebook Marketplace’s dominance is made worse by the fact that many of the good thrift and junk stores I used to go to are long dead. There are a few holdouts I still frequent and love, particularly far away from the city center, but the ones that remain are often overpriced and over-curated. A good junk store should look like a hoarder’s house that just so happens to have a cash register set up. It should smell like water damage and black mold. These kinds of junk and vintage stores are too low margin to exist in any place with high commercial rent. What’s more, the topography of most cities has been thoroughly mapped – everywhere is a known quantity ruined by overexposure. This is not Facebook Marketplace’s fault. But every single time I log into it, I am reminded of the joy of digging through crates and getting low level lung damage to find a jewel. Maybe one day, if the real estate market collapses violently enough, we will return to those days.
None of this is a recommendation for Facebook Marketplace. This is an unfortunate statement of where we are at. You can buy some incredible stuff on that site (I do regularly) but every single time you do, it will take a little part of you. To be on Facebook Marketplace is to experience that feeling of trying to run through mud that permeates every single engagement-optimized platform, that lack of precision that feels like your mind is slipping. Maybe Marketplace should be reformed, but honestly it’s probably best if it continues to spiral due to neglect until the entire thing becomes so precarious that nobody logs on any more.
I pray that one day we will all be forced to return to Craigslist. But until then, there’s a guy near me with a pretty good looking vintage bookshelf and I hope he remembers to check his inconveniently-placed Marketplace inbox.
