Everyone remembers Craigslist. Almost nobody actually uses it anymore.
Facebook Marketplace ate the casual sellers. Zillow and StreetEasy ate the apartment hunters. Most people's relationship with Craigslist these days is a vague memory of "missed connections" posts and a mild suspicion it's still around somewhere, unchanged, like a payphone nobody's removed.
It is still around. And for New York specifically, it's still genuinely useful — arguably more useful than the algorithm-driven alternatives that replaced it in most people's habits.
The whole site is still just a plain list of links. No engagement bait, no sponsored posts pushed above what you're actually looking for, no feed quietly deciding what you should see based on what keeps you scrolling. You search, you get results, chronologically or by relevance, and that's it.
For NYC apartments specifically, it remains one of the last places landlords and brokers post no-fee listings directly, without the platform fees StreetEasy and Zillow tack onto both sides. Furniture and household goods move fast and cheap — people leaving the city dump entire apartments' worth of stuff for next to nothing, especially at the end of each month's lease cycle. The gigs section still has real freelance and day-labor work that never made it to LinkedIn or Indeed.
It's not polished. It's not personalized. It occasionally still looks like it was built in 2003, because large parts of it were. But that's precisely why it still works — there's no algorithm standing between you and what's actually posted.
If you wrote it off years ago, it might be worth one more look.