C'mon, Craig! Charge a dollar!

/rant mode: on

Craig has lost his way. It was neat at first, a free "virtual wall" on which to post classified ads.

But now, like anything else available for free, the scum of the earth is taking advantage of poor Craig.

Tonight's example... I did a broad search for "Scion". That's it, no categories.

Each page of ads has 100 listings. I kid you not, on the first page 28 of them were ads for the same car, by the same dealer.

There are supposed to be protections in place to limit the number of postings by a single entity in a single day. Obviously, these protections must be fairly easy to circumvent if the average, knuckle-dragging car salesman can get around them.

So c'mon, Craig - just charge a buck an ad! Please! I'm begging you, clean up the list that bears your name!

/rant mode: off

Agreed 100%

Would subscribe to your newsletter.

Hell, even a dime would prevent most of the abuse you see.

I have been posting a few rifles locally on a outdoor classifieds type forum and have to pay a dollar an ad. I have absolutely no problem doing it.

As I've said before, I really feel that Craig is looking to reduce craigslist back down to something he can micromanage. He used to approve EVERY post. Now, he simply doesn't have the time to do that. I think this is his way of regaining control of his assets, by letting them become practically useless. Once no one uses craigslist outside of the core group in the SF Bay area, then he's back to something he has full control over again.

No conspiracy theories or anything at all. I just feel that Craig Newmark has realized that his creation has become something he never thought it would, ant it scares him.

All I wish is that craiglook would come back, or craigslist would move out of 1995.

Nice username, BTW.

Craigslist actively closes the exploits that most searches use to shut them down. I can understand that if a site is making money from hosting that search engine that you'd want it closed, but many of them are guys like us that know how to throw the code together to make it work. Most just want a better user experience, so they are creating it themselves. Craigslist wants everything to remain communal in the sense that people from one area likely don't want to drive to another area for an item, and it does build community interaction. The downfall is that there are many small cities that are within range of several craigslist cities. For instance, I'm within reasonable driving distance of 6 CL cities.

My city of about 30,000 people doesn't have their own CL. When I search for stuff, at least the way Craig wants it done, I have to manually search every city. It's a pain for me, and it's a pain for most users of the site.

Ultimately, someone needs to come up with competition for the site. Kijiji never caught on in the United States, and I don't see that changing.

If I had the skills, I would create the next craigslist. It will have several years of active use, Weird Al will make a song about it, and it will die. At least we'd have something useful for now.

If you are right about the community thing, it demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of what community is and how various locations and cultures influence it.

You can't define "community" by a specific (narrow) geographic radius.

Where I live, it is a normal and routine occurrence to travel 150-200 miles as a regular part of life. That takes 3-3.5 hours. People do it all the time to connect with family, friends, shopping, attractions, etc. Monthly is common.

Where Craig Newmark lives, 3 hours is just a simple traffic jam that doesn't get you out of the city limits.

3.5 hours from my house covers 17 different Craigslist locations. Ridiculous.

Apparently, in Craig Newmark's world, traveling 150 miles is not "community". He has no understanding of the people, the culture, or the community of where I live. His ethnocentricity and judgementalism drives his business.

He's a control freak, and I do without him as best as I can.

The multiple CL search tools have been a real blessing for as long as they lasted.

CL is still fairly useful here in Upstate SC, I've bought a few cars off of it in the past couple of years. And I search it at least once a week. I like that they've now got the option to search dealer OR private party ads (or both). But there are abuses- like all the stupid "I'm a single mom, please give me a car!" ads in the "cars for sale" section. And don't get me started on the bastardization of the English language that pervades the CL community. Overall, though, I'm glad it exists and hope they can maintain it. I'd be for them charging a buck an ad myself, too, it would REALLY help weed out the crap. Maybe if we sign a petition? Heh, wouldn't that be weird...a bunch of people signing a petition ASKING to be charged money!

I wouldn't post if it costs a penny. Flag them.

I certainly have my (major) issues with Craigslist, though the 1995 formatting isn't one of them. It's simple, fast, readable, and it works. Mainly this shutting down of the Crazedlists and Searchtempests of the world. I also live in the intersection of between 4 and 8 CLs, depending on how far you want to drive. What they've done is really counterproductive and makes me wish there was an alternative.

I'd also love to see them charge something to prevent all the spamming and overposting that goes on. I'm an active post-flagger. I love it when, as recent on the Detroit CL, my "Porsche" search keeps turning up the same Honda Passport because the idiot who posted it put every carmaker's name under the sun in his post to get more hits. And the overposting dealership ads are the worst.

As far as them charging something, I'd glady pay it to reduce the signal-noise ratio, but I don't see it happening. It goes against Craig's philosophy, and more importantly, it would be a huge effort to implement, I have to imagine.

A CL alternative would be great, but with CL as entrenched as it is, the new thing would have to offer something unique and special in order to unseat them, and I'm not sure what that would be.

The CL concept is great, but like many "free" things has been horribly abused.

Some of the tricks I've used to weed out the crap on CL:

Always have a minimum dollar amount, even if it is just one dollar.

If you are looking for a manual transmission, use the keyword speed and -auto -automatic. If you use the keyword manual, you will get cars that include the owner's manual. Be sure to select the entire ad and not just the title for your search.

Use the has images checkbox, and don't bother with ads that don't have them. Most of the real sellers will have a pic. Use the show images feature to see the thumbnail image. Spam ads will have the same images, making them easy to spot and skip.

Use alternate words, if you are looking for a truck, also search for pickup or bed in the cars and trucks section. I will also regularly search using words like coupe, classic, turbo, just to see what pops up.

In reply to EastCoastMojo:

Good tips. In addition, you can use the pipe symbol (|) to search for more than one thing, which is useful when looking for common misspellings and abbreviations. I've been looking for a convertible Mustang lately, so my search has been "mustang convertible|convertable|vert|conv". I found my E30 by searching "bmw e30|325|325e|325i|325is"

There's always Autotrader and eBay, of course, but those are so dealer-infested they are almost useless anymore.

I love craigslist, but completely agree with the first post. Spam is ruining the experience. Now instead of searching through local deals, I'm trying to search in a way that filters spammers, flagging posts, being scammed, etc.

Morons are the second biggest problem with CL, but easy to ignore.

So yes, charge a buck an ad. You'll make a fortune. If you aren't comfortable accepting the money, just donate it all to some charity.

I've been looking at seafood lately, so many people will only put the year and a price, no picture, no model, but they want 6 grand and the price is firm, dammit.

Six grand for seafood? Thems damn good eats.

It seems crazy to me that they want to shut down Searchtempest, etc. when the real problem (to me) are the scammers and the overposting dealers.

Right now on the Seattle Craiglist the same dealer's M3 is posted 13 times with 9 of those posts on the same day. Why should I have to wade through that crap to find a legitimate car that was posted once?

I don't have the time to flag all this crap and probably no one else does either since this same thing happens in every search. Your 40 results are 10 legit ads and the other 30 are the same 3 cars posted 10x.

Why not just have user accounts with a max-post per month? Each user account requires either a different phone number or a different email.

That way a dealer would either need multiple email accounts (really inefficient) or multiple phone numbers in order to spam, again, really difficult.

It seems like there are enough people who are good with web stuff/code/etc. to create a new list and make it right. Has anyone started one? It would obviously take a long time to grow to the size of CL, but I'm no expert.

I'm glad to see that the human brain doesn't go to waste...

In related news our county is making a big deal out of the fact that a telemarketing company will be creating 1200 jobs. Great. The city once known for one of the world largest paper manufactures and one of the few GE Appliance factories is now excited to be know for its annoying phone calls.

I can only hope they call me. I'm on a couple firms "don't berkeley with" list.

Datsun1500 wrote: Crazedlist, Searchtempest, and the rest are getting shut down because they are making money on something they did not create. If You built a business and someone else came along and built a business that was piggybacking on your work, wouldn't you have an issue with it? It's not a matter of being a control freak, it is a matter of protecting your brand.

Crazedlist didn't make any money, it was one dude that had an idea and thought other people could make use of it - he was right. It was great. He didn't have any ads, and no revenue stream. How would he be making money off Craigslist?

Yeah, crazedlist cost the guy money for hosting and domain registration.

EastCoastMojo wrote: Six grand for seafood? Thems damn good eats.

Sea doo, friggin autocorrect.