Dear Charlie,
I have always relied on Craigslist for everything. It used to be reliable for jobs and apartments but lately it has been one scam after the other. I can’t believe how many posts I have replied to have turned out to be scams! Craigslist was my #1 resource, but it doesn’t work anymore. I read your letter about the endless job hunt, which reminded me of how disappointing Craigslist has been for me personally too. I’m not sure what people will replace it with.
-Unlisted
Dear Unlisted,
Everything you say is true. Craigslist had a go for a while, but it has gone down the tubes because it is poorly organized. Reports of Craigslist disappointing people across the globe have even been featured on the news. It is now being identified (by me) as more of a Craplist. Sites like Facebook and Linkedin are excellent replacements for the Craigslist we used to know. There is no anonymity on those sites, as you can validate who is posting something. Linkedin is great for jobs and has the same concept of confirming & identifying contacts. In terms of universal search engines for your area, Globallistings.org is a good one. Blockwild.com is another decent new site trying to get started. Twitter has also taken off on several platforms. It’s annoying to have to keep up with the ever changing trends of online navigation, but that’s the high tech world we live in. The problem with Craigslist which has essentially warn it down over time, is that it anybody and everybody can post anonymously. This opens the door to endless possibilities as all the freaks, creeps, and perverts come out of the woodwork to take advantage. When you give this kind of freedom to site visitors, you allow anyone to be a user. Anyone can be whoever they want to be or claim to be. There’s no demand for validation. You may have found legitimate and intelligible posts suddenly vanished. Anyone can flag anything and have it removed. This includes competitors or people who are just out to sabotage for any personal reason. Eventually all the genuine and valid posts are weeded out or sabotaged, until we are left with the flakey, trashy, perverted, amateur, and con artists. This is how Craigslist became an Anarchy gone wild. We need a new “list” to take over and learn from Craig’s mistakes. When you don’t do a good job of filtering out garbage, new networking sites will dance on your grave.
