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by lbrdn
6112 days ago
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brk, thanks for the response. What do you mean by "a good indicator ... to fraud and such?" Are you implying that fraud should be accepted as just something inherent in society and shouldn't be something we try and prevent? Also, I would contend that the facebook marketplace has less fraud than the craigslist marketplace, thus giving craigslist something they could shoot for. Also, I'd like to refine "better" to "safer". General feel and aesthetics are subjective where as safety is objective. Craigslist leaves millions, if not billions, of dollars on the table every year, it would only take the inclusion of one or two more markets in their pay-to-post-real-estate stream in order to hire some really smart developers to come up with smart and subtle fraud prevention mechanisms. It's possible for them to raise some dough for this issue without harming the culture, so why shouldn't they? |
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Craigslist is easy to use and the primarily text-driven approach means it is accessible to even users on dial-up connections (and although you might think this rare, I still know people in the US who have no viable high-speed Internet options and are using dial-up).
Fraud is, IMO, inherent in society. Manipulative and creative people have been taking advantage of trusting or less educated people since man first implemented a monetary instrument.
I think part of the make-a-better-Craigslist camp is similar to some of the confusion around the mint.com sale... Not everybody has the same motivations... I don't think Craigslist wants to be the best/safest/most-diverse online classifieds system. I think they want to be the easiest, simplest, I-can-go-home-at-night-and-not-be-bothered online classifieds system. There are many things they could do to be "better", but I don't believe the cost and complexity is worth the impact on the lives of the employees and the business overall.
There is a market opportunity for an improved Craigslist, but it's a little bit of an end-of-the-rainbow pursuit.