4 ms·

The Short-Sighted Campaign against Craigslist

19 points by slapshot 16y ago

slapshot 16y ago
For the record, I disagree with some parts of the analysis. In this case, Craigslist was more than a common carrier: it created a special section just for adult advertisements and charged money only for those advertisements. You could post a couch for sale for free, but you had to pay Craigslist if you wanted to post in the "Adult Services" section. The decision to charge for ads for that category intertwined Craigslist into profiting directly and intentionally from those ads.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  Craigslist started to charge for the adult ads as result of the previous settlement with AGs. Learn the facts.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Was the additional sentence "Learn the facts" really necessary?
petervandijck 16y ago
It's a witch hunt, simple.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  Witch hunt is just a beneficial side effect. It is a struggle for power and money - the AGs are pushing prostitution back onto the streets and into traditional brick&mortar "establishments" where it is under full control of local police.
- hugh3 16y ago
  I'm always bothered by the term "witch hunt". It doesn't seem like a great metaphor. If witches existed, hunting them would be rational and sensible (let us assume, for the moment, all witches are evil). It's only if witches don't exist that witch hunting is silly, so by calling it a witch hunt you're implying that the things of which craigslist is accused are analogous to witchcraft and don't really exist? Except they really do exist, so I'm really not sure what the point of the metaphor is.
  - VladRussian 16y ago
    from Webster "witch hunt" 1 : a searching out for persecution of persons accused of witchcraft 2 : the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (as political opponents) with unpopular views Obviously this case has nothing to do with witches. In general, it is about using people's strong fear of something (is this something real or unreal - it doesn't matter, the fear itself is what only matters), like witchcraft or the threat of Finnish and Mexican immigrants taking away kernel hacking jobs, to energize and direct the crowd against one's enemies and advance the one's leadership position over the crowd.
  - sophacles 16y ago
    You are assuming that it is a term that can be understood strictly from first principles. With an idiom, such an assumption is silly, as idioms come to their meaning based on a series of historical events, accidental mis-uses, literary uses (and therefore references) and certain assumed shared views. So to understand why witch hunt actually makes sense as a term, you must first look at the real witch hunts that happened. These happened at a time and place where witchcraft was "known" to be real. Of course there weren't witches, but everyone then thought there were, so effectively hunting for witches was a valid thing to do. At the time, they also didn't know lots of other things, so if a person falls sick, or a cow dies, or a house burns down, scientific evidence based explanations were not so easy to come by. However witches were "known" to curse people, and a curse causes misfortune. So what would happen is a random person would decide to pay back a grudge, or look good to his fellow citizens or whatever, and accuse some 3rd party of witchcraft, for something like giving the evil eye, or dancing, or whatever. This would lead to a burning, and everyone would be happy again. Most of the time anyway. Sometimes, a series of unfortunate events would be construed as a major witch, or a whole coven of witches. Then everyone would go crazy, true beleivers would be terrified, ambitious social climbers would be accusing all their enemies of witchcraft, and so on. There would be attempts by authorities to get to the bottom of it, and many witches would be found. Mass burnings ensued, and eventually everyone would calm down and be happy again. So, looking back, this whole course of events is ridiculous, the root assumption of witchcraft is just plain silly. The mass panic/hysteria over it downright dangerous, and those taking advantage of the situation were repugnant. So, now, looking at the above situations, and refactoring a bit, so we can get a more generic algorithm, we see these key components: 1. A label that classifies someone as bad 2. A deep underlying fear of what the bad label stands for, but the fear must be non-specific. 3. A set of actions and vaguely sort-of correlated events (if you squint just right), that looks like: "bad things from #2 are happening to us!". 4. A set of people willing to manipulate the many for their own gain. If those conditions are met, you have a prime candidate for a "witch hunt" (keeping the name because it describes the original stuff well, and everyone knows what happened in those cases). Just start sending authorities after anyone labeled as the bad thing. There are of course some variations, and deeper nuances, but that is the gist of it.
tomjen3 16y ago
What is shortsighted about this is anybody who believes this has anything to do with sex. Thats about as ridiculous as to think the war on terror has anything to do with terror or that any politician really cares about the mosque in Manhattan. You are being played.
- hugh3 16y ago
  And you're playing the "anyone who disagrees with my excessive cynicism is naive" card. I'll skip the seriously-trolly war-on-terror thing, and go straight to the other one... really? No politician really cares about the Ground Zero Mosque? Millions of non-politicians care about it, but the political class is all too sophisticated and is only pretending to care? I think you overestimate the sophistication of the political class. (Not wanting to discuss the mosque itself, merely the question of whether any politician really cares about it.)
smallblacksun 16y ago
The argument boils down to "we should let them break the law because then all the criminals are in one place". Which is absurd. Craigslist was profiting from prostitution, which is both illegal and morally repugnant.
- chopsueyar 16y ago
  Legality depends on your location. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Nevada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Nevada Here is some moral ambiguity... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_surrogate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_surrogate
  - smallblacksun 16y ago
    You're right, I should have mentioned Nevada as an exception to the legality. The "sex surrogate" stuff is pseudo-scientific nonsense, and has no relation to what was being offered on craigslist anyway.
- psadauskas 16y ago
  How are they profiting? Don't they host those ads for free? Also, newspapers were hosting identical ads 10 years ago, and were charging for it. Isn't that worse? Edit: After checking, they did charge for adult ads, after pressure. But my 2nd point still stands, how is it different from newspapers?
- gigafemtonano 16y ago
  Craigslist donated all the revenue from erotic services to charity and used the fees for adult services to pay for lawyers to screen each and every posting. It was on NPR in the bay area shortly before the adult services section was shut down. Craigslist has said it had donated all revenues from its "erotic services" listings to charity. When it switched to its "adult services" listings last year it said it would make no commitment to how those revenues would be used. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6831MB20100904 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6831MB20100904
chopsueyar 16y ago
Only in America. Nevada's listings are gone, too. Amsterdam still has the listings, though. Didn't check any other European cities, though.
kgermino 16y ago
Serious Question: Why does prostitution need to be illegal? In the U.S. it is *legal* to: Have random, unprotected sex with anyone you want Have sex with someone only if they take you out to dinner or give you a nice gift, as long as it's not a direct cash payment Pay someone to have sex as long as its videotaped and records are kept (pornography) Etc. But it is illegal for one consenting adult to pay another consenting adult directly for sex? Why is this illegal? Especially since as the "services" get more expensive there is less and less actual sex happening. Multiple studies have shown that prostitution is less about the sex than about the john paying to have a responsibility and stress free relationship. I may be missing something and be completely wrong but thats my $.02.
- pstuart 16y ago
  It makes complete sense to be legal (and even taxed and regulated). Religious fundies will never let it happen.
- bbuffone 16y ago
  One reason for making it illegal - it's one of those things that no one wants in their town. No one wants coal burning power plants in their town but that is easily to regulate. In today's internet area having the transaction be online and the transgression to take place in private would be fine. The question i how do you ensure that.
  - kgermino 16y ago
    One option is to regulate it. You could make it illegal to pick up someone on the street and regulate it so that most if not all meetups would occur either online or by someone calling a number they found in a phone book. I would think that it could be set up so that finding a prostitute goes similarly to finding a contractor, or anyone else in the home service industry. Other than hiring someone from the parking lot of Home Depot you don't generally see contractors soliciting. Additionally advertising could be regulated so that you don't see it happening unless you look for it. That won't appease the religious extremists but it will help prevent parents from having to deal with kids asking "Mommy, what's an escort?"

19 points by slapshot 16y ago

For the record, I disagree with some parts of the analysis. In this case, Craigslist was more than a common carrier: it created a special section just for adult advertisements and charged money only for those advertisements. You could post a couch for sale for free, but you had to pay Craigslist if you wanted to post in the "Adult Services" section. The decision to charge for ads for that category intertwined Craigslist into profiting directly and intentionally from those ads.

VladRussian 16y ago
Craigslist started to charge for the adult ads as result of the previous settlement with AGs. Learn the facts.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Was the additional sentence "Learn the facts" really necessary?

petervandijck 16y ago

It's a witch hunt, simple.

VladRussian 16y ago
Witch hunt is just a beneficial side effect. It is a struggle for power and money - the AGs are pushing prostitution back onto the streets and into traditional brick&mortar "establishments" where it is under full control of local police.
hugh3 16y ago
I'm always bothered by the term "witch hunt". It doesn't seem like a great metaphor. If witches existed, hunting them would be rational and sensible (let us assume, for the moment, all witches are evil). It's only if witches don't exist that witch hunting is silly, so by calling it a witch hunt you're implying that the things of which craigslist is accused are analogous to witchcraft and don't really exist? Except they really do exist, so I'm really not sure what the point of the metaphor is.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  from Webster "witch hunt" 1 : a searching out for persecution of persons accused of witchcraft 2 : the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (as political opponents) with unpopular views Obviously this case has nothing to do with witches. In general, it is about using people's strong fear of something (is this something real or unreal - it doesn't matter, the fear itself is what only matters), like witchcraft or the threat of Finnish and Mexican immigrants taking away kernel hacking jobs, to energize and direct the crowd against one's enemies and advance the one's leadership position over the crowd.
- sophacles 16y ago
  You are assuming that it is a term that can be understood strictly from first principles. With an idiom, such an assumption is silly, as idioms come to their meaning based on a series of historical events, accidental mis-uses, literary uses (and therefore references) and certain assumed shared views. So to understand why witch hunt actually makes sense as a term, you must first look at the real witch hunts that happened. These happened at a time and place where witchcraft was "known" to be real. Of course there weren't witches, but everyone then thought there were, so effectively hunting for witches was a valid thing to do. At the time, they also didn't know lots of other things, so if a person falls sick, or a cow dies, or a house burns down, scientific evidence based explanations were not so easy to come by. However witches were "known" to curse people, and a curse causes misfortune. So what would happen is a random person would decide to pay back a grudge, or look good to his fellow citizens or whatever, and accuse some 3rd party of witchcraft, for something like giving the evil eye, or dancing, or whatever. This would lead to a burning, and everyone would be happy again. Most of the time anyway. Sometimes, a series of unfortunate events would be construed as a major witch, or a whole coven of witches. Then everyone would go crazy, true beleivers would be terrified, ambitious social climbers would be accusing all their enemies of witchcraft, and so on. There would be attempts by authorities to get to the bottom of it, and many witches would be found. Mass burnings ensued, and eventually everyone would calm down and be happy again. So, looking back, this whole course of events is ridiculous, the root assumption of witchcraft is just plain silly. The mass panic/hysteria over it downright dangerous, and those taking advantage of the situation were repugnant. So, now, looking at the above situations, and refactoring a bit, so we can get a more generic algorithm, we see these key components: 1. A label that classifies someone as bad 2. A deep underlying fear of what the bad label stands for, but the fear must be non-specific. 3. A set of actions and vaguely sort-of correlated events (if you squint just right), that looks like: "bad things from #2 are happening to us!". 4. A set of people willing to manipulate the many for their own gain. If those conditions are met, you have a prime candidate for a "witch hunt" (keeping the name because it describes the original stuff well, and everyone knows what happened in those cases). Just start sending authorities after anyone labeled as the bad thing. There are of course some variations, and deeper nuances, but that is the gist of it.

tomjen3 16y ago

What is shortsighted about this is anybody who believes this has anything to do with sex. Thats about as ridiculous as to think the war on terror has anything to do with terror or that any politician really cares about the mosque in Manhattan. You are being played.

hugh3 16y ago
And you're playing the "anyone who disagrees with my excessive cynicism is naive" card. I'll skip the seriously-trolly war-on-terror thing, and go straight to the other one... really? No politician really cares about the Ground Zero Mosque? Millions of non-politicians care about it, but the political class is all too sophisticated and is only pretending to care? I think you overestimate the sophistication of the political class. (Not wanting to discuss the mosque itself, merely the question of whether any politician really cares about it.)

smallblacksun 16y ago

The argument boils down to "we should let them break the law because then all the criminals are in one place". Which is absurd. Craigslist was profiting from prostitution, which is both illegal and morally repugnant.

chopsueyar 16y ago
Legality depends on your location. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Nevada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Nevada Here is some moral ambiguity... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_surrogate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_surrogate
- smallblacksun 16y ago
  You're right, I should have mentioned Nevada as an exception to the legality. The "sex surrogate" stuff is pseudo-scientific nonsense, and has no relation to what was being offered on craigslist anyway.
psadauskas 16y ago
How are they profiting? Don't they host those ads for free? Also, newspapers were hosting identical ads 10 years ago, and were charging for it. Isn't that worse? Edit: After checking, they did charge for adult ads, after pressure. But my 2nd point still stands, how is it different from newspapers?
gigafemtonano 16y ago
Craigslist donated all the revenue from erotic services to charity and used the fees for adult services to pay for lawyers to screen each and every posting. It was on NPR in the bay area shortly before the adult services section was shut down. Craigslist has said it had donated all revenues from its "erotic services" listings to charity. When it switched to its "adult services" listings last year it said it would make no commitment to how those revenues would be used. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6831MB20100904 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6831MB20100904

chopsueyar 16y ago

Only in America. Nevada's listings are gone, too. Amsterdam still has the listings, though. Didn't check any other European cities, though.

kgermino 16y ago

Serious Question: Why does prostitution need to be illegal? In the U.S. it is *legal* to: Have random, unprotected sex with anyone you want Have sex with someone only if they take you out to dinner or give you a nice gift, as long as it's not a direct cash payment Pay someone to have sex as long as its videotaped and records are kept (pornography) Etc. But it is illegal for one consenting adult to pay another consenting adult directly for sex? Why is this illegal? Especially since as the "services" get more expensive there is less and less actual sex happening. Multiple studies have shown that prostitution is less about the sex than about the john paying to have a responsibility and stress free relationship. I may be missing something and be completely wrong but thats my $.02.

pstuart 16y ago
It makes complete sense to be legal (and even taxed and regulated). Religious fundies will never let it happen.
bbuffone 16y ago
One reason for making it illegal - it's one of those things that no one wants in their town. No one wants coal burning power plants in their town but that is easily to regulate. In today's internet area having the transaction be online and the transgression to take place in private would be fine. The question i how do you ensure that.
- kgermino 16y ago
  One option is to regulate it. You could make it illegal to pick up someone on the street and regulate it so that most if not all meetups would occur either online or by someone calling a number they found in a phone book. I would think that it could be set up so that finding a prostitute goes similarly to finding a contractor, or anyone else in the home service industry. Other than hiring someone from the parking lot of Home Depot you don't generally see contractors soliciting. Additionally advertising could be regulated so that you don't see it happening unless you look for it. That won't appease the religious extremists but it will help prevent parents from having to deal with kids asking "Mommy, what's an escort?"