11 ms·

Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. How about some sort of reputation system? And decent moderation? As it stands, CL is a great way

Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. How about some sort of reputation system? And decent moderation? As it stands, CL is a great way to (not) meet flaky people, and to have your posts taken down on the indecipherable whims of a few obsessive users. I've gotten one job, bought a few things, sold one motorcycle, and gave away most of my possessions via CL, and it was consistently an awful, frustrating experience.

rhizome 16y ago
It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," and there is a flag help forum on Craigslist to help explain how your ad might have trammeled your area's standards.
- brianpan 16y ago
  I'd say the flag help forum (and the help forums in general) are prime examples of "consistently awful, frustrating experience".
- georgieporgie 16y ago
  It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," As far as I'm aware, nobody knows what logic or thresholds are used by CL. Common wisdom is that it's "lots" but there seems to be no reason whatsoever to think that.
  - rhizome 16y ago
    As someone who actually does flag ads (as we all agree to do by using Craigslist), I can say that it's more than "a few." Just because they don't verify the numbers doesn't mean it's low. What purpose would that serve them? Look at it this way: read the comments here. Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible.
    - potatolicious 16y ago
      > "Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible." No, both are possible, and in fact both are true. Look at apartment listings - in any major city full of spam, obviously posting far more frequently than is allowed. I've tried flaggin these posts - but it looks like the flag threshold is proportionate to the category's traffic level. Which is to say, for something like apts/housing, very high. Makes sense on paper until you realize there aren't enough dedicated users policing to actually make the flags a working feature on these categories. So yes, shitty experience for browsers, chock full of spam. Turn around, look at smaller categories where the flag threshold seems to become very low (say, anything outside the realm of selling/renting physical goods), and it becomes a terrible place to sell. Perfectly innocuous posts are flagged off for inexplicable reasons (believe me, I've sat through the flag-help posts and seen plenty of these), and incredibly common for competing advertisers to use the flag feature offensively against similar postings. So yes, too easy to flag and terrible place to sell. You can insist all you like, and pretend that anyone who gets posts flagged is obviously doing something wrong - you'd be right there with the rest of flag-help after all, but that doesn't change the fact that the flag system is routinely abused and seriously compromises the credibility of CL. It's simultaneously too strict to filter to spam, and too lenient that it generates mass numbers of false positives. It's an utter failure of an abuse-detection scheme. Craigslist is ripe for being disrupted - it's already happened in some categories, and there is a lot of ache in the market for the others. For me it's been relatively little loss - I've been using the craigslist-disruptor-equivalent to gigs/creative and it works great, much better than CL.
    - georgieporgie 16y ago
      I can say that it's more than "a few." How can you say that? How does your personal experience of flagging postings in any way give you insight into the closed CL system? I agree that flagging/community moderation is a good and necessary thing, I just think CL does it in an absolutely terrible way. For example, if people find your post annoying, there is no "flag as annoying," or "flag and leave a comment." Instead, someone inadvertently offends someone else, and their post is taken down as spam. This example has netted only irritation for all parties involved, with no learning or progress. To me, that is simply a bad system.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  Having had an ad inexplicably flagged, the flag help forum is no help at all, unless you consider random, uninformed speculation a form of help. For one thing, the tone of the flag help forum is that of a hazing circle. It's just a lot of people sitting around being snarky, making rude comments at relative novices and calling them names. Which might be easier to swallow if they actually provided any real help - but unless your post is bog-standard flag-bait the advice given is usually off the mark. I sat through a number of threads besides my own and it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements. Personally, I was looking for collaborative help in a photography project, and posted to gigs - but according to the great wisdom to flag-help I really should've been posting to services-creative instead (???) The problem here is also that there is no safeguard against other posters flagging each other's content. Using the flag feature to push competing postings off the page is depressingly common, and the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves.
  - rhizome 16y ago
    the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves. Correct, it's up to the poster to construct an ad that can stay up. Community standards are different from city to city, but it's not Craigslist's job to keep ads up that the community doesn't want to see. Where is the "accountability and reliability" in your newspaper's classifieds? You think some editor at the Star Tribune is double-checking that that muscle car being advertised isn't actually a bucket of bolts? The dominant "mechanism" or thought process I see getting thwarted on Craigslist is that since time-immemorial, classified ads (and really, ads in general) operated by the ethic of "Here it is, if you don't like it then you don't have to buy it (also: shut up)." Craigslist inverts this relationship and puts the power into the readers' hands: "You don't like getting flagged? Feel free to post your ad on some other website." This, I feel, is the most political thing that Craigslist has done: instead of forcing readers to overlook bad ads, it tries to motivate sellers not to write bad ads in the first place. That so many here are angry about having gotten flagged off in the past tells me that they were doing the bare minimum in writing their ad anyway. Good riddance, I say. It's not like Craigslist will die without whiners complaining about them. By and large the people most frustrated with their Craigslist posting experience are those who just barf out a self-serving ad and expect the invisible hand of Adam Smith to protect their "right" to get $1200 for a Britney Spears ticket. it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements. If this was your experience, I'd look to the attitude of the person asking for help. There is a certainly an amount of "RTFM" in the flag forums, but so few RTFM. Lots and lots of people get "real help" in the flag forums. Unfortunately, lots and lots of other people have a "don't like it? don't buy it." attitude.

rhizome 16y ago

It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," and there is a flag help forum on Craigslist to help explain how your ad might have trammeled your area's standards.

brianpan 16y ago
I'd say the flag help forum (and the help forums in general) are prime examples of "consistently awful, frustrating experience".
georgieporgie 16y ago
It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," As far as I'm aware, nobody knows what logic or thresholds are used by CL. Common wisdom is that it's "lots" but there seems to be no reason whatsoever to think that.
- rhizome 16y ago
  As someone who actually does flag ads (as we all agree to do by using Craigslist), I can say that it's more than "a few." Just because they don't verify the numbers doesn't mean it's low. What purpose would that serve them? Look at it this way: read the comments here. Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible.
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    > "Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible." No, both are possible, and in fact both are true. Look at apartment listings - in any major city full of spam, obviously posting far more frequently than is allowed. I've tried flaggin these posts - but it looks like the flag threshold is proportionate to the category's traffic level. Which is to say, for something like apts/housing, very high. Makes sense on paper until you realize there aren't enough dedicated users policing to actually make the flags a working feature on these categories. So yes, shitty experience for browsers, chock full of spam. Turn around, look at smaller categories where the flag threshold seems to become very low (say, anything outside the realm of selling/renting physical goods), and it becomes a terrible place to sell. Perfectly innocuous posts are flagged off for inexplicable reasons (believe me, I've sat through the flag-help posts and seen plenty of these), and incredibly common for competing advertisers to use the flag feature offensively against similar postings. So yes, too easy to flag and terrible place to sell. You can insist all you like, and pretend that anyone who gets posts flagged is obviously doing something wrong - you'd be right there with the rest of flag-help after all, but that doesn't change the fact that the flag system is routinely abused and seriously compromises the credibility of CL. It's simultaneously too strict to filter to spam, and too lenient that it generates mass numbers of false positives. It's an utter failure of an abuse-detection scheme. Craigslist is ripe for being disrupted - it's already happened in some categories, and there is a lot of ache in the market for the others. For me it's been relatively little loss - I've been using the craigslist-disruptor-equivalent to gigs/creative and it works great, much better than CL.
  - georgieporgie 16y ago
    I can say that it's more than "a few." How can you say that? How does your personal experience of flagging postings in any way give you insight into the closed CL system? I agree that flagging/community moderation is a good and necessary thing, I just think CL does it in an absolutely terrible way. For example, if people find your post annoying, there is no "flag as annoying," or "flag and leave a comment." Instead, someone inadvertently offends someone else, and their post is taken down as spam. This example has netted only irritation for all parties involved, with no learning or progress. To me, that is simply a bad system.
potatolicious 16y ago
Having had an ad inexplicably flagged, the flag help forum is no help at all, unless you consider random, uninformed speculation a form of help. For one thing, the tone of the flag help forum is that of a hazing circle. It's just a lot of people sitting around being snarky, making rude comments at relative novices and calling them names. Which might be easier to swallow if they actually provided any real help - but unless your post is bog-standard flag-bait the advice given is usually off the mark. I sat through a number of threads besides my own and it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements. Personally, I was looking for collaborative help in a photography project, and posted to gigs - but according to the great wisdom to flag-help I really should've been posting to services-creative instead (???) The problem here is also that there is no safeguard against other posters flagging each other's content. Using the flag feature to push competing postings off the page is depressingly common, and the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves.
- rhizome 16y ago
  the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves. Correct, it's up to the poster to construct an ad that can stay up. Community standards are different from city to city, but it's not Craigslist's job to keep ads up that the community doesn't want to see. Where is the "accountability and reliability" in your newspaper's classifieds? You think some editor at the Star Tribune is double-checking that that muscle car being advertised isn't actually a bucket of bolts? The dominant "mechanism" or thought process I see getting thwarted on Craigslist is that since time-immemorial, classified ads (and really, ads in general) operated by the ethic of "Here it is, if you don't like it then you don't have to buy it (also: shut up)." Craigslist inverts this relationship and puts the power into the readers' hands: "You don't like getting flagged? Feel free to post your ad on some other website." This, I feel, is the most political thing that Craigslist has done: instead of forcing readers to overlook bad ads, it tries to motivate sellers not to write bad ads in the first place. That so many here are angry about having gotten flagged off in the past tells me that they were doing the bare minimum in writing their ad anyway. Good riddance, I say. It's not like Craigslist will die without whiners complaining about them. By and large the people most frustrated with their Craigslist posting experience are those who just barf out a self-serving ad and expect the invisible hand of Adam Smith to protect their "right" to get $1200 for a Britney Spears ticket. it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements. If this was your experience, I'd look to the attitude of the person asking for help. There is a certainly an amount of "RTFM" in the flag forums, but so few RTFM. Lots and lots of people get "real help" in the flag forums. Unfortunately, lots and lots of other people have a "don't like it? don't buy it." attitude.