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If there was one thing craigslist could improve on, it would be managing the spam listings. I think we all can close our eyes and imagine how these listings loo
by asdff 2y ago
If there was one thing craigslist could improve on, it would be managing the spam listings. I think we all can close our eyes and imagine how these listings look: dozens and dozens of identical listings on a single point on a map about some scam used car loan, or an apartment that doesn't actually exist, or stolen playstations. If its so easy for us regular craiglist users to see this spam and subconsciously tune it out, then why is it such a hard problem for the craiglist developers to establish what I would guess are pretty trivial filters to set up to catch these listings that I stress again are posted dozens and dozens of times identically over the years? Seems they have tacitly acknowledge the issue with the hide duplicates checkbox, but why even have the user need to check that at all? I don't think anyone wants to see duplicate spam.
- explaininjs 2y agoIn some sense it’s actually a genius answer to the spam arms race: refuse to participate. This way, the spam is immediately obvious. In the proposed word where sophisticated spam detection algorithms are built, the adversary develops sophisticated spamming techniques that become difficult for even an experienced user to detect.
- asdff 2y agoWhy no arms race in this theory though? If spam is sure to ratchet up to meet whatever defense craigslist has today in order to continue to be effective, they might as well do a better job today as it is to not make themselves stand out so explicitly so they can get a higher click through rate. Seems to me there is some underlying reason or incentive why the current arms race on the half of the spammers might be stalled. Maybe there are enough people who fall for these scams as low effort as they seem to day, but if that were the case then craigslist is being a bit unethical allowing this susceptible population to be routinely victimized to ensure the rest of us don't get fooled by tougher spam.
- explaininjs 2y agoBecause the content hasn’t been filtered. If the adversary attempts to make a post and is prohibited from doing so (or is unable to see their post on a different browser/etc.), they will try harder to make the post “sneaky”. On the other hand if they make a post, see the post, open their phone, see the post there (tons of times! how effective!), they move on with their day.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sweetjuly 2y agoThere's also the theory that obvious scams and spam is helpful to adversaries because it filters out people who will realize it's a scam later and not follow through. Like, making the Nigerian Prince emails more convincing might lead to more work for little to no new real leads because these new people that were slightly less gullible are more likely to realize it's a scam later on too.
- spott 2y agoBecause easy scams to detect prevent false negatives for the scammer. If you get a response to a badly written scam, chances are the respondent will be a sucker and the scam will be successful. If you get a response to a hard to detect scam, chances are you will spend more time for a less likely payout. Microsoft wrote a paper on this. The same reason email scams are so bad.
- noman-land 2y agoAs a visitor, the downside to ignoring anything that even smells of spam is very low. You might miss out on the occasional real post. If you're Craigslist, every false positive is a headache. User complaints, support costs, vetting, bad publicity.
- alexpotato 2y agoThis goes the other way too. I stopped selling on Craiglist b/c EVERY SINGLE TIME I posted something I immediately started getting the "hi! I'm moving so I'm going to send the movers with a check that includes their pay and the balance to pick up your item" scam. At least on Facebook Marketplace, I can see who the person is, do they have a rating, do they know anyone I know etc etc. As a side note: For the Twitter folks, I've written a bunch of funny threads about selling things on FB and Craigslist that you can find here: https://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1305311410579214336 https://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1305311410579214336
- mrweasel 2y ago> At least on Facebook Marketplace, I can see who the person is, do they have a rating, do they know anyone I know etc etc. Yet it doesn't stop scammer at all.
- kube-system 2y ago> At least on Facebook Marketplace, I can see who the person is, do they have a rating, do they know anyone I know etc etc. I don't want that when I sell random stuff out of my house. I want to meet a random dude at a gas station, exchange cash, and never know anything about each other again.
- renewiltord 2y agoAnd that's why these two services exist. They want spam control and you want anonymity. About the clearest example of separate markets.
- loufe 2y agoGreat way of seeing it. While I don't like being on Facebook, I now almost always tend towards it over Kijiji (Canadian alternative) and Craigslist for the reputation system.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- carabiner 2y agoFor car sales, they started charging to post. It's worked wonderfully and now most ads are from serious sellers with fully fleshed out posts and who are responsive.
- SoftTalker 2y agoTo me, this is the obvious answer. Posting an ad is clearly worth some small cost to a legitimate seller. For spammers, it's a much bigger impediment, and it also establishes a money trail to who they are.
- parpfish 2y agoMinor nit about their car postings: Old dudes need to learn that this isn’t a newspaper classified that limits characters. Don’t write “Pw/pl”, just write out power windows, power locks. Actually DESCRIBE things, don’t just give a phone number and no info
- SoftTalker 2y agoIt's a game of whack-a-mole. For every "common sense" spam filter rule you develop, the spammers will quickly find a way around it. Maybe AI could be trained on spam and do a better job spotting it.
- lowtech8 2y ago[flagged]
- TeMPOraL 2y agoMaybe for you. Spam is spam. Advertising is spam. AI makes it easier, but then it makes many other things easier too.
- mrweasel 2y agoRight now I feel like the economics of AI/LLMs are in the spammers favour. You're almost suggesting that AIs be trained to recognise other AIs. Don't misunderstand, I think it would be great if we could opt to have all AI or auto-generated content removed from our internet experience. It's just not really in the interest of the shareholders. The best thing I've seen in a long time is the "Say potato" tactic against bots, not sure how well it works against LLMs though.
- nox101 2y agoThere are also legit but over zealous listings. There are apartment complexes that re-post the listings every single day. So, checking if any new apartments appear is always manually filtering over 40% the apartments you've already looked at but which were reposted.
- lh7777 2y agoThis drives me crazy. I have saved searches for various power tools within a few hundred mile radius. Most of what I see are duplicate posts from people cross-posting in adjacent regions, the same items re-posted weekly (or more frequently), and irrelevant listings that show up due to keyword spamming. I wish there was a way for me to say "I've seen this ad, don't send it to me again unless the price drops". Have been thinking about building some kind of filtering software to eliminate re-posts -- anyone know of a project that does this?
- ryandrake 2y agoMy bugaboo is people who list things for sale and fill $1 as the price in the structured data, and then in the description reveal the real price they are asking. All just so when I filter by price their listing still shows up. You can manually flag things but it feels like whack-a-mole, and I don't know if Craigslist actually deletes/punishes posters who get flagged for this reason.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoSame thing happens on Facebook.
- xeromal 2y agoI just filter above about 50$ depending on what I'm looking for.
- nobodyknowin 2y agoMine are the used car dealers that have every make and model ever created (or maybe just the 1500 most popular) in every description. On cars that aren't even close. So even if you're looking for a 1999 Honda Civic, every car for sale by Bill's automotive or whoever shows up as a description containing that text. Extremely annoying.
- themkidsonphone 2y ago[dead]