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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

A recent experience trying to find something on Craigslist was shocking. As much as its UI is frozen in time, so are its anti-abuse measures.

I have no doubt that lots of people are getting hurt using Craigslist. I would never recommend it to friends or family.

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Can you provide a concrete example?

IME any online platform is going to be a staircase into the bowels of human nature. It's all about being aware you need to protect yourself online. If you're encountering things like child porn or prostitution, or anything illegal really, it's your responsibility to at least report it.

> Can you provide a concrete example?

Sure. I spent a few weeks looking for an Xbox Series X, and I don't believe that I'm exaggerating when I say that 90%+ of the listings were scams. For about half of those, the scammers just weren't very good, and automated or semi-automated checks should've flagged those listings before anyone saw them. The other half were various scams documented in thousands of articles by a cottage industry created in lieu of anti-abuse measures.

> IME any online platform is going to be a staircase into the bowels of human nature.

Granted, but some bowels are cleaner than others. Craigslist clearly does not get enough fiber in its diet.

> If you're encountering things like child porn or prostitution, or anything illegal really, it's your responsibility to at least report it.

I did, of course, but I got tired of working for Craigslist for free after a while.

Yeah, for a while I would flag any listing I felt violated the ToS. but I started to notice that THE SAME LISTING would come up shortly (if any action was taken on the initial listing to begin with). I'm not going to bother wasting my energy trying to flag listings when CL isn't doing their part to _learn_ and improve their detection of blatantly-obvious fraud or ToS violations. I mean I'm talking like blatant keyword spam (which is against ToS) that's even prefaced by "Keywords:", the same listing made in every possible nearby jurisdiction, stuff like that. It's so obvious and and easy to detect. The worst are car ads. You search for a really specific model, of a specific year, and somehow you get like 500+ results. Because every car listing is just a wall of keyword spam, of completely unrelated makes/models. Cool.

Cars: just filter by only "cars and trucks" and "owner". Bingo bango.

That's the buyer's perspective of flagging. The other side is having your listings deleted because they compete with another product or violate people's incorrect expectations. If people think it's a fake, and it's not, or if it is rule bound to a category, but people aren't used to seeing it there, it gets flagged and removed. There is no one to appeal to, and sellers aren't told why their listings are removed. As someone who sells high-end stuff occasionally on the side, I would rather deal with Ebay or Facebook.

My experience with Craigslist has been that there are a lot of keyword-stuffed scam listings in search results, but they are generally sorted below more useful results, and generally easy to spot and ignore.

It makes sense to me as a strategy for leveraging fuzzy automation. Sorting is less risky than hiding or deleting. If the system gets it wrong, there is a still an opportunity for motivated users to dig down and find incorrectly down-sorted items.

A lot of real estate management companies seem to use software that just spams craigslist with legitimate ads, but spam nonetheless because its 40 hits for the same apartment complex.

An obvious example is zero-dollar listings with a different dollar amount in the title.

Housing is terrible on CL. Bot farms take past listings from sites like Zillow and apartments.com, cut the rent to a deal that seems too good to be true, then when you are interested you get connected to a "missionary traveling abroad who just wants their place taken care of." They will even be happy to rent to someone who is not yet in the area, which is otherwise really hard and expensive to do. All they need is you to wire a deposit and they'll have a friend deliver the keys......

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