DISQUS

Nicolás Boullosa · 3 months ago

This is repeating the words of Wired; joining the rant and --probably-- taking advantage in visits because of it. I don't see the problems in the Charlie Rose Interview (here: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8605)

Sometimes money, number of workers and "buzz" (noise, some would say) in the interweb, etc. is not the core value of some companies: Patagonia, Craigslist.org, REI and several others.

So accountability to users (some of them older than baby-boomers) is a good enough goal. Don't you think?

Christian Polleys · 3 months ago

Perhaps it's good for users that Newmark is "not much interested in wealth or in being treated as a VIP". People like craigslist for exactly the way it is...simple and low cost. This article is clearly posted to not serve user interest, but instead to pressure Newmark into changing his methods into a more profit driven and submissive midst for the large businesses that would love to get a piece of Craigslist, either through ownership or 'services'.

The fact alone that Newmark focuses on resolving customer service inquiries shows that he's more devoted to users than to charging them extra fees or making every penny possible from them.

Instead of criticizing him, we should be applauding his disinterest in profiteering and giving into media manipulators. Who cares about "the latest fads in site designs and features". That's like saying "I needed to brush my teeth so I went to the orthodontist for a checkup." Toothpaste work well when you need it, and so does craigslist. There will always be few dumb craigslist users that give out their private information without doing background checks or protecting themselves, adding additional features for security (and ultimately charging more somewhere along the line) won't ever make all men equal in their decision making.

mastergame · 3 months ago

Craig Newmark’s way of doing business is somewhere between bewildering and ridiculous, UNIX is also boring yet incalculably better than Microsoft OS.

gregcollier · 3 months ago

I applaud Gary Wolf and Wired for the well-researched article on the anomalous characters and odd decisions going on behind the scenes at Craigslist. For a business with this much traffic and this much income, the problems its users encounter day after day, post after post, are really beyond comprehension. They make enough money to fix this stuff, folks – and they refuse to do it!

And that’s not all they refuse to fix. Over the last few years, newspapers and television news stories across the country have been reporting stories about victims – from theft to rape to murder – whose only mistake was responding to a Craigslist ad. Note to Craig: telling us that “most people are good,” is not a sufficient answer! For years, law enforcement agencies have been fighting with Craigslist to clean up the obvious illegal activities on the site – and Craigslist has repeatedly balked or stalled.

The word is spreading that Craigslist is a dangerous place to buy, sell, or look for a date. This is sad state of affairs in an era when technologies exist to ferret out much of the illegal activity, and good old fashioned monitoring can clean up much of the rest – and yet Craigslist resorts to a flag system that, as your article points out, benefits troublemakers as readily as legitimate users. Yes, the criminals are in the minority; I’ll give Craig and Buckmaster that. But the problem is this: more than on any other site I’ve ever seen (and I work in this industry), criminals flock to Craigslist.

Buckmaster’s analogy to GM seems an effort to confuse the issue. Autos come with safety ratings, and manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure their cars’ safety ratings – because people’s lives are at stake. And that’s just the point. Craigslist users have every right to expect that their safety come before some abstract concept of “democracy.”

This is probably the most important difference between Craigslist and the community classifieds site I operate. At Geebo.com, we monitor our community classifieds to make every experience as safe and enjoyable as possible.

We pay attention to our users, and we are constantly improving our technologies and systems. Given how hard we work at this, it’s hard to watch the arrogance and nonsense that go on at Craigslist. When users run into problems there, they get a haiku? Give me a break! Why would anyone intentionally create a system where users’ concerns are mocked rather than addressed?

People aren’t fools: as long as Craigslist refuses to evolve, the site will increasingly be defined by bugs, scams and illegal activities – risks and frustrations that fewer and fewer users will be willing to put up with. Please let your readers know that there are alternatives to Craigslist – including ours. I welcome every Craigslist user to surf on over to Geebo where we work hard to make yours a safe, easy, enjoyable and successful community classifieds experience.