Policing the Playground

cc license by charlois from Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/charliellewellin/112297949/

Craig Newmark has a tough job. Policing a digital commons of his own creation with a skeleton crew of rag-tag uber-nerds is a thankless job, but someone has to do it. Well. At least, they do now! The little site that Craig has built has grown into a monster in terms of its size, its traffic, and its cultural influence. But there are those think that Craigslist has already outlived its usefulness.

The folks at "Craigslist Dirty Little Secrets Revealed" lay out their case for the trouble with craigslist. This page contains legitimate complaints with stupid personal attacks that make me want to punch the author.

To me they seem to be a bunch of geeks and nerds who couldn’t get any attention or dates in High School and are now exacting their revenge on the rest of humanity through their little community called Craigslist.

This is a particularly assinine comment. Um. Are you still in highschool? This comment seems to me like something that a jock, his glory fading as he works a series of bad clothing store retail jobs, might say about the geeks who are now making all the money and getting all the girls. 

Be this as it may, the guy makes a bunch of points, while mis-understanding Craig's TOU in fundamental ways. I have to wonder if he has even read it.

He criticizes Craig's TOU, saying that it's a good thing, but it is only applied when they feel like it. This in fact is part of the TOU. Craig reserves for himself the right to apply his rules haphazardly, randomly. Or perhaps, just perhaps, judiciously. 

I think the popularity of Craigslist, the fanatical zeal of its community members, comes from this quality. Craig is a benevolent despot. Humans desperately want benevolent despots. (Especially after the last eight years under The Dark Lord, Dick Cheney, and his Good Ol boy sock puppet.) They want the kind of order and authority that can only be attained through a random system of enforcement. 

Here's the thing; if Craig thinks that someone is breaking his TOU—but maybe that's a good thing, he doesn't have to do anything. He can take a step back from the abstract principle and focus on the reality of life in his community. 

Craig's TOU is a good example of the ways in which Business as a domain differs from Government. Business is more fluid, more dynamic. Government operates more robotically, in a more brittle fashion. 

The problem with business, the reason the anarcho capitalist dream of the withering away of the state is a pipe dream, is that the bottom line—money, or shareholder value, or whatever you want to call it, may create decisions that are bad for people. 

And here Craig straddles the line. But refusing to monetize most of his network, he acts as a quasi-public institution—backed by the tiny parts of his network he has chosen to monetize. Even those monetized sections, it can be argued, have been monetized for the users own good. The number of scams, in both job boards and in rental real estate lisings, seems to have decreased markedly as these parts of CL have become profit centers.

And therein lies the endgame for Craig perhaps. Taking a few more steps towards business as usual. Monetize the network, and use the money to hire more playground attendants. This seems inevitable to me at this point. Some part of me hopes I'm wrong. Because this has been an amazing story in the annals of capitalism. Craig is an amazing person, living in an amazing time. 

We salute his achievement, even as we kinda wish we could get someone on the phone when a lunatic has posted our name and adress on his site and has accused us being vampires. Ultimately, Craigslist worked because internet pioneers, early adopters, need a lot less hand-holding than the people who come along later. I know it sounds elitist, but there it is. As 'the rest of us' make the internet a daily, an hourly, part of our lives, you can expect a lot more business-as-usual. Maybe even at Craigslist.

Craig and Me

Part 1
I can still remember the day Paul Whitmore turned me on to Craigslist. I had the initial reaction a 'web designer' (I thought of myself as one in those days—I wasn't one, yet. I was an idiot.) had to its pure, visual brand-less usability.

Huh. Where's the logo? Where's the rendered stuff? Where's the drop shadows, glows and blurs? Where's the rendered grunge type? Where is the color? Where's the long pointless flash movie? Who is paying for this? My God, there's a lot of content. My god it's well organized. My god this is useful.

I fell in love with it. We all did.

I sold stuff too heavy to ship on ebay. Nice furniture we didn't need after a move. What I couldn't sell I gave way. I made it a mission to keep everything I had that had any value at all out of the landfill by giving it away on CL. I'd post an ad, and say, "It's behind my back door in a black plastic trash bag. I'll pull the ad down when I hear someone putting it in their car."

Within hours, it worked. Always.

More recently, I've seen the stories of Craigslist scams, Craigslist SPAM, Craigslist abuse. The jobs boards filled gradually with 'portfolio building' experiences, and unpaid internships. The personals filled with ads for adult services. The Rent-by-Owner section became dominated by huge building management companies, drowning out the voices of small landlords. And in the broker section...

A company I consult for, The Boston Realty Hub, was dragged into the Craigslist arena by their clients, who were looking for help with making the rental listing data-service they buy from BRH work more efficiently with CL. The BRH member agencies are ethical companies—at least, they are as ethical as it is possible to be, and stay in business. And therein lies a tale.


What Craig Believes
Craig talks about how most people are trustworthy. This is true, and, I think, it is his great discovery that user flagging can work as well as—or better than—active moderation in internet based communities. The problem, in both the real world, and on Craigslist is, what about that other one percent. The sociopaths. The liars. The cheats. The perpetually angry and pissed off. The Vandals. What about them?

They are the reason we lock our doors at night. They're the reason for policemen, and armies, and intelligence agencies, and government regulators...in short, that one percent drives a ton of activity in the economy.

What happens when user flagging doesn't work? As it has failed in the brokers section of CL?

We've watched this problem unfold in the rental real estate market in Boston. The first agencies that embraced CL saw a huge initial boost in revenue, as brokers were able to generate leads without incurring advertising expenses. This was the Agency owner's wet dream. Because agents work on commission. Once they were forced to get their own leads with free classified ads, a new kind of agency, a new way of doing business was born.

The only problem was, this new way of doing business encouraged bad actors. It encouraged the creation of large agencies constructed like pyramids, with the bottom rank filled with inexperienced, deluded agents flooding CL with redundant postings for the same properties, over and over again.

We'd spent years developing relationships with area rental agencies and building management companies as we constructed our solution to the rental real estate problem, www.onmarketboston.com. And what we saw was that their market share was being eroded by companies that posted 500-1000 Cl listings per day.

Reluctantly, we were dragged into the Cl arms race. As the race heats up, agents repost their listings over and over again, in a struggle to stay at the top of the CL pile. Some of our member agencies needed help keeping up with the speed of posting, and so we enabled this functionality in our network.

What happened next has amazed and delighted me for the last few weeks. Stay tuned. Craig talks to me! And I begin to catch a glimpse of how he works, and what makes CL such a force in this world.