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.