How To Compete Against Craigslist

Leaders in a field have no reason to change things, and so Borders and Barnes & Noble, along with traditional publishers, sat back as Amazon.com came out of no where and slowly, methodically ate their lunch.  Crown Books is reduced to selling remainders, but books you can get on amazon.com anyway.  Good luck with that model.  Google went about crushing undisputed king of search Yahoo.com in a leisurely fashion.  Craigslist seems untouchable, but it has a glaring fault: anyone can flag your ad for removal, but you cannot quite figure out by whom and what for.

Of course the model is the community of users self-police the site, which is good, but in USA we foster and celebrate the poison-pen, the anonymous snitch, as has every degenerating society in history.  It starts with our elite in colleges who are encouraged to write anonymous feedback on instructors, not quite realizing how infantilizing this process is, that is an exercise in anonymous criticism.  (In noncredit ed, students tend to sign their course feedback forms, good or bad.)

Adults and free people stand behind their comments, and take what comes.  I understand that teachers have power over students, thus we have the anonymous criticism, but that is only in accredited schools, where teacher have power make or break a student.  In a free market of education, the teacher has no such power, since a malevolent teacher would be subject to peer pressure and not protected by tenure.

Craigslist would benefit greatly by requiring flaggers to identify themselves and give the reasons why...  this way the community of craigslist users would judge the activity of the flagger and either agree of disagree...  of some such method of policing themselves.

But craigslist, like yahoo, is set in its ways, a victim of survivorship bias.  This is a lesson for anyone wishing to enter any field, wherein you believe the 800 pound gorilla cannot be taken on.  Of course it can.  Just experience a problem with the goods or service, and then come up with a solution, such as the google lads did.  And then, redesign.  As Peter Drucker said, there is no solution that cannot be improved upon.

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