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The founder of craigslist, Craig Newmark, envisions himself as a supreme do-gooder with the creation of craigslist. He is notorious for shunning profit with his venture and insists that he simply wants to make the world a better place through a website that allows people to post and search for jobs and housing at little to no cost. I have been tempted to use craigslist before but personally, I don't see craigislist as delivering something that the world was severely in need of to begin with.

Ways to search for housing, jobs, relationships, and other things have always been around: It's called the newspaper classifieds. It was a perfectly working system where for the minimal price of a newspaper, one could find the ads they were looking for. On the other end of the process, businessmen and companies would pay to post the ads. Advertisements were factored into their business model. It wasn't a large cost because they were making money and they could recoup those costs back. In the meantime, an entire industry (and an important one for the survival of democracy at that) was supported through this process.

It is tempting to praise craigslist for allowing these things to be made for free, but remember the old saying: "Nothing in life is free." Ads for housing and jobs have been the bedrock of the newspaper industry. How much does Craig Newmark contribute to the economy? He employs only about 30 people. Try measuring that against the number of people that the newspaper industry employed or the value that they had to society as a necessary component of democracy (something that Newmark proclaimed he wanted to improve, ironically).

Other than the fact that craigslist has created more bad than good, it's also massively inefficient:

1. There is an incredibly high amount of spam you have to put up with- Post something in the relationships connection and you get inundated with spam. You even get inundated with spam if you post something in the housing section as I have recently done. Some of the spam can be targeted to spread a virus or steal your identity

2. Applicants aren't filtered out through effort- If someone is advertising something through a newspaper, then the truly committed people who are willing to do the work by looking in the newspaper will be the ones in the applicant pool. By transferring it to craigslist and lowering the bar of accessibility, applicant pools for jobs are less qualified and/or less interested

3. Personal Connections-When meeting someone for a job, to exchange products, or housing, one has to meet anyway. It is far easier to decieve or misrepresent yourself online. In some cases, there have been instances of murder through the "casual encounter section." The spokespeople for craigslist have found it absurd that they should be responsible for extreme incidents. It would be a stretch to say craigslist is legally responsible, but craigslist certainly fosters a culture where these encounters are prone to happen. Bottom line: Craigslist also can't proclaim themselves a philanthropic organization that does good if they're unwilling to be judged the negative externalities.

Learn more about this author, O. Konheim.
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