Has anyone actually tried using Craigslist (in New York) to find a place in recent memory? Once every few months I go on to check out the market, see whether I’m still paying a good price for my apartment, what’s available, etc. But the amount of spam in the classifieds is unbelievable, and the amount of broker spam in the apartment listings is outstanding and increasingly notorious. In order to see the apartments in my neighborhood (Williamsburg) that are actually in my neighborhood (and don’t just show up with mentions of “near Williamsburg” or “East Williamsburg”) my search strings end up containing something close to ten arguments, and even then the results are shaky. So what’s Craigslist got to do to clean up their service? Well, they’re a notoriously laissez faire company, so why not decentralize the task of removing the spam and killing the spammers? Craigslist free classifieds should go Wiki.

In the current system, the user flags questionable entries from within the listing, and supposedly enough flags get called to the attention of the CL staff. This system fails because users often recognize spam before clicking on an entry, so they’re required to look at spam in order to flag it; there’s also no way to flag spam directly from search results. Further more, users do not get any sense of feedback by participating in an anonymous spam-voting system. When it’s spam, you want to kill it dead right then and there, or else you don’t want to waste your time. So how do you get rid of the spam? Let users kill postings, it’s that simple!

Yes, I realize that to start, the Craigslist system would suffer an enormous shock. Brokers would start attacking other brokers to as to get a better lock on a neighborhood, angry ex-roommates would take down listings after getting kicked out, etc. But this problem is easily solved with volunteer trusted admin moderators (ala the Wiki model), user-registration for posting free classifieds, and a simple trust-you-but-track-you system. Suppose that with this system, in order to post an entry on Craigslist classifieds you must first register. You’re forced to read the site guidelines about spamming before proceeding, etc., and once you post, your user name and some information (like your IP address, and what it’s been up to lately) would be public. This way, when you start misbehaving, by making additions or subtractions to the listings, your user and/or IP can be banned.

For example, a broker/roommate/owner wants to list an apartment/room/sublet. They register with CL, and post their listing. In this listing their user name is displayed as a link, and when one clicks through their IP address transaction logs from the CL Wiki database are displayed. If they’re caught unjustly killing other listings or recognized as a spammer, they are banned. If their listings look too similar to another user’s listings (i.e. they are suspected of spoofing with multiple accounts) they can be banned and have their email addresses or, if necessary, IP addresses banned. Perhaps even other unique information from the post, like the name of the broker’s company, their telephone number, etc. can be added to a filter list so anyone who later trys to post a classified with said banned-broker’s phone number in it gets denied. Of course, all of the above circumstances are extreme examples, but they need to be addressed in order to give this sytem weight.

Yes, I realize the anonymity of Craigslist is one of its appeals. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not proposing we take that anonymity away from CL users, but if you’re going to participate in the free classifieds on Craigslist’s community boards, you should be held under public scrutiny if you’re caught spamming. End of story. Just like any other community-oriented space, perhaps it’s time to let the community start taking care of keeping things clean and orderly. For all our sakes I hope CL gets their act together and lets us clean up their mess.