Craigslist is a silly, sad place populated almost exclusively with silly, sad people. Let’s laugh at them!

Net insanity: craigslist files

Craigslist Files #88: Truth in Advertising

By msarko on 9/1/10 5:45pm
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Arkansas, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virgi nia. That, in alphabetical order, is the list of Anti-Whore Super States. The Attorneys General of the aforementioned chunks of America drafted a letter to the craigslist corporate office earlier this week (with Massachusetts drafting its own because it just always has to be a little different, egotistical former colony that it is) demanding that the List remove its much contested Adult Services page. Their claims, which echo those of previous anti-AS politicians, are that Adult Services facilitates human trafficking and child prostitution. Now, I'm not exactly AS's biggest defender but I agree with craigslist CEO and all-around gasbag Jim Buckmaster when he calls such accusations unfounded. I'm not going to say that human trafficking and child prostitution have never happened or don't still happen on craigslist, but I'm also not comfortable suggesting that a black market human organ has never been traded in the For Sale section. The 18 state AsG could have focused on the actual crimes being committed on a regular basis on Adult Services, namely the obvious exchange of sex for money, but th ey're avoiding that. Maybe it's well-known in career politics that it's bad for business to oppose consensual sex in any form, or maybe they just have to stick to their original, ridiculous guns.



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Craigslist Files #87: Ne Repondez Pas, SVP

By msarko on 8/25/10 6:03pm
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We are all talking to ourselves on the Internet. Every blog, every website, no matter how big the supposed readership is, only ever connects with people on a delay. That's why it's called "shouting into the void". If you can't receive feedback you aren't really communicating, you're just talking or typing and if anyone ever responds to you it's because they happened to pass by while you were muttering to yourself. That's what craigslist is. It's a vast collection of people muttering to themselves, saying things like, "I sure would like to get rid of this old couch" or "Gee, I wish I could get laid". That's why it's so silly to see post titles with "re:" in them. Almost all of these response posts are in the Personals section, though a few pop up on the Jobs boards every now and then, usually in the form of some indignant user who is appalled that someone on the Internet expects others to work for free. The romance responses are always the best, though. Listening to people on craigslist argue about dating etiquette is like listening to a room full of Young Earth Creationists argue about scientific accuracy.



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Craigslist Files #86: The Blog

By msarko on 8/18/10 5:07pm
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started with a half-eaten cheese sandwich, ended with thisstarted with a half-eaten cheese sandwich, ended with thisThis week is going to be especially craigslist-heavy because I've decided to spend some time on the site's supplementary features. This urge to dive into craigslist's extraneous tendrils came about when the site updated its look. Really, "updated" isn't the right word. Google-fied is more like it. See, while most businesses make their interactive components, be they websites, storefronts or products, slicker and more visually appealing over time, Google has taken the opposite tack. As evidenced by the most recent dress-down of Gmail, Google is on a mission to make everything look like a slapped-together website from the earliest days of the Internet, that scrappy era before the invention of clip art or custom backgrounds. The new Gmail just looks like someone stole a bunch of features off the old Gmail, but apparently it takes up less space and stresses Google's servers a little less. Whatever, it's free and reliable. The craigslist update is another thing altogether. The old page, which was already as sparse as possible, seems to have been needlessly crunched into a smaller column with blank space on either side. This is either the prep work for a List with ads on the side or some kind of chicanery to make the site more mobile-app-friendly. Regardless, the tighter quarters forced me to rub eyeballs with some of those links on the margins, leading me to such items as the craigslist Youtube channel (also connected to a Twitter feed in some kind of terrifying Internet trifecta) and the craigslist blog.



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Craigslist Files #85: N.O. Cupid

By msarko on 8/11/10 5:52pm
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I fear for sex and love in the 21st century. I know those two things will exist as long as mammals do but they might continue to manifest in increasingly disturbing forms. The Internet has jumped on the sex train with reckless abandon, amplifying everything about human mating habits, from stimulation exaggeration to abject humiliation. Porn, IM dirty talk, frickin' sexting, shudder Chatroulette... the list grows every year. When it comes to the other side of the equation, love, the Internet is far behind the pursuit of flesh. It's not that it's not trying, just that the efforts are a little half-hearted compared to their sexual counterparts. Nowhere is this more prevalent than on craigslist.



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Craigslist Files #84: Pimpin' Ain't Easy

By msarko on 8/4/10 2:29pm
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the face of sexual liberation on craigslistthe face of sexual liberation on craigslistToday, craigslist's own CEO Jim Buckmaster released his very own national media Rants & Raves post once again defending his site's role in 21st century cyber-whoring. In his essay he makes a few good points along with a few claims that are borderline ridiculous. I'd be remiss if I didn't use this column to respond to Buckmaster's article (and let's be honest, mock it a bit).



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Craigslist Files #83: The First Colony

By msarko on 7/28/10 11:56pm
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Aside from being a current source of absurd heat, Virginia is famous for being the very first colony of the British Empire in North America. As such, it has had more time than anywhere else in the nation to both mature and absorb the inherent craziness of the United States. My own recent visit to the Richmond area got me wondering what kind of weirdness I'd find on its craigslist page, especially considering that the region itself is like a living List. The multiple Colonial Era tourist traps are like the most ridiculous Activities ads made flesh and the city has an arbitrary (not to mention wholly undeserved) obsession with pancakes that echoes some of the more Spergin' aspects of the List. A quick jaunt through Richmond's actual Activities page doesn't skimp on the crazy.



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Craigslist Files #82: Recovery Effort

By msarko on 7/21/10 3:48pm
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Pain and Negativity CAN Convert Into Happiness!

To some people, the idea of self-help or self improvement is not very REAL. Somehow they just never think in those terms. They never thought that they could DO something to
change their lives to the better.

This is a selection from a much longer post in the Community section. As is fairly obvious, it's a long-winded ad for some kind of quasi-spiritual support group. Aside from wondering how exactly group therapy counts as self-help, this post got me curious about the Recover page on the craigslist forums. If it isn't abundantly clear by now (or if you're just new to this column), I didn't have high hopes for the List's ability to actually help people with real problems. Going to craigslist to make your life happier and more normal is like to trying to get your rocks off to the Cathy comic strip. You can certainly try but you'll probably be worse off for either outcome.



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Craigslist Files #81: Guide for the Perplexed

By msarko on 7/14/10 3:02pm
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Craigslist provides no real guidance to its users. The instructions and warnings posted on the site only imply the true nature of what actually happens there. They advise you to avoid having unprotected sex with strangers but they say nothing about the frightening, becondomed people you're likely to meet in the Personals section. They tell you that nobody actually mails whole automobiles and that nobody honest has used a personal wire transfer for decades, though there's nothing on the site about the inevitable scent of piss one will find in much of the For Sale section's goods. When I look at a lot of the posts that show up on craigslist, especially those in Community, I can't help but see them as doe-eyed innocents walking into a place they don't know is horrible.



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Craigslist Files #80: Et Tu, Cetera?

By msarko on 7/7/10 4:14pm
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don't let the cuteness fool you, he's full of munitionsdon't let the cuteness fool you, he's full of munitionsIf any of the features on craigslist function, even at a fraction of the quality they're supposed to, the Jobs section does. Sure, the overwhelming majority of the posts in Jobs are still fake in one way or another, but there are enough genuine posts for actual employment that the section's continued existence is justified. In fact, even the fake posts in Jobs are pretty boring. Most of them are get rich quick schemes presented in all-caps or some other, similarly obvious trick. If you want to get a laugh, or possibly a chill down your spine, when visiting Jobs you have to go to the bottom and read ETC. While the Jobs subsections cover a lot of professional ground, there are still some reasonable gaps in the categories. Sometimes it's because there just aren't enough listings to require a whole page (like pet-related jobs) and sometimes it's because they're not really "jobs" in the strictest sense, like the ubiquitous posts for human egg harvesting. The following is just a taste of what you can expect from the ETC listings.



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Craigslist Files #79: To Russia With Love

By msarko on 6/30/10 5:05am
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I've popped around to a lot of craigslist pages both foreign and domestic, and I have to say that Russia's List is by far one of my personal favorites. I've come to believe, as I'm sure a lot of people have by now, that the reason the USSR and USA had such an adversarial relationship after World War II was because our two cultures are so much alike. Sure, some of the details are different. We're beer people, they're vodka people. They love potatoes, we love corn. They wanted a government that screwed corporations and we then (as now) supported corporations that collectively screwed our government. But America and Russia have so much in common, especially since the fall of Soviet communism. Both of our societies love supermodels, ill-advised wars and are proud of the fact that the middle of both our countries is comprised of large swathes of backward, useless nothingness. Perhaps that's why craigslist Russia has such a high quotient of ridiculous and awful material. RusskieList is just as insane as America's, which is why I love it.



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