Craigslist Files #53: Adaptation

according to Rants and Raves: dead.

It is not possible for craigslist to remain in any one condition for very long. Like some kind of living entity its individual sections, like organic tissues, adapt to pressures both internal and external, evolving over time into an effectively different creature. More plainly, craigslist is an online resource that people use. So, highly volatile sections like Rants and Raves transform almost entirely over time.

There are two major categories of Internet content. Some of it is self-contained material that exists for an express, static purpose, like entertainment sites and news outlets. People visit those sites and consume their information, but the experience is essentially one-way. Then there are heavily interactive sites that behave more like tools than resources. These are sites like Wikipedia, WebMD and most of all craigslist. People don't go to these sites to see what they have to offer, they go to them looking for something specific. Basically, they want these sites to work for them.

By tooling around with the very functionality of these online mechanisms, people end up changing them on a fundamental level. As such, craigslist users change their approach to getting what they want from the site based on the environmental pressures present in any given section. This makes the posts from one mini-epoch ill-adapted to what's currently on the site. A perfect example would be the increased prevalence of spam-bots in the Personals. Like some kind of angry, horny immune system, the people who use the LTR and Casual Encounters sections have become neurotic about flagging, which in turn makes real posters paranoid of being flagged themselves, as well as pushing spammers to mimic the paranoia in an attempt to seem more genuine.

But of all the sections, Rants and Raves changes the most frequently and dramatically. Back in the earliest days of public craigslist usage, R&R was a mix of pissy tirades and anonymous Livejournal-style babbling. Somewhere along the way it became a political soapbox for all stripes of poorly informed, bigoted or downright crazy individuals who literally had no other outlet short of street corners on college campuses. Most recently, R&R seems to have changed into a combination rumor mill and depository for stories from "successful" Casual Encounters experiences. If this section was the only source of news on the planet then everyone would believe that random celebrities die every single day, flu shots are designed to kill off 90% of Earth's population and CE is a font of psycho-sexual horrors instead of the bed of scams and fiction that it actually is.

Watching Rants and Raves, as well as other sections like General and Events, transform into non-functioning mutant versions of what they're supposed to be has convinced me that the death of craigslist (and it will, like all things, one day cease to be) will result not from a buy-out or for lack of interest, but from a complete breakdown of functionality. The Internet, unlike reality, has no limit to how far things can really deviate from their intended purpose. In the real world a knife can only be so blunt before it's no longer a knife, you can only put so much sugar in your coffee before it no longer qualifies as coffee, and if you knock down enough walls a house ceases to be a house. On the Internet the names of things are no more or less real than their functions. Craigslist seems doomed to be so choked with spam, ads and the anarchy of mob behavior that it won't be able to provide even the simplest of its intended services.

I know I use this column to tear on craigslist and all that makes it absurd, but truly I don't want to see it die. Call me an idealist, but I just want a craigslist that does what it's supposed to do. I admit, I'll likely feel a wisp of honest melancholy when the site becomes an irrelevant, forgotten mess.