I received the following e-mail from a gentleman named Ken…
I learned of your site today via an article from MSNBC.com. Upon reading your about section, you state:
“This is not a personal attack on online classifieds sites per se however some of them such as craigslist and the Village Voice Media owned backpage.com have engaged in certain business practices I feel are detrimental not only to their user base but to the public at large.”
Could you please explain, reference, and use specifics as to what you feel those practices are?
I thank you in advance for your time and consideration.
First off Ken I want to thank you for your well written e-mail. I don’t get a lot of those these days. But you’ll have to forgive me for my bluntness when I say that just about every post on this site in one way or another features the bad business practices of craigslist and backpage.
The most glaring one that I can think of is that both backpage and craigslist allowed women and children to be trafficked on their sites under the guises of ‘escorts’ and adult services. A lot of the time collecting money for these ads while always denying that they ever had a hand in the facilitation of the trafficking.
The other one that immediately leaps to mind is that fact that craigslist is still for the most part unmoderated and that their community policing has worked the opposite way it has been intended. For example through craigslist’s unmoderated casual encounters section two women have been the victims of what I’ve been calling rape by proxy. Not to mention that people who try to advertise legitimate businesses on craigslist have had their ads flagged by people whose businesses aren’t so legitimate.
Also I’d like to mention that craigslist has been rated poorly by the Better Business Bureau time and time again.
If I had the time Ken I’m sure I could come up with many more instances but in the mean time you’re more than welcome to peruse the site for yourself to see many instances of their bad business practices.
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