Consider that Meta’s Marketplace is the largest competitor. Immediately after they launched, they quickly capitalized on their Identity Verification natural monopoly on online social networking. This was ‘pivoted’ into “Identity Verification Assurance” for your average Playstore and iPhone users.
Marketplace wasn’t even easier to use than Craigslist, 99% of the arguments for using it were “it’s safer because it’s less scams”.
I wouldn’t put it beneath Zuck and his bootlickers to pay a few bitcoins to maintain an artifically inflated number of scams on Craigslist.
It reinforces the mistaken belief that scams are driven by anonymity (instead of the truth that you can have all their data and the justice department will look the other way… that’s why they keep doing it until they scam Grant Hudson of McLean, VA).
Anyway, the faster CL dies the sooner Meta consolidates a monopoly on electronic flea marketing or whatever it’s called.
I’ve found FB to be Harder to use than CL, because they don’t give a shit where or what category you’re looking for, whereas on CL, those are the two primary filters. Because they matter the most.
If I’m looking for end tables in florida, I really don’t give a fuck about cars in hawaii. FB does not understand this.
Never thought about scams being paid for, but that makes perfect sense. Or just bots of their own to post them and not even really follow through. I wish more people still used CL, it’s so much fucking better