How to improve Craigslist: essay by Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce — author, lecturer, Virtual Reality pioneer, and co-author of VRML — says,

After reading the recent BoingBoing post about Craigslist and the TOUs of relationships (hilariously well put), I put down my own thoughts about how to improve the CL experience for all its millions of users.

Link to his essay, "Trust But Verify." Snip:

You need present no credentials to post to Craigslist, other than a valid email address. Since these are notoriously easy to acquire – and easy to spoof, or make opaque and anonymous – an email address provides no trust information whatsoever. Yet Craigslist does have a login capability, so it can potentially record each of the interactions users have through the system. It could collect data about the quality of the trust interactions users experience on Craigslist, and use this information to annotate all of the postings on the system.

In short, every posting on Craigslist could be accompanied by metadata which allows users to have some basic sense of the trustworthiness of the other participant in a given transaction. With each successive transaction, Craigslist could begin to model an emergent digital social network, developed from observation, and supplemented by a user's list of first-degree contacts.

With over 10 million visitors a month – many of them repeat users – it should be relatively easy to develop a strong trust model, combining elements of both the eBay and Friendster systems, to produce an effective and anonymous solution (anonymous, that is, from the user's perspective, as this information can be maintained opaquely within Craigslist, though this brings up a further question of whether Craigslist itself can be trusted, which can only be learned via a user's long-term interactions with Craigslist itself).

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