Craigslist Review

I first heard about Craigslist in a parody on an online humor site, and decided to check out the real site.  Sometimes when something is worthy of being poked fun at, it's worthy of looking into.  Turns out Craigslist isn't worthy of being noticed at all in my area, a middle-sized town in Arkansas.  Maybe if you live in a big city where there are lots of people posting Craigslist could be fun and valueable.  Afterall, the concept is cool.  It's  a free site where people can sell things, buy things, give things away, post jobs, look for room mates, look for dates, just about anything you could imagine in your newspaper's classified ads section.  However, in smaller or more rural areas like mine, it's no fun at all.  There are very few postings period, and nearly all of them aren't actual people selling their stuff or looking for roomates or such, but mostly scammer sites.  Like a posting for a job writing content for a website that I responded to, turned out to be spamming for a link to a site for your typical work from home scams.  It wasn't a job listing at all, just your garden variety inbox spam, only I had to go to the work of responding to get it.  I even out of curiosity cruised the personals section, and rather than real people looking for friends or dates or mates, it was nothing but postings from singles sites.  The classified ads where people would sell things were almost empty, a couple of people trying to sell their cars and one trying to sell a ring. None of them were real bargains.  Certainly nothing better priced than you get on ebay or through the local classifieds .  The area for things people were giving away was empty (except obvious spam like those "Free 1000 dollar gift card" sites).  Certainly nowhere near as good as freecycle.  Though the site was easy to navigate and easy to use, there was no reason to use it.  With any big high profile site that's free and open to everyone, you're going to have to weed through some stuff that's useless sometimes along with the stuff that's good, but with Craigslist there was way more useless spam than real listings.  What a waste of time! It is a great concept, a way to connect local people to goods, services, and opportunitys for free, that fails utterly when there isn't a whole lot of people in your area to use it.