This post is an example of the Silicon Valley echo chamber at its finest.<p>With regards to the vertical sites eating their base, I call BS. Regular users who don't live on the internet can't/don't want to remember 50 different sites. The halo effect for a marketplace site like this is very strong.<p>Craigslist is fighting extremely hard against spam, to the point where they're starting to make people jump through hoops by requiring phone numbers and texting confirmation codes for certain categories. They've even resorted to silent "hellban" style hiding for posts called "ghosting", which affects a lot of innocent posters in the housing categories. There's unfortunately a lot of money in scamming, so the scams keep coming despite all of this.<p>The dip in traffic is pretty easily explainable by the banning of adult content, and I've never known Compete/Quantcast to be even within 3x of actual numbers, so using those as proof of anything is pretty dubious. This may be different on a site as large as CL, but even on sites with millions of monthly visitors, I've seen some laughably wrong numbers.<p>RE: Craigslist not being "Social", what is more social than person-to-person selling? Does he just mean that they haven't put ugly buttons for x different social networks that their main constituency has never heard of?<p>Craigslist is all about being useful and accessible, fad of the week be damned. Their design decisions have made it harder to do quality control, but it has made it accessible to people to whom posting on many of the sites you take for granted would be confusing. It's a tradeoff, and it has worked out wonderfully for them on the whole.