Craigslist turns 25 this year. It's become the biggest market for online classified ads, but it looks pretty much the same as it did 15 years ago. 'It's like a shark that's never had to evolve,' says Jessa Lingel, who wrote a history of Craigslist.
As Craigslist celebrates 25 years this year, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly spoke to Lingel, who is also an assistant professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, about how the site has managed to keep on keeping on.On Craigslist users posting anonymously, contrary to sites such as Facebook
That policy goes back to Craigslist's early days in the 1990s when it was very common to be anonymous online or pseudonymous, you know, using pseudonyms or fake names. And just like they haven't changed their appearance, they have never let go of that policy. And they see that policy as providing a form of protection and privacy to their users.
So it is true that there have been some, you know, very violent crimes. There's been scams on Craigslist. But of course, there are also scams on platforms that we think of as much classier or much safer. There's scams on LinkedIn, on eBay, on Facebook. So it isn't so much that the anonymity means that crime happens. It just means that we have a policy to blame.
So on a platform like Airbnb, for example, if you're trying to get a rental, people can discriminate against you based on how you look. We actually know for a fact that there have been these high-profile incidents on Airbnb ofSo suddenly on a site like Craigslist, you can rent an apartment, you can try and search for a job. And you don't have to worry about people discriminating against you because you're anonymous.
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