For one thing, the tone of the flag help forum is that of a hazing circle. It's just a lot of people sitting around being snarky, making rude comments at relative novices and calling them names.

Which might be easier to swallow if they actually provided any real help - but unless your post is bog-standard flag-bait the advice given is usually off the mark. I sat through a number of threads besides my own and it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements.

Personally, I was looking for collaborative help in a photography project, and posted to gigs - but according to the great wisdom to flag-help I really should've been posting to services-creative instead (???)

The problem here is also that there is no safeguard against other posters flagging each other's content. Using the flag feature to push competing postings off the page is depressingly common, and the there is neither accountability nor reliability in the flags themselves.

Correct, it's up to the poster to construct an ad that can stay up. Community standards are different from city to city, but it's not Craigslist's job to keep ads up that the community doesn't want to see. Where is the "accountability and reliability" in your newspaper's classifieds? You think some editor at the Star Tribune is double-checking that that muscle car being advertised isn't actually a bucket of bolts?

The dominant "mechanism" or thought process I see getting thwarted on Craigslist is that since time-immemorial, classified ads (and really, ads in general) operated by the ethic of "Here it is, if you don't like it then you don't have to buy it (also: shut up)." Craigslist inverts this relationship and puts the power into the readers' hands: "You don't like getting flagged? Feel free to post your ad on some other website." This, I feel, is the most political thing that Craigslist has done: instead of forcing readers to overlook bad ads, it tries to motivate sellers not to write bad ads in the first place. That so many here are angry about having gotten flagged off in the past tells me that they were doing the bare minimum in writing their ad anyway. Good riddance, I say. It's not like Craigslist will die without whiners complaining about them.

By and large the people most frustrated with their Craigslist posting experience are those who just barf out a self-serving ad and expect the invisible hand of Adam Smith to protect their "right" to get $1200 for a Britney Spears ticket.

it seems like the user base is 50% there to flog newbies, and 50% there to make wrong statements.

If this was your experience, I'd look to the attitude of the person asking for help. There is a certainly an amount of "RTFM" in the flag forums, but so few RTFM. Lots and lots of people get "real help" in the flag forums. Unfortunately, lots and lots of other people have a "don't like it? don't buy it." attitude.

No, it doesn't - it puts powers into other advertisers' hands as much as it does the users. You are also forgetting that time is not a fundamentally equal resource - in my case it seems like there are griefers on the subcategory who consistent (and around the clock, it seems) flag posts that rub them the wrong way. Perhaps it's other regular posters trying to push competing posts out of the way (very, very likely, and in fact a common tactic), or maybe a disgruntled user with a beef against a subcategory and too much time on his hands. The problem here is griefers - and there is no mechanism to stop them.

Compare this with MMORPGs - players with a lot of time on their hands can stand to be incredibly powerful in ways that normal players cannot. Most games balance for this by nerfing extreme regulars and boosting infrequent players to lessen the gap. It doesn't remove the incentive of playing more, but it prevents situations where a bunch of Lv. 100 wizards are just constantly destroying a bunch of Lv. 10 noobs. CL faces the same problem - the morality police, griefers, and other obsessive users gum up the entire system.

> "That so many here are angry about having gotten flagged off in the past tells me that they were doing the bare minimum in writing their ad anyway."

This is an attitude I saw a lot on the flag-help forum, but I read through a large number of threads and I'd wager 95% of them were just fine - neither violating the TOU, nor being offensive, nor being illegal... There are many lower-traffic subcategories where the flag threshold for being pulled is absurdly low.

That's the problem with flag-help. Most posts submitted there don't have anything obviously wrong with them, and the flag-helpers are either there to flog the newbie for daring to have a post that got flagged, or speculate on various non-obvious reasons why a post was flagged. In the end nobody gets anywhere except in the 5% of cases where the questionable nature of the post is obvious, this is pointed out, and everyone goes on their merry ways.

> "By and large the people most frustrated with their Craigslist posting experience are those who just barf out a self-serving ad and expect the invisible hand of Adam Smith to protect their "right" to get $1200 for a Britney Spears ticket."

Citation required. I hung out on the flag-help forum for a couple of hours after posting my own, digging through past posts. The vast majority of the posts that go through there are neither self-serving nor entitled. They're just normal ads that get pulled for seemingly inexplicable reasons. The flag feature is neither accountable nor does it come with context. All there is is speculation on maybe, kind of, probably why something was flagged, where really this information needs to come from the flaggers themselves. The usage of the flag as an offensive feature between posters is also almost trivially easy to stop, but yet CL has done nothing.

The flag-help forum posters are also ill-qualified for the job, since they don't have any data on why posts get flagged either! All they can do is speculate - but without any input from real flaggers their speculation is about as reliable as anyone else's. For obvious offensiveness this works, but from what I saw the vast majority of posts that pass through there were flagged for anything but obvious reasons, and the responses are not informed.

> "If this was your experience, I'd look to the attitude of the person asking for help."

I gather from the tone of this sentence that you're a flag-help poster yourself. I saw dozens of puzzled people come into the forum, be perfectly respectful and polite, only to be faced with snark and derision from the "old boys club" of flag-help users. The prevailing attitude was "how dare you post something that got flagged, you sketchy sleazebag you! Here's some random speculation from me because there's nothing obviously wrong with your post, and your confusion and bewilderment as a result will only be further proof that you are not only posting shite content to the site, but clueless to boot!"

I've given up on Craigslist entirely from both a user and advertiser perspective. Mass-posters routinely flout the minimum-post-frequency guidelines, with nobody seemingly policing this abuse. Large advertisers will routinely flag competing posts to weed out competition. Griefers make the smaller, low-traffic subcategories impossible to use. Craigslist used to be a reliable way to just find simple classifieds, but the griefers and spammers have gotten more savvy and are exploiting the system straight to hell, and CL is still operating in the bubble of "the users know what's best" when their main audience has little to no say at all.

As far as I'm aware, nobody knows what logic or thresholds are used by CL. Common wisdom is that it's "lots" but there seems to be no reason whatsoever to think that.

Look at it this way: read the comments here. Which is it, Craigslist is full of spam and a terrible place to browse; or Craigslist lets ads get flagged off too easily and it's a terrible place to sell? Only one of those is possible.

No, both are possible, and in fact both are true.

Look at apartment listings - in any major city full of spam, obviously posting far more frequently than is allowed. I've tried flaggin these posts - but it looks like the flag threshold is proportionate to the category's traffic level. Which is to say, for something like apts/housing, very high. Makes sense on paper until you realize there aren't enough dedicated users policing to actually make the flags a working feature on these categories. So yes, shitty experience for browsers, chock full of spam.

Turn around, look at smaller categories where the flag threshold seems to become very low (say, anything outside the realm of selling/renting physical goods), and it becomes a terrible place to sell. Perfectly innocuous posts are flagged off for inexplicable reasons (believe me, I've sat through the flag-help posts and seen plenty of these), and incredibly common for competing advertisers to use the flag feature offensively against similar postings. So yes, too easy to flag and terrible place to sell.

You can insist all you like, and pretend that anyone who gets posts flagged is obviously doing something wrong - you'd be right there with the rest of flag-help after all, but that doesn't change the fact that the flag system is routinely abused and seriously compromises the credibility of CL. It's simultaneously too strict to filter to spam, and too lenient that it generates mass numbers of false positives. It's an utter failure of an abuse-detection scheme.

Craigslist is ripe for being disrupted - it's already happened in some categories, and there is a lot of ache in the market for the others. For me it's been relatively little loss - I've been using the craigslist-disruptor-equivalent to gigs/creative and it works great, much better than CL.

How can you say that? How does your personal experience of flagging postings in any way give you insight into the closed CL system?

I agree that flagging/community moderation is a good and necessary thing, I just think CL does it in an absolutely terrible way.

For example, if people find your post annoying, there is no "flag as annoying," or "flag and leave a comment." Instead, someone inadvertently offends someone else, and their post is taken down as spam. This example has netted only irritation for all parties involved, with no learning or progress. To me, that is simply a bad system.