Documentary Chronicles Craigslist's Virtual Community
from the watch-those-bizarre-posters-go dept
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you almost definitely know about Craigslist. However, it's a little tough to describe to people who don't use it. While it is, basically, a site where people can post or find information about what they want to buy, sell, rent, or do, it's actually much more. There's a whole community that has grown up around it, and for many people in the Bay Area, it's the first choice place to look for events, jobs, services, housing or even just random amusement. So, it's interesting to hear that a film maker is trying to capture this community by making a documentary about Craigslist and following a number of people as they use it. Not sure how such a project will turn out. It could be really interesting - or it could be pretty boring. From my own standpoint, I've had very mixed results using Craigslist. While it has been useful for some things, I've also discovered a certain amount of online rudeness through it. When selling and buying things on Craigslist, many of the people I dealt with were not particularly polite in their dealings, and seemed to think that, because it was all online (and there's no "feedback" like with eBay) they could deal with you in ways that almost no one would deal with you in person.
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Mixed luck
If anything, I find the most annoying feature to be the "community events" ads for "today's events", in which people advertise something that will happen 10 days from now. That and the threadless, amorphic structure of the forums.
When the documentary comes out, I expect the site will be ruined fast by the spam-hurling rabble.
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