The whole Internet is like this now--it's a victim of its own success. "Dead Internet Theory" is correct, I believe. There must be some kind of sociological term for what happens with popular websites that become victims of their own success, like Craigslist, EBay, Facebook, all of them follow the same predictable pattern. When they are small and unknown, they are useless. Then they hit some critical mass and a wave of new adopters show up and it's amazing--for awhile--then as the inevitable grifters and thieves arrive, the whole thing becomes a turd of astronomical proportions. Then the good people disappear, leaving only the trash behind.
Craigslist hasn't sold out ever and eBay is still useful for its original purpose if you look for genuinely used things. You're confusing them with the Etsy dumpsterfire.
Craigslist never sold out, but it went through a big scammer phase (and largely lost me). Looking for an apartment in SF in 2016 was a mix of property management co spam and outright fraudulent listings trying to scam you. Not sure if they ever corrected this.
I’ve since moved to Portland, OR, where Craigslist seems to get about 10% of the listings compared to FB marketplace.
I generally love Craigslist and want it to succeed, but it hasn’t been “thriving” anywhere I’ve lived in a loooooong time.
Sounds like "enshittification" to me: During the growth phase the offering is good, but as growth inevitably slows, most companies will extract value by other means: Cutting costs/quality and raising prices are the most obvious and perhaps least nefarious tactics. There's companies that don't fall too far into this, but I think most successful ones do.
The problem of evil. The grifters and thieves always show up, late but inevitably, to the party. The game needs a patch to potentially fix though it's unclear what that patch would be and what could be it's unintended side effects
