

Craigslist's Increasingly Complicated Battle Against Spammers - chaostheory
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080523/0327151211.shtml

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mynameishere
It took me ten seconds to find this:

<http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/w4m/693380090.html>

...and this:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Simultaneously+with+it+I+d...](http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Simultaneously+with+it+I+do+not+miss+an+opportunity+to+visit+theater%22&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-
US:official&hs=AAx&filter=0)

(27 re-submissions of the same thing all over the place.)

Whatever craigslist is doing, they aren't doing it very well. Google should
sell an api to allow a count(*) return on text.

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stcredzero
Garret Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons>

Or my short restatement: Everything that's free is abused.

~~~
davidw
Hrm. I am inclined to not see it that way, as Craigslist is most certainly not
a 'commons' in the sense of a resource owned by no one, which is the point of
"the tragedy of the commons".

CL are doing their damndest to stop these people, just that there are a lot
more spammers than CL people.

~~~
stcredzero
It doesn't matter if it's really a commons, or just something that looks like
a commons. If someone owns an empty lot that everyone in the neighborhood
treats as a commons, then the same rules apply. Without a constant effort to
clean them, those places get just as crappy as public parks in exactly the
same way. In practice, there's little difference between everyone owning
something, and everyone getting to use it for free.

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Hexstream
Pretty impressive how some people insist SO MUCH to fuck things up for
everyone just to make a couple dollars (and some even do so for free!).

~~~
stcredzero
It shouldn't surprise you. The search for ways to make $$$ is a part of
seeking $$$. (The meta-level, if you will.)

As for the people who ^%&#$& things up for free, they are seeking to profit in
non-monetary ways.

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dpatru
Craigslist seems like it's willing to do a lot of work to avoid the simple
solution of just charging a little for postings.

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immad
It doesn't seem like it would be very hard for Craigslist to win the fight
against auto-bot posting. Some of the more sophisticated captchas are pretty
hard to crack, and they could just make people do different random things
instead of just captcha every time.

~~~
Hexstream
The more sophisticated and less automatable techniques have higher overhead
and can degrade user experience. You don't want to ask users to perform 10
special actions in order to identify themselves as human. And if you pick 10
of those actions randomly out of a bank of 100 types of action then the
spammers will reverse-engineer each type of action individually and then will
produce a function to map what's displayed by the user interface to each type
of action.

The problem is that the more the CAPTCHA-like artifacts creation process is
automatable the more their cracking tend to be automatable. And if you truly
find a way to generate CAPTCHA-likes cheaply and that are impossible to crack
by machines then the job will be shipped to the third world or the spammers
will set up sites where you have to accomplish the cracking, perhaps without
even knowing it, to get to the free stuff.

I don't expect to see the _Tragedy of the Commons_ problem resolved this
century.

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awt
It's sort of like slash and burn agriculture on the web. Spammers permanently
destroy a resource for a short term small financial gain.

