Consider that Meta’s Marketplace is the largest competitor. Immediately after they launched, they quickly capitalized on their Identity Verification natural monopoly on online social networking. This was ‘pivoted’ into “Identity Verification Assurance” for your average Playstore and iPhone users.
Marketplace wasn’t even easier to use than Craigslist, 99% of the arguments for using it were “it’s safer because it’s less scams”.
I wouldn’t put it beneath Zuck and his bootlickers to pay a few bitcoins to maintain an artifically inflated number of scams on Craigslist.
It reinforces the mistaken belief that scams are driven by anonymity (instead of the truth that you can have all their data and the justice department will look the other way… that’s why they keep doing it until they scam Grant Hudson of McLean, VA).
Anyway, the faster CL dies the sooner Meta consolidates a monopoly on electronic flea marketing or whatever it’s called.
The scammers don’t need corporate money, they are everywhere, including on facebook. All dating websites are overrun with pig butcherers run from slave compounds in South Asia, all the way to your local romance scammer.
FB is overrun with other scammers primarily though, truth scammers, influence operations, but that’s another story. They are the worst of them truly though.
We should want to keep CL. I quit FB, but have the account on hold just so I can use marketplace if need be.
I hadn’t touched Facebook in yeeeears until the band I joined insisted I need to share the posts for gigs and shit and immediately I started getting all kinds of weird messages and friend requests. Fuck Facebook.