As someone who actually does flag ads (as we all agree to do by using Craigslist), I can say that it's more than "a few." Just because they don't verify the numbers doesn't mean it's low. What purpose would that serve them?
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.
> "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.
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.