Why Amazon is Good for Craigslist

I’ve always been a fan of craigslist. I’ve sold tons of furniture, two cars, and even a reptile. I admire Jim Buckmaster, who, incidentally, brought me up to the Bay Area when he hired me as a developer at another startup back in the day.

I recently came across a post which claims Craigslist’s fight against spam is becoming more challenging. New counter-spam techniques are tested, only to be defeated by spammers armed with increasingly sophisticated software and schemes.

Historically, the Craigslist community has been vigilant in keeping listings fair and honest by being able to ‘flag’ any post. Everyone can become a virtual watchdog and keep the muck out. But when the ‘community’ is infiltrated by bots, the game changes a bit. At some tipping point, it becomes extremely difficult for the good guys to outpace the bad ones. 

There are two ways to solve this problem. One involves advanced heuristic algorithms that require a lot of hardware, code, and money - very doable given their estimated revenue. But the other is likely cheaper and more plausible to work as the cat and mouse games continue to evolve: fight people with people.

Enter the Turk

A while back, Amazon rolled out a unique Web service known as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). The idea was simple: take tasks that may be challenging or costly for computers to perform and farm it out to a virtual workforce of people who, in exchange for doing the task, get monetary compensation. 

The Mechanical Turk is a great fit for craigslist because in most cases, a human is better at determining whether a listing is spammy. A machine will have the advantage when looking for patterns across listings (e.g. duplicated mass listings with slight variations). But give a person a single page and within seconds a determination will be made.

Any developer can integrate an app with the Mechanical Turk through its API, with clients available for Java, Perl, Ruby, and more. A hypothetical craigslist integration could look like the following illustration:

Those Listings Add Up Quick

Even with a conservative cost of one cent per completed task, given the number of monthly listings (Googling it shows an estimated 30 million), craigslist’s bill from Amazon would be significant. Perhaps they could limit the use AMT to listings considered suspect based on their existing anti-spam algorithms. But I think Amazon should throw it in for free - well, there’s a catch of course.

How Are You Gonna Pay For This

One of the biggest things missing from craigslist is a payment platform. Low ticket items are usually paid with cash. But as we start getting up there, there’s definitely an area where cash and checks become a bit of a drag. And as we get further into m-commerce, being able to complete a transaction with your phone at a local garage sale visit will become the norm. There’s nothing preventing craigslist users from using PayPal or Google Checkout today but having an integrated option could make things easier.

A payment system can also be used to establish trust and reputation. Sure, there will always be some level of fraud, but it will be the lesser of two evils compared to today’s world of ‘buyers’ offering to pay with wire transfers. And I don’t believe a payment system will detract from the emphasis on ‘local’ community. People will continue to buy from others in their zip code; it’ll simply be a lot easier to pay for stuff.

Amazon’s Payment Systems is a relatively new entrant to the space. They are marketing it to developers to help proliferate it. Obviously an endorsement by someone like craigslist would be huge. Since Amazon gets a cut from each transaction, a nice revenue stream would arise if all of a sudden, 1 out of every 10 listings resulted in a payment transaction.  For this reason, Amazon could afford to give away Mechanical Turk for free and even fund the cost of each task payout.

What do you think? Would Amazon’s services make craigslist a better place?