Do you trust craigslist?

The report, “Next-Generation Media: The Global Shift” by Richard P. Adler presents a detailed document that takes a good look at some of the radical changes in the Internet and its corresponding new media. One important topic of discussion that Adler mentions is the idea of trust in the online world. In the business sense, where users of an online community perform for sale/trade transactions, the idea of trust is necessary to help keep users actively involved. Adler uses the statement of a fellow at Harvard Law School to point out that reputation systems can be used to establish trust:

When you interact with someone over time, the history of past interactions informs you about the other party’s abilities and disposition. You learn when you can count on that party, [and] the expectation of reciprocity or retaliation in future interaction creates an incentive for good behavior. Robert Axelrod refers to this as the “shadow of the future,” an expectation that people will consider each other’s past in future interactions. That shadow constrains behavior in the present. Between strangers, on the other hand, trust is much harder to build, and understandably so. Strangers do not have known past histories or the prospect of future interactions, and they are not subject to a network of informed individuals who will punish bad and reward good behavior toward any of them. In some sense, a stranger’s good name is not at stake. Given these factors, the temptation to “hit and run” outweighs the incentive to cooperate, since the future casts no shadow…. Reputation systems seek to restore the shadow of the future to each transaction by creating an expectation that other people will look back upon it (Adler 31-32).

eBay is mentioned as a good example of this, but Craigslist is an online community that would benefit from a reputation system similar to what eBay has for its users. Craigslist has remained largely unchanged since its beginnings, serving as a simple looking, centralized network of online communities that hosts free classified advertisements for almost anything. But because it has kept its simple architecture, I find that doing business on Craigslist to be a little worrisome because of the lack of a reputation system to clue the user in on the legitimacy of another user’s Craigstlist posting.One may argue that the beauty of Craigslist lies in the fact that everything on the website is barebones in structure and not feature-rich. But as a fairly consistent user of Craigslist, I would prefer that the Craigslist platform be improved by including a reputation system of some sort. While eBay has a Positve/Negative/Neutral feedback system along with short user comments, I could imagine Craigslist adopting some sort of system, at least optionally among its users. While the main purpose of Craigslist is for people to perform transactions with users geographically local to them (which would help make the transaction more trustworthy) there is still a question as to how many Craigslist transactions a user has completed, whether or not they have had problems with others in the past, so on.This could also present a problem to Craiglist because the current structure of it is based off a semi-annonymous, free, classified ad model. If a single problem user can just as easily create new user accounts, or new email addresses to post new classified listing ads without repercussion then this would be useless.Regardless, a reputation system should be taken into consideration because the fact is, even though Americans are spending more time online, they are growing more cautious about trusting information on the Internet (9). And with more new users going online, Craigslist, among other business transaction based online communities, need to establish some form of a reputation system to accommodate for the steadily increasing amount of strangers on the Internet.