Albert Shin

Facebook will kill Craigslist.

As moving season approached in Boston, I found myself casually browsing through the Facebook Marketplace section quite often. There was so much more volume (and liquidity).

Sure the Craigslist UI is not great for managing multiple items for sale but I also think the gap may be due to more trust that Facebook users have in the conversations they have. For example, before asking to buy something, I was able to manually check out user profiles and decide whether they were legitimate or would be quicker to respond (e.g. complete profile, graduate student obviously moving out this weekend, etc.). Perhaps due to this filtering, I noticed that the response rate was much higher than Craigslist as well.

And so I realized that Facebook will kill Craigslist. Facebook has basically crated a digital directory. In the short term, creating legitimate looking Facebook profiles that people would willingly buy things from come at a higher cost to a scammer than creating fake emails.[1]

However, in the long term, I could see that Facebook becomes closer linked to your actual identity that it becomes difficult to fake. [2] Some Facebook groups effectively function like Facebook Marketplace but in a closed settings as well (e.g. MIT Free and For Sale, Harvard Housing, etc.). These groups require email verification of a certain type (e.g. @mit.edu) or the approval of an admin who has the list of all pre-approved users. This could easily translate over to Marketplace in multiple ways: perhaps owning or using Libra (Facebook's digital currency) may be very much a proof of identity in the future.[3]

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[1] If Facebook goes down this path of basically becoming the digital identity directory, there's one potentially unfortunate implication of marginalizing certain users that prefer privacy. If you dont want to have a Facebook account, you can't participate. Sure, Craigslist's lack of monitoring (and thus preserving privacy)comes at a potential cost of scams, misleading posts, but everyone is able to participate. I've probably made a separate throwaway Gmail account for craigslist every time I've moved: albertmovesagain/*insertyearhere/*@gmail.com.

[2] I have kept my Facebook deactivated for 2 years (and wow my ad relevance really did fall). I caved in to get a nice office chair for cheap. Ad relevance shot back up in a single day. Is this the new trade off? The price of accessing the "free" marketplace?

[3] Bloomberg already has a closed marketplace for their terminal users (which costs $24k/year and usually a finance career to get access to... so a pretty good proof of identity). Maybe LinkedIn should follow suit?...