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.
Conversely, most of my encounters of CL were short and to the point and resolved one way or the other in usually an hour. If the people you’re dealing with are familiar with how it works, it’s two emails, one each way, and maybe a clarification/announcement text.
It’s like, where/when? Maybe another question. Here/time, text number, answer or not.
If it’s more drawn out than that, they’re usually a fucking idiot and it’s not worth pursuing, as they’ll have already sold it to some guy that walked past the sign in the yard by the time they remember how to send an email