I think it might fall under "unfair business practice" and get us all sued.

Beat CL by building better verticals.

If it was deemed an "unfair business practice" to post spam or repeatedly flag posts, then a newspaper could not pay its people to do it. True. The business is responsible for anything its employees do in surrogate.

And it should be pointed out that the CraigsList Terms of Use prohibit spam. So spamming Craigslist can come with the loss of access to the site, and with a financial penalty, if Craigslist pursued it. Still, there's a lot of spam on the site.

Oddly, the Terms of Use says nothing about mis-flagging. The closest it comes to barring its users from mis-flagging posts is one line that says:

"You agree not to post, email, or otherwise make available Content . . . that otherwise negatively affects other users' ability to use the Service."

But even that line talks only of posting, not removing posts. Seems like an oversight to me. Or, a loophole to someone more malicious.

Still, it would take a lot of people flagging posts to get a significant amount removed. There are only two ways to accomplish that:

1) Some sort of bot attack.

2) An organized protest by a large segment of Craigslist users.

In my mind, either scenario could realistically happen if Craigslist angered a group significantly enough.

You have a devious mind Mr. Grindley!

But as newspaper sites pursue their "online community building" and "user-generated content initiatives," well, let's not spit in the wind, eh?

Well, for one, big media has enough trouble staffing their newsrooms let alone hire someone to spam. heh.

I don't know what to think of a Craig Newman that spends his time behind his computers cliking on a button to eliminate spammers, then wants to be a journalist dedicated to "citizen journalism" after eliminating the jobs of so many other journalists by dumping the rates of ads "on behalf of spam"....

Spam worsens the user experience for everyone, and should be stopped.

Yet, Craig Newmark seems determined not to implement a bunch of safe guards that could prevent spam, such as registration or even a user ratings system that is eBay-esque. His only acceptable way to stop spam is charging users. Seems odd to me that he wouldn't try something else, but I suppose he doesn't make money off those other ideas.

Everyone deserves to get paid. What I don't like is how he parades around claiming to not care about money and claiming to spend so much time on customer service and fighting spammers, yet he's blind to any idea that isn't - charge users.

If he's going to charge users one day, be upfront from the beginning about the plans. And in the meantime, until sites are "mature" enough to charge, do something serious about spam.