Craigslist Adult Services Shut Down Worldwide | Hacker News Reader

Craigslist Adult Services Shut Down Worldwide

mashable.com

8 pointsbjonathan19 comments

Another victory in the war on consenting adults choosing what to do, with whom to do it, and the terms upon which they do it with each other!

What surprises me when I read this stuff from my comfortable perch in Canada, is how schizophrenic America can appear to the outside world. On the one hand, there's a fierce independence from government, a belief in making your own choices and not allowing the government to meddle in your private affairs.

And on the other hand, there's stuff like this, stuff that looks to a Canadian like being deeply un-American, deeply opposed to American values.

It's puzzling to this American as well. I too see these things as deeply un-American.

What's worse is that, as other commenters are mentioning, this makes it more difficult to track human traffickers.

In High School civics class Back In The Day we discussed a study that showed that a significant majority of Americans would agree with the statement "People should be able to advocate any political belief, no matter how wrong" but an equally significant majority would disagree with "People should be able to advocate Nazi beliefs." That is, people hold many abstract beliefs that they don't apply to specific situations.

I don't agree with this assessment at all. I know myself not to be the only person on HN with this take on the situation. But I would rather bite down on a live, wriggling cockroach than debate it on HN. If you posted this comment because you wanted to hear the contrary take on this, feel free to email me. If you posted for some other reason, feel free to ignore.

No need to debate. I'm perfectly aware that real life is far too complex to boil down to simple slogans like "Government should be big/small" or "People should/shouldn't have the right to _____."

My observation is that the image or brand presented to the outside world is contradictory, not that there's anything amiss in how you choose to govern yourselves.

I don't think you've oversimplified. I think you and I completely disagree about the regulation of prostitution. But I'm no more interested in debating than you are; I'm just saying: look at this fine orange-and-grey-tinged echo chamber we've built here.

That's a very good point, thanks!

If you remember who America's ancestors were (religious zealots) you can guess at a lot of its present behaviors with less surprise.

In related news, Craigslist Personals now rendered entirely useless by the sudden influx of covert Adult Services ads.

Craigslist's primary reason for ever creating an Adult Services category was simply to keep that sort of content out of every other category. You could imagine the situation now as similar to what would happen if Gmail's spam filter were suddenly disabled.

Worldwide prostitution has ended! (/sarcasm)

Thank you to all the politicians who lobbied to make it possible for human traffickers to move further into the recesses of the web, allowing them to continue advertising in other print and net classifieds without Craigslist's continued cooperation with the authorities.

Prostitution classifieds will save print! Thank you, Craigslist!

"Adult Services, which was previously titled “Erotic Services,” was expected to generate $36 million in revenue this year for Craigslist, nearly one-third of the $122 million the entire company has been projected to pull in."

That's a devastating blow, if it really amounted to that much revenue for Craigslist.

Given those figures, it's clear that a market exists for these services, so who will get the business now that Criagslist has withdrawn from it?

That paragraph of the article was completely irrelevant: Adult Services was never part of whatever Craigslist considers its "business plan." Craigslist doesn't try, in any way, shape, or form, to optimize for profit in the way a publicly-traded company would. Disregarding the fact that running a single ad on each page would make them ridiculous amounts of money, they're not even charging for ads in any but a few category/location pairs (e.g. real-estate in NYC.)

I don't see how a loss of tens of millions in revenue qualifies as "irrelevant". Even if it wasn't part of their business plan, it is money lost.

Because it's money they weren't planning on making, and could easily replace severalfold through one of several quick, simple changes to their site if they cared to. They weren't re-investing it in the business, using it to grow or hire; it was simply sitting in their coffers or being paid out as bonuses and charity donations. In short, if you consider Craigslist a black box, losing this income source will have no visible effect on the external operations of that black box—it will be as if it hadn't happened.

The relevance to the biz depends on where that revenue was going.

Suppose that $100M/year had been going into Craig Newmark's bank account and he had been contributing that money to charity on a regular basis.

Reducing that $100M to $30M would be irrelevant as far as Craigslist-the-company is concerned even though it would be a big hit to the charities.

Craigslist is believed to be owned by a couple of people plus EBay's 25%, so the above scenario is possible.

Are we going to ban computers, newspapers, the Latin alphabet, telephones, magazines, and street corners, too?

After all, the pernicious influence of sex must be eradicated, everywhere. We must stop at nothing!

I guess they can go back to trolling the help wanted section.

http://www.startribune.com/local/south/11545261.html

(KO was a friend of mine, and I find all this grandstanding offensive. It's not going to prevent murder, and it certainly won't prevent prostitution.)

" following the suicide of 24-year-old Philip Markoff, who had been accused of murdering one and robbing three women he met through listings in the section."

why put the blame in CL? people should be responsible wherever they are and not point their fingers to someone else's when something goes wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com