However, Facebook Marketplace seems to be slowly gaining traction. Which I hate for all the reasons you mention. I dread the day it takes over :(
With Craigslist, this always felt like an unintended consequence. With facebook, it seems like one of their top ten strategies for getting us to devolve into mineshaft dwelling mole people that live in the metaverse.
In this case, I would say the participants of the local society are responsible for paying for journalism and working to support local elections. But even then, you could come up with arguments such as so and so population was too poor and had to work two jobs and did not have time to attend city/county/state meetings, or were not sufficiently educated or literate to understand them, etc.
Not hard to extract, nor worth getting heated about.
Not having local newspapers/journalism causing problems with the local civic process is a separate problem, that has nothing to do with technology enabling sellers and buyers to reach each other more easily.
Better for whom?
The discoveries of fossil fuels brought about new ways of solving certain problems, with the benefit of hindsight they too were also not without fairly major negative consequences.
"Technology" isn't just relentlessly positive.
But where your value proposition is created by code your code defines your business model to a critical extent.
what?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness
It's sixth-grade Civics class: Without strong local and national press to hold politicians and public figures accountable, the country crumbles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate
Sadly, it seems even the Fourth Estate doesn't know its name and/or role. Being a parrot and/or sock puppet doesn't qualify (as journalism).
"The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues.[1]"
My point is, we have "journalists" whining about "the democracy" and those same "journalists" aren't aware how badly their profession has already failed said institution / ideal.
Imagine pulling up to a fire. Tossing on buckets of flammable liquids. And then with a straight face claim to be a firefighter. It's Orwellian. The lack of self-awareness is not only embarrassing, but it's become down right dangerous.
People consume press and news media on their own volition, and even more less-vetted but newsworthy information through social media. Journalists are gassing what consumers respond to.
I believe what’s happened is that in the past, local news consumers were aware of their own “fire” (crime, civics, politics) and now in a connected world it feels like their standing amongst a great massive fire, but really they just have visibility into all of the little fires (or consternation that their local fire doesn’t seem important to anyone).
Even the concept of being able to report on an issue without becoming entangled in it has become anathema. The concept was, of course, always a fiction, but fictions matter. All morality is fictional, if not all reality. Even self-styled centrists and moderates tend to tacitly accept this new narrative; that dispassion and distance is impossible and undesirable.
Many older journalists who were keeping the flame alive crumbled during the Trump years. It was understandable, but it was sort of a one-way street; they accepted defeat and have largely embraced the new narrative.
I think we've all done this, myself included. It's one thing to recognize a pathology, but quite another to seek to address it, and yet another to actually succeed. Now we're all sort of lost in the wilderness. Even the ones who have clear memories from whence we came don't know how to get back.
Congress.com isn’t all that helpful if the laws are verbose and often at time seemingly obtuse.
Printing press is one such vehicle whose time may have come, unless digital realm has slips its stranglehold on this fourth estates.
Newspapers can and should recapture their market by allowing citizens, both verified and anonymously) to post their events, may that it be a house fire, stolen car, robbery, or shenanigans by politicians.
Newspapers may be able to recapture further if they provide a running tabulation of such categories.
But what do I know, the fourth estates is probably already hijacked by social media in their own bastardized manners.
On the other hand, national newspapers completely ignored the needs and concerns of “rural White America” and that’s why they were caught flat footed and couldn’t understand the rise of Trump.
The press has never been concerned about anyone outside of Middle class White America it needed to die or evolve.
But there's one simple, guiding principle that I'm always following. And that's refusing to reactivate my FB account.
That said, I've definitely had less success on the sales side than I did in years prior, but I can't tell if that's what I'm selling being worth less used these days (desktop computers?), or if Facebook Marketplace is the de-facto place to check.
Boston has a lot of good stuff in some areas. Need random leftover shelves? A pile of screened loam? Secondhand office furniture? An unused China set from the 1960s? No problem. But good luck trying to buy and sell normal home goods with any efficiency there; it will clear much much faster on FB marketplace. Maybe even for a better price.