Is Craigslist the last real place on the Internet?

Writer W Comedian Megan Koester landed her first writing job, reviewing Internet porn, through a Craigslist ad she answered more than 15 years ago. Several years later, she used a listing site to find the apartment where she still lives today. When she wanted to buy property, she searched Craigslist and found a plot of land in the Mojave Desert. She built a residence on it (not to mention, she later discovered, it wasn’t allowed) and furnished it entirely with finds from the free section of Craigslist, right down to the wood floors, previously used by a production company.

“There’s a lot of stuff in my life that’s filled with Craigslist,” says Koester, 42, whose Instagram account is devoted, at least in part, to cataloging screenshots of what she calls “horrific photos” from the site’s free section. On the day we spoke, she was wearing a cashmere sweater that cost her nothing, along with the faith it took to answer an ad with no pictures. “I ride or die.”

Koester is one of countless Craigslist enthusiasts, many of them in their 30s and 40s, who not only still use the old-school classifieds site but also consider it an essential, if outdated, part of their daily lives. It is a place where anonymity is still possible, where money does not need to be exchanged, and where strangers can make meaningful connections – for romantic pursuits, direct transactions, and even presenting unusual creative projects, including experimental TV shows such as Rehearsal On HBO and Amazon Freevee’s Jury duty. Unlike flashier online marketplaces like DePop and its parent company Etsy or Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist doesn’t use algorithms to track users’ movements and predict what they want to see next. It does not offer public profiles, rating systems, or “likes” and “shares” for distribution as social currency; As a result, Craigslist effectively discourages clout-chasing and virality-seeking, behaviors that are often rewarded on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X. It’s a utopian vision of a much older, more serious Internet.

“The real freaks show up on Craigslist,” Koester says. “It has purity.” However, the site is still scarier than it used to be: Craigslist shut down its “casual encounters” ads and discontinued its personals section in 2018, after Congress passed legislation that would put the company on the hook for lists of potential sex traffickers. However, the Missed Connections section remains active.

The website is what Jessa Lingle, an associate professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, calls the “unaugmented” Internet. If so, it means that online optimization has accelerated in recent years, thanks in part to the spread of artificial intelligence. Even Wikipedia and Reddit, two visually basic sites created in the early 2000s, with a similar focus to Craigslist on fostering communities, have incorporated their own versions of AI tools.

Some might argue that Craigslist, by contrast, is outdated; An article published in this journal more than 15 years ago described it as “backward” and “unpredictable.” But for the site’s most loyal followers, that’s precisely its appeal.

“I think Craigslist is seeing a resurgence,” says Kat Toledo, an actress and comedian who regularly uses the site to hire hosts for her Los Angeles-based improv show Besitos. “When something is organized that simple and really serves the community, and doesn’t require a lot? That’s what sticks.”

Toledo started using Craigslist in the 2000s and has never stopped. Over the years, she has turned to the site to find romance, housing, and even her current job as an assistant to a forensic psychologist. She worked there full-time for about two years, defying Craigslist’s reputation as a purveyor of potentially sketchy one-off gigs. It can be difficult to shake the stigma of a website, which is sometimes synonymous with scammers and, in more than one case, murderers. “If I’m not doing a good job, just remember you found me on Craigslist,” Toledo jokes to her employer.