Um.
So, in the summer of 2008 I was spending a fair amount of time on my local Craigslist. I started noticing that people in my town were pretty bad at Craigslist, and I started posting some of the more egregious ads to my Livejournal account (remember those?) and making fun of them. My friends made the mistake of encouraging me, and You Suck at Craigslist was born.
I made it through 200 posts using Roman numerals as titles before I figured out THAT was a bad idea. It was somewhere around post #350 that Dan started to help out, and we’ve been co-authoring it since then. Somewhere along the way we picked up the nicknames of the Llamanun and the Ostrimu, and also picked up the most clever bunch of minions – er, commenters – that the internet has ever seen. We held meetups wherever we went, and we got to meet people who … well, they got us, and they were wonderful.
We almost got to write a book somewhere in there, back when every blog on the internet was being offered a book, but lost out when we refused to dumb it down. We also almost got bought by a large cheeseburger-focused website, but that fell through too, because we would have lost the rights to everything we had done, and there were no guarantees that we could have kept doing it. We just liked doing it.
It’s been over six years of bees, things that aren’t lions, French non-Provincial furniture, and every spelling imaginable of chihuahua, armoire, and ottoman. We’ve made jokes about things as diverse as the Maginot Line, Chuck Close, and Marcel Duchamp. William Gibson, Roger Ebert, and Dan Piraro all publicly said they liked our website. We’ve written soliloquies, operas, and movies, and more song parodies than anyone other than Weird Al Yankovic. (Some of them even got recorded.)
And we loved every minute of it.
That’s why this is really hard for us. As life has a tendency to do, whether you want it to or not, life has changed for us since 2008, and both of us have things going on now that demand our attention. We’re at post #1800 as of today, which is a nice round number … and so as of today, we’re (un)officially calling an end to You Suck at Craigslist.
We’ve put together a list of the Best of the Worst posts of 2014, and we’d be honored if you took the time to re-read some of our favorite moments. As always, no clickbait – the original posts and our commentary are now all on one page, but we urge you to take the time to click through to each individual post and read the comments, which are usually the best part of the site.
Thanks to everyone – everyone who read the site, commented, or sent in submissions. The site would not have worked without you. Thanks to Craig Newmark for not suing us. And a special thanks to all of the Sparkys who posted on Craigslist and gave us such a wealth of material to work with. We will miss all of you.*
-Llamanun and Ostrimu
*This is actually true. Well, maybe not the Sparkys.
