What was your best Craigslist M4M hookup story?

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

I've given a lot of thought to the end of Craigslist and what came after.

IMO CL M4M was already in decline for a few years before CL pulled the plug on it. Warning this may become a blog post. Hooking up on CL was already becoming more difficult and frustrating, by about 2011 or 2012 at least. Not because I am fat or fug, but because the demographics of internet users were changing.

Millennials brought to the internet a large cargo of neuroses including social anxiety, body dysmorphia, and selfie obsession, along with a general lack of manners. Ghosting, butthole selfies and demands for portfolios of pics esp. face pics before hooking up became much more common.

Alongside this was the explosion of flavor of the month porn and the appification of hooking up. People suddenly had a need to claim ownership of a number of strange kinks without understanding that most people simply want to fuck and suck. Apps reduced communication further, which some loved, but it made it difficult for people who were being careful and prudent to size up others. Of course millennials thought that face pics were the solution to everything; and if you didn't provide a face pic, you were a serial killer or otherwise unacceptable as a partner.

New disrespectful mores cropped up including not providing basic stats, refusing to answer basic questions by ignoring them, and ghosting and flaking becoming typical, even expected behavior.

Then kink and drugs became more normalilzed. One had to continually guard oneself against closet trannies, closet piss, shit, and fisting freaks, and meth heads, often wrapped up in the same person. Mentally ill people with little to do other than troll online was another hazard.

Millennials and Zs discovered they could demand money and drugs for sex, and Boomers discovered they could demand sex with people one-third their age in exchange for drugs and money. Whereas sex used to be the common ground that brought people together on CL M4M, by 2018 many people there were engaging in various hustles with sex as a secondary or tertiary concern.

By 2018 when CL M4M went offline, it was already a cesspool. I was briefly vainly hopeful when Doublelist came on the scene that things might improve. But of course the freaks, addicts, crazies and hustlers were the first people to show up there. Like CL, Doublelist's auto-mod doesn't work well, and one is treated to multiple posts by the same people hour after hour, day and night.

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