Congratulations on being the 100,000th person to have this idea, namely, why don't all these smarty-pants people go to a different forum where they can talk about things other than missed connections?
The answer is, because they wouldn't have an audience there. I think CLMC is what it is only because its a combination of 3 things:
1) the angst/tension/hopefulness of people searching for romance or at least sex
2) clever or not so clever people who try to redirect that attention; and
3) anonymity
Take away any of those 3 elements, and you have something very different and not nearly so entertaining. The people in category #2 are like street performers, but what would be the point of street performers if there were no passers by, or if the passers by were themselves just other street performers go to or from their performance. Hence they need the people in #1.
And without anonymity, people wouldn't let go their inhibitions and really speak their minds. What's shocking is what people actually say when they can speak their minds. In general, it doesn't bring out the best in people, rather it brings out something close to the worst. And yet everyone who reads this list has to admit to having some morbid curiousity about what that is (some parallels there with reality TV shows, which seem to get alot of air time on CLMC).
Another aspect of combining those 3 elements is that it doesn't draw in just a particular sector of society, say, shakespeare readers or skateboarders or perverts. It draws them all into one place where they can attempt to have something resembling a conversation: rarely productive but always a curious phenomenon.
On CLMC you see the whole range of semi-literate to literate humanity expressing itself -- the only qualification being an internet connection and an ability to type. Yes a monkey could, in theory, do it and some posts bear a remarkably simian resemblance. Other posts are just fucking brilliant and most people who read the list have probably decided its worth the effort just to find those one or two each day. Each post is like a small stage with a curtain around it. You walk through and pull the curtains off. Reactions range from disgust, to awe, to the very mundane "oh, you again."
None of which addresses the "problem" that most of the posts here (including this one -- but see below) don't concern a real missed connection. But creating a new list wouldn't cure that. Nor would flagging every non-MC post (even if you could). What Craig in fact does seems to me to be more or less the right thing -- allowing for a balance of the legitimate and the non-legitimate. That some of this censorship power is in the hands of fellow readers makes some people upset but the answer to them is that you can always spend your time elsewhere.
There I've done it again, wasted another perfectly good 10 minutes on CLMC . . .
My MC: Shante from S. San Francisco. Will we ever dance together again?