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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's terrible, but deactivating your account is exactly the wrong thing to do if you're interested in fixing this sort of behavior.

Nextdoor doesn't make people be shitty human beings, but it is a local forum that augments or replaces the sorts of venues that people used to be shitty in -- town hall meetings, HOA events, neighborhood watch, political rallies, etc.

Arguing with people on the internet is (heh) usually a waste of time. But pushing for decency and respect within your neighborhood is not a waste of time if you value strong communities.

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Nextdoor appears to facilitate neuroses in isolation, which was not the case with public meetings.

I don't have any data to back it up, but my theory is that Nextdoor allows bad behavior because people have been trained by millions of comment sections that confrontation on the internet is fruitless.

That's a misguided instinct when the people you are talking to live two doors down. Get a handful of people who see them everyday to say, "knock it off", and they usually will.

It's entirely possible for folks living in the same neighborhood to not actually see each other all that often, especially not in any sense beyond waving at each other from across the street.

Yep. I don't even know the names of my neighbors, and I've barely spoken two words to any of them.

Years ago, I had a couple of neighbors I'd talk to, but they all moved away. Had a few friends I talked into moving to my complex too, but they've all moved away as well.

Your community is broken. I'm sorry to hear that.

I know my neighbors and wish I didn't.

Town hall meetings, being somewhat limited in duration, do a better job of filtering out the peeve of the minute nonsense. Half the time the problem will resolve itself before the meeting.

Is filtering really what you want, though? It's trivial to filter out the nonsense from Nextdoor, too: just set up a bookmarklet that drops all the posts containing one of {sketchy, black, hispanic, male, teens, loose jeans, hoodie, 911}. Problem solved, amirite? We can name it sweep_under_the_rug.js

It solves the problem for you, but the rest of your neighbors have to put up with it - and it further isolates you from the problems they face.

Yes, I want filtering, and no, I don't want to write my own javascript to do it.

I view it differently. In the same way a lot of online forums shadowban people, I look at Nextdoor as a shadowban from real life. Here these crazies are, thinking they're having this change-making dialogue with their neighbors, but in reality, they're just posting to a void on the internet while the real life version of their neighborhood continues on. (Also, the forum moderator was deleting posts from anyone that was kindly pointing out "hey, this isn't real neighborly of you.")

But this is definitely not "a void on the internet". We have several police officers who post regularly on the forum. Local politicians use it. Local businesses use it. Special interests organize on it. Zoning departments publicize polls through it. The people on there are making a real impact (often a negative one) on the real-life community. Disengaging because it's "just the internet" is not a winning strategy.

The moderator problem is real, and I don't have an answer. Maybe Nextdoor needs to review the behavior of moderators and have a replacement policy when they're misbehaving.

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