Chad V.

The sad thing is that everything folks are saying about Nextdoor is true. And the surface has only just been scraped. Nextdoor is advertised as being special-built to serve the needs of neighborhoods, but it contains no features that any old WordPress blog or web forum doesn't do better. It's security and privacy are tragic jokes. It's trivial to join with a fake identity and scrape the members list for addresses, and send spam messages to everyone. Every other site in existence does classifieds, photo galleries and calendar/reminders better. It's one useful feature is sharing posts with nearby neighborhoods. Emergency alerts via SMS is nice, too.

To be fair, many of the problems affecting Nextdoor affect any online venue with an $#*! for a moderator, or immature members. For us, the real problem was the Nextdoor Staff, and specifically their Director of Neighborhoods, Gordon Strause. I call him DORGON RAUSSTE, Speaker of Forked Tongue and Demon of Hopelessness.
https://nextdoor.com/about_us/
http://gordonstrause.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordonstrause

I and a group of earnest neighbors promoted Nextdoor due to our neighborhood Yahoo group being heavily censored by the tiny clique who also run our poorly-attended and advertised neighborhood $#*!'n. Nextdoor knew we were a no-censorship alternative and promised us they would never turn the group over to the $#*!'n. I was a Lead, so officers and old friends of the $#*!'n hounded me, constantly testing my patience, experimenting with stretching the rules, and bombarding Nextdoor with complaints about me.

After a year and a half, with over 240 members choosing us over the old Yahoo group, Nextdoor abruptly removed Lead status from me and two others, and empowered one of the officers of the neighborhood $#*!'n as lead for the Nextdoor group. Nextdoor sent a chillingly cheerful email a few days later saying "we're giving him a try, and we're sure you'll work great together!" The pretense they'd been waiting for was when I suggested in private message to this $#*!'n officer that his choice and scope of posts was attracting complaints. So they had a series of phone calls with this guy, removed me as Lead, and HANDED THE GROUP DIRECTLY OVER TO HIM! To be precise, they said they "couldn't have a Lead who mis-represented his powers". I've been a sysop, OP, moderator and blogger for over 25 years. One of the most sucessful moderator tactics to quell a troll is to tell him he's attracting complaints. Also, it's not actually against Nextdoor's rules. When members objected to there being only one Lead now, Nextdoor chose additional new Leads, without any public input.

http://dawsonneighborhood.org/dawsonaustin-on-nextdoor-seized-by-neighborhood-assn/

Nextdoor staff and Gordon Strause are meddlers, kingmakers, and frankly, nazis. Folks here are reasonable to expect Nextdoor to be a place that reflects our democratic way of life in the USA, but Nextdoor is having none of that. They're working hard to eliminate anyone who raises the slightest controversy, and to hand the neighborhood communities to whomever they think will bring them the most members, and their marketing information. In fact, they scorn the idea of free speech, which you'll see if you ever correspond with them. Free speech is not in Nextdoor's DNA nor one of their guiding philosophies. I'm not sure just what kind of brave new world they hope to march us into.

This wasn't my first mindblowing run-in with Nextdoor. Last year, Gordon abruptly disabled my account, and that of our other Lead's, and ordered me to demonstrate Nextdoor's security problems which I was trying to discuss in the private "National Lead's Forum" hosted by Nextdoor on another site. I refused, and he was keen to terminate us, except that we were working on a neighborhood picnic and our absence would be problematic. He un-suspended us, making us regular members, and the following week made us Leads in appearance, but not in actual power. He'd thoughtfully crippled specific lead tools and messaging features and ordered us not to use others without his permission.

The year that followed was full of scoldings from Nextdoor about every aspect of my moderation. Any time I so much as sent a cautionary note to a troublemaker, Nextdoor scolded me for failing to be permissive and open minded. If I let something slide a few days, for lack of complaint, Nextdoor scolded me about being inattentive to my duties. Any time I referred advertisers and other troublemakers to them, they scolded me, too. They take seriously their bizarre rule about "always assume your neighbor's best intentions". You can't complain that someone is up to no good, no matter how obvious, since everyone's intentions are to be considered golden. They never backed me up one tiny bit against the petty complaints of the neighborhood $#*!'n and their friends. Still, I sent out over 300 email invites and many dozens of postcards. I dealt with ads and other issues within moments of their being posted. I forwarded local news and kept organizing get-togethers.

The exact opposite happened once I was stripped of Lead powers and made a mere member. The new leads instantly began removing my new and old posts just because they don't like me, and they let their friends attack me in public, and set a negative tone over any contribution I try to make. Everything I post gets flagged. The Leads have admitted that my posts don't break any Nextdoor rules, but that they don't care since they're going with their opinion anyway. Nextdoor staff says essentially, "The Lead has complete discretion and it's against the rules to argue with him – remember to accept his good intentions in every way", etc. Nextdoor is micromanaging with a specific, personal goal. They've conducted a covert regime change of our neighborhood group, and I've even been warned not to spread the "myth" that the group was seized from us and handed to the neighborhood $#*!'n!

Later, Gordon Strause responded to my last *******@nextdoor complaint about my messages being removed by cheerfully "giving me a break" from Nextdoor – for the rest of my life. I made no violations of the rules, I know them better than anyone in my neighborhood and checked with ND staff in advance to make sure my news and event postings were OK. He ignores every question about what I had done wrong. However, Gordon hinted that he knew I was writing about Nextdoor here on the Internet, and suggested I should enjoy being free to write more openly now. Uh, THANKS for letting me have my civil rights, jerk. I guess I didn't have that when I was a Lead or member? But, I sure didn't sign any of my rights away to them. Nextdoor has a "read-only, no-posts" mode, but he's chosen to disable my account completely. He also disabled the account of my neighbor, who was another Lead, just for good measure. She was never entangled in any conflict at all, she's just my good friend. It's a conscious, blatant act to disenfranchise us from our community.

My last contact with Gordon was a request to be re-activated. He replied that "I had not used the time to re-establish my neighbor's trust" and that he would only consider granting me read-only restricted mode. He didn't re-activate me, as he wished to hear my response. My response was ignored. Even if Gordon and my neighbors were 100% right about me being an unreasonable troublemaker (they're not), how am I to prove my worthiness when I'm locked out of participating in the neighborhood group in the first place? Also, Gordon rejected my complaints about his choice of Leads having long histories of neighborhood hostility because, out of "fairness", Nextdoor cannot consider anything that happened off-Nextdoor. How convenient.

So use Nextdoor at your own peril. "Your" group is theirs to take and give away whenever they want. The feature-set is really poor for neighborhood purposes, other than to establish a really basic, pre-labeled community. Nextdoor works on hidden features that help them punish and restrict people, rather than to encourage good relationships and develop healthy communities. Leads are considered, and treated like company employees. The very worst thing you can do, in their eyes, is to be determined to stand up against bullying and have a good vocabulary to express it. They prefer that everyone just plug in their marketing details, and then keep their mouths shut.