Deactivated my Nextdoor again

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My second experiment with trying out Nextdoor has come to an end, after I gave it an even fairer shot than last time.

I won’t go into the details of what happened because I really don’t want to even think about it, but here’s my “suggestions for improving the site” on my deactivation form:

This place sucks and every time I try it again, it turns out to be irredeemable. Any technical fix I can think of is minor compared to the deep-seated social issues which come about from everything about both the site structure and the moderation model, and it doesn’t help that once you become the focus of toxicity there is no way to escape it.

At the very least, hiding notifications about a post should also hide notifications about people replying to your comments on that post or the like.

All I was doing was letting folks know that a racist word is racist, and I’ve had an unending barrage of people spewing hatred and ire at me for it. I muted the worst offenders but there’s just so, so many.

This feeds into my greater disdain for modern social networking, and every time something like this happens (as well as an ongoing situation on Mastodon that is, again, something I don’t want to really get into right now) all I can say is: I miss blogs, and if you want to follow me, the best way is with a feed reader.

toxicity update

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Unsurprisingly yet unfortunately, the podcast which triggered this recollection about one of its consultants ended up just having its own reckoning about internal systemic bias and workplace toxicity, brought about when they did a series about another toxic, systemically-biased workplace.

It’s almost like this stuff is rampant, or something…

Nearly 20 years on

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Some recent conversations around Internet toxicity have been reminding me about some deeply traumatic, formative experiences I had nearly 20 years ago, with being doxed, harassed, stalked, and threatened online.

What makes things even worse was that this was directly facilitated by someone who is now a self-proclaimed expert in Internet toxicity, and who was recently given “special thanks” in a podcast I listen to, on an episode about these problems that he very directly contributed to.

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