The first time I heard about the Nextdoor website was at an Inman News real estate conference in either New York City or San Francisco not long after their US launch. The company presented at the conference to pitch real estate agents on the concept of a social network that focuses on hyperlocal content, which would be a perfect fit for agents interested in advertising to a hyperlocal audience.
I’m pro hyperlocal so I signed up.
If my memory serves me right, Nextdoor, at the time, allowed users to define their own neighborhoods because they were too cheap to license neighborhood boundary data, which led to a lot of weird neighborhoods being formed. Perhaps after a new round of funding, the site got around to licensing neighborhood boundary data but they needed someone to wrangle the previously created ac hoc neighborhoods. A neighbor was hired by Nextdoor to take on that Herculean task for Minneapolis, and during his time with the company he took me out for a beer at the Longfellow Grill and asked me if I would be willing to volunteer to help moderate posts and comments in the Longfellow community.
I said yes for two reasons. I cared about the Longfellow Community and was willing to play a role in making sure that this particular social network wouldn’t become as toxic as every other social network. And, I’m a bit of a nosy neighbor. I find value in seeing my neighbors at their worst. I don’t think I’m a large tea spiller, but I have plenty of tea.
And, you never know when that tea is going to become valuable. For example, on the Hiawatha Neighbor podcast in 2024, I shared that even the most left-wing areas in the City of Minneapolis like Longfellow still have one in ten neighbors voting for Trump. Due to my long tenure with Nextdoor, I have a good sense of who those one in ten neighbors are, which is really helpful when working to protect vulnerable neighbors from the kind of people that would have turned in the Frank family in Amsterdam.
The work of a Nextdoor Moderator is pretty simple. We see a list of posts and comments that have been flagged for review by other Nextdoor users. We have the option to vote to keep, remove, or vote to maybe remove the flagged content. We can also leave a comment explaining our vote. One vote does not get a comment removed or saved from removal. It takes a certain number of votes, and a certain amount of agreement to get something removed.
The moderation team is diverse, and I definitely don’t vote the same way as many of the other moderators on the site. And, since it’s 2026, there is help from AI that can do pattern matching against previously removed posts to rate the moderation worthiness of posts and comments. Basically, a post can show up in the moderation queue without being reported by a human user if people create posts or comments that are similar to previous toxic content that was removed. It’s not a perfect system. Some content flagged by AI is benign. But it does catch some toxic content before it’s flagged by a human.
So, what do I see? I see which neighbors are the racists. But, not just neighbors. Nextdoor has loosened their boundaries quite a bit, so I see a decent sample of the racists around town. I also see the bullies. While Facebook has no problem with people rightfully calling people who make idiotic comments idiots, that doesn’t fly on Nextdoor. You need to act civilly even when dealing with the dumbest and most 24 hour news poisoned neighbors. This catches good people with a mouth on them, who are rightfully angry and coming from other social media sites, by surprise.
What I’ve Learned
Some people who are bad at online forums. It doesn’t matter which one. They can’t read a room. It’s annoying when users treat a forum like it’s their personal blog. People who share information relevant to a forum are awesome. People who share every thought they have on forums with a specific focus are tone deaf.
The number of truly toxic people around town on Nextdoor is relatively small. The leaderboard includes a cat lady in Falcon Heights, two dudes in the Reservoir Woods neighborhood of Roseville, and, of course, a Karen in Edina. Having grown up in the Northwest Como neighborhood of St Paul, it has been a bummer to see this grouping of toxic people within walking distance of my childhood home. They’re definitely not the only trolls, but they’re the current crop of people who are simply unwilling to believe that murdering people on camera is murder.
If you’re going to use Nextdoor, use the reporting features. It really does make the site better. This surely varies based on the biases of local moderators, but it still matters. Minneapolis is lucky to have moderators who understand that racism is bad, so vote to remove racist content, but that’s probably not universally true. (Local moderators who don’t see toxic online content the same way I do include moderators include Linda in Powderhorn Park [seriously, Powderhorn Park], a woman in Woodbury, and a guy south of Holy Angels in Richfield).
So, what inspired this post? A hiatus:
The mistake I make as a volunteer Nextdoor moderator is being both moderator as a person with information to share. This leads to comments I post being flagged by people who don’t agree with me..
For example, a person who has had their brain poisoned by – I’m assuming – local right-wing talk radio made a stereotypically dumb comment that the StarTribune is the Red Star Communist rag, so I asked the commenter who own the StarTribune and which political party were they a member of while in the state legislature. That comment got me flagged.
A comment where I said something like, “The majority of Minnesotans disagree with your analysis based on election results” was flagged.
a comment that said something like, “ICE is an organization that spends hundreds of billions of dollars hunting, arresting, detaining, torturing, and deporting Minnesota taxpayers” was flagged.
Basically, Nextdoor allows facists to team up against people who think fascism is bad.
I’m currently suspended for a week from Nextdoor for pointing out that fascism is bad. If Nextdoor’s values are more aligned with the people who reported my posts than someone who’s spent more than a decade volunteering to moderate hate speech on their platform, I would be disappointed. The site, despite its flaws, is still far better than other places where people turn to for local news online, including Facebook, pro-apartheid Twitter, or anything associated with Liz Collin. I base my opinion on being chronically online for more than 30 years.
However, if Nextdoor thinks that it’s good for their advertising model to let the fascists win, I’ll invest my volunteer time elsewhere.
What’s better than Nextdoor?
If you’re in Minneapolis today, you’re seeing it. You’re living it. You don’t need a platform like Nextdoor to connect with your neighbors. You need like-minded neighbors who care about neighbors to form texting groups, email groups, signal chats, Whatsapp groups, block club parties, and coffee meetups. Neighbors don’t need a multinational corporation to connect, and it’s actually much less racist and much more civil when neighbors who care about neighbors organically connect.
If you live anywhere in Minneapolis at this time and haven’t already connected with neighbors on some form of group chat, knock on your neighbor’s door and ask them about it. It’s happening all around you.
And some of these online groups are fairly mature due to many of them forming after the Minneapolis Police Department murdered a handcuffed man at 38th & Chicago. If you’re new to the neighborhood and/or not rh neighbor who’d turn in the Frank family in Amsterdam, talk to someone who can vouch for you.
