Racist busybodies were nattering racists long before they had a social media platform. If anything, platforms like Nextdoor are helping the issue by shining light on it, allowing the nutjobs just enough of a safe space to feel free to talk while letting the rest of us see what they're doing.

Regardless, Nextdoor in my area is hardly toxic. It's actually pretty stale -- mostly a mix of home services referrals and junk for sale. They've cranked up the ad content very significantly over the last year without really bringing/encouraging much in the way of better neighborhood content. I don't know if Google is going to do it any better, but some competition in this space certainly couldn't hurt.

They seem to have gotten the racist freak outs under control in my area. In the last year we’ve moved on to animal welfare freak outs.

A couple of weeks ago there was a thread condemning jogging with your dog. The OP was pretty upset about someone jogging with their dog during the heat of the day. There’s plenty of validity to the concern that someone could overheat their dog, but the crazy just exploded from the woodwork. A flame war erupted and several of the commenters stopped just shy of calling for dog joggers to be stoned.

Nextdoor seems to bring out a special brand of crazy.

My wife somehow became our neighborhood's leader or whatever it's called on NextDoor. Half the stuff is garbage like that. The other half is upper-middle class adults behaving like spoiled children.

My neighborhood was mostly black when I moved here 15 years ago. Nextdoor was definitely the go to place for people moving into the neighborhood and then realizing they were surrounded by suspiciously non-white folks.

For good or bad everyone is now fixated instead on the local homeless encampment after the mayor and ACLU created a situation where those folks can't be dislocated. It's less "how do we help those days unfortunate souls so they aren't in this situation" and more "how did we get rid of these stinky campers bringing down my property value?"

Why should we expect an online forum to be free of racism if oral forum of speech isn't.

As another poster pointed out in a way the fact that racism is obvious in these platforms is an improvement over it hiding in plain sight.

Honestly this kind of makes me want to join Nextdoor just so I can find and call out anyone in my neighborhood who behaves like this.

Trust me, NIMBY white folk won't stop dog whistling just because they are on a platform run by Google.