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Comment by mupuff1234 | Hacker News Reader

Nextdoor shares don't look like they did too well under her management.

She was an awful CEO; she was basically a CFO hired to shepherd the company through the IPO (SPAC) process, but the years following were awful. I left right before the board fired her (along with many, many senior people) and hope the company is doing better without her there. Not surprised to see her failing upward.

If your complaint is that she was a fine CFO but a terrible CEO then i can hardly see her going back to a CFO role as failing upwards.

> If your complaint is that she was a fine CFO but a terrible CEO then i can hardly see her going back to a CFO role as failing upwards

Failing upwards would be her announcing she's raised money for a new start-up at which she will be CEO. (EDIT: To be clear, I'm agreeing with you.)

Instead, she's going back to where she has a track record. It would be like Musk selling Twitter. Or David Marcus going back to 2001 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Marcus

right, you're agreeing with GP

Yeah I agree with that. OpenAI is obviously a much bigger and more relevant company than Nextdoor, but she is going back to a role she has a proven track record at.

>Nextdoor shares don't look like they did too well under her management.

Isn't it fair to look at share price under their leadership? What other objective measures do we have of their management abilities? We take the OP's word for it that they're the best? Or is this like sports teams recycling the same 30 coaches?

> Or is this like sports teams recycling the same 30 coaches?

This.

The valley is nothing but a machine. Feed young engineers in one end and spit unicorns out the other. The same players make it all go.

I don't think she's someone to be admired. Being ceo of an app that is IMO rife with bigotry, xenophobia, and scare mongering.

A bit unfair. A neighbourhood orientated social media platform is always going to have a vocal tiny minority of the people you described. I’d like to hear suggestions on how she as a CEO could prevent those issues

A UI can promote positive interactions, and a moderation team can mitigate negative ones. Quite tired of hearing implications that social media platforms aren't shaping the way people communicate on them.

I.e. the app can brainwash people into reflecting some specific sensibilities. That's some Orwellian-level stuff there.

The platform shaping communication is a fact, but not a license to use it to program a worldview. The job of a general-purpose platform is to enable communication, but otherwise stay out of the way.

Weak and paranoid take

Nextdoor is close to the worst example I can think of in terms of dark patterns and user experience, and I don't say that lightly. I think it is quite fair to lay that at the feet of the executives.

I would be sympathetic if it were not for their insane level of dark patterns, spam emails and growth hacking schemes. I had to make a blanket ban on @nextdoor.com email addresses because a dying relative was unable to parse their actual emails over nextdoor’s spam.

I would think you should admire her for taking a strong moral stand at the expense of the business. She added a number of grievance-oriented features to reduce "bigotry", "xenophobia", etc; thereby making the product less able to render reality; thereby hurting its value proposition; thereby losing users; thereby cratering the share price.

Aren’t those things the point of the app?

> an app that is IMO rife with bigotry, xenophobia, and scare mongering

I don't use it a lot. But my Nextdoor is basically pictures of animal sightings, pictures of pets who got out and pictures, a few hours later, of them being found.

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