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Comment by DoubleDerper | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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

> 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.

Aren’t those things the point of the app?

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.

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