That's a very good point. I think I phrased it that way because I believe it's part of a bigger issue at hand - namely that we have all these things reinforcing our bad habits and bad traits, and we don't really pay attention to it since it's so ubiquitous.

I can't think of many technological solutions to these types of problems - I say that because trying to ban those types of software generally is like playing whack-a-mole. You get rid of one and another one pops up.

The real solution is that people have to police themselves when interacting with technology - being judicious. I wish there was a good way to make that part of our culture.

Reading "Here Comes Everybody" is what inspired this line of though in me.

Edit: Especially since reading through the rest of the article: what's happening on NextDoor was happening on other sites: email groups and yahoo groups. I think there's bigger hubbub about next door because it's more visible.

It's always a balance, see liberty (of all legal kinds) legal access to alcohol, etc.

It's about being mature and responsible and learning and mitigating bad behavior via feedback loops.

Exactly. It would be trivial to have a "flag" button that after a certain amount of "boy cried wolf" complaints Nextdoor either prevents people from making crime alerts or in some other way throttles them. If this sort of behavior is causing a ton of user churn Nextdoor needs to get something in place ASAP.

It could say something like "5 of your neighbors thing you are complaining too much, but hey, don't shoot the messenger!".

Signal to noise will always be a problem in online communities because of the one to many nature of them.

> Some groups have even actively silenced and banned the few vocal voices of color speaking up on the websites, according to records that I reviewed.

Looks like some kind of process for silencing voices is already present in the app....it's just mostly being used to silence voices that point out not all blacks are criminals.

I guess I just live in a less racist neighborhood. I've experienced none of these problems and Nextdoor is very useful for myself and my neighbors. Blame the idiots living in the neighborhoods posting these comments, not Nextdoor.

What neighborhood are you in?

"Most people would consider something which amplifies bad traits to be a bad thing."

This is only true if a thing _only_ amplifies bad traits.

This is a fair point, but in the present context, it seems like the claim is that nextdoor.com is _only_ amplifying bad traits.

At the very least, it seems like the present claim implies that bad traits are eclipsing the good ones. The reason I think this matters is because tech evangelism has a worrying tenancy to write problems off as existing prior to the technology, without honestly evaluating whether or not the technology is responsible exacerbating the problem.