I agree that the behavior being capitalized on here is pathological but using the terms "neuroticism", "illness", and "crazies" here unfairly and wrongly stigmatizes people with mental illness when in practice people with mental illness are more likely to be harmed by these suspicious posts and behavior nextdoor had been encouraging

There is never any conflict that I can tell of and there certainly aren't dubious posts about "suspicious" characters.

People say that it's the outliers but the reality is that in many cases, this is the silent majority driving the behavior.

Frankly I just don't think we can handle social media. We're trying to do this whole technological civilization thing and we've made progress that is absolutely mind bending, but it wasn't long ago that we were using fur and bones and would only meet 100 people our entire life. And our brains are still there mentally, lagging behind the rest of our progress.

I still can’t reconcile just how wildly wrong i was. I didn’t appreciate that it’s not common to want to know truth, common is titillation and tribalism - which always existed anyway, it’s not that the internet increased it or made it more popular, it’s that i was a geek hacking away in my bedroom and didn’t see much of real society.

Although my biggest hangup contrasting then vs now is that Microsoft is my favourite tech company these days.

You weren't wrong. Sharing knowledge freely absolutely solved many of society's problems.

It uh... created a few more too...

Wouldn't be so hard on your past self.

You’ve just described Twitter perfectly.

This is a fair point, and one I think is very important to consider. When I wrote the original quote, I was not thinking of another facebook, but rather a platform that would work on issues like providing access to local government meetings, and probably be closer to what we now think of as "journalism". Which the lack of is a major problem in many parts of the country due to the declining newspaper industry.

Small towns and rural America is in trouble, and although it's naive to say there are simple solutions, I am optimistic that it is possible for technology to solve some problems.

Lately some these guys have a post history in /r/Seattle too, talking about CHAZ or whatever.

It's obnoxious, there's enough going on locally in NYC without a bunch of racists jumping in to defend stop and frisk or whatever.

It's not something you see in subreddits for smaller or less popular cities with similar demographics. Subreddits for these tend to be actually useful.