Yes I ran into this the other day when I tried Nextdoor out for the first time. I was actually so in awe of the insane and sociopathic dark pattern that is their email/notification subscription system that I immediately deleted the app. I don’t want to be a user on a platform that treats its users with so little respect.

I did the exact same thing a few days ago. I thought NextDoor would be social media that connects me with my local community. Nope. It’s overwhelmingly “recommend me someone for <service>”, camera footage of shady people or crime reports, and complaints about neighbors. The excessive emails were the final straw that took me from indifference to actively excising NextDoor from my phone.

So if anyone has ideas for connecting with your local community, I’m still looking…

We just have a WhatsApp group...

> camera footage of shady people or crime reports

Which are usually just black people existing or generic "people walking by my house" reports.

> I was actually so in awe of the insane and sociopathic dark pattern that is their email/notification subscription system…

At least it’s on brand. Once you start reading you will be so in awe of the insane and sociopathic people who do the bulk of the posting.

Another for the hall of shame: MyHeritage. They will never, ever stop spamming you if they get your email. Set your language to Chinese and delete your account, now they will spam you in Chinese.

The special award though, must go to Wal-mart. That company doesn't exist in my country. I obviously never interacted with them in any way. I still get their "newsletter", and sure enough, it's authenticated to come from their domain.

Why do you bother fighting to unsubscribe properly with a company like that? I have a rule: I will try 1 time to legitimately unsubscribe, using the normal flow. If you keep sending me email after that, I will mark every email you send as spam and my email provider will stop delivering your mail.

I started doing this years ago after watching a talk by some Gmail devs on how they think of spam. They said they internally - controversially - redefined spam to be any email the user doesn’t want to receive. Well guess what? I don’t want to receive shitty marketing emails after I unsubscribe. If you send them to me, I’ll get you listed as a spammer.

I encourage everyone else to do the same thing. Life is too short to put up with this crap.

I was taking a low-effort apporch of just unsubscribing from emails and newsletters as they came in. I saw a huge decrease in unwanted emails at first but NextDoor kept coming _no matter what_. Finnally in frustration I logged in, did half the above unsubscribing, then just deleted my account instead. I agree.

This should be illegal