Musings of a recovering... 9-28-2023: Moderately nice
A brief timeline of a brief suspension on Nextdoor in Sept 2023
In short, Nextdoor doesn't like when users talk about moderation on the main news feed. They do describe this in their guidelines. Moderation exists at various levels in Nextdoor: corporate people, corporate programs, community moderators, etc. To have your account suspended/disabled, Nextdoor corporate will be involved and have been decently responsive via email. It's possible to communicate with a person at corporate who can offer useful info and/or reconsider your situation.
Deets
- 9/22: When attempting to login to Nextdoor I was redirected to a page informing me that I was very temporarily suspended (logged out and I had to log in again) and need to re-review the guidelines on civil discourse. I was confused so I used the contact us option on the Nextdoor site.
- 9/24: Nextdoor corporate responded that they had noticed me posting about moderation in the main feed. This is a violation of the guidelines. I was tempted to argue that many posts do not comply with the guidelines, but I instead focused on how I could be better at not violating the guidelines. The Nextdoor corporate response encouraged me to create a group if I wished to continue my discussion of moderation on nextdoor.
- 9/25: I also asked Nextdoor corporate about how to join the community review team. They confirmed the inability to join based upon request. One must be invited but the parameters remain murky.
I appreciate the utility of parts of this email, but the encouragement to report community moderators is confusing. How can any Nextdoor user recognize that a community moderator isn't active or is voting in an unfair manner? I've never seen an audit trail related to moderation that would provide that level of insight, but I would be interested to see that data.
9/26: I created a nextdoor group to discuss moderation. When you create a group on Nextdoor, they site directs you to create a post for your group so I created post to describe the purpose of this group to discuss moderation on nextdoor. This post was published to the main news feed (ooops!) and, ever vigilent, Nextdoor corporate noticed. This was a mistake on my part. I didn't realize that I was posting about my group to the main news thread, but I do recognize that I did. As a result, my account was suspended for 4 days.
- 9/26 Later: I used the contact us feature again to determine why I was suspended. Nextdoor corporate confirmed my violation of posting about moderation to the main feed.
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9/28: I continued to communicate with Nextdoor corporate to explain my mistake and advocated that I was attempting to follow the guidelines and inadvertently posted to the main news feed. Eventually I landed on a Nextdoor employee who understood, agreed and unsuspended my account early. Yay! Upon logging into the site, I saw the notification related to my violating post.
- 9/30 I won't be appealing the moderation, but I will be linking to this blog post in the moderation group.
My take away
No conspiracies, no ALL CAPS screaming, no political machinery at work, just good ole corporate self-protection and bureaucratic annoyance. One very small slice of moderation.