How to be Called a C*NT on Nextdoor.com, Pt. 1: The Background

I feel compelled to share about two subjects that I recently learned were very controversial. These subjects are: (1) children; and (2) Halloween. I know that Halloween is over and that most people have shifted their focus onto Christmas, but my Halloween was so exceptionally absurd and horrifying that it has stuck with me. And, sometimes, the only way to ameliorate the unpleasant aftertaste of sticky, crazy, bad experiences is by telling other people about them. Allow me to illustrate.

Let’s say you overhear your parents having sex. This is an unquestionably traumatic event and it stays with you. The sound of the your parents’ bed creaking – the bed you crawled into as a small child when you had a nightmare – rings in your ears for days. If you are misfortunate enough to overhear your parents having sex, you know that you must immediately and earnestly tell your sibling about it. And you must tell your sibling because hearing your parents boning is an occurrence so gross that you can’t handle knowledge of its existence all by yourself. While my Halloween wasn’t gross per se, it was horrifying and traumatizing. So, sharing about it seems appropriate.

The backdrop of my Halloween story is none other than Nextdoor.com. If you are unfamiliar with the website Nextdoor.com, I will briefly explain what it is. Nextdoor.com is a social media platform designed to connect you with others in your area. It can best be described as a Facebook for your neighborhood. Just like Facebook, there is a newsfeed comprised of the posts by your neighbors. Similarly, Nextdoor also has a feature that allows you to privately email other users.

However, unlike Facebook, Nextdoor users don’t really have personal “pages,” on which other neighbors can post messages or news stories. This means if you want to communicate with someone about a post, you can either do it for all of your neighbors to see or privately over email. And, importantly, on Nextdoor, you don’t get to pick the neighbors with whom you will connect. Instead, you are connected to ALL of the people who live in your direct and immediately surrounding neighborhoods. This means that you are inevitably connected to a lot of strangers.

Nextdoor keeps its users in line with the help of its reporting feature. If you find certain content offensive, mean, or uncouth, you can “report” a post. If the post is found to be offensive, the punishment inflicted can range from merely removing the post to kicking the user off of Nextdoor entirely.

This reporting feature is repulsive to me – and not just because I have been reported three times. The feature disgusts me because it is so overused. And it is so overused because you can report someone anonymously. In other words, when someone reports you (or me), you, as the reportee, can never find out who was offended by your comment. Reporting happens with alarming frequency and in response to the most innocuous of posts. In my opinion, anonymous reporting has the strange effect of turning full-grown adults into whiny little bitches who run to authority figures in order to get someone else in trouble. And I thought it was common knowledge that snitches get stitches and end up in ditches?

But reporting is far from the website’s most unpleasant feature. The absolute worst part of Nextdoor.com is what happens to you once you have decided to log on. It’s a little known fact that, when a person decides to log onto Nextdoor.com, they become sucked into a secret and invisible portal. In this portal, they are stripped of all reason and decency. What began as a normal human being is transformed into a judgmental and entitled asshole. Once the asshole has been pooped out onto other side of the portal, and has successfully logged onto Nextdoor.com, the asshole loses all self-awareness. But nature abhors a vacuum, so, soon, the asshole develops a delusional sense of entitlement, self-importance, and omnipotence, which inevitably take the place of the asshole’s former ability to use logic and rational thought.

For the record, and as a total aside, I am one of the exceedingly few lucky people out there. I have superpowers that enable me to enter the Nextdoor universe without having to use the asshole transformation portal. Therefore, the asshole transformation process I just described never happens to me.

Given what ensues when one logs onto Nextdoor.com, it’s unsurprising that the website is rife with unnecessary and ridiculous drama. In a nutshell, the Nextdoor newsfeed and accompanying commentary can best be described as a vicious cycle of self-righteousness, passive aggressive sarcasm, martyrdom, and nuclear meltdown.

For example, one time, everyone’s tempers flared over the fact that the local mall instituted a paid parking regimen. Literally for months people posted comments indignantly saying how they will never, ever return to our local mall. Instead, they planned to make the 12-mile drive to the other mall across town in order to really stick it to the mall owners. Just when the commenters’ frustration level reached the point of being beyond absurd, the scavengers came in.

The scavengers are the people who wait until other neighbors have lost their cool and then capitalize on the opportunity to mock the very unreasonably angry neighbors, who are easy targets. Fights inevitably ensue between these two contingencies and these fights can last for months. At times, other neighbors try intervene in an effort to make peace, but this rarely works. Inevitably Sisyphus makes an appearance and bemoans the sorry state of affairs on the website. And it is at this point that the thread has officially gone rogue and is hopeless.

Nextdoor.com users usually have strong negative impressions of the website. But I am of two minds. On the one hand, I love to watch the mini-dramas unfold on there. Nextdoor is a guilty pleasure of mine. I get off on seeing a good mudslinging match between neighbors. In fact, if I am being totally honest, I actually scan the newsfeed for posts that might ignite some controversy. This may make me slightly pathetic and evil, but it’s true.

On the other hand, though, sometimes the website bores me to tears. A small percentage of the time, people are well behaved and, for the most part, the newsfeed is mainly populated by posts from lame-ass teenagers who are advertising their babysitting or pet-walking services. When the waters are calm on Nextdoor.com, I am quite disappointed in the website. Therefore, I have mixed feeling about Nextdoor.com. However, it was this latter boring version of the website that I encountered on Halloween. On Halloween, the Nextdoor landscape was barren and desolate – not an interesting post in sight.

I’m not sure why Nextdoor was so lame on Halloween, but it might have something to do with the fact that 99% of my neighbors were either out with their kids or passing out candy. Halloween is a big deal in my neighborhood. The majority of my neighbors get pretty extravagant when it comes to their decorations. Giant ghosts will hang out of second floor windows, elaborately carved pumpkins sit on the stoop of every house, strobe lights and blaring scary music monopolize the sound waves, and orange Christmas lights illuminate the bushes and trees. Kids from all over come to my neighborhood to go trick or treating both because of the festivities, but also because my neighbors splurge on the candy. When I was a kid, we got bite-sized candy and only one of those at that. Now, instead of a single miniature Hershey’s Krackle bar, the little monsters get a full-size Snickers. It’s bullshit.

This year, I really stepped it up for Halloween. My friend gave me two pumpkins as a silly congratulatory gift for passing the bar exam and I placed the two pumpkins out on our front walk way. I felt a sense of pride for doing my part. But, then there’s the candy thing. Yeah, I just don’t participate in the handing out of the candy thing. Instead, my husband and I turn off all of the lights and hide out in the basement from 5 pm to 9:30 pm. Turning off all of the lights is the universal signal that communicates: “we are not participating in Halloween – go away.” Despite clearly broadcasting this signal, we still had about half a dozen inept parents come to our door – and the same thing happened last year. That’s why, this year, we not only turned off all the lights, we also retreated to the part of our house that sits below ground.

Given that we were being held hostage in our own basement by greedy little costume-wearing children and their needy parents, my husband and I had little to do but watch Netflix. However, I have Attention Deficit Disorder. This means that I become super restless if I simply watch TV. I need an additional activity to keep me occupied. Therefore, throughout our incarceration, I needed to bounce back and forth between various apps on my phone to entertain myself.

After exhausting the top news stories, Facebook, my Gmail account, and Microsoft Outlook, I decided to log onto Nextdoor to see if anything interesting was going on there. Much to my disappointment, it was one big yawn. The newsfeed was inundated with posts advertising dog walking, babysitting, and cleaning services. In addition, Diane wanted to know about which pre-school in the area was best. Carl had to rave about his amazing podiatrist appointment. Cheryl had a bad experience with a moving company and needed to tell everybody else about it. Larry wanted to know of a reliable snow removal service. And these are the highlights. The actual newsfeed was much more boring. Nextdoor was failing to deliver and it was making me antsy.

Obviously, something needed to be done about the sad state of affairs on Nextdoor. And, obviously, I was just the one to do it. I have a lengthy history and even a bit of a reputation for being a little mischief-maker on there. But it had been months since I fucked with my neighbors. Honestly, I had been wanting to pull a Nextdoor heist for quite sometime, but was experiencing a sort of writers block. The pathetic newsfeed on Halloween provided me with just the inspiration I needed.

I clicked on the button to create a new post and selected the option that allowed me to share my post with not just my immediate neighbors, but with the 15,000 + neighbors who lived within a substantial distance from my home. I typed the following heading: BEST WAY TO HIDE FROM CHILDREN ON HALLOWEEN? And below the heading, I typed the following:

“Hello neighbors, Happy Halloween! My husband and I work a lot. So much so that it completely escaped us that tonight is Halloween. This means we purchased no candy for the little goblins that are currently haunting the streets. Consequently, we are hiding in our house with all of the lights off and being the Scrooges of Halloween. Despite our best efforts to discourage the little monsters, the kids have persisted and there has been a steady stream of knocking on our door for hours now. Does anyone know of a good child repellent they could recommend? There must be some sort of spray – kind of like the spray you use to get cats to stop urinating on your furniture.”

I sat back and awaited the results of my social experiment. And, in no time, the responses came in spades. The first response was fairly pathetic. Megan advised me, “make sure to turn off your front porch light.” Wow. Thank you, Einstein. We had not thought of that before you mentioned it. Thank you. The next few responses were pretty much all the same – essentially, people finding humor in the post while lamenting about how much money they spent on candy.

But then there was Mark. Mark clearly found no humor in my post – instead, he took my post very, very seriously. He barked at me to turn off Netflix (how did he know?!) and go get some candy at the nearby Walgreens. Fair enough. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Good idea Mark, but that’s not happening. I didn’t respond and didn’t spend another moment thinking about his comment. Until three minutes later, when Mark posted again. “I can’t believe you didn’t get any candy for the kids! You’re pathetic! I bet your neighbors are thinking some pretty interesting things about you right about now!” “Uhhhh…?” was my response. To me, it seemed like Mark was getting a little too worked up. Then less than five minutes later, he posted for a third time, “you’re pathetic! Think of the kids! I am not a selfish ass who doesn’t think of the kids on Halloween! I think of my own kids. In fact, I think of the WHOLE neighborhood! You’re a selfish asshole!”

Wow. Uhhhh … I didn’t anticipate this. I waited to respond. I didn’t want to jump the gun and type out something just to have to go back and delete or edit it. Plus, I needed to gather my thoughts. During this time, though, my post garnered another response – this time from a man named Daniel. Like Mark, Daniel took my post too seriously. Except Daniel was much, much, much more pissed off. Daniel felt moved to write:

“YOU FUCKING BITCH CUNT. I work long hours and my partner just had surgery and my job is FUCKING exhausting. I would NEVER forget Halloween. In fact, I try to make Halloween festive for ALL!!!! I am upset that my house was just painted so that I COULDN’T decorate for Halloween. But I would never NOT buy candy!!!! YOU ARE A FUCKING BITCH.”

Holy shitballs. Wow. Not only did I not anticipate this, but I also wasn’t sure how to recover from it. I needed to defend myself, explain that this was a tongue in cheek comment, AND make these guys feel like dicks. “How do I do that?” I wondered. I know I could have done better, but I eventually decided to go with:

“Wow. Daniel, I suspect something other than my tongue in cheek post (which was a total joke BTW that you did not pick up on) is fueling your rage. Mark, I’m impressed with the fact that you felt the need to comment not once, not twice, but 3 times. Both of you, please relax. It’s called a joke. Happy Halloween despite the fact that Mark, you yelled at me and Daniel you called me a see you next Tuesday.”

There. My comment had to make them feel like assholes. They would definitely back down. But, this was not the case. In fact, things were just getting started with both of these guys.