An Alternative to Nextdoor for the Heights
--
Nextdoor infringes on its users’ ability to express their opinions freely. Nextdoor’s anonymous ”moderators” remove user content on the Nextdoor website in an arbitrary manner. They do so without informing the author of the cause of the removal or a path to appeal their decision. Nextdoor bans an extremely broad set of content to the extent that it has almost reached the point that most of the content consists of requests for plumbers names and notices of missing cats. The ability of neighbors to engage in serious and vigorous discussions is seriously curtailed by Nextdoor.
Many will argue that Nextdoor is a private company and so has the right to impose any conditions that they choose on their users. However when a service becomes the 21st century equivalent of the public square we need to look at the situation in a new light.
If we Americans have struggled for two centuries to restrain the government from restricting our speech how can we tolerate private interests from restricting it in an even more arbitrary manner than any government edict? To the extent that we hold the belief that every person has the right to speak and every person has the right to listen so long has they don’t harm others, we are allowing Nextdoor to abolish one of our most fundamental principles.
Restricting speech harms both the speaker and the listener
Speech that offends, angers, annoys, disturbs, saddens, distorts, or exaggerates is also speech that may educate and inform us and such speech should not be restricted both for the benefit of the speaker and the benefit of the listener.
The most egregious harm of censorship occurs to the person who is unable to hear and consider the opinions of others in his or her society because a censor has restricted the flow of speech between them. Yet this is exactly what Nextdoor is doing today.
A social website that maximizes freedom of speech
We need a new model for social websites, an alternative to the Nextdoor model.
This project is an attempt to create such a site for the Heights region of Northeast Ohio which respects our traditional beliefs that freedom of speech is vital to our society and must only be curtailed under extreme circumstances, a social website that allows maximum freedom of speech while properly respecting the law and the rights of all persons.
Neighborhood only
A neighborhood will be defined as a region within some radius of a central point.
Users will be allowed to sign up if they are within the radius as determined by the geolocation feature in their browsers. If the user’s browser does not support geolocation then users will be able to sign up if they successfully complete another verification process.
Adults only
All users will be required to affirm that they are age 18 or above.
Verification
Verification is the process by which a person proves that they are the person that they claim to be on the site. Verification will be voluntary. Wherever content appears on the site the author’s icon will be displayed alongside the author’s name. A green verification icon will be displayed alongside the user’s icon if he or she is verified.
Verification will be carried out by asking the person wishing to be verified to provide his or her phone number to the site. Web services exist that reliably associate full names and addresses with phone numbers.
Alternatively, a person can request to receive a postcard by postal mail with a sign-up code. The person will then be able to sign up using the code which establishes that the user lives at that address.
(So most users will initially be unverified.)
Content Structure
Content is either an image or textual information.
Any user can create a new item of content as a “new post.”
Any user can create a new item of content as a “reply” to any other item of content.
So all content will be structured in a tree-like form.
All content will be visible to each user according to each user’s settings as described below.
Deleting content
Any user may edit or delete any of his or her content.
If an item of content is deleted and that content has replies, the replies may still be valuable and so will not be deleted.
Muting content
Any user can mute any content. Muted content will no longer appear on the user’s news page.
Muting other users
Any user can mute any other user. Content authored by the muted person will no longer appear on the muting user’s news page.
??? Any user who is muted by the author of any content will be disabled from replying to that author’s content. ???
Users will have the option of muting all content authored by unverified users.
It will be possible to unmute any content that has been muted.
Flagging
Any user can flag any content.
Any content which has been flagged by one or more user(s) will appear with one or more warning notice(s) above stating “User Name has flagged this content. [Other Name has flagged this content.] etc.”
The user can click any warning notice and be presented with a dialog box with the following options: 1) “Ignore flags by this user.” 2) “Mute all content flagged by this user.”
The second case will also be referred to as Opt-in moderation.
Any content which has been flagged three or more times will require the user to confirm that they wish to view it by clicking OK to a “View flagged content” dialog.
Opt-in moderation
Opt-in moderation will be a system by which any user can offer his or her moderation services to any other user. For instance, one user may find content that uses profanity to be offensive. She may state in her bio, “I flag all profanity.” Then any other user who wishes to avoid profanity could “follow” that user’s moderation. Any content flagged by the moderator would be removed from the news page of the “following” user.
Any user will be able to enable or disable any moderation relationship at any time.
Removal of prohibited content
Any user may email the site administrator regarding any content with the claim that it falls under one or more categories of prohibited content.
The administrator will then:
a) agree that it is in violation and permanently remove it.
b) disagree that it is in violation and take no action
c) find that it may be in violation and temporarily remove it. Then the content will go through a review process. That process has not been worked out yet.
Further Information
This is the current draft Members Agreement:
