Amy Brown acknowledges she is and always has been a "compulsive poster" online, but she didn't expect to become "public enemy No. 1" on her local Nextdoor feed. In an essay for the Oakland Review of Books, Brown recounts how it all began: When she bought a house in El Cerrito, Calif., and backed a property-tax measure to fund a new library. Brown, a volunteer community content reviewer on the app, went from amused lurker to combatant after posting on Bluesky that many opponents of the library tax were elderly homeowners unwilling to fund improvements they might not live to see—adding some choice insults for "rich" seniors.
Those posts migrated back to Nextdoor, where Brown was swiftly branded ageist, reported repeatedly, and suspended multiple times. The backlash followed her offline, including a tense realization that one of her harshest critics was a neighbor on her block. Brown describes panic, attempts at apology, and eventually coffee with a leading organizer against the tax initiative, which complicated her assumptions about him—and his about her. The piece doubles as a case study of how online "justice" obsessions and parasocial beefs can poison small-town politics. And Brown learned some lessons:
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"I wish I knew how to fix the internet, but I don't," she writes. "So I'm starting with what I can control: my own behavior. Little things, like not jumping into a pile-on in progress just for a cheap hit of dopamine, or not talking s--- about my neighbors in a public forum with my full name attached. Being more conscious and intentional about the things I put out there." Read the full piece.
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