I am trying to purge myself from most social media and Nextdoor.com is one of those sites.

I want to stop receiving all emails/alerts from them so over Christmas four months ago I set all my Nextdoor.com notifications to "off". And that helped...for a bit.

Today I got some more emails from Nextdoor.com - they don't have an un-subscribe link on their emails, so I returned to the Notifications page.

To my surprise there were many that were back to "on" and I went through and turned them all off.

I asked their support "How do I stop all Nextdoor.com notifications" and it pointed me to the "Unsubscribe from Nextdoor emails" page. See the attached image.

Dark Patterns example

Even if you turn off all the notifications today, they state "[if] Nextdoor introduces a new type of email notification in the future, you will be automatically subscribed to those new email notifications. Revisit your settings and toggle these notifications off if you don't want to receive them."

What. The. Actual. Heck? I might be cleaning my subscription emails proactively for self-sanity reasons, but Nextdoor.com knows better and will gleefully add me to the next company that pays for a "new type of email notification"?

For those that aren't aware, this behavior is called a "Dark Pattern" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern - in user interface design. It's considered unethical, but is commonly employed by some shady sites. But it's also employed on many common sites such as Facebook, Twitter/X, etc. - but also many "professional sites" such as your cell phone or internet providers making subscribing very easy, but canceling a tortuous affair. Many people give up canceling temporarily and then are forced to pay for one more month (or year for yearly auto-renewals), or are forced to continue to receive emails from them... (Ahem, Nextdoor.com)

So, I'm going to vote with the only way I know how. I'm going to fully un-subscribe from their site and add their emails to my "Spam" folder list. Maybe that'll make an impression.

But they probably won't notice - there's a lot more who are stuck in the "dark pattern" trap that will remain.

Update: So, I decided to deactivate my account and leave. Lo and behold, at the reason for leaving page, when I choose "Too many emails or notifications" I THEN get the "Unsubscribe all" button made available.

Nextdoor.com Deactivation Option

Sorry Nextdoor.com - too little, to late. I'm deactivating my account.