A neighborhood feud that spilled onto my practice's page
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A neighborhood dispute that had nothing to do with medicine spilled onto Nextdoor, and almost overnight a cluster of one star posts about my practice appeared from people who had never been patients.
It was reputational collateral damage from a community argument I was barely connected to, but Nextdoor's hyperlocal reach meant the posts landed in front of exactly the neighbors I depend on for my practice. I could not separate my practice from a feud I was not truly part of.
I watched people I might see in the grocery store form an impression of my competence based on a feud rather than on any care I had given, and the anxiety of knowing this was circulating in my own small community, where everyone knows everyone, was worse than a distant one star review would have been.
Nextdoor offers providers very little recourse, and there is no real review appeal process the way there is on some larger platforms. I tried reaching out to the platform and to a couple of the more reasonable posters, which mostly went nowhere.