Nextdoor CEO: After helping to pioneer online reviews, I’m trying to fix them

In a world of infinite information, trust is the scarcest resource.

In 1999, I co-founded Epinions, one of the first user-generated review sites, and helped pioneer the reviews economy.

The premise was that anyone could review anything, and the collective judgment of the masses would sum to something useful.

Epinions succeeded.

We sold the company to eBay.

But it, along with the review sites that followed, set an industry in motion that would eventually be gamed.

Today’s online reviews are a mix of the genuine and the fabricated: real experiences sitting next to anonymous ratings that can be manufactured or bought, often indistinguishable from the real thing.

It got bad enough that in 2024, the Federal Trade Commission finalized a landmark rule making deceptive review and testimonial practices illegal.

I had a stake in that fight in 1999, and I find myself with one again now.

I co-founded Nextdoor, a neighborhood network built on real identity and local trust.

A large part of how neighbors use Nextdoor is to gather local advice and recommendations — reviews, in effect — on local businesses and service providers.

My co-founders and I didn’t set out to get back into the reviews business.

But here we are, and the timing works in our favor: in today’s world, who’s behind the review matters more than ever.

The platforms at the center of this problem aren’t oblivious to it.