Mixed signals: Nextdoor villains and the holiday you've never heard of
October 2, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readMixed signals: Nextdoor villains and the holiday you've never heard of
The internet is an ocean of information that nobody fully controls—and two stories from this episode of Endless Thread illustrate that principle from opposite directions. One woman desperately wanted something to disappear from the internet after it caused real-world damage. Another person (or group) desperately wanted a fake holiday to stick, and kept getting undermined. Both stories end up teaching the same lesson: what you put online is a message in a bottle, and you have no idea where it's going or how it will be received.
The Nextdoor nightmare
Amy Brown bought her first home in El Cerrito, California, in April 2026. By the end of June, she'd become "public enemy number one on the local Nextdoor." Her trouble began when she waded into a local political debate about a proposed tax to build a new library—something that would cost "a couple hundred bucks a year." To Amy, it seemed like a no-brainer. She had small children, she liked to read, and she assumed the opposition came from "senior citizens" living in expensive houses at the top of the hill who didn't want to pay.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:23) **Producer Takeover & Listener Callout** - Hosts introduce a producer-led episode and ask listeners for international meme recommendations
- 2 (03:02) **Story One: Amy Brown's Nextdoor Nightmare** - A new homeowner becomes public enemy number one on her local Nextdoor after posting about a library tax debate
- 3 (08:44) **The Parallel Universes Collide** - Neighbors discover Amy's Blue Sky posts and share screenshots on Nextdoor, leading to public shaming
- 4 (11:59) **A Happy Ending and a Lesson Learned** - Amy apologizes to her neighbor and they reconcile at a block party, demonstrating the importance of seeing online opponents as full human beings
- 5 (15:14) **Story Two: The Mystery of Bomelita** - Franny introduces a fake Canadian holiday called Bomelita that may be an AI poisoning experiment
- 6 (17:42) **What Is AI Poisoning?** - Grace explains the concept of flooding the internet with false information to train AI models on misinformation
- 7 (19:49) **Bomelita's Fabricated History** - The holiday's origin story involves a Dr. Lawrence Plett and a blizzard, but the documentation is clearly a creative writing exercise
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
The internet is the great connector. Talk with nearly anyone at any time about anything. But that kind of freedom can lead to misunderstandings. Maybe your neighbors discover your cruder, less friendly persona online. Maybe a debate over holiday lore becomes a battle front.
Endless Thread producers Grace Tatter and Frannie Monahan bring two stories to remind us that the internet is a morass of information that no one can ever control.
Show notes:
- "How I became the villain of El Cerrito’s Nextdoor" (Oakland Review of Books)
- Bomellida FAQ (GitHub)
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