City-Data.com

Websites and the contents posted belong to the company that owns it. They set the rules. I've gone on it on and off (mostly off) for about three years. I go on it for a while, get a demerit for posting something. I may continue using it (I'm old enough to not care about demerits) and ultimately and consistently get fed up with it and quit.

I was given a demerit yesterday. Part of the reason was due to not staying on subject in the thread. Another part of the reason was something about religion. The reality:
1) I responded to people who took the original post and turned it into something it was not really related. I stated in my responses (and there were many) that the commenter was not writing anything related to the topic and I was going to reel the comment in and segue it to the post.
2) The next response to the post (the OP asked if homosexuality was an abnormality) was about God and sin. My posts were on later pages. The religious comment was left with many people responding to it. They were left.

I went on the following day and told the inconsistent moderator other posts (like the first religious response) should be removed as well. I also attempted to remove my other posts. It was enough and I had a memory of why I stayed off city-data. So, I told them they should get rid of my ID and delete my posts.

If the moderators were consistent, it wouldn't matter. But they appeared to take a dart and toss it at my clean and factual responses. Free speech isn't the issue because they're allowed to control the site as they see fit but they're doing a poor job at it and have done a poor job.

They don't like attacks or name-calling and that's prevalent throughout.

I've been a member of this site since '11. I recently got an infraction for "trolling" and a 20 day suspension.

My crime? Defending myself after getting ganged up on by a bunch of apparent dog haters in a thread about a mailman spraying tear gas in a FENCED in dogs face.

Animal abuse is one of those things that triggers immense rage inside me, I'll put that right out front. And when I read posts that condone straight out putting a "hatchet through its head" (this particular post was by a member named Soviet--and went undeleted), yes... I am likely to get a little blunt. Other posters were saying things like "I'd just shoot the dog" etc and I was completely appalled.
I posted that perhaps this mailman needed to find another job and was immediately ganged up on by The Clique.

They said horrible things to me that triggered not-so-nice memories of high school bullying so I left the thread when I spotted a thread about cyberbullying and found sanctuary there UNTIL the bullies stalked my profile and recent posts and actually FOLLOWED me to my sanctuary thread to continue to berate and pick on me.

I was expecting the mods to follow their own TOS, in particular the "personal attacks" definition which states that telling another poster they need "psychiatric help" is bona-fide criteria for which one particular bully, "LuvsArkansas" violated several times and nothing was done.

As a consequence I felt I had no choice but to defend myself against a bunch of posters that assumed they knew everything about me and continued the bullying until I was actually in tears. I left to take a break and when I came back in several hours later I found I'd been banned for 20 Days.

City Data is breaking the law by not only allowing cyberbullying but CONDONING it. I've never seen a bigger group of horrible people then the bullies on that forum.

Going on City Data is like having your head jammed up Trump's $#*! while he's giving Putin a blow job.

Worthless site. Some geek in moms basement runs it and moderates it.

I, like so many others, had a really awful experience with this site. I really don't understand why it dominates so many internet search engine results. That's how I got sucked into it, and apparently that's how most people get sucked into it. Once you're registered, you're stuck there. Unless of course you get permanently banned from the site, as I thankfully was. There is no self-cancellation option.

The forums are dominated by biased, censor-happy moderators and a handful of obnoxious, (seemingly) mentally ill users who seem to have no actual life outside of the forums and their relentless and constant posting of nonsensical, amateurish, misinformative, "my city/state/opinion is better than yours" tripe... day after day. Sometimes even hour after hour. Many of them are intolerant and can be downright nasty, though typically juvenile and (in my experience at least) ineffectual in their attempts to insult and belittle other users. It is often reminiscent of the comments section under youtube clips, only it's typically the same 10-15 usual suspects. Many of these "usual suspects" seem to pull favor with the mods, and regularly get away with personal attacks, racist-sexist-nationalist-homophobic rhetoric, and blatant trolling. Meanwhile, other, much more innocuous users providing legitimate information or seeking meaningful, civil discussion are reprimanded in the form of "infractions", and (if they're lucky enough) banned from posting.

The forums are like an alternate reality where logic and actual facts are tossed aside, and replaced with opinions that border on fantasy, and are presented as "fact". Stereotypes are thrown around abundantly, and users are constantly trying to one-up each other. There is a real "group-think" herd mentality that exists among long-time users and the mods who enable them, and it's a code of behavior that one dares not question if one is a new user. I was often scolded for bringing actual facts to the table.

It is a truly bizarre site (the forums part of it) that seems to serve no real purpose, other than to allow ill-tempered, mentally unstable, delusional creeps a platform to spew vitriol, snark, and wild, outlandish misinformation in order to compensate for their personal insecurities and lack of being in touch with reality. And as others have pointed out, there seems to be an underlying extreme-right wing tone in most (but not all) of the forums. It should be known, and I can't stress this enough, that if you're seeking actual information about a place, be it a city, state, or region... that this is quite possibly the WORST site to look for it. All you're going to find is a lot of wildly varying opinions, many of which have no basis in reality and are mainly a lot of boostering, which often devolves into bickering and heated pissing matches that often veer WAY off topic. Avoid at all costs. I have even since blocked C-D from my search engine results