i removed myself after months of watching people on this app become more and more paranoid, feeding off each other.
the breaking point was when someonea put out a warning that someone had knocked on their door at 7:00pm, “the wife and i were eating dinner when the rude knock came. we crept over to the window, peeked out, and didn’t recognize the person. be careful!”
the person knocking turned out to be a 16 year old girl who lives three blocks away who unfortunately got a flat tire and was hoping to borrow a phone to call her dad.
we live in an incredibly safe wealthy suburb and these people “crept” to a window like they’re in an old west shootout and decided to put out a warning on nextdoor about a little sixteen year old girl.
we still laugh just thinking how crazy these people must have looked while creeping from their kitchen to peek out a window in one of the safest areas in the state at a time of day when people are still out mowing their lawns.
nextdoor somehow just adds to these people’s already insane creeping paranoia.
There was some poor lost delivery driver in a McHouse subdivision about near me. In one hand she was holding a plastic bag with food containers, and the other she was holding a phone. Two people posted video/photos of her clearly looking at house numbers. Both people posted "be on the lookout for this suspicious person casing the neighborhood" posts.
Like, come on. How stupid do you have to be.
And it's not NextDoor, it's only exposing a larger issue.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/7/18528014/fear-social-med...
>> The issue is compounded by the media, Ewoldsen says. >> “If you see more coverage of crime you think it’s more of an issue, even if real-world statistics say it isn’t,” Ewoldsen said. >> And all this is happening at a very contentious point in time, both politically and socially. >> “Some of this has to do with the general level of discord and lack of comfort societally right now,” Rutledge said. >> As Ewoldsen put it, “The president screaming about crime all the time — creating a fake crisis at the border and saying immigrants are stealing jobs, that Mexico and other countries are sending criminals — is reinforcing the idea that crime is going through the roof.”
Exactly. The giant glaring irony of the situation is that these paranoid neighbours are themselves the biggest danger to their neighbourhood. They're the ones creating an environment where you can't walk down the street, ring someone's door, ask for help, photograph your car, or pretty much do anything in public anymore.
They are the real menace to society, but they can't see that.
George Gerbner's famous television studies suggested that heavy viewers of crime shows would become more fearful and over-estimate violent crime (hence the name "scary world theory"). But scientific support is mixed, it's not safe to assume that this effect exists.
(Eventually we found the home. The mother said their dog was in their basement, and we almost left without a flyer until her daughter ran to the door and said their dog was missing and identified her and then the mom was willing to come get the dog. Strange episode.)
The last post I read that caused me to delete my account was about an elderly woman complaining about a brown guy taking pictures of his own car on a public street. (It seemed like he was putting it up for sale, after looking at the photo "evidence" and he obviously was the owner.)
When I commented it was that it was a public street, she got all huffy and flipped out at me. And the same type of "We have to be careful!" response.
It turns out he was mentally impaired and lost. Some hours later, someone who works with such people recognized the situation and started working on finding him to help him (literally posted that someone should help him before someone else harms him). She did find him, and got him where he needed to be.
It seems like it wasn't that long ago that neighbors would actually talk to each other. That seems to have almost completely disappeared. We don't really know who is in our communities anymore, and so everyone is suspicious about everyone around them. And it's even scarier in states like mine, Texas, where there's such a strong push for lethal intimidation (open carry and all that).
This is endemic in American society now. Everywhere I lived in the suburbs/exurbs I'd describe the vast majority of my neighbors to act exactly like that. Utter sheer fear of things that simply don't exist. And they vote on those fears.
I don't think American society survives the suburbs, personally. The social fabric it ripped apart, and the "bubble" it put so many citizens in I believe is the most harmful thing to happen to the US at least in the modern era. Not to mention the financial sustainability of the past 50 years of construction.
It has very little to nothing to do with Nextdoor. Those apps just bring into the open what I've been personally witnessing the past 20 years.
Did you poll them all?
> I don't think American society survives the suburbs, personally. The social fabric it ripped apart, and the "bubble" it put so many citizens in I believe is the most harmful thing to happen to the US at least in the modern era.
No. The suburbs are fine, it's social media that will get us. It greatly amplifies the the voices of people who use it compulsively, and those people are often unhinged and driven by unreasonable paranoia, fear, anger, etc.
The most alienating, dehumanizing, isolated environments I've ever lived in are large and medium cities and apartments, while the most welcoming, strong communities I've been a part of have been suburbs, exurbs and rural areas.
I will mention that due to the rise of the internet and Certain Entities having an interest in making people afraid, people are exposed a lot more to things they should be afraid of. Would people have heard about e.g. a child disappearing in the next state over say 50 years ago?
? you think we are overbuilding?
For context we live in a somewhat isolated, well off suburb, that according to police data has had a grant total of 63 crimes committed in it during the last 12 months, 41 of which were just people vandalising the same abandoned building.
There was a study on this, and California is one of the worst offenders. There a rich hamlets with not crimes to speak of that hire retired FBI agents and Navy Seals to issue parking tickets.
This is a great example: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-framed/#chapter1
HOMELESS MAN LOOKED AT MY DOG AGGRESSIVELY
Then you have a bunch of insipid suck-ups piling on in the comments, with "Oh I'm so sorry this happened to you!" "So glad you're OK!"
Fear and hate drive engagement. If engagement is their metric that is how they will get it.
I solved it by becoming the benevolent dictator of a handful of my local online groups and swiftly delete messages like this.
It's not perfect, but it'll do.
I'm sort of biased though, I find mild gossip to actually make a place feel almost "comfy" and "lived-in". It's like the vibe of a local diner or church meetup, where nothing really happens in the community so anything minor (from a new car a neighbor has parked outside their house, to the loud kids who collect sticks to pretend-fight with and store them in a pile behind the mailbox, to the "crazy" party that the young couple had in their backyard last night with half a dozen friends) is a subject of minor gossip and banter and speculation.
I honestly bet 90% of the bad rep nextdoor get is purely a generational thing because nextdoor is basically just social media for older people and young people just don't really get how old people use social media. Notwithstanding the email/notifications topic here of course.
On a personal level, an unexpected interaction can lead to meeting friendly people. You may even get some unexpected "reward" out of it: say maybe a neighbor was knocking to see if they could borrow your car, maybe the same neighbor has some plumbing skills and notices the leak in your kitchen, and proposes to fix it for you.
On a societal level, unmediated interaction between strangers is very important for social life and a sense of community. Please note there is a huge difference between unsollicited contact and stalking behavior: a person knocking on your door to ask something is certainly not in the same mindset than someone following you home.
So sure there's scams and salespeople. But if you don't open the door to those, you'll miss plenty of friendly interactions as well. At this point, better not check your email or phone because there might be spam there too?
By which I mean, I don't think I've ever gotten any of those latter three, and have dealt with a couple of the former. (Mostly drunk men in the middle of the night, so I totally understand why some people wouldn't want to answer the door in that situation.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok27k6bX-Yc&list=PLPIowqjlFO...
The hyper-vigilence this app creates has turned one of my friends into the worst kind of person.
As a counter point, then, the people should have posted when they are eating, so one can tell if everyone is busy. Alexa could probably guide the lost girl to the next bike shed if social karma allows /s
There are occasionally things I want to see on there: a new Costco going in where the OSH Hardware used to be, or whatnot. So I got the daily email digest. One email per day -- tolerable.
Then it stopped coming. I wrote to Support, and their guy swore it was still being sent! I said "no, it's not. I looked in Spam and Trash." He swore again that it was going out, and I should "check with my email provider."
I asked "How do you know they're going out? Did you look in the Sent folder?" He got all sniffy and said "We are unable to disclose anything about our internal operations." Ooh, big secret!
So I wrote to the Nextdoor handle on Twitter. They told me there was an experiment going on. I asked if they could take me out of it. They did and all was good again.
Except other people on Nextdoor were also unhappy about being in the experiment, and asked me how I got out of it. I told them; they tried it; Nextdoor now refused to do it for them.
Think about it -- almost every site on the Web is trying to get you to sign up for a daily email. Nextdoor already has one, and they're trying to take it away.
Well, this is kind of a "duh!" moment though, yeah? Of course they don't want your only interaction with them to be a single email once a day. That's so Web1.0. They want you on their appyApp so that they can hit you with all of their engagement algos and gather all of those metrics from you and what not. No once-a-day-v̵i̵t̵a̵m̵i̵n̵-email will ever give them the numbers they are looking, and if you're not giving them those $$$ then why give you the content?
Nextdoor: "Hey, how about you come here several times a day and stay, like we were a real website or something?"
Me: "Nope, nope, nope. Buh bye."
Once a day isn’t “engaging” enough when Nextdoor’s biggest competitor is built around real-time notifications of fear-porn-near-you: https://citizen.com/
This is why I like debian, I never open an app to find out the entire UI is changed while I was asleep.
Nextdoor, as an institution, actively seeks out people who pathologically engage with their platform and then gives them power over people geographically local to them. This results in moderation-cliques that decide what can and cannot be posted in their local neighborhoods.
It somehow manages to be worse than this site when it comes to suppression and censorship, and to be honest I’ve almost totally lost the desire to interact with either.
I’ve hit peak moderation fatigue, I’m tired and quite frankly offended anyone thinks they can tell me what I should (or want) to see. All their algorithms are corrupt, all the systems that rely on manual, human moderation are biased and useless. Curation is an iron grip around my throat and I want to cut it.
I’m to the point that I’d rather drink from the firehose of “misinformation” than thirst in the desert centralized of approval.
Edit: originally posted this in reply to a comment down-chain, but by the time I finished typing “you can’t reply to this anymore”. It’s getting meta at this point
My new community lead is me, somehow, even though I didn't post for almost as long. 99% of my posts even now are basically, "hey, can you guys please read the rules before making yet another post about a suspicious black dude who's obviously up to no good cuz he's wearing a hoodie? kthx".
(I don't know if that constitutes the "neighborhood gestapo" in your book.)
Honestly, I think we'd all be better off if all social media was in digest form: queue up everyone's posts to be published next day at 9AM. That'd put a break on things, instead of having stuff snowball out of control.
However, it's probably been determined that it's best for the social media companies themselves for stuff to always snowball out of control, so non-digest it what we'll always get.
I live in the UK in a cul-de-sac with about 25 houses in the street. We've lived here about 4 years and have a dog so we have bumped in to all the neighbours and know all of them by name at least.
I get a note through my door from NextDoor claiming to be from a neighbour in my street with a name that we did not recognise. Apparently this neighbour had signed up for NextDoor to keep our street safe and exchange important information yada yada yada...
Needless to say it's total horse shit - none of us are using their scummy platform and have absolutely no desire to.
So they're preying on people's fears, and hoping that some kind of FOMO plus the fear of being stabbed in your sleep if you don't know what's going on in your street will get people on to their platform.
"<family member> wants you to be their emergency contact on Nextdoor. In case of emergency, <family member> wants their neighbors to be able to message you via Nextdoor. Please accept their invitation to join and connect on Nextdoor so that you can be their emergency contact."
This is scummy manipulation also. They now have my email address. That's an emergency contact, right there. But they aren't going to let anyone use it unless I "join".
I accept that there's a case for needing my permission here. I'd be happy to give them permission to email me if a signed-up neighbour of my family member wants to send me an emergency message. But no, I have to sign up for their entire service first.
I passed, and selected the "don't email me again" option. If my family member wants the neighbors to be able to contact me, then they can pass on my phone or email directly.
Worse, if I remember right, the page’s entire state (for all the creators) was represented in a single, slow HTTP request that was fired off when any checkbox was changed. Unchecking checkboxes quickly (faster than 1/second) would lead to undefined behaviour as requests get processed out of order and earlier requests would override some of the latter ones, silently undoing your work (since the earlier request has more remaining checkboxes - remember that every request represents the entire state of the page).
Absolutely dumb design on so many levels.
Why is this a huge problem? I am paying the individual artists, and getting communications from them individually.
It's not exactly clear why the typical user would want to Patreon-ize someone and not want to see the music, art or whatever that you are paying for, but if so, you can just turn off notifications when you start following them.
Sure, a global switch would be "nice to have", but it doesn't make the site crippled.
Does anyone know if this can be reported to a public agency?
Some, I actually admire. For example: Debates about national politics are against the TOS.
Makes sense, they don't want a locally focused forum turning into the usual partisan cesspool.
So when inevitably threads turn to national partisan politics, there seems to be some flag which is toggled. You might get notifications about replies to your posts, but click yields "This comment has been deleted". You have to use one of a few workarounds to catch up with the whole thread. Boom: Fewer shitposts by virtue of slowing down the whole discussion to a near-standstill.
If you don't want people unsubscribing, you just add more buttons and make unsubscribing harder to do.
Although you can just turn off notifications at the app level, this is annoying because it means you can't won't get notifications for emergency/safety notices, people messaging you directly, etc.
The number of relevant agencies will vary by your location, and in my 10 years on ND I have only received an agency notification once or twice. However, I think agencies were only introduced a few years ago, so things could be different in the future.
If you don't want to be bothered, use the website on your phone, not the app. And set up an email filter for anything from Nextdoor. If I need to communicate in real-time with anyone (to arrange pickup details for a for-sale item), I tell them to text me instead of DM.
On a related note, you can change your news feed preference among three settings. But if you choose something other than their desired algorithm, it informs you that this preference will be set for the next X days (45 or 90, I forget). I have never seen a preference that tells you up front that it will respect your wishes for some number of weeks before reverting to the default. Insane.
The problem is that Apple is too stupid to respect the setting you make there. If you turn off Bluetooth in your system settings, they should treat the control panel's Bluetooth switch as a true on/off. But no; it's always temporary.
Sometimes Apple can't figure out how to solve simple UI problems. When they even bother to try, their "solution" is an overly complicated, unreliable mess.
It is a waste of time trying to educate assholes, avoid them.
no thanks
[1]: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277942-Ca...
That being said: it's a technological step, another countermotion in a never ending arms race. I would like to see policy steps that erase this ridiculous battle entirely. I shouldn't need a giant pile of code to automate email addresses for me, because this kind of corporate behavior should be completely illegal and extremely risky (from a liability perspective) to begin with.
I'm tired of having to deal with (i.e. Mark as spam) a barrage of emails every time I register to a service.
Also, advertising on their platform brings almost $0 ROI. The only benefit was a decently ranked back link.
plus, i like to imagine i’m doing a tiny bit of good in the world by redirecting a bit of revenue from a shitty company to the probably less-shitty individual operating the help desk.
> Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $46,517, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:
$$('selector').forEach(el => el.click())
The only trouble is that some services can verify that the number isn’t a “real” number (how do they do this?!) but it works most of the time.
I’ve slowly been transitioning as much as possible to it. Phone calls even work great, and you can take them right through your laptop.
It doesn’t solve the problem of push notifications, but it’s semi related to the problem of being spammed. (I set my phone to permanent “do not disturb” mode long ago.)
They only cover that specific type of notification and have a toggle switch on the form that makes it confusing as to whether you're subscribing or not.
It took about a week to fully stop the emails because different "types" of notifications kept coming in.
Shady stuff.
Unfortunately this dark pattern is rather common, I think most social networks do that.
So much for the email "privacy". I guess I'm better off not giving two shits about it.
On Fastmail, as far as I know, the spam filter model is only updated for my organisation, and even if they had a service wide filter taking user feedback, they are much smaller.
The first thing he did was install 7 cameras with motion sensing alerts. I asked him what he was protecting against and he came up with vague comments about burglars etc. (FYI the crime rate in our town is very low, and especially low in his neighborhood and the surrounding older neighborhoods).
So he spends all day getting alerts as the cameras mis-diagnose moving shadows (caused by the sun) as "movement." All the new construction in the neighborhood triggers the cameras frequently, and eventually he disabled most of the alerts.
I think our society has done such a thorough job of feeding us "fear porn" that we are all ready to assume the worst.
Apart from this, it happened just a few months ago that these settings suddenly stopped working, so I received several non-solicited emails from notifications that should have been disabled.
Issues like this could have a significant negative impact in user experience and retention, in my opinion
It seems more like a place to gossip. If I want to connect with my neighbors, I just go knock on their door.
“Look out fellow Nextdoor-neighbors! There's this weirdo knocking on doors with some sort of chat up scheme. Stay safe! [blurry photo of you]”
“he came round here to. i peeped thru the blinds but he didnt spot me.”
“I think it was a she, but you can't tell with the hoodie can you? Seems shady to me. I'm calling the police if she comes here.”
I can make an argument that only good things will happen if we literally shut down the internet from tomorrow.