This seems like the least of the negative impacts nextdoor encourages.
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.
>> 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.
Please note that the fear-instilling effect of media coverage is not backed by conclusive evidence.
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.
Seems to me that this is a direct corollary of the claim that people’s beliefs are affected at least somewhat by the data they are exposed to. This seems self-evidently true.
(1) inconclusive means we may not have looked hard enough, or
(2) the effect may be very very small, as in not distinguishable from zero, or
(3) there are alternative models of learning. People could do bayesian updating, but they may also employ thresholds, toggle between belief systems and so on.
Summary: it's very complicated, lack of evidence suggests caution.
Maybe, but it's also possible that the people who LIKE crime shows tend to be less overly paranoid about it vs. people who just watch the news not necessarily expecting to see negative content, but do.
Similarly, the effect of media coverage can also be thought to be visible in perceptions of race relations. When polled, Americans say that their local race relations are still near the best they've ever been, but for the past few years have tended to respond more and more negatively about the quality of race relations at a national level — ie, what they perceive through the media and social media.
Also, in my experience older people just get more paranoid. I have seen it happen with family members who are otherwise pretty sharp. They get more wary or suspicious in ways that aren't very rational. Since that is a lot of the folk who hang out on places like Nextdoor, I can see how that goes. That's why you need diversity and young families in neighborhoods. It provides balance.
That specific creeping behavior is hilarious. Several years ago, my daughter and I found a lost dog clearly a family pet near our home near a busy road. We trapped it in our shaded yard and went around with some quick flyers to find the owner as we knew it was one of 30 homes. Multiple people revealing as little of their eyes as possible through blinds and curtains became funnier and funnier.
(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.)
It's really tragic that people are that afraid of their neighbors. I'm blessed to live in a neighborhood where we all wave at each other and talk for 5-10 minutes when we see each other on morning jogs or walkin' the dog.
Oof, I had to delete my Nextdoor account after witnessing that same kind paranoia (with a hint of racism).
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.
Yeah, but is it really Nextdoor that feeds this paranoia or is it just the true face of american suburb, that some, more secure feeling americans, like yourself weren't aware of?
Its not a vocal minority from my experience. I live in a safe neighborhood in Southern California and there are hundreds of people like that here. I have seen people posting photos from their door cameras and posting warnings about seemingly normal things.
In an area near where I used to live, there was a similar post, except it was a black man at the door. People started tracking his whereabouts, some even sounding a bit threatening. He was arrested twice that day, and released both times because there was no crime, but released to where? Not home, clearly. And not to family.
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).
> we live in an incredibly safe wealthy suburb and these people “crept” to a window
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.
> 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.
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.
> No. The suburbs are fine, it's social media that will get us.
Strong disagree. The decline of US civic life/institutions has been growing far before social media came on the scene. 13 year old me understood this fact just watching the Greatest Generation interact vs. the Boomers.
The fear-based culture of the suburbs existed since I was born, with local talk radio functioning as the NextDoor of the ye olde days giving every crank who saw someone suspicions a platform to rant on.
Social media certainly amped things up and accelerated this specific bit of our social decay. But it certainly didn't start it and the social fabric is breaking down in a manner far broader and earlier than what social media would explain.
Without talking about uninteresting outliers - we effectively McInfrastructured ourself into inhuman layouts designed to minimize unwanted social interaction. Fracturing communities and people the way we did with our construction patterns will end in tears. Humans are not built to only interact with those exactly like them on their own terms.
Those forced uncomfortable social interactions are absolutely key to humanity and personal growth and they have been nothing but reduced my entire life.
> The fear-based culture of the suburbs existed since I was born
Well my anecdote is the opposite. I once lived in a high-rise, and in that environment never met or knew anyone. Everyone fast-walks from the elevator to their door and go in. There are no common spaces so there's zero opportunity to meet anyone. Also, because the conditions are so tight everyone is hypersensitive about any sound through the walls etc so they're constantly complaining about everyone else.
Here in the suburbs, everyone spends time outside so I know all my neighbors, it's much more social and connected.
> Strong disagree. The decline of US civic life/institutions has been growing far before social media came on the scene. 13 year old me understood this fact just watching the Greatest Generation interact vs. the Boomers.
I suppose it could pre-date social media, but I don't think the reason for it is suburban living itself or the antidote is something explicitly anti-suburban, like bulldozing suburbs and piling people into high-density housing or something like that.
> Humans are not built to only interact with those exactly like them on their own terms.
I'm not so sure about that. I'd imagine that through the vast bulk of human history, most did only interact with people from their own small, insular communities who were very much like themselves.
This is so contrary to my experiences living in suburbs/exurbs most of my life that I'm honestly not exactly sure how we came to such polar opposite beliefs.
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 live in the suburbs and I have a similar view. Kids play in the street unsupervised, well-behaved dogs are free to roam, bikes are left in driveways without chains, and cars are left unlocked. I can't stand being in big cities for more than a few hours, it feels inhuman.
I get why some people like cities. Especially kids who don't want to be tied down, who want to be able to explore who they are, who want to see and be part of something bigger than their hometown. There's plenty of things to love about cities, from the convenience of the nightlife/food culture, to the "pulse" of the city, the feeling that something is always happening at any time of day, the compassionate social compromises residents adopt to accommodate the diversity of backgrounds of people, etc.
But there's a reason the plurality of Americans choose and prefer to live in suburbs. It's deeper than just "outdated 20th century city planning". It's something specific about American culture, community, etc. that resists specific generalizations.
I'm not making a case for dense urban living. I understand many do not prefer that form of living, in fact I'd say most do not. Something in between dense living and what we are currently building in the US seems most prudent to me, but I'm simply an observer.
My experiences in the suburbs were not remotely near yours, and I spent nearly all my life in them throughout the US - including raising a kid. In my experience, those sorts of vibrant communities only seemed to exist in a few select "older" suburbs (aka suburbs with downtowns) from where I was from. I agree those look great.
It also certainly depends on personality. In my experience, unless you enjoy a very structured social life you simply will not have one. I have seen many folks end up slowly just spending most of their time indoors in front of the TV/computer cut off from the world. This is at least a bit harder to do in an environment not basically built to optimize that condition. I enjoy going out with a friend on a random Wednesday night, but I don't enjoy planning on that activity a week in advance.
It's an interesting topic to me. I think of my Grandfather's house in what could only be called a prototypical suburbs of the 1950's and I can absolutely see that life being amazing. The same life in a 2000's era suburb just seems like an utterly different living experience to me - almost alien in nature when I lived there.
That and the whole financial sustainability of the endless expansionist sprawl is highly suspect to me.
For the record I grew up between two types of places. One was a pretty, forested, newish, wealthy, totally-isolated-from-anything-that's-not-a-home-or-school development very similar to this:
I found both of those great in their own ways. The former was extremely pleasant and peaceful. Kids would play around outside, neighbors would walk their dogs together, people would frequently have house parties and barbecues and such. Weirdly, it's completely isolated from any commercial development. It's a 10 minute drive to the nearest place you can buy anything. Nobody had much of a problem having a social life as far as I could tell.
The latter was great too, but in a more independent kind of way. Everybody kept to themselves more at home, but they would congregate at church or at the local restaurants all the time. People would shoot guns, drive 4x4s, just do whatever the heck they wanted and nobody gave them shit for it. There was a bigger mix of poorer folks and richer folks, oftentimes along traditional racial boundaries, but they coexisted better than any community I've seen. Rich farmers would shoot an extra deer each year for the poorer families so they could eat meat for dinner even when it was expensive. There was a bit of a "downtown" but it was still like, 20 minutes drive away on a country road so not really accessible without a car obviously. School and sports was a huge center of life there: people all over town would come to the local high school football games.
I'm still not exactly sure which kinds of suburbs, or aspects of suburbs, you find alien.
It's this onslaught in the media of violent crime, stranger danger, drugs and gangs and immigrants everywhere. This isn't a new idea, it started decades ago.
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?
I'm going to hazard a guess that the OP agress here but I'll at least chime in with my own take on that which is our building habits of desertification of the planet (grass and a few trees is a biological desert) based on a mistaken belief of cheap, infinite oil to power cars happily down roads unimpeded by traffic, building cheap houses that won't last at out of plastic, composite materials which are needed because of poor architecture and a negative heating feedback loop were a bit unsustainable.
We're both under-building (in terms of volume, and quality) and over-building in terms of spreading things out too much.
This does not mean pack everyone into skyscrapers like Hong Kong. It means building medium density neighborhoods like we used to (ya know all of the most expensive places in America? Wonder why they're so expensive...) where most of your daily activity would involve walking or biking somewhere, you have some yard in the back of your home and you probably own a single car but can certainly own more than one if needed. But transit isn't 99% (literally) car-based infrastructure.
EVs won't solve these problems. The root problem is car-based infrastructure so more efficient cars just puts more people on the road and uses more resources. The only solution is changing architecture and neighborhood design.
Those are mild. In my nextdoor feed, there’s an elderly woman who angrily replies to every post telling them to stop emailing her. She apparently doesn’t know how to turn off notifications. People have tried to help but I guess she doesn’t read the replies either.
Not sure if Amazon still does this but when someone asked a question about a recently purchased item you’ll get an email with their question. A lot of times the response is something like “I don’t know quit emailing me” or something similar.
Never used this app but I suppose it is a neighborhood-thing? Nobody can simply swing by her home and explain it to her? And if she does not open her door, it is what is.
My Nextdoor devolved into multiple houses on my street setting up a shared Nest/Google account and rigging up a dozen or so cameras to watch their entire stretch of the street 24/7. All this because someone thought their car was vandalised (turns out it was vandalised in the parking lot of a mall ~10km away).
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.
The phrase “overpolicing” used to refer to wealthy, low crime suburbs that spent insane amounts of money on police.
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.
That just sounds like old people talking to each other, I don't see the problem. That kind of small-talk would be commonplace in any small-town diner. In a quiet neighborhood where nothing happens, literally anything is gossip-worthy. Not every online has to be maximally interesting content, sometimes it's fine if it's just old people talking about the weather.
This is a large part of why I’m leaving the United States after 20 years and have never wanted to buy a house here. In most streets that I’ve seen, neighborly interactions are horrendous and weird, and people seem scared of each other and think that talking to a new person is somehow dangerous and to be avoided. Often the first time I’ve met neighbors it’s with them complaining about noise or something. But because of their fear of talking to people by the time they pluck up the courage to say something about their perceived wrong, they are an absurd melting pot of apoplectic rage. It’s mainly California / Bay Area that I’m thinking of.
One of my immediate neighbors moved in about 4 years ago. He's had confrontations with me as well as four other homes, plus with a rando walking down the sidewalk. Everyone else gets along fine, but this guy has threatened physical altercations numerous times, and has had the police called on him at least once. Funny that he hasn't had a beef with the cop who lives on the block...
> 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!”
Fear and hate drive engagement. If engagement is their metric that is how they will get it.
I don't know that fear and hate are the only drivers of engagement, but they do seem to be easy drivers of engagement. If some social network succeeds in basing their drivers on empathy and social responsibility I hope they displace Facebook.
My impression of nextdoor based on my admittedly very limited usage was that maybe 5% of people (the usual paranoid types) used it as a sort of unofficial neighborhood crime watch, and 95% of everybody else used it to share pictures of local wildlife, organize barbecues, complain about the weather, and share old people memes.
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.
Creeping around and posting paranoid messages is silly but I wouldn't blame anyone for ignoring an unexpected knock. The ratio between people I want to engage with and people I don't is just too low. For every teenage girl needing help there are a hundred proselytizers, salespeople, and scam artists.
Not all social interactions we have is desired to start with. It's possible to shut off and close the door on people you don't desire, but you never know unless you open the door in the first place.
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?
Lots of people's best defense against doorstep scams (and predatory salespeople) is not to open the door. I always open the door because I can easily fend off such people.
As it happens my street has a confusing layout which means I get lost food drivers at least twice per month. It only takes a moment to direct them to the right house.
Heh, I'm in the opposite scenario - Uber's map's shitty routing directs delivery drivers to the block behind me, so often my food gets dropped off at the wrong house. Luckily, they are not the type to open their door to unexpected knocks, so the food is still there when I go to collect it.
Definitely a neighborhood-dependent thing. I get more drunk people in need of help than proselytizers, salespeople, or scam artists.
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.)
I just don't get enough door knocks to care. Maybe once a week, at most? At that rate it doesn't bother me to simply answer and decline. Although I do ask door-to-door salespeople for their license.
My teenage daughters just default to not answering the door, unless they've ordered doordash etc. Same with phone calls from unknown callers; straight to voicemail.
Ignoring an unexpected phone call is one thing, but you should never ignore a person knocking on your door. I’m afraid it sounds like you are exactly the sort of person that everyone else in this thread is complaining about and laughing about.
Why? For women, it can be a dangerous situation. I'm pretty comfortable since I'm a mountain of a man compared to the women who live in my house, but it's pretty dumb to say that everyone should answer the door.
I think it depends on the neighborhood. Here it's mostly harmless. A couple pot shots here and there but mostly people share recommendations, list lost pets, announce HOA meetings and local news. I did see one physical threat one time but that guy was gone by the time I checked out the post again, mods had deleted him and people moved on. That said I don't use my real name or say where I live other than a large neighborhood.
Yeah its insane in this case. On the other hand a fishing buddy of mine was stabbed by a total stranger when he answered the door. (a drug addict trying to rob his place.) Fortunately he was able to shove the guy back out the door and lock it before passing out from blood loss and others in his house called the cops administer first and emergency services were able to save him.
In conclusion, the sixteen year old had better post on the community website that she has a flat tire if anyone could help it, because knocking has become so rare that it upsets people.
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
NextDoor: home of the dumbest people on the Internet. They must be proud of that.
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.
> 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?
Why? Well, the alternative is: I never go to their stupid website. Whereas now, I go there when some entry in the daily email is interesting. And very occasionally, contribute something that entices other people to go there.
Nextdoor: "Hey, how about you come here several times a day and stay, like we were a real website or something?"
Right, and I bet the experiment was to figure out how many people would notice the missing email, and either complain, or start visiting the site more often. Of course we'll never know if most people are more like you, or would actually go to the site daily, if it weren't for the email.
I don't have the app on my phone, so either (1) they didn't notice that, or (2) they wondered if losing the digest would make me install it (guess not).
I think the app is what's supposed to make their site "sticky."
> Nextdoor already has one, and they're trying to take it away.
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/
What is it with these corporations randomly running experiments on people anyway? It used to be that there was an opt in buried somewhere in the settings. Now they just assume we want to be their unpaid guinea pigs?
It's a consequence of having our software run on other peoples computers. 20 years ago it wasn't really an option because most software was installed and pushing updates was hard, but now everything can be updated without the user even knowing. IME there's a lot of people on HN that will even defend this sort of A/B testing.
This is why I like debian, I never open an app to find out the entire UI is changed while I was asleep.
- Mandatory software updates can change UIs that run on """your""" machines.
- I still remember when I was running Debian Unstable, the day I ran a routine upgrade which replaced GNOME 2 with GNOME 3, I couldn't find my way around, and couldn't even easily revert because Linux distributions ship all their software in synchronized packages with interdependencies, and aren't built around picking and choosing older package versions (especially foundational packages).
You chose to run software with "unstable" in the name, when there is a free "stable" version you could use instead. You opted in to unexpected, disrupted changes
This is because Nextdoor is “moderated” by your local neighborhood gestapo.
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
I don't know how Nextdoor "seeks out people" to moderate, but what I can tell you is that my previous community lead was a guy who didn't post at all for like 2 years.
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.)
When a neighborhood is created, the person who does so automatically becomes a lead; I believe that was the case for the guy who was lead before. Aside from that, I have no idea.
NextDoor is an incompetent mailing list. They don't even understand how a digest is supposed to work. I mean... FREE software had this down in the '90s.
> NextDoor is an incompetent mailing list. They don't even understand how a digest is supposed to work. I mean... FREE software had this down in the '90s.
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.
Specifically for the design. I haven't been on it in a year, so my memory is foggy, but the reason I left was the fact that it seems tailor made to amplify the most paranoid, antisocial perspectives at the expense of good faith and trust.
The following progression of thought comes to mind: many police departments have a mandatory arrest policy for calls in response to alleged domestic violence. Despite the fact that many neighborhoods are, frankly, boring, plenty of nextdoor users are looking for a chance to interact with the app and contribute to "the greater good." It's easy enough to call the police "just in case," but often there are disastrous results[0] that at minimum include the arrest of one of the partners, regardless of guilt. This kind of mindless see-something-say-something excuse marches us daily toward a speech-chilling antisocial breakdown where all that's left to do is clutch our pearls and cower at the thought of interaction. Nextdoor directly provides a channel for the amplification and praise of this modality of thought. While (I hope) most people reject or ignore it, its continued existence is a net negative for neighborhoods and society.
I can’t comment specifically with certainty on the internals of their algorithm.
What I can say though is I have lost most of the faith I had in moderation systems, their role should be to validate that XYZ is actually your neighbor. Maybe rate limit all posts by geo. Beyond that? Fuck off.
Yeah they changed the default behavior a year or two ago so that if there’s a post in a nearby neighborhood that someone in your neighborhood engages with, it shows up in your feed.
The result is that shitposts spread and drive engagement.
Nextdoor wins my prize for the scummiest human manipulation to increase user signups I've witnessed.
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.
Patron has a similar issue. Subscribing to a creator by default opts you into all types of notifications from them, and notifications are configured on a per-creator basis with no global override.
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).
I actually appreciate having that level of control. Some creators are absurdly talkative, others only post things I’m interested in. The ability to control it at such a fine level has kept my sanity, and my support.
I don't think the issue is with having fine-grained control as much as it is having no ability to either set defaults (e.g.: Opt-in to notifications from certain creators) or set account-wide overrides (Opt-out of all notifications).
> notifications are configured on a per-creator basis with no global override.
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.
It's a problem because there is no global opt-out and having to uncheck 8 checkboxes per creator is a massive pain, even more so if the page breaks when you uncheck them too quickly. I used Patreon purely to support artists and otherwise follow them on other platforms (my RSS reader) so I don't need noise in my emails.
This is also my experience with Patreon. Recently, I have been receiving popups from them about opting out of marketing emails. However, they do not seem to save my choices and ask me this every several days.
Square is the same whenever you buy something from anywhere. You AFAIK can only unsubscribe as each business spams you. If there another way, it’s not in the email that’s sent.
I once had to purchase something for work myself to be reimbursed by the company from a shop that used Square. It asked for an email address, so I used the company email so it would be under that account when filing out the remiburse info. However, that card was now somehow permanently associated to that email address. I haven't worked at that company for 5 years now, but that address still received Square emailed receipts. I gave up trying to fix it.
Probably the darkest UX pattern I've seen in a while... It's not spam per say so I'm not sure if this can be reported to the FTC, but it sure is a dirty move. Whoever designed is either evil or had was forced by an evil organization who would do anything to make their stock go up after a rough SPAC introduction.
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.
Anybody can flag a post or a comment on Nextdoor, and people do so quite a lot. Most of it is "this guy said something I don't like", but depending on the person reporting, they might be savvy enough to look up a rule that's actually violated by the post/comment they didn't like. Leads of neighborhoods where the post/comment showed up then get a notification to vote on whether to delete it or to keep it.
Ah, but for these threads you get the "this post has been deleted" for many posts which 100% are still there. It just takes extra work to be able to see them.
Once you have seen it and dug into it a bit, it feels very intentional and sneaky.
Yeah, I begrudgingly use Nextdoor to make sure I don’t get put on blast for going on a run or walking my kid to school too close to someone’s driveway, and the unfathomably bad design and functionality of their mobile site has me convinced that they’d be incapable of intentionally implementing dark patterns.
>I begrudgingly use Nextdoor to make sure I don’t get put on blast for going on a run or ...
And so what if you are? Not being there and put on blast affects you how? Being there and put on blast is different because? You can respond by using gasoline to put out the fire?
Nextdoor is a great place to find out who you never want to associate in real life.
You say this as if people are not complaining and organizing against you now. Are you sure that's not actually happening and you're just not on the same chat they are? Let that fester...
What a brilliant business technique! You have to to consent or be punished for otherwise acting like a responsible human. Then they can monetize the engagement. Everybody wins!
Let's extend that. Publish any senior executive's home address to a list containing many militant communists unless they subscribe to your engagement platform themselves! High value info to monetize right there. Then do the switch because they clicked through something. Capitalism working just like we were told about as kids...
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.
When you "turn off" WiFi or Bluetooth via the control center you're simply disconnecting from any remote devices. To actually turn the radio off you need to go into the WiFi or Bluetooth settings – this lasts until you turn the radios back on.
Annoyingly, I've found that it doesn't even disconnect from all currently-connected devices. For example, my AirPods are often hijacked by my iPad when I'm setting it up for my kids to watch something. To pre-empt this, I will turn off BT via Control Center, but even having done that, the AirPods often switch over. Super annoying.
Fast access to frequently used controls from across the system in one “pane of glass”.
Once you understand that the control center changes are temporary, it’s not proven to be an issue. It’s meant I have not accidentally left Wi-Fi disabled for weeks at a time as I forget I made the change once due to a bad router.
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.
Apple is smart enough to recognise that people want to turn off things for different reasons, and give you different options - to permanently turn off the transceiver hardware, or to disable various services.
For example: When I leave my home to walk to the shops or something, I will often put YouTube on and listen to something, when I get to the top of the road and the phone can still see the WiFi network but can't use it reliably playback will often stop before it has chance to to fully swap to cellular (And Background Play on iOS YouTube often will need a kick to start playing again after a network error).
So I have got into the habbit of "turning off" WiFi via control center as I'm setting up what to listen to as I'm leaving the house and the playback pause issue is gone. With the current behaviour of control center it will "re-enable" WiFi by the time I get home so I don't forget to swap back to WiFi and eat up my cell data.
EDIT: When I want to turn WiFi completely off, I have a shortcut to do just that which I added to to the Assistive Touch menu.
Not in this case. The person who drills down into his settings to REALLY turn something off really wants to turn it off. So Apple should respect that, and treat the control-panel on/off as persistent in that case.
That would serve everyone's preferences and reasons: People who only turn the stuff off from the control panel would get the temporary behavior of those controls. People who turn them off at the system level would get the persistent behavior.
Yes, I agree. I've run into some great subreddits and extremely helpful people there. Reddit imo is the best social media experience, almost like the old usenet, if the 'engagey' subreddits are removed from one's list.
To each their own I guess, to me reddit is a feces filled dumpster fire, even the smart/tech subs lack critical thought and are full of bad/wrong information that gets upvoted.
Reddit is the best build your own bubble adventure game in all of human history. A few good subreddits here and there don’t make up for the epic toxicity of the broader site. Not to mention it’s functionally unusable unless you happen to know to browse the old.Reddit site. The “main” site is an abomination against the internet.
Nah, they decided some subreddits are "bad for advertisers" during the covid time, and /r/conspiracy got put on a long list of "undesirables". The precedent for the was /r/the_donald before that).
Some more radical pro-censorship subreddits decided to just ban anyone posting on any of those subreddits, and the sentiment spread to larger subreddits, like eg. /r/pics).
Combine conspiracies and covid, and "spreading covid fake news" was the official reason to ban people just by posting to any of such subreddits.
We desperately need a revised CAN-SPAM[1], with two additional fangs: additional prohibitions on these sorts of dark patterns (designed to exhaust users into submission), and the opening of individual standing against companies that spam (so that individuals can directly sue these misbehaving companies rather than waiting for the FTC to un-capture itself).
We desperately need to overhaul how the average mail provider works. We need unique email addresses every time we sign up for an account that can then be disabled. I do this with fastmail though it's a little annoying to spend 20 seconds to create a new alias every time. At last count I had something like 470 aliases. Probably at least 40 disabled ones after receiving emails I didn't opt in for, or I disabled immediately after the first use because I had no need for further communication with that organization.
Do you prefer not to use a catchall alias[1] to prevent someone from just sending mail to garbage12345@yourdomain or for some other reason? I also use unique addresses for every website account I have but with the catchall, I don’t need to spend the 20 seconds to create the alias. It’s just automatically there. I can’t think of any issues I’ve had by using the wildcard alias.
i guess im very pedantic - i don't want to make a rule to delete a email. i want it to bounce and never see my inbox and have the sender see that it bounced.
Fastmail has first-class support for exactly what you want. Settings > Users & Aliases > + New Alias > "Show advanced preferences". There's a checkbox that says "Disable - Reject (bounce) all mail sent to this address (disable the alias) Disable a specific address when you have a wildcard (catch-all) alias."
Automated unique email addresses are a great idea, and I've been happy to see Apple make some positive moves in that direction.
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.
If you have your own domain, Fastmail will let you set a wildcard rule and anyrandomthing@yourdomain.com will hit the mailbox, no further config necessary.
NextDoor continues to spam you even after unsubscribing from everything. Some how every month I get a random new email, and some how another new email subscription is enabled in my account.
Also, advertising on their platform brings almost $0 ROI. The only benefit was a decently ranked back link.
forward your spam to their help desk (usually help@<website> or contact@<website>). other humans hate dealing with spammy email about as much as you so often the fastest way to solve it is by looping in an email.
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.
Unfortunately there's no such thing as free forwarding. help@ sees an email coming from your email account and it can be marked as spam. Not worth it. Just mark it as spam.
> 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:
Just wanted to share that I’ve been using OpenPhone for dealing with text spam, and I really like it so far: https://www.openphone.com/
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.)
I just went through this and the unsubscribe links in emails are slightly deceptive.
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.
I remember finding out about next door and being excited because it seemed like such a good idea on the surface. It's so sad to see how poorly executed the whole thing is.
Honestly, email notifications and the concept of "unsubscribing" is a big fad. 9/10 services that I try to unsubscribe to, end up asking confusing questions, and instead of ubsubbing me at once, they will rather ask me which topics I'm interested in.
So much for the email "privacy". I guess I'm better off not giving two shits about it.
If it isn't a 1-click unsubscribe I click the back button and mark as spam. I read on this website that marking stuff as spam causes a lot of problems for gmail delivery, which is what I want.
The one thing I miss since leaving Google for mail is the knowledge that I could use the report spam button on companies that made unsubscribing difficult and if enough users did this, it hurt their deliverability to most of their customers.
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.
I’m not sure how fastmail handle it, but with hotmail Microsoft would automatically send a list unsubscribe request if you marked an email as spam. Any legitimate mailing platform will honour that request.
My favorite misfeature of Google mail is when you get a spam email sent to a Groups mailing list, mark it as Spam, and Google helpfully offers to “Unsubscribe & Mark as Spam.” Clicking this button removes you from your Google Group!
“You have been unsubscribed from engineers@work.example!”
I find the paranoia in suburbia amazing. I have a coworker who bought a new house in a brand new development. He works as does his wife, but his mother lives in the home as well.
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.
I'm reminded of a similar pattern in Atlassian's email notification preferences -- multiple pages of multiple checkboxes for every product in their portfolio, with no clear "unsubscribe all" option available.
Meetup suffers from a similar issue, where one cannot perform bulk changes to all the subscribed groups, which becomes unwieldy when one has over 100 subscribed groups.
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
How can I remove my email from their database if I never opened an account? Once I lived in New York city and thought I will use this service but then I moved out. Unfortunately I started to signing in. Then they wanted to send me a confirmation snail mail. But I don't live there any more. And my registration is stuck in a limbo since like 10 years. I can't login because I have no password nor confirmation that I live in the NYC...
Mailbox providers should build in an unsubscribe feature that actually works on a local level. Essentially which creates a filter and doesn’t show you the emails. It’s optimistic to let the spammers handle the unsubscribe feature. AI is getting good enough to have two buttons “unsubscribe from all” and “unsubscribe to emails like these”
They do. If you mark something as spam, gmail should put all future emails from the sender in spam. On Fastmail they make it a little clearer by calling the option “block sender” which puts all their emails in trash.
This was the same issue I ran into after signing up. Each notification "type" required a separate unsub link to disable, and there was no visibility on when it will stop sending me emails.
I literally cannot find a way to have the app installed and not get pushes 2/3 times a day. This started a few months back - I tweeted them about it and got no response. Painful.
The west side Denver nextdoor is mostly people crying about fireworks or posting videos of porch pirates. I couldn't find the value in it so I stopped using their service.
All I know about Nextdoor I’ve learned from The Neighborhood Listen. Hilarious podcast starring Paul F Tompkins where they do sketches based on real nextdoor posts.
Next door is a dreadful system that is so overloaded with advertisements that its almost useless. Im very surprised facebook hasn’t developed a local-focused platform
They did. They have classifieds (competing with Craigslist) and Groups. Every neighborhood in my city has a Facebook Group that's more active than NextDoor.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to have a neighborhood-based social network that's any different. Even before the internet, this is how HOAs and small town governments behaved.
However, before the internet, pettiness and other unpleasantness had a cost. You wouldn't call up an HOA meeting, send a letter or a phone call to everyone every time you see a dude that you think is "suspicious".
The Internet and platforms like Nextdoor not only reduced that cost to near-zero but actually encourage and reward that behavior since they profit off this "engagement". Middle-class paranoid (and sometimes racist) dumbasses with too much time on their hands are the perfect target for a "growth & engagement" company; they're dumb but far from broke and thus a perfect target market for advertisers.
You may be right, but... and maybe I'm being naive here... if HN can do it, why can't local social networks? The amount of people in the network is even smaller than HN. I suppose the problem is finding good moderators that keep to an ethical standard and that ethical standard is different everywhere. Well I think I answered my own question lol
I agree. HN is heavily moderated (using both automation and human intervention). The site pays for itself by being a honeypot for tech talent, which only Y Combinator companies can access.
Neighborhood social networks have no similar way to monetize themselves and pay for talented moderators.
Thanks OP. If not this post, I wouldn't go there just to see it myself. While there (it wasn't easy to find where these settings are), unsubscribed from most of the email and push notifications. Hopefully, I will remember occasionally launch the app to see _some_ useful posts...
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.