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We recently deactivated our account. We were excited about the idea of being able to informed of our entire neighborhood, not just our street. Instead, we found
by jcizzle 11y ago
We recently deactivated our account. We were excited about the idea of being able to informed of our entire neighborhood, not just our street. Instead, we found out that in our neighborhood of 8000, there are about 50 crazies that spend all day posting on Nextdoor, and everyone else had basically given up. In the real human interactions I have with neighbors, 'How's the weather?' has been replaced with 'Did you see that Nextdoor post? That was hilarious!'
Some gems in recent memory:
1. Someone posted an urgent 'BOLO black men with what appears to be a weapon or something to be used to break in to houses' accompanied by a picture of a man with a rake. Another neighbor commented, "That's my landscaper and he's been my landscaper for 10 years".
2. A heated debate over tearing down old houses and replacing them with bigger ones ended up with a guy crawling into someone's backyard, taking pictures of their house, and posting them and critiquing their design choices on the forum.
3. A neighbor created a small sculpture of stacked stones, each stone being about fist-sized. Another neighbor posted photographs and personal information, asking that he take the stones down, because if they fell on a kid, he would sue him.
4. Multiple occurrences where someone posted 'surveillance' video of dog poop not being cleaned up, which always resulted in another neighbor identifying the dog owner, and the dog owner almost always being an elderly woman, who embarrassingly had to indicate she ran out of poop bags but went back later to clean it up.
- cafard 11y agoPart one sort of sounds like my neighborhood list serve in Washington, DC.
- adevine 11y agoI had a similar experience. I don't understand how people find use out of Nextdoor - the signal to noise ratio (where "noise" is borderline crazy people) is just way too low. When I used it, I was instantly reminded of that Far Side cartoon where God is sprinkling "Jerks" onto the Earth, thinking "And just to keep things interesting..."
- lsniddy 11y agohttp://collectionofawesome.com/2012/04/05/farside-comic-jerks/ http://collectionofawesome.com/2012/04/05/farside-comic-jerk...
- AJ007 11y agoI never used Nextdoor but this sounds like typical online community behavior. How does one moderate a micro community without altering what it is representing?
- pavel_lishin 11y agoDoes NextDoor even have a way for people living in the neighborhood to be moderators?
- ashwinaj 11y agoWhen will people realize that they live in a "society" and they need to co-exist with others. The stone sculpture story made me chuckle; if this sculpture was on the creator's property why the hell would you ask him to bring it down? And how about letting children be what they are...children. This whole protective bubble in which they grow up is shocking to me. Talk about growing up with zero life experiences.
- cm2012 11y agoThe dog one is understandable. The elderly people probably didn't forget, definitely not on multiple occasions. It's a good example of where shame should work.
- oconnore 11y agoYeah, it's terrible, but deactivating your account is exactly the wrong thing to do if you're interested in fixing this sort of behavior. Nextdoor doesn't make people be shitty human beings, but it is a local forum that augments or replaces the sorts of venues that people used to be shitty in -- town hall meetings, HOA events, neighborhood watch, political rallies, etc. Arguing with people on the internet is (heh) usually a waste of time. But pushing for decency and respect within your neighborhood is not a waste of time if you value strong communities.
- jcizzle 11y agoI view it differently. In the same way a lot of online forums shadowban people, I look at Nextdoor as a shadowban from real life. Here these crazies are, thinking they're having this change-making dialogue with their neighbors, but in reality, they're just posting to a void on the internet while the real life version of their neighborhood continues on. (Also, the forum moderator was deleting posts from anyone that was kindly pointing out "hey, this isn't real neighborly of you.")
- oconnore 11y agoBut this is definitely not "a void on the internet". We have several police officers who post regularly on the forum. Local politicians use it. Local businesses use it. Special interests organize on it. Zoning departments publicize polls through it. The people on there are making a real impact (often a negative one) on the real-life community. Disengaging because it's "just the internet" is not a winning strategy. The moderator problem is real, and I don't have an answer. Maybe Nextdoor needs to review the behavior of moderators and have a replacement policy when they're misbehaving.
- djtriptych 11y agoNextdoor appears to facilitate neuroses in isolation, which was not the case with public meetings.
- oconnore 11y ago
- nashequilibrium 11y agoIn my spare time, I should make an app called "Racist NextDoor" where you post pictures of all racist residents within a neighbourhood, especially those making dangerous 911 calls.
- puredemo 11y agoIn this example, are the blacks racist for assaulting Asians, or are the Asians racist for profiling blacks? http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dirty-secret-of-black-on-Asian-violence-is-out-3265760.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dirty-secret-of-black-... Who would you expose here, exactly?
- dragonwriter 11y ago> In this example, are the blacks racist for assaulting Asians, or are the Asians racist for profiling blacks? Those options are not mutually exclusive; its quite possible for their to exist Black racists that target attacks against Asians and Asian racists that profile Blacks, motivated (or rationalized) by the fact that some Blacks have engaged in racist attacks against Asians.
- rodgerd 11y agoMuch like people and Yelp it seems that the "value" proposition is essentially blackmail-as-a-service: participate or else something bad may happen.
- eitally 11y agoI've seen some of this, too. I "founded" the Nextdoor community for my neighborhood and stayed a lead after that. A lot of the success depends on the nurturing and moderation the leads do, and if they decline to actively participate, well, what you described is likely to happen.
- amyjess 11y agoThis reminds me of the community meetings from Parks & Recreation to a very scary degree, just online. Is this really what people spend their time doing? Also, I remember a friend of mine talking about how people on a Facebook page for her neighborhood went crazy... death threats were made over posts there, and police were called.