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The rise of fear-based social media like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Neighbors
- cmurf 7y agoI have a friend on Nextdoor who routinely complains of neighbors freaking out about "suspicious" people in the neighborhood, how crime is on the rise, and oh my god what are we going to do!? All that angst despite that neighborhood has one of the lowest crime rates in Denver, and there is zero evidence from publicly available police records that the crime rate is going up.
- lazyasciiart 7y agoPeople in Seattle are starting to sound like conspiracy theorists in their efforts to explain why crime reporting data doesn't show that Ballard is now a hellish warzone where they fear for their lives just opening the front door.
- techsupporter 7y agoHoly crap, no kidding. Between NextDoor and /r/SeattleWA, compared to my own experience, I'm beginning to think that I live in one of The Orville's split universes. According to those forums, there are lawless hordes of vagrant gangs roaming the streets, dumping bags of used syringes onto little old ladies in walkers while stealing their bikes and running over children with RVs. Meanwhile, I (a person with no car so I walk and bus everywhere since my neighborhood isn't cool enough to get light rail...ever) barely see any of what they describe. Yes, there are a handful of tents around freeway onramps. Yes, the trash looks a little unsightly. Yes, I wish it wasn't there. But I've not once been attacked and I rarely see a syringe or even a hint of what looks like poop (statistically, it's probably dog poop given the scourge of terrible owners of dogs in this city). So I'm not discounting that something happens sometimes, but damn, not on the level that the screaming hysterics seem to think it does.
- oceanplexian 7y agoI like how we live in a first world country, but yet casually dismiss the fact that there are homeless people living outside in tents, and that feces and syringes are only an occasional thing so it's really not so bad. Coming from a clean, safe neighborhood in New England, where even trash on the side of the road would be offensive, I feel like we are definitely living in two different parallel universes.
- techsupporter 7y agoI think that's a very disingenuous reading of what I wrote. I was comparing my personal experience to the hysterics I read on forums like NextDoor and local Reddit. I did not say that the problem was not a problem, but that some responses to and perceptions of it are overblown. (Oftentimes, these positions are used to justify espousing a preference for simply throwing homeless people in jail for "vagrancy" or involuntarily removing people from the state. So, yes, in a way, I do find the response to be worse than the actual problem.)
- mdorazio 7y agoNot really disingenuous at all - I read your comment the exact same way.
- hsod 7y agowhat's your point? honestly can't tell what you're trying to convey here
- CodeMage 7y agoI don't mean this in a confrontational way, I'm just being curious: have you been on Nextdoor? From my experience so far, the typical attitude of an average Nextdoor "neighbor" towards the homeless is not: "This is a problem, we have to do something for these poor people." Rather, it's: "This is a problem, I don't want it near me." I don't know about Ballard, but people on Nextdoor in the Eastside neighborhoods have a penchant for NIMBYism and, as a side effect, truly do tend to exaggerate things. I'm not saying we should just ignore homelessness, but exaggerated complaints on Nextdoor are definitely not the way to address the underlying problems.
- cableshaft 7y agoThe local police department is on our NextDoor neighborhood, and posts on it about seemingly every single crime that happens in the city. So I see a lot of these type of posts hit my email (I rarely click them), but it's because it's the police that are doing it.
- ultrarunner 7y agoThe police are on NextDoor here, too, but their posts are chiefly "Critical Incident Report," which means they shot someone again. The response is consistently and overwhelmingly "good job, thank you for staying safe." I never would have predicted this as a consequence of social media.
- throwawaysea 7y agoHave you considered that many people actually appreciate having police enforce laws and recognize that they by and large do their job well? I don't think it is that out of place.
- mikeash 7y agoShooting someone is never a good outcome.
- throwawaysea 7y agoNever? I disagree. Recently in Seattle there was an incident where a gunman was sitting in a car, ostensibly pinned down. On Twitter, posts informed residents that the suspect was in a standoff with the police, and made clear where that area was. Residents assumed that other surrounding neighborhoods that were not cordoned off were safe and continued about their business. The police who were present waited through this initial standoff, trying to avoid shooting the suspect, due to potential political fallout and the undeserved scrutiny/criticism they have received in the past when doing their jobs. This gunman ended up suddenly flooring the car to try and get away, and ended up crashing into another car elsewhere, killing the other driver. Shooting the suspect when he was pinned down and not cooperating would have absolutely been the correct outcome and would have saved an innocent life. Article on the above incident: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2-dead-2-injured-apparent-random-shooting-car-crash-seattle-n988261 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2-dead-2-injured-appare...
- mwfunk 7y agoIt's both funny and sad to read my local Nextdoor comments, for exactly those reasons. The comments around me fall into a few major categories: (1) Announcements from the local police and local government about stuff they want to let people know about. This is actually useful and informative sometimes. (2) People who are expending titanic amounts of time and effort to save almost nonexistent sums of money, hoping they can buy stuff off their neighbors. People looking for stepladders or planters or shovels that they hope random neighbors have lying around unused in their garages so they can save like $5. These are clearly not people trying to be less wasteful, these are clearly people with a lot of money devoting hours on end to trying to save $5 instead of just going to Home Depot or whatever. (3) People who are looking for random people in the neighborhood to do their housekeeping for them or babysit their kids or cook for them for some reason. The common theme is, whatever service they're looking for, it's always something where it's completely insane to ask a bunch of random strangers who just happen to be registered in the same Nextdoor neighborhood as them, and again appears to be people with tremendous amounts of money trying to marginally cheap out by snagging some random stranger to do whatever they need doing. I can't imagine anyone seeing one of these and thinking, "heck yeah, I have no idea who these people are but I would absolutely stop whatever I'm doing at noon every day to go over to this person's house and cook a meal for their shut-in in-laws in exchange for $10 a week because these people want to save money by cheaping out on caring for their older relatives." (4) People who are very frightened by everything they see out the window of their wealthy, manicured neighborhood. This is the racist stuff. Most of it's either, "I saw some <ethnicity> youths walking down the street and it made me worried", or "A stranger of <ethnicity> rang my doorbell and I didn't answer and they went away and nothing's happened since but it made me worried." (5) Occasionally informative, useful stuff about yard sales, garage sales, funny stories, lost pets, accidents, crime, mysterious loud noises, etc. Like (1), it's not often relevant to me, but it's good to have that source of information.
- malandrew 7y agoIt's kind of ironic seeing journalists write about this since selling fear is the primary M.O. of engagement-driven journalism today.
- A2017U1 7y agoSad seeing this comment greyed out, I have friends who are journalists and they lament this all time. The media model always had this strain in it on the fringes but now it's prevalent everywhere in a world of A/B tested headlines and click KPI's rather than newspapers sold.
- malandrew 7y agoAs they say "If it bleeds, it leads"
- chrisdhoover 7y agoFear, propaganda, and outright lies.
- jklinger410 7y agoThis article is 100% FUD. For the downvoters, let me summarize. Social media is bad because people. Saved you a read.
- goostavos 7y agoWell... it is from Vox...
- chaostheory 7y agoI don't feel that having more data is a bad thing as long as there's some transparency and context
- dariusj18 7y agoThe tools to understand that data are important too.
- chaostheory 7y agoI agree. Hopefully it'll lead to discovering and understanding the root causes of problems and not just the symptoms.
- majos 7y agoI struggle with this issue. I'm a big fan of the idea of transparency given, as you point out, context. But many people are terrible at looking for context, even when it's available. Wherever transparency exists, some aggregator that will harvest shocking information and divorce it from explanatory context to drive "engagement" seems not to be far behind. But I find careful packaging of information for people off-putting as well.
- chaostheory 7y agoMaybe we suggest it to companies like Amazon and Nextdoor. They're both HQ'd in progressive areas and I wouldn't be surprised if they would be open to hearing about suggestions to tweak their UI to add more context.
- davidw 7y agoThese two twitter accounts are pretty entertaining: https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor?lang=en https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor?lang=en and https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv?lang=en https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv?lang=en Nextdoor is definitely a vector for accute NIMBYism where I live.
- pjc50 7y agoAny social media can be fear-based if you're scared enough. "Fear of crime" has rarely had much connection to actual crime levels, far more to do with perceptions of cleanliness and social class.
- davidgould 7y agoAnd color, can’t forget color..
- zepto 7y agoIsn’t Vox itself ‘fear based social media’?
- jshaqaw 7y agoInteresting. I signed up for Nextdoor to see what it is based on this article. For my NYC neighborhood it’s all tag sales, requests for opthomology recommendations, etc... No fear monger it in sight.
- CodeMage 7y agoI've been on Nextdoor for months now. Here's my take on it: if you need to get recommendations for local businesses, it's great. Most of the rest is headache-inducing display of NIMBYism, self-righteousness, self-entitlement and armchair politics. It's basically watered-down Facebook -- without the benefit of having friends -- that happens to be a pretty decent complement to Yelp.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoI'm suspicious of it's value for local business recommendations. I've used it in 3 neighborhoods and it seems like it's mostly everyone just recommending their friend's business. Is that not everyone else's experience? At least that's better than all the people hawking their multi-level marketing crap.
- TomVDB 7y agoThe recommendation part is not my experience. (The whining about suspicious people walking on the street OTOH...) We pretty much only use Nextdoor for the occasional recommendation or when we have some garage stuff to sell/give away.
- orthecreedence 7y agoTry it in a mostly-white suburban neighborhood. You'll rapidly add new items to your library of dog whistles.
- taborj 7y agoChecking in from a mostly-white suburban neighborhood. The only "crime" post I've ever seen was about a homeless guy going through trashcans and yelling at people. Everything else is as OP states; yard sales, missing (and found) pets, etc. Edit: I also find it ironical that you're fear mongering on a post complaining that apps are fear mongering...
- ethagnawl 7y agoIn my limited experience with it, Citizen is trash and incentivizes bad behavior. I once watched someone live streaming themselves following police into a call at a private residence. Unsurprisingly, the police officers responding forced the person back out onto the street. Now, I am all for accountability, bodycams, etc. but ordinary people holding up their smartphones _should not_ be following police officers into active crime scenes and any company that incentivizes or gamifies this behavior is, by definition, trash.
- gradyj 7y agoSounds like Nightcrawler to me.. creepy.
- burger_moon 7y agoThe game Charlie and Frank play at night?
- jklinger410 7y ago>incentivizes bad behavior How exactly did they incentivize this?
- ethagnawl 7y agoI haven't used the app in a while, so I don't remember the exact set of social features it offers, but the app is very social and, as is to be expected, users get off on how many people are watching their feed, commenting, following them, etc.
- kradroy 7y agoThe commenters also egg on the camera man to get closer and do risky things.
- Supermancho 7y agoNextdoor.com was something I resisted for a long time, despite the number of neighbors using it. Once I signed up, I have be an ardent supporter. Having moved 3 times since, my partner and I both use it as extensively as the neighborhood requires. The ability to restrict messages to a specific neighborhood or set of surrounding with appropriate veiling of information, is brilliant.
- sharadov 7y agoNextdoor is comedy gold - from people complaining about teenagers ringing their doorbell and running away, to reporting "suspicious black males", someone asking for free lemons. It's hilarious!
- BoorishBears 7y agoIt's all fun and games until I'm the "suspicious black male" and held at gunpoint by police because of this foolishness.
- tuxxy 7y agoNextdoor is... very odd. In Salt Lake City, where I currently live, all I see are people complaining about homeless people and "suspicious people", who are _always_ people of color just walking down the street (who I've actually recognized occasionally). Yeah, people call others out on this sort of casual racism, but it doesn't make it go away. It becomes a hotbed of these kinds of thoughts. When someone gets a bike stolen, you'll always see a comment like "The homeless problem here is out of control" and sometimes a comment with a picture of some random (again, person of color...) walking down the street from a Nest cam asking, "Did you see anyone like this? My bike was stolen too." It's so odd to me to see all this on Nextdoor because I live a block away from a homeless shelter (one of the "gritty" parts of the city) and I can count only twice that I've had issues with homeless people or crime. I've lived here for almost six years now and I've never felt nearly as nervous or afraid as some of these Nextdoor users claim. However, there is a ton of amusement from Nextdoor users, as well. The number of times I've seen people call each other rude because they used the word "fuck" in their post is extremely high, but that could be because I live in Utah haha. In short, it's my experience that Nextdoor is filled with the type of person who calls the cops on their neighbors for no reason (like noise complaints). These users would really benefit from just getting to know their neighbors in real life.
- jahewson 7y agoNoise complaints are “no reason”?
- CodeMage 7y agoAt least try talking to people before calling the cops on them for making noise. What is controversial about this?
- derekp7 7y agoI think that some people have either had bad enough experiences themselves, or have heard of incidents, where they fear confrontation. By talking to someone who is engaging in an annoying (to you) or antisocial behavior, you are opening yourself up to retaliation by that person. If you just call the police anonymously then the target doesn't know who to retaliate against. Of course, a much better strategy is to go out of your way to be neighborly, get to know the people around you. That way if someone is having a party a few houses down, instead of calling the cops you can grab a couple six packs and head on down and join them.
- shakkhar 7y agoLove the Oxford comma in the title :P
- garmaine 7y agoNextdoor is particularly rotten. I’ve never signed up but I constantly get spam emails about what people are talking about in my complex. Click the link and it brings you to a sign up page. I will never do business with a company that thinks it’s okay to spam non-customers like this.
- carrja99 7y agoNextdoor is a gigantic advertisement for Ring and Nest products.
- rednerrus 7y agoMy wife and I joke that Nextdoor is "Racist Facebook."
- standardUser 7y agoI live in a very dense part of San Francisco and most of the Nextdoor activity I see is people complaining about the constant car break-ins, human feces, needles, package theft and unstable vagrants. There's one group that thinks these things are bad and should be stopped, and another group that likes to argue otherwise. Sometimes there's some overt racism but usually those posts disappear quickly.
- TomVDB 7y agoIn our well to do South Bay neighborhood, it's about unknowns ringing their door bell, which is obviously a very suspicious activity. When my wife and I once had to go to all the houses of the neighborhood, it was amazing how many people who were clearly at home did not open their door. It's a totally alien concept to where I originally come from.
- scruple 7y agoAlso in a well-to-do neighborhood, though south in Orange County. I've had people look through their windows at me while I'm holding their mail, which was incorrectly delivered to my address. What can you do other than toss it at their door and go back home... I genuinely don't understand it, either.
- c22 7y agoThe other day my girlfriend and I were getting into our car to leave the parking lot at the Y and some lady in a Lexus was "parked" directly behind our car, preventing us from leaving. Since she was in her car I figured if we got in our car and started the engine she would move, perhaps to one of the many open parking spots in the lot. After a minute or two of idling it was clear she wasn't going to do this so I went over to her driver's side and knocked on her window. She looked up from her phone (of course) and I smiled at her and waved and made the "roll down your window sign". She refused to roll down her window, even just a crack! She looked at me with horror through the glass and mouthed "can I help you?" At this point my politeness bit flipped and I yelled "yeah, you can move your fucking car so I can get out!" This was in the middle of the day with numerous people milling about, I don't understand what she was even afraid of.
- throwawaysea 7y agoI get the feeling most commenters here don't actually use NextDoor, but have plenty of opinions about NextDoor that [Vox | Gizmodo Media | Twitter | etc.] fed them. I have been on NextDoor for years and I almost never see frivolous complaints or racism. It seems to me that people get this notion based on hit pieces written by online journalists and by things like the 'best of next door' Twitter feed, which showcases cherry-picked isolated posts. Many of the comments here are alleging widespread racism on Next Door, but I don't agree with the idea that a report about suspicious behavior that involves a POC is inherently racist. Broadly labeling such reports as racist is disingenuous and frankly harmful. OTOH, I see plenty of discrimination in this thread, where people are surmising that NextDoor is "just older white people" (as another comment put it). For those who don't use NextDoor, they have a very well-designed workflow when you try to submit a post about a crime or suspicious activity, where they ask you step by step to isolate what happened, why that behavior was suspicious, and so forth, before collecting details on the people involved. For those saying "I don't see any problems at all, these NextDoor posters are conspiracy theorists or hysterical fear-mongers" - maybe that's true for you but it is definitely not true for me: I've had needles thrown into my front yard by drug-addicted homeless people. I've been the victim of property crime and lost irreplaceable possessions. I've had friends physically assaulted, robbed at knifepoint, caught in the middle of gunfire, and even threatened with murder in front of their children. I've seen needles in front of my workplace, in front of stores I go to, and in greenbelts in parks. I encounter human poop about once a week downtown. These are all real problems that were absolutely not prevalent 10 years ago in Seattle, and have received limited press coverage due to our ideologically-skewed demographics + city council + journalists. Violent crime is still rare here but on the rise in Seattle. Property crime is incredibly common, and a lot of it goes unreported because the SPD is not staffed to handle it and has been directed to de-prioritize investigating it or directed to not enforce certain laws or directed to not enforce laws against some groups of people (i.e. homeless). Both Facebook and NextDoor luckily have given voice to what are very real concerns to law-abiding residents. PS: the level of discourse in this thread is appalling. So many people are using labels (e.g. "NIMBY") or discriminatory remarks ("old white people") to dismiss others' valid perspectives, values, and opinions. I find this ironic considering the same posters seemingly uphold the value of "lived experiences" in other contexts. But more importantly, it seems like lazy comments that aren't making any actual argument or adding any information are garnering votes, which is not good for the community.
- mikeash 7y agoI live in the DC suburbs about a mile from a relatively new Metro station. The local Nextdoor is fairly reasonable, but about once a month someone posts to report a small crime (like a car break-in) and concludes with something like, “this never happened before Metro was put in.” Right, because criminals are spending an hour on the train, then walking a mile or two to your house so they can commit a crime, then hustling to get back home before the system closes down for the night. It certainly is interesting to see how disconnected from reality some people are.
- NikkiA 7y agoMeanwhile, the only post on my nextdoor today is a reminder that it's the day of the year when they get together to repaint and clean up the poorest part of town as part of a charity event. shrug
- beeskneecaps 7y agoIt is interesting to observe assumptions about the entire network, where one can only observe a small fraction of the entire network. A single observation of racism or toxicity causes many observers to assume their neighborhood is full of casual racism or is completely toxic.