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WTF Nextdoor? Over 130 clicks to disable email and push notifications?
- draw_down 4y ago
- lopespm 4y agoMeetup 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
- MollyRealized 4y agoHaving looked at both: if you think Nextdoor is bad with its paranoia, check out Neighbors by Ring.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- juliennakache 4y agoProbably 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?
- ausbah 4y agoseems more like just a bad design
- dragontamer 4y agoDark UX Design is bad design on purpose. If you don't want people unsubscribing, you just add more buttons and make unsubscribing harder to do.
- honkler 4y agoit's never bad to the users benefit. Always works in favor of the corp. I wonder why?
- tomcatfish 4y agoHow would it be "bad to the users benefit"?
- el_benhameen 4y agoYeah, 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.
- harry8 4y agoWhat 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...
- RajT88 4y agoNext-door is filled with dark patterns. 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.
- int_19h 4y agoAnybody 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.
- RajT88 4y agoAh, 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.
- trinovantes 4y agoI would probably just try document.getElementsByClass('selector').forEach((el) => el.click()) in the console
- wonderbore 4y agoAlso works: $$('selector').forEach(el => el.click()) Every browser console has extra helpers: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/web_console/helpers/index.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/web_co...
- duskwuff 4y agoI'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.
- sem000 4y agoNextDoor 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.
- colinsane 4y agoforward 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.
- wonderbore 4y agoUnfortunately 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.
- t-writescode 4y agoFriendly reminder: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act... > 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:
- Overtonwindow 4y agoNext 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
- smt88 4y agoThey did. They have classifieds (competing with Craigslist) and Groups. Every neighborhood in my city has a Facebook Group that's more active than NextDoor.
- throwawaylala1 4y agoWe have one too but it's overrun by jerks. Lots of bickering and ganging up on people.
- smt88 4y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- throwawaylala1 4y agoYou 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
- smt88 4y ago> 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.
- princevegeta89 4y agoHonestly, 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.
- Macha 4y agoThe 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.
- iamacyborg 4y agoI’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.
- krallja 4y agoMy 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!”
- jabroni_salad 4y agoIf 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.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoJust 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/ 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.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jimhi 4y agoIt's because it's a VOIP number which they can check instead of a Mobile number.
- Nextgrid 4y agoPatron 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). Absolutely dumb design on so many levels.
- falcolas 4y agoI 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.
- BeefWellington 4y agoI 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).
- cli 4y agoThis 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.
- azinman2 4y agoSquare 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.
- 4y ago
- gnicholas 4y agoA few reactions: 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.
- totetsu 4y agoiOS only lets you turn off bluetooth for a day at a time.
- codsane 4y agoWhen turned off using control center. You can still completely disable it within settings. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208086 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208086)
- remram 4y agoOn Mac there is a "control center" that is not the system's settings? What is it for?
- falcolas 4y agoFast 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.
- CitrusFruits 4y agoI 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.
- TedShiller 4y agoThat's why I never signed up in the first place
- zip1234 4y agoI had to close my account to stop it. Also, it seems mainly people complaining about how a school bus drives through their neighborhood, etc.
- tmaly 4y agoI stayed clear of them when they started canvassing my neighborhood. It seems more like a place to gossip. If I want to connect with my neighbors, I just go knock on their door.
- Freak_NL 4y ago> 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.”
- tmaly 4y agoThanks, I needed a good chuckle to get the day started.
- throwaway71271 4y agoOh I laugh.. but this is so true, it hurts. I can make an argument that only good things will happen if we literally shut down the internet from tomorrow.
- woodruffw 4y agoWe 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). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003
- beeboop 4y agoWe 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.
- istjohn 4y ago1password has an integration now with Fastmail that automatically generates one-off email addresses for you when registering on a website.
- mttjj 4y agoDo 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. [1]: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277942-Catchall-Wildcard-aliases https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277942-Ca...
- timando 4y agoCan you disable an alias (i.e. drop all incoming mail to a particular address)?
- AlbertCory 4y agoNextDoor: 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.
- dylan604 4y ago> 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?
- AlbertCory 4y agoWhy? 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?" Me: "Nope, nope, nope. Buh bye."
- wly_cdgr 4y agoBahaha, is that a record?
- sashk 4y agoThanks 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...
- roylez 4y agoMaybe this should be posted to https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign . It is a waste of time trying to educate assholes, avoid them.
- waplot 4y ago>reddit no thanks
- dylan604 4y agoactually, they posted old.reddit it's like 2 totally different things
- lwansbrough 4y agoIt's the people not the layout.
- Semaphor 4y agoDepending on the subreddit, the people are less of an issue than on HN.
- abawany 4y agoYes, 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.
- archerx 4y agoTo 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.
- parkingrift 4y ago
- tristanb 4y agoI tweeted this exact thing to them last month and they basically acted surprised I didn’t like it.
- 55555 4y agoMailbox 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”
- Gigachad 4y agoThey 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.
- spoonjim 4y agoThe people who use NextDoor deserve the worst experience on the Internet
- waplot 4y agoJust use sub-addressing, then discard all emails send to that address.
- chrismarlow9 4y agoI 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. Shady stuff.
- stormcode 4y agoSame here. It's shady AF.
- wonderbore 4y agoGranularity is fine and often welcome, but following the unsubscribe link should also show what else is enabled and let me disable it on the spot. Unfortunately this dark pattern is rather common, I think most social networks do that.
- Pakdef 4y agoI created a filter to dump their emails in the trash... it was the easiest way
- toofy 4y agoThis 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.
- snapetom 4y agoUgh. Tell me about it. 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.
- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- idontwantthis 4y agoAll 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.
- yakkityyak 4y agoI just blocked their domain entirely.
- tims33 4y agoThe worst part is that they regularly add new notification topics that you also have to go back and disable.
- creativityland 4y agoThis 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.
- technick 4y agoThe 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.
- throwaway2056 4y ago
- simonswords82 4y agoNextdoor 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.
- rlpb 4y agoI got this: "<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.
- simonswords82 4y agoMan that's so trashy - the team at Nextdoor must be total scumbags to use these tactics.
- whymauri 4y agoThat is insidious. Shame on NextDoor.
- AndrianV 4y agoNextdoor has earned my award for the worst example of human manipulation to boost the number of user signups that I've seen.
- iamben 4y agoI 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.
- temptemptemp111 4y ago
- greedo 4y agoI 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.
- otikik 4y agoMy email provider has a way to deal with that with very few clicks ("mark all email from this domain as SPAM")
- gitowiec 4y agoHow 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...
- timvisee 4y agoWTF LinkedIn? I need a ton more clicks to disable all their bullshit notifications on there, and it's even paged!