11 ms·

>just lots of people occupying neighboring space and rarely talking to each other. This is a bitter stereotype that is leveled against both city-dwellers and s

• rcpt 2y ago
  I installed nextdoor and now I actively avoid interacting with my neighbors
  • jjice 2y ago
    Why's that? Never used the app. Is it just a lot of negativity and you get negative vibes from them?
    • RankingMember 2y ago
      It is exactly that. A lot of "saw a black guy walking down the street...should I call police?"
      • Kevguy 2y ago
        NextDoor used to be bad about that, but they are now much more careful to remove it quickly if anyone does post racist crap. Now it seems to be 50% paid ads, 30% lost/found pets, 10% unpaid ads, and 10% everything else. Worth checking to find the owner of a stray dog or cat, but not much else.
        • RankingMember 2y ago
          I deleted the app a few years ago because it was a drag. Glad (and honestly surprised) to hear you say they remove the racist stuff quickly, and not surprised it's mostly ads these days.
        • kortilla 2y ago
          The problem is people say the same thing without saying race. “Did anyone see this suspicious character?” with a picture from a doorbell cam of a black guy. It’s still obviously racist to everyone but it’s not reportable or treated as such.
    • roflchoppa 2y ago
      I don't use it, but some family members do... From what they describe, it sounds like an app to complain/snitch on people.
      • JoshTriplett 2y ago
        It attracts the same kinds of people who love homeowners associations, yes.
    • hombre_fatal 2y ago
      It exposes you to the mental illness of some people, like the kind of person who will make a thread asking if anybody knows this new runner they saw jog by their place because it's very suspicious and it's making them very angry that someone would jog down their street. Or bicker about street parking. Or people who post on social media in general, like to talk about politics or fake outrage over nothing or the weird boasting people like to do like post a news article about some family freezing to death in the Yukon and how disappointing it is that the husband didn't keep his SUV prepped for such an occasion like I do here in Houston—you know, I don't even leave my house without <LARP armor>. It can get in the way of a foundational part of the social fabric: being able to assume your neighbors are normal, nice people.
      • rufus_foreman 2y ago
        >> the kind of person who will make a thread asking if anybody knows this new runner they saw jog by their place That's what the urbanologist Jane Jacobs, in her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" called "eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street". As she said, "The first thing to understand is that the public peace - the sidewalk and street peace - of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves". To many people, of course, this is disgusting behavior.
        • Barrin92 2y ago
          >To many people, of course, this is disgusting behavior. Well in my experience when I lived in a neighborhood like this in practice this meant a lot of really bored soccer moms in the local facebook group posting pictures of every new van on the street because they were now convinced their kids were in mortal danger. The million ring doorbells probably didn't help either. I think P.K. Dick was much more accurate and prescient than Jacobs when it came to the paranoid character of local neighborhoods in particular in an age where that is amplified by technology
      • ryandrake 2y ago
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    Social media tends to bring out the worst in people.
  • volkk 2y ago
    i think most of the types of people you'd want to hang out with aren't posting on nextdoor
    • abalashov 2y ago
      Underrated insight of the week.
      • leethargo 2y ago
        "I want to make cypherpunk friends, but none of them are on Facebook!"
    • throwway120385 2y ago
      Yeah -- my partner and I moved to a small island in WA and this is so intensely true that I feel it to my core. Nextdoor attracts mostly vain self-promotion where we're at. Where we move to after this, I'm going to get on their Nextdoor and make a list of names of people who post there regularly, and when I meet them in real life I'm going to avoid them as much as possible.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • neilv 2y ago
    When they started mentioning WhatsApp, I did have the briefest thought that this could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor. There's certainly opportunity. NextDoor comments here are of mixed quality. And the NextDoor feed seems to have the ad saturation cranked up unpleasantly high. > Thus, the WhatsApp group was born. At first this was just a place to announce when we’d be out having stoop coffee, but we soon realized people wanted to connect over more things than just coffee. So we ended up converting the group into a WhatsApp Community where we could have chats dedicated to certain topics or groups and plan other types of events together.
    • margalabargala 2y ago
      > NextDoor comments here are of mixed quality. You're lucky, sounds like your local NextDoor community has above average (for NextDoor) comment quality...
      • neilv 2y ago
        Even before we had some unelected mentally ill person making Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and then still handed them unprecedented powers to disassemble our government... and a whole lot of people seeming fine with that... The signs of a populace with wildly conflicting values, a lot of anger, a lot of mental illness, and a lot of cognitive problems and knowledge deficit... has been apparent in online comments for a couple decades. One thing with NextDoor might be that it's developed a reputation. So that many people expect that the typical post will be some alarmed retiree posting a doorbell cam photo of a "suspicious person" going to doors on their street, who was obviously delivering packages while being nonwhite. In real life, most people would minimize interaction with the alarmed person, not install an app to get more of it. Another thing with NextDoor is that some aspects of the experience are really user hostile. Besides the ad saturation-bombing, and the user interface that could use some cleanup and straigtening-out, there's things like 2FA (for Nextdoor!). I'd love to see numbers on how many users that 2FA alone cost them, and what they got in return. A UI cleanup is possible only if it's not overruled by the people doing the ad saturation, where user confusion just means more opportunity to show ads (until those users dont' come back, and don't bring their friends, but that's someone else's KPI this quarter).
  • mauvehaus 2y ago
    On the way home from the subway one snowy Boston evening, I joked with my wife that what the world needs is yelp, but for snow shoveling. People could get out all their passive-aggressive and aggressive-aggressive crap about their neighbors by complaining about the quality of the snow shoveling in the sidewalks in town. It seems Nextdoor has fulfilled that need and more.
    • jimbokun 2y ago
      Pretty sure it was a conversation just like this that led to the creation of Nextdoor.
  • UncleOxidant 2y ago
    I mean, I know you're kind of kidding, but there's also a lot of truth in it. When I was last on Nextdoor, a woman had posted asking for any information about a car that hit her as she was riding her bike and sent her to the hospital. She was trying to find people who might have witnessed the incident. People were answering that it was her fault for being on a bike. I uninstalled the app right then and there.
• drcongo 2y ago
  Having lived most of my life in cities, I moved from London to the suburb of a smallish town about 4 years ago. Since that move, I've got to know maybe 20x more of my neighbours here than I managed in two decades in London. However, I also got a dog and I think 90% of this is down to that.
  • drukenemo 2y ago
    Very similar story to mine. Moving from Amsterdam to the “suburbs” of a smaller city in the Netherlands AND getting a dog was the only way I’ve found to meet new people and befriend neighbors.
  • LawnGnome 2y ago
    The dog part is definitely key. We moved a few blocks — so within the same neighbourhood — shortly after getting our dog, and it was amazing how much more quickly we got to know our new neighbours with our (extremely extroverted) then-puppy compared to the previous place. (And, on the flip side, I'm on a first name basis with every dog on my block, which usually implies also being on a first name basis with at least one of their humans.)
    • sokoloff 2y ago
      I can recognize and name more dogs on our block than people.
      • drcongo 2y ago
        Ha, me too. I have a terrible mental block with human names but for some reason I can hold the names of 100 dogs in my head.
        • chrz 2y ago
          are you me? Maybe we should pretend people are dogs so we can remember their names
• dm03514 2y ago
  In my experiences of living in suburbs for 30 years, I’ve seen the default is to ignore neighbors. I don’t really get this. Our communities have so much in common and so much overlap, we shop at the same stores, go to the same parks, get stuck in the same traffic, our kids are at the same schools,our neighbors care for us medically, teach our kids, maintain our dwellings, work on our cars, and contribute to our local municipalities through property tax. We vacation at the same places. We have so much in common but we put our heads down and duck into our homes ignoring our neighbors. To be honest it makes me really sick to think about. Like the internet has allowed us to live these parallel lives, highly dependent on our neighbors but completely isolated from them. We smile and nod then go to the ballots and kick our spite up to the federal level (in the US). To me, we have the majority of our lives in common. Social media and the political engines preys on our differences making them the focus of our interactions ignoring the fact that 90% of our day-to-day lives are overlapping and our concerns are similar: health, wealth, prosperity, safety, education and recreation. It’s not much, but as I get older I’m making a point to slow down and talk to my neighbors, have real conversations with them, many of them fly political flags that are contrary to my political beliefs but I find out we have so much In common because we have such similar day-to-day lives and experiences.
  • glitchc 2y ago
    Part of it is politics. Totally correct about everything in common, and yet in the multicultural fabric we call society, politics could be vastly different: Neighbour 1 cares about Trump, neighbour 2 about Ukraine, neighbour 3 is focused on Palestine, neighbour 5 about public transit, while I might not care about any of those. All of them are going to seek like-minded people who are unlikely to be their next door neighbours. It wasn't like this in the past, where economic mobility was relatively limited. Multiculturalism coupled with economic mobility means often neighbours and you don't really have much in common. As an example my next door neighbour: He's a major, I'm in the sciences. We travel in different circles. I have a dog, he doesn't like pets. We both have kids but they are of different ages, don't go to the same schools and basically don't know each other. We met a few times then realized that we have very little in common and stopped interacting. There's nothing binding us beyond a shared geography.
• russellbeattie 2y ago
  Every house has a front yard, and many have large front porches. And no one uses them. I'd say "anymore" but I've rarely seen them used for socializing in my lifetime. They're almost vestigial. I remember one beautiful June Saturday afternoon cutting through a gorgeous neighborhood on my bike and amazed it was like a ghost town. All the houses with their beautiful yards on a quiet street, and literally no one outside. It was so weird.
  • pkamb 2y ago
    Air conditioning and TVs are the answer to this unfortunate problem.
• jimbokun 2y ago
  Suburbs often have physical constraints with the way houses are laid out making this "stoop coffee" approach more difficult, if anything. Houses laid out in a way that you're more likely to drink your coffee on your back patio surrounded by a fence or hedges to avoid being seen. And even if you are sitting in front of your house, neighbors are more likely to be driving by instead of walking so not very likely to stop and chat. In densely populated cities, you are often in close proximity with other humans you haven't met yet. But there can be social and cultural norms to keep walking and avoid eye contact because social interaction with all the countless people you pass is completely impractical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AoNuz1gjQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AoNuz1gjQo So both environments have their challenges for impromptu social interactions.
  • tptacek 2y ago
    I live in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago (Oak Park) and stoop coffee would be much easier to do here than in San Francisco (where I lived many years ago). This is what my suburb looks like: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9014246,-87.791197,3a,75y,177.64h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sp9IMOrbuL7PL0rGB6IbVlg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0%26panoid%3Dp9IMOrbuL7PL0rGB6IbVlg%26yaw%3D177.64!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDMxOS4yIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9014246,-87.791197,3a,75y,17...
    • azdle 2y ago
      There's no official definition of what the "the suburbs" means, but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks. The area you linked looks to me more like an older "streetcar suburb", which I think most people would just call "the city".
      • RHSeeger 2y ago
        Nobody I know would call that street the city. In my mind, "the city" is, minimally, houses that are a few feet apart, small yard in back/front, pretty much nothing on the side. Frequently, it's 2-3 story buildings, with whole floors rented out as an apartment. That's my "least dense" vision of a city. Anything less than that (ie, full yards) falls into my vision of suburb.
• screye 2y ago
  Many Americans still think of cities as modernist concrete, interstate exits and parking lots. In this imagination, social trust is eroded by homelessness, drug addicts and variety of crimes endemic to inner cities. Unfortunately, cities that were razed for cars fit some of these stereotypes. In fact, parts of SF match the description too. This story would have unfolded differently in SOMA. Even in safe neighborhoods, (eg: Mission Bay, Rincon Hill) large towers, 5 lane roads and 35+ mph thru-traffic discourage neighborhood vibes. > has some truth to it in both cases, but amounts to uncalled-for negativity I disagree. This isn't a case of 'both sides'. Cars destroyed American cities. Then Americans moved to gated suburbs that did everything in their power to limit through traffic and therefore the destructive onslaught of cars. Suburban residents demand easy access to the city by car, but reject the car in their own neighborhood. Suburbs want to have their cake and eat it too, at the expense of city residents. In contrast, cities do not impose their wants or needs onto suburbs. The resentment by city dwellers towards suburbanites is justified. Fortunately some cities escaped razing. Boston, NYC, DC & SF have many neighborhoods that enable wonderful stories such as this.
  • eleveriven 2y ago
    That said, I think it's worth acknowledging that not everyone in the suburbs actively chose that setup
• enaaem 2y ago
  The thing is that whether you click with your neighbours or not is pure luck and it's no one's fault. That's why you read many opposing anecdotes in this thread. When there are more local third places, there is a higher chance you will find a nice community to hang out with.
  • more_corn 2y ago
    Pro tip. Being a good neighbor helps you click with your neighbors, and that can be the difference between life and death in an emergency, or your house burning down or not if a neighbor catches something and calls you because you’re chill, friendly and helpful. It is worth extreme efforts to cultivate good relationships with your neighbors.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Very much so. For a very different example, I live in a small village of about 250 people in rural New Mexico. Of the 250, there are between 50 and 75 people who are sociable and interested in forming, maintaining and enjoying community. Of the remaining 200 or so, about 1/3 of them are friendly and social, but generally do not want to participate in community activities. The remaining 2/3 live here because it offers them (amongst other things) a chance for privacy.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    I should have said that about 50 of them live here because their families have been here since the early 1600s, too.
• jaredklewis 2y ago
  Yes, but the geographic scale of suburbs just puts limits on this type of thing. “Everyone with a five minute walking me” is a very different number of people in Brooklyn vs the suburbs. Let’s say 50 vs 500? I think it’s way easier to end up on an anti-social block than in a city, where the law of large numbers draws blocks toward the average.
  • bluGill 2y ago
    You only have room for a few hundred friends in your life. Sure there might be 500 people who live in 5 minutes walk - but that is too many and so you will learn to take steps to limit the number of people who will accept an open invite. If you are a Hindu living in a small US city you will find and becomes friends with every other Hindu in the city - there are not very many and you stick together. If you move to a slightly larger small city you will discover that there are too many Hindus and it is hard to make friends with them because their friend groups are already full. (This is a real example from someone I work with, names and exact cities not given for obvious reasons)
    • jaredklewis 2y ago
      I guess my comment wasn’t clear, but I’m saying if on average half the people are not social, then in a city that leaves 250, which as you point out is plenty. In a suburb, because the total population of a block is smaller, the variance in the percentage of anti-social people is going to be much higher, even if averaged across all blocks you still get 50% (or whatever the population average is). If the number drops to 20, for example, my experience is this is less likely to form into a “community.” Twenty is a lot of people but you need more because any given person isn’t available much of the time. This matches my own experience of living in the suburbs where some streets are way more interconnected than others. To be clear I’m not claiming this is rigorous social science. Just sharing my intuitions based on experience.
• throwaway894345 2y ago
  I don't think it's "just" a stereotype. There's a lot of literature around how American suburbs are designed to be isolationist. The most obvious example is how much more difficult it is to meet your neighbors when you have to get into your car for every slight errand (FWIW, I've lived in all densities--I'm not some urban chauvinist).
• chongli 2y ago
  It's all down to the design of suburbs. Many cities have bylaws and zoning regulations that prohibit human-centric suburbs from being built [1]. Older neighbourhoods (prior to these ill-advised laws) are incredibly livable and naturally produce a sense of community. They also feature mixed-use zoning with quaint little corner cafes, restaurants, and small shops. These are incredibly important as third places [2] which have largely disappeared from our society. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
• anon291 2y ago
  In reality, many criticisms of suburbia are simply criticisms of HOAs