4 ms·

I installed nextdoor and now I actively avoid interacting with my neighbors

by rcpt 2y ago

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.

I installed nextdoor and now I actively avoid interacting with my neighbors

by 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.