7 ms·

I am part of a Nextdoor neighbourhood in a Bay Area suburb with 302 neighbours (216 of 423 households). It's very handy. The thing that surprised me most is ho

by shazow 12y ago

I am part of a Nextdoor neighbourhood in a Bay Area suburb with 302 neighbours (216 of 423 households). It's very handy. The thing that surprised me most is how publicly abrasive people can be when they're using their Real Names with real photos and real descriptions of their children and pets just a click away, talking to people who live just down the street. There's a big hubbub in my 'hood about some homeowners who want to rebuild our community pool, a multi-million dollar project. Vast majority of the neighbourhood doesn't care one way or the other, but they don't want their HOA fees to increase. Had it not been for Nextdoor, the loud minority would have quietly passed the bill and started construction because nobody attends the community meetings or bothered to vote. Except, Nextdoor started taking off in our area just at the right time and a bunch of people flipped out when they found out about this through various threads on Nextdoor. There was namecalling, sarcasm, pedantry, even classic trolling (people taking positions that they clearly don't care about just to upset the original poster). Almost Youtube-comment level stuff. Even weirder, most of our neighbours are middle-aged or older. They didn't grow up with this kind of online behaviour and had trouble recognizing it. Clearly the behaviour of these people is not Nextdoor's fault. I am grateful that Nextdoor is there partly for passively observing the drama in my community and partly for actually feeling like I'm getting to know the people I run into when I walk my dog. Coming away from working at Google during the peak of the Real Name controversy, it's weird to see the benefit premise explicitly shaken, if not refuted.

Brakenshire 12y ago
I suppose if there is no close community in an area, that still remains the case even if you give people the means of broadcasting to one another. If people had wide friendship links amongst the community, then youtube-level trolling would be out of the question, because it makes you look bad amongst your friends and acquaintances, but if you don't know anyone, there is no clear barrier to that kind of behaviour. You're still operating by the rules of an online forum, not a local community.
- exodust 12y ago
  The other thing is that certain topics will enrage anyone in any forum, no matter the social connections. This includes neighborly chats, TV talk shows, dinner parties, classrooms, offices, pretty much anywhere you have humans talking about issues that are important to them and affect them personally, you'll get all kinds of behavior and language. Unless you have a dedicated moderator of a debate, one who everyone agrees is the moderator, the floodgates are open and the tone of the discussion can go in any direction. This is especially true when the consequences of the debate can mean a new pool is or isn't built at whatever cost down the road from where we live. "Friendship" among the participants won't stop someone speaking out against such things if they feel strongly about it.
jerf 12y ago
"There was namecalling, sarcasm, pedantry, even classic trolling (people taking positions that they clearly don't care about just to upset the original poster). Almost Youtube-comment level stuff. Even weirder, most of our neighbours are middle-aged or older. They didn't grow up with this kind of online behaviour and had trouble recognizing it." I first got online in 1994 or so with local BBS, which turn out to be fantastic ways to put your toes in the online water... they're just gone now, and I'm actually sort of grateful. So I've had twenty years of posting with text to learn how to do it, and what to do, and what not to do. One of the things that watching Facebook has reminded me of (even though only my wife has the account) is that knowing how to socially interact online is a skill, and it can be a brutal thing when certain personality types get exposed to it for the first time. My wife is skilled enough that she has not gotten caught in any crossfire, but we've seen friendships die. I'm sure others here could post stories of marriages ended on Facebook. Don't be afraid to educate your non-online friends a bit, if they'll have it... you can save them a lot of grief. And this sounds like a network even more likely to pick up network newbies than Facebook itself. That's going to be... interesting.
- mrfusion 12y ago
  How would you educate them?
jonnathanson 12y ago
I signed up, and invited all the neighbors I knew, in large part because I have an out-of-control HOA. They purposely schedule meetings on short notice, typically when they know everyone's at work (2pm on a Tuesday, for example). Then they pass all sorts of pet projects, spending resolutions, "house rules" (don't even get me started on that nonsense), and so forth. Time will tell if peer pressure and transparency are effective antidotes to the petty tyranny of my HOA. But I'm all for anything that can theoretically check their influence. So far my neighborhood is pretty quiet. About 50-odd users. It's entertaining, though. There's this one guy who posts weird survivalist rants and doomsday scenarios about The Big One, and how we're not sufficiently prepared for it. (Probably true, I hate to say.) There's a woman breeding puppies in her apartment and offering them for sale. There's a guy using the site to promote his political blog. There's a guy playing True Detective, tracking all of the car break-ins in the neighborhood, and looking for a "pattern" and "the perp's signature" in the items left on the scenes. I kind of dig it all. Seeing the eccentricity on display adds a smidgeon of big-city atmosphere that I've always felt SF was lacking in comparison to other cities I've lived in. I hope the network comes into its own, and that we get more people in my neighborhood on board. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the strangeness of my early adopter cohort.
- satori99 12y ago
  Can I ask what a HOA is for and what it does? I don't think they exist in my country. We have body corporate entities for strata title blocks, but freestanding houses pay rates to local government directly for services. Does a HOA provide garbage removal, street maintenance, etc?
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    The nominal answer is that HOAs are membership associations to which owners in a condo building or neighborhood are sometimes obligated to join. The homeowners pool dues every month to cover things like garbage collection, building maintenance, etc. The HOA also acts as a governing body over the building's residents, and is free to impose any number of rules and restrictions on usage, design, etc., in anything defined as a "common area" (chiefly, any part of the building that is outside the airspace of the condo interiors). Some HOAs set additional restrictions on what you can do inside your condo, provided that activity, construction, design, etc., affects the neighboring units in any way. Above and beyond their common-area jurisdictions, many HOAs are free to establish "house rules," which are arbitrary and binding restrictions on just about anything that the HOA board happens to dislike. The cynical answer is that HOAs are legal fictions set up to shelter building developers from the financial burdens and liabilities of having to pay for, or be on the hook for, any of those services or maintenance needs. HOAs are the greatest invention in favor of real estate developers since the timeshare.
ern 12y ago
The thing that surprised me most is how publicly abrasive people can be when they're using their Real Names with real photos and real descriptions of their children and pets just a click away, talking to people who live just down the street. When I signed up for Geni, a few unstable relatives (avoided IRL) started fights on the message boards and it put me off the entire social family tree concept (the copious amounts of spam that Geni sent out didn't help, since many people lacked the computer savvy to opt-out, and it made them even more hostile). My guess is that something similar happens with Nextdoor: you can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family, or your neighbors. In the case of LinkedIn, and Yammer, trolling is far less of a problem, because there can be consequences for misbehavior, and it is easy to unfriend someone on FB, or unfollow/block on Twitter. Unless there was some way to control trolls and nutters, I wouldn't sign up for Nextdoor.
peterwwillis 12y ago
I find people have a pretty hard time controlling themselves online. If you're upset, screaming into a text box is a lot less real than screaming at a person in front of you. But many people do that too... the internet just exposes our lack of emotional intelligence.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  More than screaming; folks will be more sarcastic, hurtful, smart-alec and generally unsocial in text than in person. Something about an emotional distance provided by the abstraction?
grayclhn 12y ago
The town I live in has a Facebook group for neighborhood news, gossip, etc. From what I've heard, it's exactly the same story there.
afarrell 12y ago
Having lived in an MIT dorm with a mailing list, this does not surprise me.

by shazow 12y ago

Brakenshire 12y ago

I suppose if there is no close community in an area, that still remains the case even if you give people the means of broadcasting to one another. If people had wide friendship links amongst the community, then youtube-level trolling would be out of the question, because it makes you look bad amongst your friends and acquaintances, but if you don't know anyone, there is no clear barrier to that kind of behaviour. You're still operating by the rules of an online forum, not a local community.

exodust 12y ago
The other thing is that certain topics will enrage anyone in any forum, no matter the social connections. This includes neighborly chats, TV talk shows, dinner parties, classrooms, offices, pretty much anywhere you have humans talking about issues that are important to them and affect them personally, you'll get all kinds of behavior and language. Unless you have a dedicated moderator of a debate, one who everyone agrees is the moderator, the floodgates are open and the tone of the discussion can go in any direction. This is especially true when the consequences of the debate can mean a new pool is or isn't built at whatever cost down the road from where we live. "Friendship" among the participants won't stop someone speaking out against such things if they feel strongly about it.

jerf 12y ago

"There was namecalling, sarcasm, pedantry, even classic trolling (people taking positions that they clearly don't care about just to upset the original poster). Almost Youtube-comment level stuff. Even weirder, most of our neighbours are middle-aged or older. They didn't grow up with this kind of online behaviour and had trouble recognizing it." I first got online in 1994 or so with local BBS, which turn out to be fantastic ways to put your toes in the online water... they're just gone now, and I'm actually sort of grateful. So I've had twenty years of posting with text to learn how to do it, and what to do, and what not to do. One of the things that watching Facebook has reminded me of (even though only my wife has the account) is that knowing how to socially interact online is a skill, and it can be a brutal thing when certain personality types get exposed to it for the first time. My wife is skilled enough that she has not gotten caught in any crossfire, but we've seen friendships die. I'm sure others here could post stories of marriages ended on Facebook. Don't be afraid to educate your non-online friends a bit, if they'll have it... you can save them a lot of grief. And this sounds like a network even more likely to pick up network newbies than Facebook itself. That's going to be... interesting.

mrfusion 12y ago
How would you educate them?

jonnathanson 12y ago

I signed up, and invited all the neighbors I knew, in large part because I have an out-of-control HOA. They purposely schedule meetings on short notice, typically when they know everyone's at work (2pm on a Tuesday, for example). Then they pass all sorts of pet projects, spending resolutions, "house rules" (don't even get me started on that nonsense), and so forth. Time will tell if peer pressure and transparency are effective antidotes to the petty tyranny of my HOA. But I'm all for anything that can theoretically check their influence. So far my neighborhood is pretty quiet. About 50-odd users. It's entertaining, though. There's this one guy who posts weird survivalist rants and doomsday scenarios about The Big One, and how we're not sufficiently prepared for it. (Probably true, I hate to say.) There's a woman breeding puppies in her apartment and offering them for sale. There's a guy using the site to promote his political blog. There's a guy playing True Detective, tracking all of the car break-ins in the neighborhood, and looking for a "pattern" and "the perp's signature" in the items left on the scenes. I kind of dig it all. Seeing the eccentricity on display adds a smidgeon of big-city atmosphere that I've always felt SF was lacking in comparison to other cities I've lived in. I hope the network comes into its own, and that we get more people in my neighborhood on board. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the strangeness of my early adopter cohort.

satori99 12y ago
Can I ask what a HOA is for and what it does? I don't think they exist in my country. We have body corporate entities for strata title blocks, but freestanding houses pay rates to local government directly for services. Does a HOA provide garbage removal, street maintenance, etc?
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  The nominal answer is that HOAs are membership associations to which owners in a condo building or neighborhood are sometimes obligated to join. The homeowners pool dues every month to cover things like garbage collection, building maintenance, etc. The HOA also acts as a governing body over the building's residents, and is free to impose any number of rules and restrictions on usage, design, etc., in anything defined as a "common area" (chiefly, any part of the building that is outside the airspace of the condo interiors). Some HOAs set additional restrictions on what you can do inside your condo, provided that activity, construction, design, etc., affects the neighboring units in any way. Above and beyond their common-area jurisdictions, many HOAs are free to establish "house rules," which are arbitrary and binding restrictions on just about anything that the HOA board happens to dislike. The cynical answer is that HOAs are legal fictions set up to shelter building developers from the financial burdens and liabilities of having to pay for, or be on the hook for, any of those services or maintenance needs. HOAs are the greatest invention in favor of real estate developers since the timeshare.

ern 12y ago

The thing that surprised me most is how publicly abrasive people can be when they're using their Real Names with real photos and real descriptions of their children and pets just a click away, talking to people who live just down the street. When I signed up for Geni, a few unstable relatives (avoided IRL) started fights on the message boards and it put me off the entire social family tree concept (the copious amounts of spam that Geni sent out didn't help, since many people lacked the computer savvy to opt-out, and it made them even more hostile). My guess is that something similar happens with Nextdoor: you can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family, or your neighbors. In the case of LinkedIn, and Yammer, trolling is far less of a problem, because there can be consequences for misbehavior, and it is easy to unfriend someone on FB, or unfollow/block on Twitter. Unless there was some way to control trolls and nutters, I wouldn't sign up for Nextdoor.

peterwwillis 12y ago

I find people have a pretty hard time controlling themselves online. If you're upset, screaming into a text box is a lot less real than screaming at a person in front of you. But many people do that too... the internet just exposes our lack of emotional intelligence.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
More than screaming; folks will be more sarcastic, hurtful, smart-alec and generally unsocial in text than in person. Something about an emotional distance provided by the abstraction?

grayclhn 12y ago

The town I live in has a Facebook group for neighborhood news, gossip, etc. From what I've heard, it's exactly the same story there.

afarrell 12y ago

Having lived in an MIT dorm with a mailing list, this does not surprise me.