The rise of fear-based social media like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Neighbors | Hacker News Reader

The rise of fear-based social media like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Neighbors

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129 pointscardamomo112 comments

Nextdoor 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.

Noise complaints are “no reason”?

At least try talking to people before calling the cops on them for making noise. What is controversial about this?

I 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.

This might work if you live in a decent neighborhood. I lived in a shitty part of town in my teens and both of the neighbors on either side of us were total degenerates. One dealt drugs out of his house and the other had zero respect for people’s sleep - played loude music at 2 am and had druggies hang around the house. Talking to ether one was pointless. I usually just called cops right away and for the most part it worked well.

It’s a game theory situation in the context of not being acquainted with your neighbors.

If you go to them directly and they aren’t receptive, you lose goodwill (or stay at par, at best).

If you then call the cops, you lose at lot more goodwill, probably into the negative, possibly with more adverse consequences to you if someone decides you are discriminating against the partiers for some reason other than “I am disturbed by the noise”.

If you call the cops first, and they don’t know it was you, you win (if the cops shut it down).

The optimal solution is, of course, to get to know your neighbors and establish goodwill before any of this.

Absent that, I don’t think law enforcement ignoring complaints is a good solution, because many people aren’t going to be content with “there is literally nothing you can do if your neighbors are making your home unlivable.” Those people, if they can’t move, will resort to rash actions or non-state “settlers of questions”

It can be pretty risky to knock on a door to tell someone to keep it down. You have no idea how they might react. Knocking on random doors can be very unsafe in typical urban environments, unless it’s someone you already know.

Having spent a lot of my adult living in pretty impoverished urban environments, and having knocked on a lot of doors for both personal and professional reasons (as a neighbor, and as a social worker) - I think the risks are pretty overblown.

Talk to your neighbors.

Definitely talk to your neighbors instead of calling highly armed and confrontational people who can kill someone or toss them in a cage because of something affecting your quality of life.

I don't particularly want someone who has already proven themselves to be rude and inconsiderate to know my name, face and address. The kind of people who don't care about how their actions impact other people are precisely the kind of people I always strive to avoid - not get to know on a first name basis.

Not every culture is the same in what they consider rude; not every socioeconomic group is the same in what they consider rude; not every person is the same in what they consider rude.

Consider talking to people and trying to understand them before you cast judgement on them. Cultural relativism really isn't that hard.

Honestly, I might if I think it's just women, but for crying out loud does anyone anywhere want to go confront any man about something like this? No one wants to go tell some big guy to stop begin an inconsiderate prick. And if his cultural background leads him to truly believe he is not being a prick, that just makes the situation FAR more frightening.

If his cultural background is that no one in his culture has ever called him out for being inconsiderate I can see how he might make this mistake.

There really is no risk at all. This is such an unfounded fear.

It's more risky to call a group of armed individuals with a violent history to go to your neighbor's door. Why would you ever put that sort of risk on your neighbor? The most important political relationships we can form are those with our neighbors, why would you damage those relationships by leveraging state aggression against them for something as trivial as a noise complaint?

Should people talk more to their neighbors and try to hash things out? Sure. Personally I would very rarely ever call the police.

But at least see the point of view of someone who might very legitably not feel comfortable knocking on someones door. A single person, with no family now has to run the risk of retribution with no help. Live with that fear everyday their neighbor might attack them directly or indirectly.

this is the exact paranoia the creator of the thread was talking about. If knocking on a neighbours door causes anxiety we might as well all wrap ourselves in styrofoam and never leave our apartments.

I've spent time in very impoverished (aka high-crime) areas and never once did it occur to me to be scared of knocking on my neighbor's door.

In fact, that's one of the first things I will do when moving into a new place, not only to socialize and build goodwill but to ascertain any potential threats and establish that I am not afraid to unload shells onto anyone breaking into my home.

In the most ghetto of ghetto places, your neighbor is the only person you fuck with. Neighborhood gangs are no joke. Only in Whiteville, America are we afraid of our own neighbors.

Decades of creating distrust in impoverished minority communities, and the government's still done a better job at keeping the affluent disunited than the poor.

i've avoided nextdoor and the like by simply getting to know some of my co-tenants directly. we trade info in person and through texts. walking my dog helps me meet folks farther afield. through that little network, i hear about stuff in about a two/three block radius around where i live (not everything, but enough).

we have the usual low-level urban issues: traffic accidents, snoopers, taggers, petty theft, teenagers doing dumb things, and mentally ill folks being weird nearby, but nothing so serious to fear-monger or overly worry about (yes, be alert; no, don't suspect everyone).

it saddens me that a few nearby buildings have newly put up fences, as if that promotes anything but isolation. it doesn't keep bad people out but will keep good samaritans out in case of emergency.

That kind of paranoid neighbor is nothing new. They would benefit from being social shamed and isolated. Connecting a whole network of them together is just about the worst thing I can think of.

Nothing reinforces crazy like an echo chamber.

If people are having their bikes stolen, that’s not paranoia. I would not want to live in such a neighborhood and it’s always a little shocking to me to see this type of commentary on Hacker News where low level theft and vandalism appears to be accepted as just how life is. It definitely doesn’t have to be.

yes, it can definitely still be paranoia even if there's occasional theft. We don't live in a utopia where crime never occurs, that doesn't justify a paranoid mindset.

It's akin to the constantly jealous boyfriend or girlfriend who keeps track of everything their partner does. Even if they catch one cheating eventually, it doesn't change the fact that the constantly suspicious state of mind is pathological.

Indeed. For many people, it's not just 'a bike', it's their only method of transportation to work, to the shops and across town. Price difference aside, it's like taking somebody's car.

The majority of low-level theft and vandalism is by bored teenagers in their own neighborhood.

The worst petty crime I ever had to deal with was living next to a middle school in a nice neighborhood in Houston. There were car windows smashed all the time by middle and even upper-middle class kids walking home from school and seeing something shiny in the passenger seat.

It sucks, but it’s not a good justification for being afraid of “those people.” Turns our those people is us.

In my neighborhood there are very few teenagers. The bike thieves, package thieves and car ransackers are either actual thieves (with lookouts), or addicts. People like to blame bored teenagers, but given my city has one of the lowest percentages of teenagers in the country but yet this happens, indicates it’s something else (proven by the pictures and videos posted by neighbors).

It's certainly not new, that's for sure. I do think that online communities have made the feedback loop much tighter, though. Previously, you'd have to find someone in person to express your crazy to. Now you can just go onto a neighborhood Facebook group or Nextdoor or whatever. I've personally found myself the subject of such posts, too, despite being a very average looking white dude. Simply because I have an older model car that I park on the street while living in a nice neighborhood, where the expectation is everyone should be driving a new Tesla, Benz, or BMW, apparently, and anyone else "doesn't belong."

Haha I’d like to hear more about that. Do you live in the Bay Area? I work at one of the tech companies and have noticed that it mostly seems to be new hires that spend a lot on cars. I think the VP in my org actually drives a Toyota. I really don’t understand the expensive car obsession around here.

I think this is a long time trend of kids in their 20s with more disposable income or poor financial judgement than anything else (count myself in that group in the past).

Nah, but where I live is more or less indiscernible from most of the neighborhoods that I've been around in the Bay Area/SV. I'm in south Orange county. My wife and I live in new development. The demographics down here are different but the people are still new-car obsessed. Our neighborhood is a handful of young couples, a handful of other working folks, and then probably 70% retirees, empty nesters, and foreign money. My hot take is they have more money than they do sense. There's also quite a few folks who don't work because they don't have to work.

So, I have a 2004 Scion xB. It's an "Orange Box." It's really hard to miss this car. Or, so you'd think. My wife uses it as her daily driver for her short commute but it's generally parked right in front of our place. We also have a newer Subaru but it's almost always in the garage because I work full-time remote.

One day, for whatever reason I can't recall, I had the Scion and my wife had the Subaru. I had some errands to run at lunch that day. When I got back home, someone had parked in the spot that the Scion usually occupies, in front of our place, and so I parked two blocks down at an open spot on the street. Someone was home where I had parked, had somehow managed to have never seen this Orange car that'd been parked on the street for the last 600 or so freaking days, and had decided that the car and myself were _clearly_ out of place.

So, maybe 30 minutes go by and I get a text to check out the Facebook group from one of our other neighbors that I'm friends with. This person had posted a picture of my car along with something like, "This person just parked their beater in front of our house and then took off down the street. We're thinking about calling the cops. Does anyone know who it belongs to?" So, I get on there and told them I live 5 houses away from them and question how they've managed to literally never see the bright orange car parked on the street anytime in the past ~2 years. And I said something like, "I like this car, I don't think it's a beater!" They never said anything back.

This is a very quiet, very safe neighborhood, where many, many people are around all throughout the day. There's been a single break-in the entire time that we've lived here that I'm aware of. I had thought about selling that car, too, but thought better of it and we decided to keep it. If people are going to judge me for having that car... Well, fuck 'em. I park my beater in front of their house all of the time now on principle.

" I park my beater in front of their house all of the time now on principle." Made my day!

>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."...

This is a real problem. People are having their lives impacted in a materially negative fashion because of actions like this. Not just minorities either. Recently a female police officer walked into the home of a random black guy and blew him away for no reason. (Well, no good reason.) Not 24 hours later a picture of a white female, who had nothing to do with the shooting mind you, was being circulated around the world as being the shooter. The woman had done nothing more than go to work at a place where the unfortunate victim also worked.

Seneca said that a lie can travel the world before the truth can even get its shoes on. So this proclivity towards making much ado about nothing has been going on for a long long time if it's something that Seneca spent time observing. Given that reality, it has to be conceded that it's not necessarily because of these companies that your average drama king or queen is out pointing a finger at some random black guy minding his own business. But as far as low life corporate ethics go, these companies probably rank right up there with other pond scum of the internet age, like location "information brokers" and such.

>Seneca said that a lie can travel the world before the truth can even get its shoes on [...] not necessarily because of these companies that your average drama king or queen is out pointing a finger

That's a good comment. I agree with you. People have been toxic and irrational since forever, but perhaps our ability to reflect on these behaviors at arm's length on the internet is actually a good thing.

Next-door only has two uses in my condo community: trolling the HOA, and selling crap. Nobody really gets on the thing except every now and then, and then there are some people who are retired and just sit on it all day long. Basically pointless. Go talk to your neighbors. Just to know them in person.

In 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.

Sounds like Nightcrawler to me.. creepy.

The game Charlie and Frank play at night?

>incentivizes bad behavior

How exactly did they incentivize this?

I 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.

The commenters also egg on the camera man to get closer and do risky things.

I 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.

In 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.

Also 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.

The 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.

My doorbell has become as bad as my cell phone. 70% of the time I hear it ring, it's someone trying to sell me solar panels, home security systems, Jehovah, some of the latter day saints, tree trimming, or the "gas company" (really a window installation company).

Another 25% of the time its a package delivery and the courier is gone before I get to the door.

So basically 1 in 20 chance that the person is a neighbor.

I'm loathe to drop whatever it is I'm doing to get up and answer the door, just to have to shoo away solicitors.

In this thread people are scared to open their doors when someone knocks. In the other thread people are scared to knock on their neighbor’s door. How did this society become so irrationally terrified of everything? I know people who won’t let their kids outside because they think crime is everywhere. This is in a firmly middle class single family home Leave It To Beaver neighborhood.

People probably aren't scared so much as they don't want to be bothered because 90% of the time it's someone selling something (religion, magazines, carpet cleaning, etc.)

Communication technology has changed everything. We expect to be communicated with first in ways that have a minimal impact on our time and personal space, like text, email or a messaging system. We can handle those communications if and when we deem fit.

Someone calling on the phone or knocking on the door is someone demanding immediate and exclusive use of my time for reasons only they know. In the case of a door, they are also asking for access to my home (to a degree).

The fact that the vast majority of those calls and knocks are for sales, religion or politics make us rightly avoidant. And sure, some can even be dangerous. But almost none of them are people we actually want to communicate with. Those people would have already called/texted/emailed. If they called, we'd recognize their number. If they were coming over, they'd give us advance warning.

So the folks left surprising us are the folks we are least likely to want to engage with.

Interesting. 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.

I'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.

I'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.

The 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.

Try it in a mostly-white suburban neighborhood. You'll rapidly add new items to your library of dog whistles.

Checking 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...

Like everyone's complaints about Slack, it's the users and not Nextdoor that are the problem.

Sure, but like Slack at work, you don't have the option to choose who you're connected to on it. So if you happen to have bad people on it (and both apps incentivize people who are inclined to act poorly to do so), you're boned.

Nextdoor around me is awful. It's just older white people posting pictures of people of color who walk in front of their house and saying "Does anyone know if this guy lives here??? I think he was trying to rob my house!!!" and everyone piles on with "Yeah I don't know that guy, call the cops!".

Fuck Nextdoor. I can't wait until it's out of business.

I used next door in the white burbs. It didn’t seem too bad. It Was mostly people setting up garage sales, or the trying to get the whole street to do some kind of themed Christmas lights. The biggest flame war I saw was a bunch of people ganging up on a cop who said he didn’t want the local marijuana dispensary to open up cuz it would bring in the riff raff...

Just wait. When I signed up for it the bizarre/comedic posts took a while to appear. I have to agree with the article that there are some disturbing sentiments on there. In my immediate area in SF there's a lot of homelessness, petty crime and property crime. The opinions/proposals to solve the problems range from "putting the homeless in compounds" to "giving them sturdier shelters and condoning their homelessness."

I stopped checking it regularly because the content is largely irrelevant to me. The new hotness in my area is traffic calming measures, because some residents find it too inconvenient to walk a block to cross at the nearest crosswalk. I wonder what the userbase demographics are by area, and if they reflect the make-up of the population accurately.

My experience is that same: asking for recommendations, alerting neighbors to car break-ins, coyotes, suspicious people on bikes at 3am peering into properties, yard/garage sales, free stuff and occasionally shaming people when they add descriptors to suspects as well as complaining about kids not respecting private property.

Austin,TX suburbs, plenty of of those things but there are resident crime fear discussions, and certain personalities that make themselves 'important' by constantly warning about crime and that "they" are targeting us etc. EVERYONE has a 'ring' or whatever the camera doorbell thing is.

In my experience NYC residents are a lot more comfortable with seeing strangers on street.

Since Nextdoor is siloed on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, the tone of the site can vary significantly from one area to another. And once the fearmongering starts in a neighborhood, it's likely to stick.

I 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.

Nextdoor.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.

Any 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.

And color, can’t forget color..

These two twitter accounts are pretty entertaining:

https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor?lang=en

and

https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv?lang=en

Nextdoor is definitely a vector for accute NIMBYism where I live.

I 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.

People 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.

Holy 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.

I 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.

I 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.)

Not really disingenuous at all - I read your comment the exact same way.

I 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.

It's way worse on the west coast than most places and I think it's probably somewhat of a "boiling a frog" scenario. Rather than a single big influx upsetting everyone, the homeless situation has been slowly getting worse every single year to the point where we now have tent towns that stretch literally for a mile [1]. The problem is there are no clear solutions that anyone can agree on.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Z3Rd0rD_I

Rhode Island (where I used to live before Seattle) is a blue state with functioning prosecutors that actually prosecute charges for misdemeanors and crimes, but they offer sentenced individuals the alternative of entering the drug court system for mandatory interned rehab, or the mental health system. People going through the system say it saved their life.

Intervention works. West coast states do have similar drug courts, but since crimes are not prosecuted and misdemeanor charges are routinely vacated there is no incentive for people to actually be helped.

For helpful information on Rhode Island's program I recommend the last 20 min of this documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw

I don't think criminal law/enforcement explains enough of it. The west coast has a somewhat unique combination of fair weather, public services, people willing to give money to the homeless, and cultural acceptance of vagrancy that you don't see many other places. The result is that we kind of vacuum up a bunch of homeless people from other states, which then don't have to deal with the problem themselves.

Do you mean "lack of public services"? Try New York, for instance - you don't see people camping in tents because they spent billions of dollars building shelters, to meet the constitutional requirement for shelter. Massachusetts has the same right in their constitution.

It's not about "is the homeless situation here terrible". It's that there are organized groups in Seattle that claim the city is too dangerous to live in because of homeless drug gangs, and that's nonsense.

In New England, you freeze to death if you are not under cover in the winter, so you don't really have sizable permanent populations like in places with a less godforsaken climate.

I see on average 2-3 syringes on the sidewalk and in the dirt beside the sidewalk during my weekly walks through the neighborhood around the new elementary school. I've had human diarrhea inside my compost bin, and solid feces in a giant pile in the middle of our shared townhome driveway. Used condoms beside my outdoor furniture in the week following the wind storm that took down our fence. Multiple Christmas presents of mine and my neighbors were stolen by package thieves. My wife reports multiple cases of being suddenly followed by loitering males and was screamed at once by a crazy racist lady.

This is in Licton Springs, for what it's worth. From what I've seen other neighborhoods are much cleaner.

The 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.

The 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.

Have 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.

Shooting someone is never a good outcome.

Never? 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-appare...

There are times when it’s the least bad outcome. It’s never a good outcome.

For context I live near to where the Daniel Shaver incident took place. Many of these look troubling for several reasons. I am very much convinced that the people expressing support for the violence do so in part because it aligns with their sense of a just society, but I am not so sure that alignment is as obvious as it maybe have appeared in the past. The allusions to racism (the real kind, i.e. “what race was he; ahh, then he had it coming”) only add to my doubt.

It'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.

I don't feel that having more data is a bad thing as long as there's some transparency and context

The tools to understand that data are important too.

I agree. Hopefully it'll lead to discovering and understanding the root causes of problems and not just the symptoms.

I 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.

Maybe 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.

Nextdoor is a gigantic advertisement for Ring and Nest products.

It 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.

Nextdoor 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!

It's all fun and games until I'm the "suspicious black male" and held at gunpoint by police because of this foolishness.

Meanwhile, 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

It's kind of ironic seeing journalists write about this since selling fear is the primary M.O. of engagement-driven journalism today.

Sad 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.

As they say "If it bleeds, it leads"

Fear, propaganda, and outright lies.

Nextdoor 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.

I 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.

I'm in Seattle too, and NextDoor is mostly frivolous racist complaints. Last time I used it, a bunch of angry white men were planning to "get their baseball bats" to "deal with" a homeless guy they suspected of breaking their car windows. (After the cops told them that they reviewed the camera footage and didn't think it was that guy).

I, too, have friends in Seattle, and none of them have had any of the experiences you describe happen to them. I go downtown daily for work for years, and have seen poop about three times, and discarded needles about the same number.

The reason you don't like being called a NIMBY is because it's accurate.

Do you have evidence to back up your claim that NextDoor is mostly frivolous racist complaints? How did you determine either “frivolous” or “racist” in each instance? Did you investigate and verify or invalidate each of the reports to arrive at a strongly-backed understanding that they were frivolous? Did you somehow determine that race played a major factor and not suspicious behavior? I’m betting you don’t have any such data nor any legitimate way to make those determinations.

> The reason you don't like being called a NIMBY is because it's accurate.

No one likes pejoratives. They add little value to the discussion. It is a crutch where there is otherwise no sound argument.

I used my eyeballs and common sense, same as you.

They have a well designed workflow, now, because those news blogs pointed out how racist some of the posts were back then.

Love the Oxford comma in the title :P

This article is 100% FUD.

For the downvoters, let me summarize.

Social media is bad because people.

Saved you a read.

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