Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

NextDoor: home of the dumbest people on the Internet. They must be proud of that.

There are occasionally things I want to see on there: a new Costco going in where the OSH Hardware used to be, or whatnot. So I got the daily email digest. One email per day -- tolerable.

Then it stopped coming. I wrote to Support, and their guy swore it was still being sent! I said "no, it's not. I looked in Spam and Trash." He swore again that it was going out, and I should "check with my email provider."

I asked "How do you know they're going out? Did you look in the Sent folder?" He got all sniffy and said "We are unable to disclose anything about our internal operations." Ooh, big secret!

So I wrote to the Nextdoor handle on Twitter. They told me there was an experiment going on. I asked if they could take me out of it. They did and all was good again.

Except other people on Nextdoor were also unhappy about being in the experiment, and asked me how I got out of it. I told them; they tried it; Nextdoor now refused to do it for them.

Think about it -- almost every site on the Web is trying to get you to sign up for a daily email. Nextdoor already has one, and they're trying to take it away.

> Think about it -- almost every site on the Web is trying to get you to sign up for a daily email. Nextdoor already has one, and they're trying to take it away.

Well, this is kind of a "duh!" moment though, yeah? Of course they don't want your only interaction with them to be a single email once a day. That's so Web1.0. They want you on their appyApp so that they can hit you with all of their engagement algos and gather all of those metrics from you and what not. No once-a-day-v̵i̵t̵a̵m̵i̵n̵-email will ever give them the numbers they are looking, and if you're not giving them those $$$ then why give you the content?

Why? Well, the alternative is: I never go to their stupid website. Whereas now, I go there when some entry in the daily email is interesting. And very occasionally, contribute something that entices other people to go there.

Nextdoor: "Hey, how about you come here several times a day and stay, like we were a real website or something?"

Me: "Nope, nope, nope. Buh bye."

Right, and I bet the experiment was to figure out how many people would notice the missing email, and either complain, or start visiting the site more often. Of course we'll never know if most people are more like you, or would actually go to the site daily, if it weren't for the email.

I don't have the app on my phone, so either (1) they didn't notice that, or (2) they wondered if losing the digest would make me install it (guess not).

I think the app is what's supposed to make their site "sticky."

> Nextdoor already has one, and they're trying to take it away.

Once a day isn’t “engaging” enough when Nextdoor’s biggest competitor is built around real-time notifications of fear-porn-near-you: https://citizen.com/

Jesus. That is some proper scifi dystopian stuff. Any employees on here? How do you live with yourselves?

It even uses 'for the greater good' as the tagline. I guess they haven't seen Hot Fuzz[1]?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm--inJtnc4

My favorite part is "Your world is safer with Citizen" superimposed over a photo of One World Trade Center.

Why not address the shareholders and officers with that question?

What is it with these corporations randomly running experiments on people anyway? It used to be that there was an opt in buried somewhere in the settings. Now they just assume we want to be their unpaid guinea pigs?

It's a consequence of having our software run on other peoples computers. 20 years ago it wasn't really an option because most software was installed and pushing updates was hard, but now everything can be updated without the user even knowing. IME there's a lot of people on HN that will even defend this sort of A/B testing.

This is why I like debian, I never open an app to find out the entire UI is changed while I was asleep.

If only it were that easy...

- Mandatory software updates can change UIs that run on """your""" machines.

- I still remember when I was running Debian Unstable, the day I ran a routine upgrade which replaced GNOME 2 with GNOME 3, I couldn't find my way around, and couldn't even easily revert because Linux distributions ship all their software in synchronized packages with interdependencies, and aren't built around picking and choosing older package versions (especially foundational packages).

You chose to run software with "unstable" in the name, when there is a free "stable" version you could use instead. You opted in to unexpected, disrupted changes

Chill, I was young and new to Linux at the time, and Stable had outdated versions of packages I wanted.

This is because Nextdoor is “moderated” by your local neighborhood gestapo.

Nextdoor, as an institution, actively seeks out people who pathologically engage with their platform and then gives them power over people geographically local to them. This results in moderation-cliques that decide what can and cannot be posted in their local neighborhoods.

It somehow manages to be worse than this site when it comes to suppression and censorship, and to be honest I’ve almost totally lost the desire to interact with either.

I’ve hit peak moderation fatigue, I’m tired and quite frankly offended anyone thinks they can tell me what I should (or want) to see. All their algorithms are corrupt, all the systems that rely on manual, human moderation are biased and useless. Curation is an iron grip around my throat and I want to cut it.

I’m to the point that I’d rather drink from the firehose of “misinformation” than thirst in the desert centralized of approval.

Edit: originally posted this in reply to a comment down-chain, but by the time I finished typing “you can’t reply to this anymore”. It’s getting meta at this point

I feel for you. And that's why it's worth getting a daily email from Nextdoor, but no more than that.

I don't know how Nextdoor "seeks out people" to moderate, but what I can tell you is that my previous community lead was a guy who didn't post at all for like 2 years.

My new community lead is me, somehow, even though I didn't post for almost as long. 99% of my posts even now are basically, "hey, can you guys please read the rules before making yet another post about a suspicious black dude who's obviously up to no good cuz he's wearing a hoodie? kthx".

(I don't know if that constitutes the "neighborhood gestapo" in your book.)

"Somehow"? How are these community leads assigned?

Look like the least jittery person is assigned :-)

I like the concept of appointing the least active participant as moderator.

When a neighborhood is created, the person who does so automatically becomes a lead; I believe that was the case for the guy who was lead before. Aside from that, I have no idea.

NextDoor is an incompetent mailing list. They don't even understand how a digest is supposed to work. I mean... FREE software had this down in the '90s.

> NextDoor is an incompetent mailing list. They don't even understand how a digest is supposed to work. I mean... FREE software had this down in the '90s.

Honestly, I think we'd all be better off if all social media was in digest form: queue up everyone's posts to be published next day at 9AM. That'd put a break on things, instead of having stuff snowball out of control.

However, it's probably been determined that it's best for the social media companies themselves for stuff to always snowball out of control, so non-digest it what we'll always get.

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