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Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

This seems like the least of the negative impacts nextdoor encourages.

i removed myself after months of watching people on this app become more and more paranoid, feeding off each other.

the breaking point was when someonea put out a warning that someone had knocked on their door at 7:00pm, “the wife and i were eating dinner when the rude knock came. we crept over to the window, peeked out, and didn’t recognize the person. be careful!”

the person knocking turned out to be a 16 year old girl who lives three blocks away who unfortunately got a flat tire and was hoping to borrow a phone to call her dad.

we live in an incredibly safe wealthy suburb and these people “crept” to a window like they’re in an old west shootout and decided to put out a warning on nextdoor about a little sixteen year old girl.

we still laugh just thinking how crazy these people must have looked while creeping from their kitchen to peek out a window in one of the safest areas in the state at a time of day when people are still out mowing their lawns.

nextdoor somehow just adds to these people’s already insane creeping paranoia.

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Ugh. Tell me about it.

There was some poor lost delivery driver in a McHouse subdivision about near me. In one hand she was holding a plastic bag with food containers, and the other she was holding a phone. Two people posted video/photos of her clearly looking at house numbers. Both people posted "be on the lookout for this suspicious person casing the neighborhood" posts.

Like, come on. How stupid do you have to be.

I mean if I was an enterprising criminal that's a whole lot less conspicuous than a white panel van with "Bob's plumbing" on the side.

Sure but why jump to nefarious conclusions when a simple explanation is right there or just take the situation at face value?

At least they did not shoot her.

And it's not NextDoor, it's only exposing a larger issue.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/7/18528014/fear-social-med...

>> The issue is compounded by the media, Ewoldsen says. >> “If you see more coverage of crime you think it’s more of an issue, even if real-world statistics say it isn’t,” Ewoldsen said. >> And all this is happening at a very contentious point in time, both politically and socially. >> “Some of this has to do with the general level of discord and lack of comfort societally right now,” Rutledge said. >> As Ewoldsen put it, “The president screaming about crime all the time — creating a fake crisis at the border and saying immigrants are stealing jobs, that Mexico and other countries are sending criminals — is reinforcing the idea that crime is going through the roof.”

Please note that the fear-instilling effect of media coverage is not backed by conclusive evidence.

George Gerbner's famous television studies suggested that heavy viewers of crime shows would become more fearful and over-estimate violent crime (hence the name "scary world theory"). But scientific support is mixed, it's not safe to assume that this effect exists.

Seems to me that this is a direct corollary of the claim that people’s beliefs are affected at least somewhat by the data they are exposed to. This seems self-evidently true.

Maybe, but there's more to it.

(1) inconclusive means we may not have looked hard enough, or

(2) the effect may be very very small, as in not distinguishable from zero, or

(3) there are alternative models of learning. People could do bayesian updating, but they may also employ thresholds, toggle between belief systems and so on.

Summary: it's very complicated, lack of evidence suggests caution.

Maybe, but it's also possible that the people who LIKE crime shows tend to be less overly paranoid about it vs. people who just watch the news not necessarily expecting to see negative content, but do.

> At least they did not shoot her.

Exactly. The giant glaring irony of the situation is that these paranoid neighbours are themselves the biggest danger to their neighbourhood. They're the ones creating an environment where you can't walk down the street, ring someone's door, ask for help, photograph your car, or pretty much do anything in public anymore.

They are the real menace to society, but they can't see that.

Similarly, the effect of media coverage can also be thought to be visible in perceptions of race relations. When polled, Americans say that their local race relations are still near the best they've ever been, but for the past few years have tended to respond more and more negatively about the quality of race relations at a national level — ie, what they perceive through the media and social media.

Decades old and still completely relevant, "Culture of Fear": https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Fear-Americans-Afraid-Things/...

Also, in my experience older people just get more paranoid. I have seen it happen with family members who are otherwise pretty sharp. They get more wary or suspicious in ways that aren't very rational. Since that is a lot of the folk who hang out on places like Nextdoor, I can see how that goes. That's why you need diversity and young families in neighborhoods. It provides balance.

That specific creeping behavior is hilarious. Several years ago, my daughter and I found a lost dog clearly a family pet near our home near a busy road. We trapped it in our shaded yard and went around with some quick flyers to find the owner as we knew it was one of 30 homes. Multiple people revealing as little of their eyes as possible through blinds and curtains became funnier and funnier.

(Eventually we found the home. The mother said their dog was in their basement, and we almost left without a flyer until her daughter ran to the door and said their dog was missing and identified her and then the mom was willing to come get the dog. Strange episode.)

Good on you for making the effort. The daughter would've been beside herself!

It's really tragic that people are that afraid of their neighbors. I'm blessed to live in a neighborhood where we all wave at each other and talk for 5-10 minutes when we see each other on morning jogs or walkin' the dog.

Oof, I had to delete my Nextdoor account after witnessing that same kind paranoia (with a hint of racism).

The last post I read that caused me to delete my account was about an elderly woman complaining about a brown guy taking pictures of his own car on a public street. (It seemed like he was putting it up for sale, after looking at the photo "evidence" and he obviously was the owner.)

When I commented it was that it was a public street, she got all huffy and flipped out at me. And the same type of "We have to be careful!" response.

Yeah, but is it really Nextdoor that feeds this paranoia or is it just the true face of american suburb, that some, more secure feeling americans, like yourself weren't aware of?

I wouldn't call a self selected vocal minority the 'true face' of anything.

There have always been 'get off my lawn' types, predating nextdoor. Nextdoor is also not heavily used in every single neighborhood across america.

Even this conversation thread is driven by the selected group of people that participate in the specific social network in question.

Its not a vocal minority from my experience. I live in a safe neighborhood in Southern California and there are hundreds of people like that here. I have seen people posting photos from their door cameras and posting warnings about seemingly normal things.

it's the latter.

In an area near where I used to live, there was a similar post, except it was a black man at the door. People started tracking his whereabouts, some even sounding a bit threatening. He was arrested twice that day, and released both times because there was no crime, but released to where? Not home, clearly. And not to family.

It turns out he was mentally impaired and lost. Some hours later, someone who works with such people recognized the situation and started working on finding him to help him (literally posted that someone should help him before someone else harms him). She did find him, and got him where he needed to be.

It seems like it wasn't that long ago that neighbors would actually talk to each other. That seems to have almost completely disappeared. We don't really know who is in our communities anymore, and so everyone is suspicious about everyone around them. And it's even scarier in states like mine, Texas, where there's such a strong push for lethal intimidation (open carry and all that).

> we live in an incredibly safe wealthy suburb and these people “crept” to a window

This is endemic in American society now. Everywhere I lived in the suburbs/exurbs I'd describe the vast majority of my neighbors to act exactly like that. Utter sheer fear of things that simply don't exist. And they vote on those fears.

I don't think American society survives the suburbs, personally. The social fabric it ripped apart, and the "bubble" it put so many citizens in I believe is the most harmful thing to happen to the US at least in the modern era. Not to mention the financial sustainability of the past 50 years of construction.

It has very little to nothing to do with Nextdoor. Those apps just bring into the open what I've been personally witnessing the past 20 years.

> Not to mention the financial sustainability of the past 50 years of construction

? you think we are overbuilding?

I'm going to hazard a guess that the OP agress here but I'll at least chime in with my own take on that which is our building habits of desertification of the planet (grass and a few trees is a biological desert) based on a mistaken belief of cheap, infinite oil to power cars happily down roads unimpeded by traffic, building cheap houses that won't last at out of plastic, composite materials which are needed because of poor architecture and a negative heating feedback loop were a bit unsustainable.

We're both under-building (in terms of volume, and quality) and over-building in terms of spreading things out too much.

This does not mean pack everyone into skyscrapers like Hong Kong. It means building medium density neighborhoods like we used to (ya know all of the most expensive places in America? Wonder why they're so expensive...) where most of your daily activity would involve walking or biking somewhere, you have some yard in the back of your home and you probably own a single car but can certainly own more than one if needed. But transit isn't 99% (literally) car-based infrastructure.

EVs won't solve these problems. The root problem is car-based infrastructure so more efficient cars just puts more people on the road and uses more resources. The only solution is changing architecture and neighborhood design.

> This is endemic in American society now. Everywhere I lived in the suburbs/exurbs I'd describe the vast majority of my neighbors to act exactly like that. Utter sheer fear of things that simply don't exist. And they vote on those fears.

Did you poll them all?

> I don't think American society survives the suburbs, personally. The social fabric it ripped apart, and the "bubble" it put so many citizens in I believe is the most harmful thing to happen to the US at least in the modern era.

No. The suburbs are fine, it's social media that will get us. It greatly amplifies the the voices of people who use it compulsively, and those people are often unhinged and driven by unreasonable paranoia, fear, anger, etc.

> No. The suburbs are fine, it's social media that will get us.

Strong disagree. The decline of US civic life/institutions has been growing far before social media came on the scene. 13 year old me understood this fact just watching the Greatest Generation interact vs. the Boomers.

The fear-based culture of the suburbs existed since I was born, with local talk radio functioning as the NextDoor of the ye olde days giving every crank who saw someone suspicions a platform to rant on.

Social media certainly amped things up and accelerated this specific bit of our social decay. But it certainly didn't start it and the social fabric is breaking down in a manner far broader and earlier than what social media would explain.

Without talking about uninteresting outliers - we effectively McInfrastructured ourself into inhuman layouts designed to minimize unwanted social interaction. Fracturing communities and people the way we did with our construction patterns will end in tears. Humans are not built to only interact with those exactly like them on their own terms.

Those forced uncomfortable social interactions are absolutely key to humanity and personal growth and they have been nothing but reduced my entire life.

> The fear-based culture of the suburbs existed since I was born

Well my anecdote is the opposite. I once lived in a high-rise, and in that environment never met or knew anyone. Everyone fast-walks from the elevator to their door and go in. There are no common spaces so there's zero opportunity to meet anyone. Also, because the conditions are so tight everyone is hypersensitive about any sound through the walls etc so they're constantly complaining about everyone else.

Here in the suburbs, everyone spends time outside so I know all my neighbors, it's much more social and connected.

> Strong disagree. The decline of US civic life/institutions has been growing far before social media came on the scene. 13 year old me understood this fact just watching the Greatest Generation interact vs. the Boomers.

I suppose it could pre-date social media, but I don't think the reason for it is suburban living itself or the antidote is something explicitly anti-suburban, like bulldozing suburbs and piling people into high-density housing or something like that.

> Humans are not built to only interact with those exactly like them on their own terms.

I'm not so sure about that. I'd imagine that through the vast bulk of human history, most did only interact with people from their own small, insular communities who were very much like themselves.

This is so contrary to my experiences living in suburbs/exurbs most of my life that I'm honestly not exactly sure how we came to such polar opposite beliefs.

The most alienating, dehumanizing, isolated environments I've ever lived in are large and medium cities and apartments, while the most welcoming, strong communities I've been a part of have been suburbs, exurbs and rural areas.

I live in the suburbs and I have a similar view. Kids play in the street unsupervised, well-behaved dogs are free to roam, bikes are left in driveways without chains, and cars are left unlocked. I can't stand being in big cities for more than a few hours, it feels inhuman.

I get why some people like cities. Especially kids who don't want to be tied down, who want to be able to explore who they are, who want to see and be part of something bigger than their hometown. There's plenty of things to love about cities, from the convenience of the nightlife/food culture, to the "pulse" of the city, the feeling that something is always happening at any time of day, the compassionate social compromises residents adopt to accommodate the diversity of backgrounds of people, etc.

But there's a reason the plurality of Americans choose and prefer to live in suburbs. It's deeper than just "outdated 20th century city planning". It's something specific about American culture, community, etc. that resists specific generalizations.

I'm not making a case for dense urban living. I understand many do not prefer that form of living, in fact I'd say most do not. Something in between dense living and what we are currently building in the US seems most prudent to me, but I'm simply an observer.

My experiences in the suburbs were not remotely near yours, and I spent nearly all my life in them throughout the US - including raising a kid. In my experience, those sorts of vibrant communities only seemed to exist in a few select "older" suburbs (aka suburbs with downtowns) from where I was from. I agree those look great.

It also certainly depends on personality. In my experience, unless you enjoy a very structured social life you simply will not have one. I have seen many folks end up slowly just spending most of their time indoors in front of the TV/computer cut off from the world. This is at least a bit harder to do in an environment not basically built to optimize that condition. I enjoy going out with a friend on a random Wednesday night, but I don't enjoy planning on that activity a week in advance.

It's an interesting topic to me. I think of my Grandfather's house in what could only be called a prototypical suburbs of the 1950's and I can absolutely see that life being amazing. The same life in a 2000's era suburb just seems like an utterly different living experience to me - almost alien in nature when I lived there.

That and the whole financial sustainability of the endless expansionist sprawl is highly suspect to me.

I'm assuming the types of older w/ downtown suburbs you're talking about are more like this, right?:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.2054168,-71.5416077,3a,75y,0...

For the record I grew up between two types of places. One was a pretty, forested, newish, wealthy, totally-isolated-from-anything-that's-not-a-home-or-school development very similar to this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7471229,-122.073413,3a,60y,0...

The other was a more remote, rural, mixed-income area a lot like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.4281764,-78.0252446,3a,75y,1...

I found both of those great in their own ways. The former was extremely pleasant and peaceful. Kids would play around outside, neighbors would walk their dogs together, people would frequently have house parties and barbecues and such. Weirdly, it's completely isolated from any commercial development. It's a 10 minute drive to the nearest place you can buy anything. Nobody had much of a problem having a social life as far as I could tell.

The latter was great too, but in a more independent kind of way. Everybody kept to themselves more at home, but they would congregate at church or at the local restaurants all the time. People would shoot guns, drive 4x4s, just do whatever the heck they wanted and nobody gave them shit for it. There was a bigger mix of poorer folks and richer folks, oftentimes along traditional racial boundaries, but they coexisted better than any community I've seen. Rich farmers would shoot an extra deer each year for the poorer families so they could eat meat for dinner even when it was expensive. There was a bit of a "downtown" but it was still like, 20 minutes drive away on a country road so not really accessible without a car obviously. School and sports was a huge center of life there: people all over town would come to the local high school football games.

I'm still not exactly sure which kinds of suburbs, or aspects of suburbs, you find alien.

It's this onslaught in the media of violent crime, stranger danger, drugs and gangs and immigrants everywhere. This isn't a new idea, it started decades ago.

I will mention that due to the rise of the internet and Certain Entities having an interest in making people afraid, people are exposed a lot more to things they should be afraid of. Would people have heard about e.g. a child disappearing in the next state over say 50 years ago?

My only interaction with Nextdoor these days is @bestofnextdoor on twitter. I highly recommend this arrangement. https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor

Those are mild. In my nextdoor feed, there’s an elderly woman who angrily replies to every post telling them to stop emailing her. She apparently doesn’t know how to turn off notifications. People have tried to help but I guess she doesn’t read the replies either.

She's probably only missing 125 clicks...

Never used this app but I suppose it is a neighborhood-thing? Nobody can simply swing by her home and explain it to her? And if she does not open her door, it is what is.

I can see it now, OP in handcuffs for casing the joint.

Not sure if Amazon still does this but when someone asked a question about a recently purchased item you’ll get an email with their question. A lot of times the response is something like “I don’t know quit emailing me” or something similar.

> “does this motherboard support 4th gen ryzen?”

> “I don’t know my grandson seems to like it”

Why don’t you go to her house and talk to her?

Presumably she would peek out the blinds, ensure all the doors are bolted, and make a fearful post on nextdoor.

> She apparently doesn’t know how to turn off notifications.

I mean the OP mentions 125 switches to turn off...

My Nextdoor devolved into multiple houses on my street setting up a shared Nest/Google account and rigging up a dozen or so cameras to watch their entire stretch of the street 24/7. All this because someone thought their car was vandalised (turns out it was vandalised in the parking lot of a mall ~10km away).

For context we live in a somewhat isolated, well off suburb, that according to police data has had a grant total of 63 crimes committed in it during the last 12 months, 41 of which were just people vandalising the same abandoned building.

The phrase “overpolicing” used to refer to wealthy, low crime suburbs that spent insane amounts of money on police.

There was a study on this, and California is one of the worst offenders. There a rich hamlets with not crimes to speak of that hire retired FBI agents and Navy Seals to issue parking tickets.

This is a great example: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-framed/#chapter1

Yeah, it's pathetic. Here's your standard NextDoor headline:

HOMELESS MAN LOOKED AT MY DOG AGGRESSIVELY

Then you have a bunch of insipid suck-ups piling on in the comments, with "Oh I'm so sorry this happened to you!" "So glad you're OK!"

That just sounds like old people talking to each other, I don't see the problem. That kind of small-talk would be commonplace in any small-town diner. In a quiet neighborhood where nothing happens, literally anything is gossip-worthy. Not every online has to be maximally interesting content, sometimes it's fine if it's just old people talking about the weather.

Or, in many cases, you could view it as mollycoddling and encouraging hysteria and NIMBYism.

It doesn't have to be interesting, but the endless repetition of the same caterwauling need not be fawned over and encouraged.

This is a large part of why I’m leaving the United States after 20 years and have never wanted to buy a house here. In most streets that I’ve seen, neighborly interactions are horrendous and weird, and people seem scared of each other and think that talking to a new person is somehow dangerous and to be avoided. Often the first time I’ve met neighbors it’s with them complaining about noise or something. But because of their fear of talking to people by the time they pluck up the courage to say something about their perceived wrong, they are an absurd melting pot of apoplectic rage. It’s mainly California / Bay Area that I’m thinking of.

One of my immediate neighbors moved in about 4 years ago. He's had confrontations with me as well as four other homes, plus with a rando walking down the sidewalk. Everyone else gets along fine, but this guy has threatened physical altercations numerous times, and has had the police called on him at least once. Funny that he hasn't had a beef with the cop who lives on the block...

> the breaking point was when someonea put out a warning that someone had knocked on their door at 7:00pm, “the wife and i were eating dinner when the rude knock came. we crept over to the window, peeked out, and didn’t recognize the person. be careful!”

Fear and hate drive engagement. If engagement is their metric that is how they will get it.

I don't know that fear and hate are the only drivers of engagement, but they do seem to be easy drivers of engagement. If some social network succeeds in basing their drivers on empathy and social responsibility I hope they displace Facebook.

I agree. Local facebook and whatsapp groups are the worst for this sort of thing.

I solved it by becoming the benevolent dictator of a handful of my local online groups and swiftly delete messages like this.

It's not perfect, but it'll do.

Insanely high costs to you though, constant moderation just to keep things sane.

Oh sure, it's not scalable. But I'm not trying to solve content moderation at scale. Just shut down a few people that shit-stir in my own community.

My impression of nextdoor based on my admittedly very limited usage was that maybe 5% of people (the usual paranoid types) used it as a sort of unofficial neighborhood crime watch, and 95% of everybody else used it to share pictures of local wildlife, organize barbecues, complain about the weather, and share old people memes.

I'm sort of biased though, I find mild gossip to actually make a place feel almost "comfy" and "lived-in". It's like the vibe of a local diner or church meetup, where nothing really happens in the community so anything minor (from a new car a neighbor has parked outside their house, to the loud kids who collect sticks to pretend-fight with and store them in a pile behind the mailbox, to the "crazy" party that the young couple had in their backyard last night with half a dozen friends) is a subject of minor gossip and banter and speculation.

I honestly bet 90% of the bad rep nextdoor get is purely a generational thing because nextdoor is basically just social media for older people and young people just don't really get how old people use social media. Notwithstanding the email/notifications topic here of course.

Deleted my account when 5G hysteria came to town. I’d rather stick with waves and good mornings, and not know what my neighbors are thinking.

Creeping around and posting paranoid messages is silly but I wouldn't blame anyone for ignoring an unexpected knock. The ratio between people I want to engage with and people I don't is just too low. For every teenage girl needing help there are a hundred proselytizers, salespeople, and scam artists.

Not all social interactions we have is desired to start with. It's possible to shut off and close the door on people you don't desire, but you never know unless you open the door in the first place.

On a personal level, an unexpected interaction can lead to meeting friendly people. You may even get some unexpected "reward" out of it: say maybe a neighbor was knocking to see if they could borrow your car, maybe the same neighbor has some plumbing skills and notices the leak in your kitchen, and proposes to fix it for you.

On a societal level, unmediated interaction between strangers is very important for social life and a sense of community. Please note there is a huge difference between unsollicited contact and stalking behavior: a person knocking on your door to ask something is certainly not in the same mindset than someone following you home.

So sure there's scams and salespeople. But if you don't open the door to those, you'll miss plenty of friendly interactions as well. At this point, better not check your email or phone because there might be spam there too?

Lots of people's best defense against doorstep scams (and predatory salespeople) is not to open the door. I always open the door because I can easily fend off such people.

As it happens my street has a confusing layout which means I get lost food drivers at least twice per month. It only takes a moment to direct them to the right house.

Heh, I'm in the opposite scenario - Uber's map's shitty routing directs delivery drivers to the block behind me, so often my food gets dropped off at the wrong house. Luckily, they are not the type to open their door to unexpected knocks, so the food is still there when I go to collect it.

I block unsolicited contact over e-mail and telephone too.

Definitely a neighborhood-dependent thing. I get more drunk people in need of help than proselytizers, salespeople, or scam artists.

By which I mean, I don't think I've ever gotten any of those latter three, and have dealt with a couple of the former. (Mostly drunk men in the middle of the night, so I totally understand why some people wouldn't want to answer the door in that situation.)

Ignoring an unexpected phone call is one thing, but you should never ignore a person knocking on your door. I’m afraid it sounds like you are exactly the sort of person that everyone else in this thread is complaining about and laughing about.

Why? For women, it can be a dangerous situation. I'm pretty comfortable since I'm a mountain of a man compared to the women who live in my house, but it's pretty dumb to say that everyone should answer the door.

Why? I'm not deluded into thinking they're some kind of threat but uninvited strangers aren't entitled to interrupt my day or waste my time.

I just don't get enough door knocks to care. Maybe once a week, at most? At that rate it doesn't bother me to simply answer and decline. Although I do ask door-to-door salespeople for their license.

My teenage daughters just default to not answering the door, unless they've ordered doordash etc. Same with phone calls from unknown callers; straight to voicemail.

Brings to mind "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok27k6bX-Yc&list=PLPIowqjlFO...

The hyper-vigilence this app creates has turned one of my friends into the worst kind of person.

I think it depends on the neighborhood. Here it's mostly harmless. A couple pot shots here and there but mostly people share recommendations, list lost pets, announce HOA meetings and local news. I did see one physical threat one time but that guy was gone by the time I checked out the post again, mods had deleted him and people moved on. That said I don't use my real name or say where I live other than a large neighborhood.

Yeah its insane in this case. On the other hand a fishing buddy of mine was stabbed by a total stranger when he answered the door. (a drug addict trying to rob his place.) Fortunately he was able to shove the guy back out the door and lock it before passing out from blood loss and others in his house called the cops administer first and emergency services were able to save him.

In conclusion, the sixteen year old had better post on the community website that she has a flat tire if anyone could help it, because knocking has become so rare that it upsets people.

As a counter point, then, the people should have posted when they are eating, so one can tell if everyone is busy. Alexa could probably guide the lost girl to the next bike shed if social karma allows /s

Like I say below: it's worth getting one email a day. No more than that. If they had an option for a weekly digest instead, I'd probably take that.

Key to making Nexdoor tolerable is setting your neighborhood radius as small as possible.

0 is my setting, at which point I don't need an account, but the service becomes extremely tolerable.

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