The Anti-Facebook | Hacker News Reader

The Anti-Facebook

theverge.com

258 pointsfourstar164 comments

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.

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.

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.

"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.

How would you educate them?

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.

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?

Homeowner association http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association

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.

I'm not entirely sure if this is different in the US, however where I live (The Netherlands) the owners make up the HOA in the end. So if a majority of the owners doesn't want a specific rule or board member it's easy (and possible) to override that decision and put a new/better board member there.

Where I live the HOA board only gets to decide on the 'small stuff' (for big purchases like said Pool renewal above they still need a majority vote.) I try to 'activate' HOA members (everyone that contributes) and remember them that a HOA is made up of its members in the end. If you don't like anything about it you should either talk with your HOA representative / board member AND/OR contribute by opting to become a board member yourself.

Source: I'm one of the five HOA board members in our small (60apt) apartment building.

HOA systems vary pretty dramatically in the US, in terms of how they operate exactly.

Some HOAs operate by pretty weak by-laws, and can only decide trivial things. Others have obnoxious levels of control.

Typically an HOA board consists of community members or home owners (if that's the type of development), and sometimes a company that either developed (and owns) the neighborhood or one that manages it will have seats.

Some HOA boards are easy to toss out, others are not.

The vast potential variances make it important to try to get to know more about the HOA ahead of time if you're thinking about moving into a development with such.

So do you rent the buildings from the HOA? Or do you own them? And surely if you own them, they have no legal right to tell you want to do unless it breaks the law?

As I understand it, it can be either case. Not sure how they can screw you around if you own it, probably some obscure law, but it's obvious enough if you're renting from them.

> Not sure how they can screw you around if you own it

The sale of the residence includes (and requires) contracting with the HOA.

> probably some obscure law

No need for laws, you've signed a contract.

They can screw you around pretty easily and legally, even if you are an owner. They levy fines for noncompliance, and if you don't pay the fines and comply, they can put liens on your property -- even if you own the property outright. It's all part of the contract you enter into upon purchasing the property. Membership in the HOA is compulsory in many cases, and your purchase of the property comes with the obligation to join the HOA and be subject to its Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions (CC&Rs).

So why in the hell would you sign that sort of deal in the first place? Well, if you don't have to, you shouldn't. But in some cities, such as SF, it's extremely hard to buy a condo that doesn't come with an HOA.

HOAs are as prevalent as they are because in most cases they are highly beneficial, both legally and financially, to building or subdivision developers. So more and more developers are using them.

> So do you rent the buildings from the HOA?

You buy from the developer or the previous owner.

> And surely if you own them, they have no legal right to tell you want to do unless it breaks the law?

Membership to the HOA is required by and included into the building sale, contracts are binding.

You own the property same as you would without an HOA. They are a form of real covenant [0], are tied to the property, and are enforceable against any owner of the property. In the US, the bundle of covenants used are also referred to as "deed restrictions". [1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_%28law%29#Covenants_re...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_%28law%29#Covenants_in...

I mostly agree with you, my HOA is more of just a community group for our subdivision (or development if you're an east coaster). Members of the board live in the neighborhood and they encourage everyone in the neighborhood to hold a position at some point (2 year term). Our fees are only over 100 bucks a year and cover maintenance of the common areas and the like. We meet once a year, vote on a few things (like to have a spring cleaning event where we rent a dumpster for the community). That's about it. I was afraid of buying a house that had an HOA but I'm ok with the way ours is done, no company owns it just the community.

I've always assumed it was the equivalent of Australia's strata management fees and the resulting decisions you get with strata-titled properties.

Sadly, I think any time you have amateurs involved with administration and decision making, you cop the resulting amateur politics and it can quickly make the process miserable.

I wonder if somehow anonymising the process and removing personalities could even help? Leave it purely about the issues, funds and votes?

HOA's are generally required to maintain community storm drains. They also perform other functions like maintaining common areas such as pools and enforce conformity requirements as decided by the community. HOA members are exempt from certain taxes and pay assessment fees to the HOA to provide these services.

It's like a Body Corporate, but they tend to be a lot more intrusive, both in their reach and how much they wield their power. They do stupid shit like fine people for not having perfect grass, even during droughts, that sort of rubbish. They also tend to have more power to approve who lives in the building/complex, rather than just what you can and can't change on the property.

A collection of people in your building who have nothing fulfilling in their own lives, and thus relish the prospect of telling you how many flowers you can have in your front window or how heavy your dog can be. They manage the common property, services and insurance for a building where there is a tenancy-in-common situation, like a condominium. They are usually elected, although the people who would run for this kind of position tend to be the last people you want to have any kind of power.

They were largely meant for keeping black (or jewish) people from moving into neighborhoods (and called "white homeowners associations.") They also set up common standards for yard maintenance, how your house could be painted, parking, visitors etc. - and were a vehicle for cooperating to invest in shared neighborhood infrastructure. Everyone signed an agreement which gave the HOA legal claim against the homeowner for violations of those standards, and when you sold your house, the prospective homeowner would have to be approved by the HOA and would have to sign the same agreement.

Like many bureaucracies, they survived the obsolescence of their original purpose. They provide little beyond (sometimes) a way to arbitrate homeowner disputes.

Huh? What HOAs are you talking about? At least in Texas, every HOA I know of is just allowed to pass rules about upkeep of a persons property (they also manage community resources). They have zero say about who can and cannot live in a given area. Also, HOA rules can never supersede any local/state/federal law/ordinance.

> Huh? What HOAs are you talking about?

http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/covenants.htm

> They have zero say about who can and cannot live in a given area.

Because they've been barred to by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Parent said "they were", not "they are".

My neighborhood is much less interesting than yours. We have someone stealing mail but no detectives yet.

If you need someone to investigate your mail theft, I'm happy to put in a word with our vigilante. I'm sure he'd love to take the case.

Fair warning: based on the tone of this guy's dispatches, I'd say there's an outside chance he is the car thief. The plot thickens.

This is something I've never understood about the US, that people collect their post from unlocked boxes by the roadside instead of a lockable box on the wall or a letterbox in the door. Is there any specific reason, or just tradition? I would never be comfortable leaving my post lying around for anyone to take; you might as well write your bank details, name and date of birth on your wall.

Where I grew up nobody would ever think about stealing postal mail. It would rate as approximately the lowest concern as a home owner. I never saw a single locked box, they were always simple fold down boxes by the road-side in front of the house. First it's a federal crime and fairly serious to steal postal mail, second most of the stuff in the postal mail would be bills or junk-mail, and third home owners get used to when the postal mail would arrive based on when the postal worker runs their route, so a mail thief would have to have good timing and risk getting caught by the home owner. Neighbors often watch out for each other as well, someone suspicious snooping around your neighbor's mailbox might warrant a call or stop by to point it out.

Most Americans, at least in the past, would be throwing out bank statements in their trash every month (now a lot of it would be digital of course). If you wanted to steal bank details, I suspect that would be the way to do it rather than trying to time the mail and risk getting caught that way.

Name and date of birth are mostly trivial to come by. You can look up modest details about almost anyone in the US for $20 or $50.

Most urban areas have doorstep mail delivery. My older house in Seattle has a mail slot, as do the houses of friends who live in Detroit and Dallas.

Suburban areas are typically classified as "rural routes" so they're required to have mailboxes on posts out by the curb. These days, a "rural route" is basically anything that isn't an older neighborhood inside a larger city.

One can rent a locked post office box at the post office and use that for sensitive mail. From what I've heard, getting a PO Box is one of the first recommendations a lawyer makes to anyone going through a divorce. :)

HOAs sound totally messed up. How do they have any legal power?

Plain and simple contracts.

Developers create residential subdivisions, incorporate a HOA, and ownership in the subdivision requires contracting with the HOA.

If you are in California, there are a lot of legal restrictions on HOA boards. I would recommend picking up this: http://condobook.com/ for more information. (Despite the name it has a lot of information general to common interest developments.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

To really be an anti-Facebook, this service would need to be decentralized. And it's a perfect example of a service that should be decentralized by design. There's no earthly reason to have this live on one server somewhere, except if you want to track people and show them ads.

There is no relation between decentralisation and advertisment. Any node can serve you ads.

Also, in a decentralised network, it may be even harder to keep control over data. Example: It is easier to hold Google accountable for data in their servers than users of BitTorrent for their data.

> There is no relation between decentralisation and advertisment. Any node can serve you ads.

But there's no point in showing ads in a decentralized network since the proceeds would belong to no one. Unless someone controls the client application/interface, but then it's not entirely decentralized.

The proceeds would belong to the owner of the local node you connect to.

Dammit Chad, stop serving ads or I swear I will slash your tires

Of course there is. If you need to pay for a node, showing ads may be the only way to finance it. And I also can have a node just for showing ads to a network. Imagine Facebook as the network and the members as peers. There are many peers who just advertise something.

Could local businesses act as sponsored nodes somehow?

> There is no relation between decentralisation and advertisment. Any node can serve you ads.

There is a difference between "track you and show you ads" and just "show you ads." A print newspaper can show you ads.

> Example: It is easier to hold Google accountable for data in their servers than users of BitTorrent for their data.

Not really. If Google or Facebook has your data but your "friends" have access to it, your friends also have your data. They can copy it and keep it indefinitely. Removing the middle man doesn't reduce your own control, it only removes the middle man's control.

Not parent but...

> There is a difference between "track you and show you ads" and just "show you ads." A print newspaper can show you ads.

And a federation of networks can get together and decide to share what data they have about you with each other.

> Not really. If Google or Facebook has your data but your "friends" have access to it, your friends also have your data. They can copy it and keep it indefinitely. Removing the middle man doesn't reduce your own control, it only removes the middle man's control.

Could you clarify this? I'm really not sure what you mean, sorry.

> And a federation of networks can get together and decide to share what data they have about you with each other.

Federation means competition. You can choose providers you trust and who agree not to do that. Or you can run your own, which in a properly designed system shouldn't require more than some free software, a domain name and a machine to point it at. Which ordinary people might buy off the shelf as an appliance that plugs into your modem.

> Could you clarify this? I'm really not sure what you mean, sorry.

OK, so right now you have a funny cat video, so you upload it to YouTube and then post the link on Facebook. So Facebook can tell who you've shared the link with and who has clicked on it, YouTube can tell what you've uploaded and who has watched it, and anyone you've shared it with (or, in the absence of authentication, anyone in the world) can download it and save a copy on their hard drive.

In the alternative, you upload the funny cat video to some distributed CDN thing like Freenet or BitTorrent, and then your friends get the link in something that resembles an RSS reader that gets its feeds from something that distributes messages how email does.

So anyone you've shared the video with can still download it and keep it but there is nobody who has the complete list of everyone you've shared it with and there is no third party middle man who can keep track of everyone who is looking at it.

Whoever is doing the uploading can still tell who is downloading but presumably these are your friends who are not keeping permanent records rather than some corporation bent on converting every aspect of your personality into a data set for selling hotdogs and health insurance.

Who is creating and maintaining the protocol with which the members of the federation speak to each other?

Protocols are created by the first implementer, as usual.

Should it ever grow big enough IETF, W3C, ECMA, ITU, ISO and the likes might be appropriate maintainers (depending on the details).

See SMTP, XMPP which are both federated.

Yeah, as troubling as Facebook is, are you literally suggesting the W3C could do a better job running a social network via a federated protocol than Facebook with a centralized one?

That SMTP and XMPP exist are just more proof for the value of Facebook (and to be clear: I hate FB and don't have an account, but I still see that it has value). SMTP has massive amounts of users, likely more than FB, and yet FB still exists because SMTP . XMPP is a good protocol, and yet no one is using it because federation makes it too hard for these things to work in the market.

IETF maintains the SMTP specs, yet their mail server operation is one tiny (set of) server(s) among many.

The idea with federated systems is that the standard body isn't _running_ the network. So no, I wouldn't expect W3C to run a social network, federated or not. Their own node, maybe.

That's kind of a matter of semantics, I wasn't sure how to say it properly. "Directing" a social network? I understand they aren't literally paying for the nodes, but defining the protocol gives you quite a lot of power and centralization.

It's a multi-stakeholder model. In the end a "social networking protocols working group" would primarily consist of delegates from all social network operators that implement the standards.

IETF? Mozilla? Who is creating and maintaining TCP/IP or HTTP or DNS?

On the other hand, assuming you can't convince your friends to all choose the same provider, almost every provider will know everything you post.

You're assuming the providers are allowed to see what you post. They don't even need to see the destination. The sensible way to do message routing is: You encrypt a message to your provider which contains the destination's provider and a message encrypted to the destination's provider, which itself contains the destination and a message encrypted to the destination. If the providers aren't colluding they won't even be able to tell who is communicating.

I'm not totally sure. Centralized services usually seem much lower friction than decentralized ones, and that can be important getting people to actually use a service.

However the sign up process for NextDoor seems hard, so friction might not be a good reason. It might be hard to keep sign up rigorous without a central vetting body though.

Not difficult in the slightest. I was able to sign up to Nextdoor within a minute of visiting the site (just now). They offer the option of calling your phone which has your billing address in order to verify you live in the neighborhood.

You don't need a central vetting body if the node runs in your neighborhood. Physical proximity plus a neighbor vouching for you are plenty.

Step 2, go to 6131 48th and ask Kim for a logon code.

Sign-up is actually a LOT more low-friction than I expected. You verify your phone number (which takes about ten seconds), and if your billing address matches, you're signed up and address-verified immediately.

It's a little more complicated if you're billing addr is not your home addr (and you don't want to put in your credit card), but my guess would be that phone-number verification works in the 95% general case. Given how quick and easy sign-up is, I'd imagine that the friction argument is still rather relevant.

Any idea how they get your phone number's billing address?

EDIT: Doesn't seem to work with my T-Mobile cellphone, so I'm guessing they have some arrangement with like some cell carriers?

Maybe they mean billing address for your credit card?

I don't really know about the implementation details or anything, I just went through the sign-up flow and was really surprised at how simple it was.

Would there be risks (to the online community) in putting control in the hands of whoever set up the web app? That is, unless it was significantly redesigned to remove that as an issue.

You mean "federated" (each node has its set of data and controls what to share with the others upon request) more than "decentralized" (there is single set of data that is replicated and handled by multiple nodes, each of which may have all the data or part of it).

You are technically correct. The best kind of correct!

You certainly could do it decentralized, but I suspect federated is the better fit.

I've never heard of that term before... is there a good resource for reading up on federated servers/networks/design (I'm not even sure which of those three terms is the most appropriate here).

The StackExchange network is an example of federation. All of the various sites have unique userbases and data sets, with a system for authorizing and trusting a user's identity between the lot of them.

Otherwise, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_%28information_techn... for a general discussion.

Classic examples of federated systems: email, usenet, IRC, Jabber, DNS, BGP.

I would argue that if built upon a platform like MaidSafe, which should come out late 2014/early 2015, it would be a decentralized network.

> There's no earthly reason to have this live on one server somewhere

Except, of course, running, maintaining and developing the thing, all of which are quite earthly.

> And it's a perfect example of a service that should be decentralized by design.

Except that would make it an order or two of magnitude more complicated, but that's irrelevant next to random people on the Internet armchair quarterbacking. And, of course, procuring a server and installing a node on it is much, much easier than just signing up on a website and inviting your neighbors. It's the perfect example, I can't think of any reason why they didn't do it that way. Oh, of course, advertising. That's it. Sorry, never mind me.

I agree wholeheartedly. If a decentralized social network were easy to implement well, someone would have done it by now (Diaspora is the only thing close to this I can think of).

Do you have a reason why decentralization is necessary? The only two reasons you cite seem to be not tracking people and not showing people ads, both of which regularly happen on decentralized networks.

Slack is killing emails.

Nextdoor is killing Facebook.

Verge is killing journalism or what's left of it.

In reality Slack had only 150K users. Nextdoor is barely known outside of few neighbourhoods (sure, they can claim 1 in every 4 neighbourhood has "adopted" Nextdoor). Lot of articles from Verge getting posted here recently smells a lot like just paid PR stuff for startups. They are almost like informatials on late night TV. Take everything from them with huge pinch of salt.

that is how it begins.. early signs of FB was killing MySpace was back when it was a thing that kids in a handful of colleges used. These early signs are important to recognize and highlight for incumbents as well as participants.

This is a nice submarine ad.

This would be great if people were more active on NextDoor. I haven't seen too many neighborhoods in the Bay Area where it works beyond 4-5 active people.

That was exactly my first thought too. For anyone who doesn't know what chaostheory means, see: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

This is what I thought too. There is nothing described in the article that can't be accomplished with a closed group on Facebook, which we use for our apartment building in San Francisco.

The main feature I wouldn't mind having, if NextDoor has it, is a way to share tools and other things that I have with my neighbors. For example, I have some power tools, excellent specialized cooking gear, commercial juice press, bike repair stand, etc. and plan on buy a commercial vacuum sealer. All of these things are capital goods that are extremely useful but might spend a lot of their time used infrequently. Since these are going to be available to use a lot of the time I'm happy to lend them to a neighbor so long as I know they are going to come back to me in the same condition as they were lent. I just want a system where I can write down my expectations insofar as how I expect my things to be cared for and cleaned before returned, and how I can remedy issues and leave feedback like "3-stars b/c my stock pot came back dirty" or "5 stars b/c my stock pot came back cleaner than it was when I leant it".

I believe that was the original concept behind Yerdle, although they seem to have pivoted from loaning out to giving away.

https://yerdle.com/

To be fair Next door shows where people live in relation to you, which is a little better than just a disembodied bunch of facebook contacts.

NextDoor is really useful if you live in a high crime area. I live in a neighborhood that had the misfortune of having a public housing apartment complex built in the middle of it which has resulted in a tremendous amount of crime. As a result almost everyone in our area is on Nextdoor so you know about who has been robbed/attacked/burgled most recently.

Sorry but NextDoor sucks in terms of being an Anti-Facebook. EveryBlock was killing it so hard and NextDoor just kind of filled the void once EveryBlock was acquired by MSNBC. I know EveryBlock is coming back though which is awesome.

Any Anti-Facebook service needs at least a good "News Feed" like Facebook does. EveryBlock had a really awesome and useful news feed. You'd see all the new permits(film locations, building, zoning, etc.) issued, crime reports, comments about community issues, events, etc. in your neighborhood. It was exactly what I thought of in terms of "hyperlocal" news. It was extremely useful even as a passive user.

NextDoor just isn't any of that. They don't have the same News Feed quality that EveryBlock had. NextDoor posts are like "I have a new Ikea desk I'm trying to get rid of" or "What's happening at 20th and Mission"-style Twitter posts. Not very informative or useful.

Have you used the service? Nextdoor absolutely has a configurable newsfeed built from scratch to be highly scalable...it seems like you're forming your opinion based on outdated information.

There's also a feed of "Nearby Neighborhoods" and a City Platform that feeds in alerts and information from police and local government.

It's literally everything you described and more.

I still use NextDoor, but they somehow(even though EveryBlock is much older) don't have nearly as much data as EveryBlock seemed to have access too. Or maybe EveryBlock had a much better design that seemed to communicate the data they had more effectively than NextDoor.

EveryBlock had solved a good-"News Feed"-for-the-neighborhood problem. NextDoor has yet do that as effectively.

Everyblock tried to pull in public data about the neighborhood and post it automatically. I've never seen a NextDoor post that wasn't human generated. That's the main difference.

Everyblock pulls in Chicago public data pretty well, it's one of my favorite things about the site.

That's incredibly useful.. Imagine if people got involved in something like that which also piped in local, county, and State political news.. Like proposed bills and upcoming votes.

I'm thankful to have Everyblock back in Chicago (even if it primarily serves as a do-go project by Comcast now). I truly appreciate all the automatically pulled in data-- learned about new restaurants, violent crimes etc.

EveryBlock: "— Sorry, we don't cover [my zip code] —"

Not quite every block ... :-/

FFS. Their site says "Login with Facebook" so I try. Apparently all this does is give them access to your Facebook profile, it doesn't actually give you an account on Nextdoor. You still have to provide your email address and establish a password.

In other words, even their signup page contains a scam, designed to steal your friends list. And I'm supposed to trust this site with anything? Fuck no.

It also gives you a chance, on subsequent logins, to just login using your FB account. Not that uncommon.

> It also gives you a chance, on subsequent logins, to just login using your FB account. Not that uncommon.

Then why the heck does it ask for a password?

If I use FB login, the primary benefit is not having to track another password.

The FB access is just for authentication and easy login as well as profile picture. In no way does the website have access to your friends list....

I think your definition of scam is a bit off...because every app in the app store would be qualified as a "scam".

When a Facebook connected app or site has access to "your profile" that includes your friends list.

Anyway as I can see that you failed to read for comprehension I must reiterate that allowing next-door to read your Facebook profile in no way authenticates you to the site, nor does it provide them with your profile picture.

Slight correction - it has access to your friends who have also used the facebook login for that site.

If you're the first person to login, the site will get an empty list. Only the set of your friends who have previously used the service, will show up if the service queries fb for your friends.

I was confused by this too. It said 'Or Login With Facebook' but when I clicked that it only turned into 'Facebook connected' and I still had to enter an email and password.

That was confusing and I considered stopping. I went through with it anyway, but that part was strange. Why do you do that?

When is "Login with Facebook" ever not a scam?

I agree it's a good marker for "This site probably shouldn't be trusted with personal data" though.

I am the "neighborhood lead" for Nextdoor in my neighborhood and I have found it incredibly useful, for a number of reasons: meeting neighbors, unloading free/cheap stuff I don't want to put on Craigslist or Freecycle, learning about neighborhood problems & news (vandalism, construction, permits, etc), finding and vetting service providers (plumbers, landscapers, electricians, etc), and generally staying in touch with people I live near. This is hugely more valuable than the crap I see on Facebook. Nobody posts ice bucket challenge videos on Nextdoor, or kid pics, or game invites. :)

> Nobody posts ice bucket challenge videos on Nextdoor, or kid pics, or game invites. :)

I'm sure this is an exception, but I turned off email notifications when people started discussing how to insulate their apartments to protect themselves from wifi radiation.

I can get behind that. Not to protect myself from wifi radiation, but to cut down on the amount of wifi traffic interfering with my signal. There are only 13 usable channels in 2.4Ghz, and I don't feel like replacing my router for 5Ghz right away.

In the US, there are 11 channels, and either 3 or (with cooperation and planning between neighbors) 4 non-overlapping channels. Investing in 5ghz was the only way I could get a decent signal in my high-rise apartment.

It would be cool if someone in the neighborhood could purchase a device that would setup a local nextdoor type of service. It would show up as a wireless connection, once connected when they try to visit a website it would give them an explanation what this service offers and allow them to setup a profile. Only people within a certain distance would be able to connect, the network could be expanded with multiple devices. It would allow, decentralized networking based on geographic location. Users would also be allowed to create a backup of their profile and interactions for record keeping if they wish.

It could be very helpful for local discussion, community awareness, emergency communication (if the access points are kept off the main grid) and possibly even direct democratic voting for small local issues.

Sort of like a PirateBox, but more sophisticated non-anonymous local private social network. Not entirely sure if the technology exists to allow this to scale affordably to at least a block or two.

You're basically describing http://tidepools.co

which was created as a localized discussion and mapping platform that runs on wireless mesh networks (or any server setup)

This is a cool and much needed social network however it appears signup is broken at the moment. I tried 2-3 times to make it through the signup page and couldn't do it with either Facebook or Email signup.

Having your user registration broken when you get a positive article published about your service must really suck.

EDIT: Seems to be a chrome issue. Submitted a request to their support time. Safari seems to work just fine.

So, first of all, my neighbourhood name in their map is kinda offensive (a local colloquialism). Second, to complete the registration process, I have to either supply a debit/credit card, the will call a phone number and somehow compare that against phone records to verify my identity, or send me a postcard.

This seems incredibly intrusive and a big privacy ingress. No thanks.

A postcard seems perfect for a neighbourhood-based social network.

That also gives you confidence that all members in the neighborhood are verified.

I'm not sure how I feel about debit/credit cards, but the postcard idea is clever. What better way to validate identity on a neighborhood-based network than postage?

I believe CouchSurfing has been doing the postcard thing for years, as well.

> Second, to complete the registration process, I have to either supply a debit/credit card, the will call a phone number and somehow compare that against phone records to verify my identity, or send me a postcard.

This is actually a HUGE piece of what makes the social network special. This builds inherent trust into the network so you actually know that the people that you're talking to are actually who they say they are and actually live in your neighborhood.

This means that, if you're selling your couch, or buying something from a neighbor, you can be sure that it's trusted neighbor that you're interacting with.

This actually HELPS privacy rather than impeding it.

Nextdoor also cross references with sex offender databases as well as "some" criminal databases so that they are banned from joining. It's also a safety feature.

You should identify yourself as a Nextdoor employee! (Looks like you've promoted them several times in your comment history.)

I'd much rather have a simple web of trust between the people than this central authority.

That's called real life isn't it? Just choose an unmediated life if that's what you want.

> Nextdoor also cross references with sex offender databases as well as "some" criminal databases so that they are banned from joining. It's also a safety feature.

Ugh. Those things increase recidivism and violate fundamental concepts of justice by not allowing people to ever 'serve their debt to society'. If I can pass someone by on the sidewalk or walk by their house, I don't see why they should be banned from talking to me on such a network.

Assuming those people are actual, proven, and unanimously agreed upon sex offenders, such as a 50 year old man who did time for making 10 year year old boys perform fellatio on him, I don't see what is wrong with making them pariahs. If anything, they should have been executed rather than reintroduced into society.

Because no criminal can ever be reformed, right?

If they're released, it generally implies they no longer pose a threat, and are monitored if not the case.

Hmm, except that the sex offender registry is also absurdly broad. Should public urination result in you being a life-long pariah? What about being an underage teen sexting?

http://www.businessinsider.com/surprising-things-that-could-...

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not with your final sentence. But assuming you aren't. If they did their time, they did their time. Why not ban anyone with a criminal conviction?

>Assuming those people are actual, proven, and unanimously agreed upon sex offenders

How do you prove this to the computer? Have a representative manually handle every case with a sex offender to see if someone is too perverted to join their network? Surely that's a PR nightmare. "Well he had sex with a 17 year old girl, so we're fine with him joining. But a 10 year old boy, that's where we draw the line."

The list of sex offenders is more than just a list of child molesters. Public urination or indecency and anything in between goes on there. All of them are bad to a certain degree, some of them terrible. But if someone has served their time, we should not continue punishing them, but give them a chance to reform.

Can you elaborate on how the postcard is a big privacy issue for you? Their concern is confirming your address, to confirm that you're in the neighbourhood you've chosen -- what forms of data would you be willing to give to prove you live at said location?

I didn't find it particularly onerous to register.

The thing that bothered me is that I had no indication as to the value prior to signing up. I had no way to know whether my neighborhood had active, thriving, productive discussions or whether it was a ghost town. I had no way to know if it was healthy or full of gossip. This is the down side to it being private.

I set up our neighborhood's NextDoor site last year. I got to name it. As the site owner, I can change the name (I think), if people objected and wanted a better name, I'd do it.

It was tough because our area is fairly low density and they require a minimum number of households to set up a neighborhood. I didn't want to include a couple of developments where they really weren't in the same demographic as the neighborhood I was setting up. I did some gerrymandering to make it work.

Now Nextdoor is including comments and posts from all of the surrounding neighborhoods, which is really annoying because I don't really care about what is going on over there and would just as soon not have them tracking what is going on over here.

Hmpf.

You can go to your settings and choose not to receive those notifications. You can also customize which nearby neighborhoods you'd like to receive updates from as well. [disclaimer: I work at Nextdoor]

I just submitted a help request before seeing this comment. I thought I was losing my mind as the log-in page just reloads but doesn't throw an error of any kind except prompting new account creation which then tells you that you already have an account.

love the article is about the anti-facebook only to land at Nextdoor who, lets you sign up with your facebook account

For folks in the UK theres http://streetlife.com which also is a local social network.

You can verify your address to prove you are local and subscribe to local area conversations and news etc... Just like in life the communities are mixed - some more involved than others but I've found it a great resource so far.

Being in Europe I wished I could have a peek at what's inside. I wished I could set up an account and see what happens and if my neighbors would sign-up. I suppose it's not possible (yet) because of i18n, targeted/local ads and public announcements particularities ?

Any open-source alternative I could set up ? A small diaspora/facebook clone ?

If you're interested, Peerby is something similar which is open in many parts of Europe right now.

https://peerby.com/

Thank you. Don't know why you're being downvoted so I refilled your karma.

I had this idea a while back and I'm glad that Nextdoor is dominating it. Growing up on a double cul-de-sac, I'd say I was fortunate enough to have a close neighborhood just by virtue of the shape of the street, but for people that didn't have that this seems like a really awesome service.

What's a double cul-de-sac?

I would guess it's a 'street' whose only outlet is halfway point, while both ends are cul-de-sacs (more or less the shape of a letter T, with the ends of the top part being the cul-de-sacs and the lower part giving access to other streets, etc).

What happens if somebody wants to join, but the Leads refuse?

If a small minority of Leads can prevent people they don't like from joining, it seems like it risks reinforcing bigotry and intolerance.

Leads don't get that power. They can only flag members to our support team who will investigate; they can't stop someone from joining. [disclaimer: I work at Nextdoor]

They talk at the end of the article about monetisation. This kind of network really has the possibility of disrupting Craig Craigslist. Proof of identity and local neighbours would hopefully reduce the kind of scams you see on craigslist.

Serious question: is this something that would be popular in the US? I could never see anyone in my neighbourhood using a private/local social network. Interested to hear from people who think this would be popular in their country.

It is. My Girlfriend started a Nextdoor group. They use it for neighborhood stuff. They send postcards to people in your region asking for signups. Someone starting a local CSA was using it to organize.

Oddly recently she's been getting requests to expand the neighborhood area as people just outside the edges seem to want to join.

It is. My neighborhood has currently 64 members on the site, and 274 people from nearby neighborhoods.

I think so! I work for https://peerby.com , which does something similar (but more narrow, only for borrowing things from neighbors), which started in the Netherlands but it's picking up rather quickly in the US now as well - I think we have many more members in the US now than in some countries where we tried much harder.

I'm really confused why someone would want to know their neighbours. I don't know my neighbours but even if I did, I wouldn't want to be sharing with them on an online network. I like my anonymity and privacy.

I'm glad to see Nextdoor getting this kind of recognition. I've moved around the Bay Area several times in the last few years, and every new Nextdoor community I've joined has been very active and helpful (I bought furniture, found out about a block party, and much more). Highly recommend joining.

I just moved to the bay area, but unfortunately there is no life in my NextDoor community. I actually found it by coming up with the concept and googling to see if anything like it actually existed. I was hoping to make some new friends, but oh well.

I loved using Nextdoor in my last neighborhood. I found a dog walker, got some free yarn, and had a better sense of who my neighbors were. I don't have the time to dedicate to being a neighborhood leader, though, so I haven't set one up in my new neighborhood.

My favorite nextdoor story is when it helped neighbors find chicken poop https://twitter.com/kabragovind/status/483721368710963200

Can someone provide me an inside look at Nextdoor? I'm not an American but want to use the website as inspiration for a personal project, but as you know, I can't get passed the sign up process.

I'm curious about features and UI implementation. Thanks

¼ "American neighborhoods"? That seems like a bit of a reach.

Oh wow could this be any more transparently a PR fluff piece? This doesn't reflect well on The Verge at all as far as any sort of journalistic integrity goes.

Wasn't there a similar service that shut down because it couldn't get traction a few years ago? I remember seeing it here in HN.

Seems a bit difficult to be the anti-Facebook when the very first screen presents a login with Facebook button.

We're trying to do something similar but a bit more narrow at https://peerby.com/ . It's specifically for items you want to borrow. We're based in Europe but the SF community is picking up pretty well right now.

Finally, I was thinking about this too: only allowing to show neighbors who are in your area instead. Maybe you need some mechanism to forbid users to quickly change area, or make it hard to create multiple account to watch several areas. That would be quite a big bump for privacy.

Wonder if any thoughts on Spiral (sprlr.com) as an alternative based on location instead of proof of residence - so you could always connect to the community around you, even if you move around. Can work for work settings, colleges, events, etc.

FD: I'm involved with Spiral.

"40,000 neighborhoods, or roughly one in four American communities, with 10 or more active users"

Found it funny as hell.

I don't know about other neighborhoods, but Nextdoor in SOMA is pretty piss poor in terms of content.

you mean nothing that interests you? or there isn't much? or? [disclaimer: I work for Nextdoor]

Hardly any posts. Nothing that interests me.

From the looks of it, Nextdoor is very similar to Front Porch Forum, except FPM has been around for almost a decade but exists only in Vermont. While occasionally useful, it inevitably reminds me that there's a reason the Internet took off in the first place: I have very little in common with my neighbors besides geographical proximity.

I don't use Facebook, and I use Nextdoor all the time and it seems very useful to me.

How are neighbourhoods defined? What are the areas based on?

OT: I'd like to take a moment to appreciate The Verge for making the first mention of Nextdoor in the article a link, and for making that link actually go to the Nextdoor web site instead of a silly "here's what The Verge has to say about the company Nextdoor" page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com