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.
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.
>> 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.”
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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?
> 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/
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?
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
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 wins my prize for the scummiest human manipulation to increase user signups I've witnessed.
I live in the UK in a cul-de-sac with about 25 houses in the street. We've lived here about 4 years and have a dog so we have bumped in to all the neighbours and know all of them by name at least.
I get a note through my door from NextDoor claiming to be from a neighbour in my street with a name that we did not recognise. Apparently this neighbour had signed up for NextDoor to keep our street safe and exchange important information yada yada yada...
Needless to say it's total horse shit - none of us are using their scummy platform and have absolutely no desire to.
So they're preying on people's fears, and hoping that some kind of FOMO plus the fear of being stabbed in your sleep if you don't know what's going on in your street will get people on to their platform.
"<family member> wants you to be their emergency contact on Nextdoor. In case of emergency, <family member> wants their neighbors to be able to message you via Nextdoor. Please accept their invitation to join and connect on Nextdoor so that you can be their emergency contact."
This is scummy manipulation also. They now have my email address. That's an emergency contact, right there. But they aren't going to let anyone use it unless I "join".
I accept that there's a case for needing my permission here. I'd be happy to give them permission to email me if a signed-up neighbour of my family member wants to send me an emergency message. But no, I have to sign up for their entire service first.
I passed, and selected the "don't email me again" option. If my family member wants the neighbors to be able to contact me, then they can pass on my phone or email directly.
Patron has a similar issue. Subscribing to a creator by default opts you into all types of notifications from them, and notifications are configured on a per-creator basis with no global override.
Worse, if I remember right, the page’s entire state (for all the creators) was represented in a single, slow HTTP request that was fired off when any checkbox was changed. Unchecking checkboxes quickly (faster than 1/second) would lead to undefined behaviour as requests get processed out of order and earlier requests would override some of the latter ones, silently undoing your work (since the earlier request has more remaining checkboxes - remember that every request represents the entire state of the page).
I actually appreciate having that level of control. Some creators are absurdly talkative, others only post things I’m interested in. The ability to control it at such a fine level has kept my sanity, and my support.
> notifications are configured on a per-creator basis with no global override.
Why is this a huge problem? I am paying the individual artists, and getting communications from them individually.
It's not exactly clear why the typical user would want to Patreon-ize someone and not want to see the music, art or whatever that you are paying for, but if so, you can just turn off notifications when you start following them.
Sure, a global switch would be "nice to have", but it doesn't make the site crippled.
This is also my experience with Patreon. Recently, I have been receiving popups from them about opting out of marketing emails. However, they do not seem to save my choices and ask me this every several days.
Square is the same whenever you buy something from anywhere. You AFAIK can only unsubscribe as each business spams you. If there another way, it’s not in the email that’s sent.
Probably the darkest UX pattern I've seen in a while... It's not spam per say so I'm not sure if this can be reported to the FTC, but it sure is a dirty move. Whoever designed is either evil or had was forced by an evil organization who would do anything to make their stock go up after a rough SPAC introduction.
Does anyone know if this can be reported to a public agency?
Some, I actually admire. For example: Debates about national politics are against the TOS.
Makes sense, they don't want a locally focused forum turning into the usual partisan cesspool.
So when inevitably threads turn to national partisan politics, there seems to be some flag which is toggled. You might get notifications about replies to your posts, but click yields "This comment has been deleted". You have to use one of a few workarounds to catch up with the whole thread. Boom: Fewer shitposts by virtue of slowing down the whole discussion to a near-standstill.
Although you can just turn off notifications at the app level, this is annoying because it means you can't won't get notifications for emergency/safety notices, people messaging you directly, etc.
The number of relevant agencies will vary by your location, and in my 10 years on ND I have only received an agency notification once or twice. However, I think agencies were only introduced a few years ago, so things could be different in the future.
If you don't want to be bothered, use the website on your phone, not the app. And set up an email filter for anything from Nextdoor. If I need to communicate in real-time with anyone (to arrange pickup details for a for-sale item), I tell them to text me instead of DM.
On a related note, you can change your news feed preference among three settings. But if you choose something other than their desired algorithm, it informs you that this preference will be set for the next X days (45 or 90, I forget). I have never seen a preference that tells you up front that it will respect your wishes for some number of weeks before reverting to the default. Insane.
We desperately need a revised CAN-SPAM[1], with two additional fangs: additional prohibitions on these sorts of dark patterns (designed to exhaust users into submission), and the opening of individual standing against companies that spam (so that individuals can directly sue these misbehaving companies rather than waiting for the FTC to un-capture itself).
We desperately need to overhaul how the average mail provider works. We need unique email addresses every time we sign up for an account that can then be disabled. I do this with fastmail though it's a little annoying to spend 20 seconds to create a new alias every time. At last count I had something like 470 aliases. Probably at least 40 disabled ones after receiving emails I didn't opt in for, or I disabled immediately after the first use because I had no need for further communication with that organization.
NextDoor continues to spam you even after unsubscribing from everything. Some how every month I get a random new email, and some how another new email subscription is enabled in my account.
Also, advertising on their platform brings almost $0 ROI. The only benefit was a decently ranked back link.
forward your spam to their help desk (usually help@<website> or contact@<website>). other humans hate dealing with spammy email about as much as you so often the fastest way to solve it is by looping in an email.
plus, i like to imagine i’m doing a tiny bit of good in the world by redirecting a bit of revenue from a shitty company to the probably less-shitty individual operating the help desk.
> Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $46,517, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:
Just wanted to share that I’ve been using OpenPhone for dealing with text spam, and I really like it so far: https://www.openphone.com/
The only trouble is that some services can verify that the number isn’t a “real” number (how do they do this?!) but it works most of the time.
I’ve slowly been transitioning as much as possible to it. Phone calls even work great, and you can take them right through your laptop.
It doesn’t solve the problem of push notifications, but it’s semi related to the problem of being spammed. (I set my phone to permanent “do not disturb” mode long ago.)
I just went through this and the unsubscribe links in emails are slightly deceptive.
They only cover that specific type of notification and have a toggle switch on the form that makes it confusing as to whether you're subscribing or not.
It took about a week to fully stop the emails because different "types" of notifications kept coming in.
I remember finding out about next door and being excited because it seemed like such a good idea on the surface. It's so sad to see how poorly executed the whole thing is.
Honestly, email notifications and the concept of "unsubscribing" is a big fad. 9/10 services that I try to unsubscribe to, end up asking confusing questions, and instead of ubsubbing me at once, they will rather ask me which topics I'm interested in.
So much for the email "privacy". I guess I'm better off not giving two shits about it.
If it isn't a 1-click unsubscribe I click the back button and mark as spam. I read on this website that marking stuff as spam causes a lot of problems for gmail delivery, which is what I want.
The one thing I miss since leaving Google for mail is the knowledge that I could use the report spam button on companies that made unsubscribing difficult and if enough users did this, it hurt their deliverability to most of their customers.
On Fastmail, as far as I know, the spam filter model is only updated for my organisation, and even if they had a service wide filter taking user feedback, they are much smaller.
I find the paranoia in suburbia amazing. I have a coworker who bought a new house in a brand new development. He works as does his wife, but his mother lives in the home as well.
The first thing he did was install 7 cameras with motion sensing alerts. I asked him what he was protecting against and he came up with vague comments about burglars etc. (FYI the crime rate in our town is very low, and especially low in his neighborhood and the surrounding older neighborhoods).
So he spends all day getting alerts as the cameras mis-diagnose moving shadows (caused by the sun) as "movement." All the new construction in the neighborhood triggers the cameras frequently, and eventually he disabled most of the alerts.
I think our society has done such a thorough job of feeding us "fear porn" that we are all ready to assume the worst.
I'm reminded of a similar pattern in Atlassian's email notification preferences -- multiple pages of multiple checkboxes for every product in their portfolio, with no clear "unsubscribe all" option available.
Meetup suffers from a similar issue, where one cannot perform bulk changes to all the subscribed groups, which becomes unwieldy when one has over 100 subscribed groups.
Apart from this, it happened just a few months ago that these settings suddenly stopped working, so I received several non-solicited emails from notifications that should have been disabled.
Issues like this could have a significant negative impact in user experience and retention, in my opinion
How can I remove my email from their database if I never opened an account? Once I lived in New York city and thought I will use this service but then I moved out. Unfortunately I started to signing in. Then they wanted to send me a confirmation snail mail. But I don't live there any more. And my registration is stuck in a limbo since like 10 years. I can't login because I have no password nor confirmation that I live in the NYC...
Mailbox providers should build in an unsubscribe feature that actually works on a local level. Essentially which creates a filter and doesn’t show you the emails. It’s optimistic to let the spammers handle the unsubscribe feature. AI is getting good enough to have two buttons “unsubscribe from all” and “unsubscribe to emails like these”
They do. If you mark something as spam, gmail should put all future emails from the sender in spam. On Fastmail they make it a little clearer by calling the option “block sender” which puts all their emails in trash.
This was the same issue I ran into after signing up. Each notification "type" required a separate unsub link to disable, and there was no visibility on when it will stop sending me emails.
I literally cannot find a way to have the app installed and not get pushes 2/3 times a day. This started a few months back - I tweeted them about it and got no response. Painful.
The west side Denver nextdoor is mostly people crying about fireworks or posting videos of porch pirates. I couldn't find the value in it so I stopped using their service.
All I know about Nextdoor I’ve learned from The Neighborhood Listen. Hilarious podcast starring Paul F Tompkins where they do sketches based on real nextdoor posts.
Next door is a dreadful system that is so overloaded with advertisements that its almost useless. Im very surprised facebook hasn’t developed a local-focused platform
They did. They have classifieds (competing with Craigslist) and Groups. Every neighborhood in my city has a Facebook Group that's more active than NextDoor.
Thanks OP. If not this post, I wouldn't go there just to see it myself. While there (it wasn't easy to find where these settings are), unsubscribed from most of the email and push notifications. Hopefully, I will remember occasionally launch the app to see _some_ useful posts...
toofy|3 years ago
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.
snapetom|3 years ago
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.
adamredwoods|3 years ago
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.”
1123581321|3 years ago
(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.)
bmarquez|3 years ago
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.
bedast|3 years ago
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).
phil21|3 years ago
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.
ultrarunner|3 years ago
synicalx|3 years ago
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.
NonNefarious|3 years ago
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!"
da39a3ee|3 years ago
hourago|3 years ago
Fear and hate drive engagement. If engagement is their metric that is how they will get it.
maxehmookau|3 years ago
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.
harpersealtako|3 years ago
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.
siskiyou|3 years ago
causality0|3 years ago
FollowingTheDao|3 years ago
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.
stjohnswarts|3 years ago
smegger001|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
posterboy|3 years ago
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
AlbertCory|3 years ago
ec109685|3 years ago
AlbertCory|3 years ago
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.
dylan604|3 years ago
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?
Lammy|3 years ago
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/
matheusmoreira|3 years ago
zionic|3 years ago
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
NonNefarious|3 years ago
zionic|3 years ago
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simonswords82|3 years ago
I live in the UK in a cul-de-sac with about 25 houses in the street. We've lived here about 4 years and have a dog so we have bumped in to all the neighbours and know all of them by name at least.
I get a note through my door from NextDoor claiming to be from a neighbour in my street with a name that we did not recognise. Apparently this neighbour had signed up for NextDoor to keep our street safe and exchange important information yada yada yada...
Needless to say it's total horse shit - none of us are using their scummy platform and have absolutely no desire to.
So they're preying on people's fears, and hoping that some kind of FOMO plus the fear of being stabbed in your sleep if you don't know what's going on in your street will get people on to their platform.
rlpb|3 years ago
"<family member> wants you to be their emergency contact on Nextdoor. In case of emergency, <family member> wants their neighbors to be able to message you via Nextdoor. Please accept their invitation to join and connect on Nextdoor so that you can be their emergency contact."
This is scummy manipulation also. They now have my email address. That's an emergency contact, right there. But they aren't going to let anyone use it unless I "join".
I accept that there's a case for needing my permission here. I'd be happy to give them permission to email me if a signed-up neighbour of my family member wants to send me an emergency message. But no, I have to sign up for their entire service first.
I passed, and selected the "don't email me again" option. If my family member wants the neighbors to be able to contact me, then they can pass on my phone or email directly.
Nextgrid|3 years ago
Worse, if I remember right, the page’s entire state (for all the creators) was represented in a single, slow HTTP request that was fired off when any checkbox was changed. Unchecking checkboxes quickly (faster than 1/second) would lead to undefined behaviour as requests get processed out of order and earlier requests would override some of the latter ones, silently undoing your work (since the earlier request has more remaining checkboxes - remember that every request represents the entire state of the page).
Absolutely dumb design on so many levels.
falcolas|3 years ago
TomSwirly|3 years ago
Why is this a huge problem? I am paying the individual artists, and getting communications from them individually.
It's not exactly clear why the typical user would want to Patreon-ize someone and not want to see the music, art or whatever that you are paying for, but if so, you can just turn off notifications when you start following them.
Sure, a global switch would be "nice to have", but it doesn't make the site crippled.
cli|3 years ago
azinman2|3 years ago
juliennakache|3 years ago
Does anyone know if this can be reported to a public agency?
RajT88|3 years ago
Some, I actually admire. For example: Debates about national politics are against the TOS.
Makes sense, they don't want a locally focused forum turning into the usual partisan cesspool.
So when inevitably threads turn to national partisan politics, there seems to be some flag which is toggled. You might get notifications about replies to your posts, but click yields "This comment has been deleted". You have to use one of a few workarounds to catch up with the whole thread. Boom: Fewer shitposts by virtue of slowing down the whole discussion to a near-standstill.
ausbah|3 years ago
gnicholas|3 years ago
Although you can just turn off notifications at the app level, this is annoying because it means you can't won't get notifications for emergency/safety notices, people messaging you directly, etc.
The number of relevant agencies will vary by your location, and in my 10 years on ND I have only received an agency notification once or twice. However, I think agencies were only introduced a few years ago, so things could be different in the future.
If you don't want to be bothered, use the website on your phone, not the app. And set up an email filter for anything from Nextdoor. If I need to communicate in real-time with anyone (to arrange pickup details for a for-sale item), I tell them to text me instead of DM.
On a related note, you can change your news feed preference among three settings. But if you choose something other than their desired algorithm, it informs you that this preference will be set for the next X days (45 or 90, I forget). I have never seen a preference that tells you up front that it will respect your wishes for some number of weeks before reverting to the default. Insane.
totetsu|3 years ago
roylez|3 years ago
It is a waste of time trying to educate assholes, avoid them.
waplot|3 years ago
no thanks
woodruffw|3 years ago
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003
beeboop|3 years ago
wonderbore|3 years ago
I'm tired of having to deal with (i.e. Mark as spam) a barrage of emails every time I register to a service.
sem000|3 years ago
Also, advertising on their platform brings almost $0 ROI. The only benefit was a decently ranked back link.
colinsane|3 years ago
plus, i like to imagine i’m doing a tiny bit of good in the world by redirecting a bit of revenue from a shitty company to the probably less-shitty individual operating the help desk.
t-writescode|3 years ago
> Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $46,517, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:
trinovantes|3 years ago
wonderbore|3 years ago
sillysaurusx|3 years ago
The only trouble is that some services can verify that the number isn’t a “real” number (how do they do this?!) but it works most of the time.
I’ve slowly been transitioning as much as possible to it. Phone calls even work great, and you can take them right through your laptop.
It doesn’t solve the problem of push notifications, but it’s semi related to the problem of being spammed. (I set my phone to permanent “do not disturb” mode long ago.)
unknown|3 years ago
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jimhi|3 years ago
chrismarlow9|3 years ago
They only cover that specific type of notification and have a toggle switch on the form that makes it confusing as to whether you're subscribing or not.
It took about a week to fully stop the emails because different "types" of notifications kept coming in.
Shady stuff.
wonderbore|3 years ago
Unfortunately this dark pattern is rather common, I think most social networks do that.
stormcode|3 years ago
CitrusFruits|3 years ago
princevegeta89|3 years ago
So much for the email "privacy". I guess I'm better off not giving two shits about it.
jabroni_salad|3 years ago
Macha|3 years ago
On Fastmail, as far as I know, the spam filter model is only updated for my organisation, and even if they had a service wide filter taking user feedback, they are much smaller.
unknown|3 years ago
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greedo|3 years ago
The first thing he did was install 7 cameras with motion sensing alerts. I asked him what he was protecting against and he came up with vague comments about burglars etc. (FYI the crime rate in our town is very low, and especially low in his neighborhood and the surrounding older neighborhoods).
So he spends all day getting alerts as the cameras mis-diagnose moving shadows (caused by the sun) as "movement." All the new construction in the neighborhood triggers the cameras frequently, and eventually he disabled most of the alerts.
I think our society has done such a thorough job of feeding us "fear porn" that we are all ready to assume the worst.
duskwuff|3 years ago
lopespm|3 years ago
Apart from this, it happened just a few months ago that these settings suddenly stopped working, so I received several non-solicited emails from notifications that should have been disabled.
Issues like this could have a significant negative impact in user experience and retention, in my opinion
gitowiec|3 years ago
zip1234|3 years ago
55555|3 years ago
Gigachad|3 years ago
tristanb|3 years ago
creativityland|3 years ago
iamben|3 years ago
krallja|3 years ago
technick|3 years ago
idontwantthis|3 years ago
Overtonwindow|3 years ago
smt88|3 years ago
stackedinserter|3 years ago
astura|3 years ago
tmaly|3 years ago
It seems more like a place to gossip. If I want to connect with my neighbors, I just go knock on their door.
Freak_NL|3 years ago
“Look out fellow Nextdoor-neighbors! There's this weirdo knocking on doors with some sort of chat up scheme. Stay safe! [blurry photo of you]”
“he came round here to. i peeped thru the blinds but he didnt spot me.”
“I think it was a she, but you can't tell with the hoodie can you? Seems shady to me. I'm calling the police if she comes here.”
timvisee|3 years ago
AndrianV|3 years ago
otikik|3 years ago
MollyRealized|3 years ago
tims33|3 years ago
Pakdef|3 years ago
sashk|3 years ago
waplot|3 years ago
TedShiller|3 years ago
yakkityyak|3 years ago
wly_cdgr|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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temptemptemp111|3 years ago
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draw_down|3 years ago
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throwaway2056|3 years ago
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spoonjim|3 years ago