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

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/7/18528014/fear-social-media-nextdoor-citizen-amazon-ring-neighbors

by cardamomo • 7 years ago

129 109 7 years ago

cmurf• 7 years ago

I have a friend on Nextdoor who routinely complains of neighbors freaking out about "suspicious" people in the neighborhood, how crime is on the rise, and oh my god what are we going to do!? All that angst despite that neighborhood has one of the lowest crime rates in Denver, and there is zero evidence from publicly available police records that the crime rate is going up.

lazyasciiart3• 7 years ago

People in Seattle are starting to sound like conspiracy theorists in their efforts to explain why crime reporting data doesn't show that Ballard is now a hellish warzone where they fear for their lives just opening the front door.

techsupporter2• 7 years ago

Holy crap, no kidding. Between NextDoor and /r/SeattleWA, compared to my own experience, I'm beginning to think that I live in one of The Orville's split universes. According to those forums, there are lawless hordes of vagrant gangs roaming the streets, dumping bags of used syringes onto little old ladies in walkers while stealing their bikes and running over children with RVs.

Meanwhile, I (a person with no car so I walk and bus everywhere since my neighborhood isn't cool enough to get light rail...ever) barely see any of what they describe. Yes, there are a handful of tents around freeway onramps. Yes, the trash looks a little unsightly. Yes, I wish it wasn't there. But I've not once been attacked and I rarely see a syringe or even a hint of what looks like poop (statistically, it's probably dog poop given the scourge of terrible owners of dogs in this city).

So I'm not discounting that something happens sometimes, but damn, not on the level that the screaming hysterics seem to think it does.

cableshaft• 7 years ago

The local police department is on our NextDoor neighborhood, and posts on it about seemingly every single crime that happens in the city. So I see a lot of these type of posts hit my email (I rarely click them), but it's because it's the police that are doing it.

ultrarunner2• 7 years ago

The police are on NextDoor here, too, but their posts are chiefly "Critical Incident Report," which means they shot someone again. The response is consistently and overwhelmingly "good job, thank you for staying safe." I never would have predicted this as a consequence of social media.

mwfunk• 7 years ago

It's both funny and sad to read my local Nextdoor comments, for exactly those reasons. The comments around me fall into a few major categories:

(1) Announcements from the local police and local government about stuff they want to let people know about. This is actually useful and informative sometimes.

(2) People who are expending titanic amounts of time and effort to save almost nonexistent sums of money, hoping they can buy stuff off their neighbors. People looking for stepladders or planters or shovels that they hope random neighbors have lying around unused in their garages so they can save like $5. These are clearly not people trying to be less wasteful, these are clearly people with a lot of money devoting hours on end to trying to save $5 instead of just going to Home Depot or whatever.

(3) People who are looking for random people in the neighborhood to do their housekeeping for them or babysit their kids or cook for them for some reason. The common theme is, whatever service they're looking for, it's always something where it's completely insane to ask a bunch of random strangers who just happen to be registered in the same Nextdoor neighborhood as them, and again appears to be people with tremendous amounts of money trying to marginally cheap out by snagging some random stranger to do whatever they need doing. I can't imagine anyone seeing one of these and thinking, "heck yeah, I have no idea who these people are but I would absolutely stop whatever I'm doing at noon every day to go over to this person's house and cook a meal for their shut-in in-laws in exchange for $10 a week because these people want to save money by cheaping out on caring for their older relatives."

(4) People who are very frightened by everything they see out the window of their wealthy, manicured neighborhood. This is the racist stuff. Most of it's either, "I saw some <ethnicity> youths walking down the street and it made me worried", or "A stranger of <ethnicity> rang my doorbell and I didn't answer and they went away and nothing's happened since but it made me worried."

(5) Occasionally informative, useful stuff about yard sales, garage sales, funny stories, lost pets, accidents, crime, mysterious loud noises, etc. Like (1), it's not often relevant to me, but it's good to have that source of information.

malandrew2• 7 years ago

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

A2017U1• 7 years ago

Sad seeing this comment greyed out, I have friends who are journalists and they lament this all time.

The media model always had this strain in it on the fringes but now it's prevalent everywhere in a world of A/B tested headlines and click KPI's rather than newspapers sold.

malandrew2• 7 years ago

As they say "If it bleeds, it leads"

chrisdhoover• 7 years ago

Fear, propaganda, and outright lies.

jklinger4102• 7 years ago

This article is 100% FUD.

For the downvoters, let me summarize.

Social media is bad because people.

Saved you a read.

chaostheory3• 7 years ago

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

dariusj18• 7 years ago

The tools to understand that data are important too.

chaostheory3• 7 years ago

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

majos• 7 years ago

I struggle with this issue. I'm a big fan of the idea of transparency given, as you point out, context. But many people are terrible at looking for context, even when it's available. Wherever transparency exists, some aggregator that will harvest shocking information and divorce it from explanatory context to drive "engagement" seems not to be far behind. But I find careful packaging of information for people off-putting as well.

chaostheory3• 7 years ago

Maybe we suggest it to companies like Amazon and Nextdoor. They're both HQ'd in progressive areas and I wouldn't be surprised if they would be open to hearing about suggestions to tweak their UI to add more context.

davidw• 7 years ago

These two twitter accounts are pretty entertaining:

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

and

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

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

pjc50• 7 years ago

Any social media can be fear-based if you're scared enough.

"Fear of crime" has rarely had much connection to actual crime levels, far more to do with perceptions of cleanliness and social class.

davidgould• 7 years ago

And color, can’t forget color..

jshaqaw• 7 years ago

Interesting. I signed up for Nextdoor to see what it is based on this article. For my NYC neighborhood it’s all tag sales, requests for opthomology recommendations, etc... No fear monger it in sight.

CodeMage3• 7 years ago

I've been on Nextdoor for months now. Here's my take on it: if you need to get recommendations for local businesses, it's great. Most of the rest is headache-inducing display of NIMBYism, self-righteousness, self-entitlement and armchair politics. It's basically watered-down Facebook -- without the benefit of having friends -- that happens to be a pretty decent complement to Yelp.

TallGuyShort• 7 years ago

I'm suspicious of it's value for local business recommendations. I've used it in 3 neighborhoods and it seems like it's mostly everyone just recommending their friend's business. Is that not everyone else's experience?

At least that's better than all the people hawking their multi-level marketing crap.

orthecreedence• 7 years ago

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

taborj• 7 years ago

Checking in from a mostly-white suburban neighborhood. The only "crime" post I've ever seen was about a homeless guy going through trashcans and yelling at people. Everything else is as OP states; yard sales, missing (and found) pets, etc.

Edit: I also find it ironical that you're fear mongering on a post complaining that apps are fear mongering...

PascLeRasc• 7 years ago

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

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

ImprovedSilence• 7 years ago

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

kradroy2• 7 years ago

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

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

mc322• 7 years ago

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

gameswithgo• 7 years ago

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

noer• 7 years ago

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

duskwuff• 7 years ago

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

ethagnawl2• 7 years ago

In my limited experience with it, Citizen is trash and incentivizes bad behavior.

I once watched someone live streaming themselves following police into a call at a private residence. Unsurprisingly, the police officers responding forced the person back out onto the street. Now, I am all for accountability, bodycams, etc. but ordinary people holding up their smartphones _should not_ be following police officers into active crime scenes and any company that incentivizes or gamifies this behavior is, by definition, trash.

gradyj• 7 years ago

Sounds like Nightcrawler to me.. creepy.

burger_moon• 7 years ago

The game Charlie and Frank play at night?

jklinger4102• 7 years ago

incentivizes bad behavior

How exactly did they incentivize this?

ethagnawl2• 7 years ago

I haven't used the app in a while, so I don't remember the exact set of social features it offers, but the app is very social and, as is to be expected, users get off on how many people are watching their feed, commenting, following them, etc.

Supermancho• 7 years ago

Nextdoor.com was something I resisted for a long time, despite the number of neighbors using it. Once I signed up, I have be an ardent supporter. Having moved 3 times since, my partner and I both use it as extensively as the neighborhood requires. The ability to restrict messages to a specific neighborhood or set of surrounding with appropriate veiling of information, is brilliant.

sharadov• 7 years ago

Nextdoor is comedy gold - from people complaining about teenagers ringing their doorbell and running away, to reporting "suspicious black males", someone asking for free lemons. It's hilarious!

BoorishBears• 7 years ago

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

tuxxy2• 7 years ago

Nextdoor is... very odd.

In Salt Lake City, where I currently live, all I see are people complaining about homeless people and "suspicious people", who are _always_ people of color just walking down the street (who I've actually recognized occasionally).

Yeah, people call others out on this sort of casual racism, but it doesn't make it go away. It becomes a hotbed of these kinds of thoughts. When someone gets a bike stolen, you'll always see a comment like "The homeless problem here is out of control" and sometimes a comment with a picture of some random (again, person of color...) walking down the street from a Nest cam asking, "Did you see anyone like this? My bike was stolen too."

It's so odd to me to see all this on Nextdoor because I live a block away from a homeless shelter (one of the "gritty" parts of the city) and I can count only twice that I've had issues with homeless people or crime. I've lived here for almost six years now and I've never felt nearly as nervous or afraid as some of these Nextdoor users claim.

However, there is a ton of amusement from Nextdoor users, as well. The number of times I've seen people call each other rude because they used the word "fuck" in their post is extremely high, but that could be because I live in Utah haha.

In short, it's my experience that Nextdoor is filled with the type of person who calls the cops on their neighbors for no reason (like noise complaints). These users would really benefit from just getting to know their neighbors in real life.

jahewson• 7 years ago

Noise complaints are “no reason”?

CodeMage3• 7 years ago

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

clairity• 7 years ago

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

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

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

burlesona2• 7 years ago

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

Nothing reinforces crazy like an echo chamber.

Amezarak• 7 years ago

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

scruple3• 7 years ago

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

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

a comment with a picture of some random (again, person of color...) walking down the street from a Nest cam asking, "Did you see anyone like this? My bike was stolen too."...

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

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

wallace_f• 7 years ago

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

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

Simulacra• 7 years ago

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

shakkhar• 7 years ago

Love the Oxford comma in the title :P

garmaine• 7 years ago

Nextdoor is particularly rotten. I’ve never signed up but I constantly get spam emails about what people are talking about in my complex. Click the link and it brings you to a sign up page.

I will never do business with a company that thinks it’s okay to spam non-customers like this.

carrja99• 7 years ago

Nextdoor is a gigantic advertisement for Ring and Nest products.

standardUser4• 7 years ago

I live in a very dense part of San Francisco and most of the Nextdoor activity I see is people complaining about the constant car break-ins, human feces, needles, package theft and unstable vagrants. There's one group that thinks these things are bad and should be stopped, and another group that likes to argue otherwise.

Sometimes there's some overt racism but usually those posts disappear quickly.

TomVDB2• 7 years ago

In our well to do South Bay neighborhood, it's about unknowns ringing their door bell, which is obviously a very suspicious activity.

When my wife and I once had to go to all the houses of the neighborhood, it was amazing how many people who were clearly at home did not open their door.

It's a totally alien concept to where I originally come from.

scruple3• 7 years ago

Also in a well-to-do neighborhood, though south in Orange County. I've had people look through their windows at me while I'm holding their mail, which was incorrectly delivered to my address. What can you do other than toss it at their door and go back home... I genuinely don't understand it, either.

function_seven• 7 years ago

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

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

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

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

ryandrake• 7 years ago

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

throwawaysea4• 7 years ago

I get the feeling most commenters here don't actually use NextDoor, but have plenty of opinions about NextDoor that [Vox | Gizmodo Media | Twitter | etc.] fed them. I have been on NextDoor for years and I almost never see frivolous complaints or racism. It seems to me that people get this notion based on hit pieces written by online journalists and by things like the 'best of next door' Twitter feed, which showcases cherry-picked isolated posts.

Many of the comments here are alleging widespread racism on Next Door, but I don't agree with the idea that a report about suspicious behavior that involves a POC is inherently racist. Broadly labeling such reports as racist is disingenuous and frankly harmful. OTOH, I see plenty of discrimination in this thread, where people are surmising that NextDoor is "just older white people" (as another comment put it). For those who don't use NextDoor, they have a very well-designed workflow when you try to submit a post about a crime or suspicious activity, where they ask you step by step to isolate what happened, why that behavior was suspicious, and so forth, before collecting details on the people involved.

For those saying "I don't see any problems at all, these NextDoor posters are conspiracy theorists or hysterical fear-mongers" - maybe that's true for you but it is definitely not true for me: I've had needles thrown into my front yard by drug-addicted homeless people. I've been the victim of property crime and lost irreplaceable possessions. I've had friends physically assaulted, robbed at knifepoint, caught in the middle of gunfire, and even threatened with murder in front of their children. I've seen needles in front of my workplace, in front of stores I go to, and in greenbelts in parks. I encounter human poop about once a week downtown. These are all real problems that were absolutely not prevalent 10 years ago in Seattle, and have received limited press coverage due to our ideologically-skewed demographics + city council + journalists.

Violent crime is still rare here but on the rise in Seattle. Property crime is incredibly common, and a lot of it goes unreported because the SPD is not staffed to handle it and has been directed to de-prioritize investigating it or directed to not enforce certain laws or directed to not enforce laws against some groups of people (i.e. homeless). Both Facebook and NextDoor luckily have given voice to what are very real concerns to law-abiding residents.

PS: the level of discourse in this thread is appalling. So many people are using labels (e.g. "NIMBY") or discriminatory remarks ("old white people") to dismiss others' valid perspectives, values, and opinions. I find this ironic considering the same posters seemingly uphold the value of "lived experiences" in other contexts. But more importantly, it seems like lazy comments that aren't making any actual argument or adding any information are garnering votes, which is not good for the community.

fwip2• 7 years ago

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

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

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

throwawaysea4• 7 years ago

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

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

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

yardie• 7 years ago

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

mikeash3• 7 years ago

I live in the DC suburbs about a mile from a relatively new Metro station. The local Nextdoor is fairly reasonable, but about once a month someone posts to report a small crime (like a car break-in) and concludes with something like, “this never happened before Metro was put in.”

Right, because criminals are spending an hour on the train, then walking a mile or two to your house so they can commit a crime, then hustling to get back home before the system closes down for the night.

It certainly is interesting to see how disconnected from reality some people are.

NikkiA• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, the only post on my nextdoor today is a reminder that it's the day of the year when they get together to repaint and clean up the poorest part of town as part of a charity event.

shrug

beeskneecaps• 7 years ago

It is interesting to observe assumptions about the entire network, where one can only observe a small fraction of the entire network.

A single observation of racism or toxicity causes many observers to assume their neighborhood is full of casual racism or is completely toxic.

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

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