by juliennakache on 6/21/22, 12:19 AM with 233 comments
by toofy on 6/21/22, 3:24 AM
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.
by AlbertCory on 6/21/22, 1:58 AM
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.
by simonswords82 on 6/21/22, 9:29 AM
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.
by Nextgrid on 6/21/22, 1:19 AM
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.
by juliennakache on 6/21/22, 12:24 AM
Does anyone know if this can be reported to a public agency?
by gnicholas on 6/21/22, 1:23 AM
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.
by roylez on 6/21/22, 2:09 AM
It is a waste of time trying to educate assholes, avoid them.
by woodruffw on 6/21/22, 1:56 AM
by sem000 on 6/21/22, 1:20 AM
Also, advertising on their platform brings almost $0 ROI. The only benefit was a decently ranked back link.
by trinovantes on 6/21/22, 12:47 AM
by sillysaurusx on 6/21/22, 1:17 AM
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.)
by chrismarlow9 on 6/21/22, 2:40 AM
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.
by CitrusFruits on 6/21/22, 1:27 AM
by princevegeta89 on 6/21/22, 1:08 AM
So much for the email "privacy". I guess I'm better off not giving two shits about it.
by greedo on 6/21/22, 1:51 PM
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.
by duskwuff on 6/21/22, 12:48 AM
by lopespm on 6/22/22, 6:02 PM
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
by gitowiec on 6/21/22, 11:00 PM
by zip1234 on 6/21/22, 1:37 AM
by 55555 on 6/21/22, 2:30 AM
by tristanb on 6/21/22, 2:15 AM
by creativityland on 6/21/22, 4:35 AM
by iamben on 6/21/22, 10:57 AM
by technick on 6/21/22, 5:16 AM
by idontwantthis on 6/21/22, 4:01 AM
by Overtonwindow on 6/21/22, 1:06 AM
by tmaly on 6/21/22, 1:40 AM
It seems more like a place to gossip. If I want to connect with my neighbors, I just go knock on their door.
by timvisee on 6/22/22, 9:59 AM
by AndrianV on 6/21/22, 9:49 AM
by otikik on 6/21/22, 1:56 PM
by MollyRealized on 6/22/22, 9:53 PM
by tims33 on 6/21/22, 4:10 AM
by Pakdef on 6/21/22, 2:58 AM
by sashk on 6/21/22, 2:04 AM
by waplot on 6/21/22, 2:39 AM
by TedShiller on 6/21/22, 1:31 AM
by yakkityyak on 6/21/22, 4:06 AM
by wly_cdgr on 6/21/22, 2:01 AM
by spoonjim on 6/21/22, 2:36 AM