From Best of Nextdoor.
It began innocently enough. What could be wrong with a website that reunites people with their lost cats, offers crowdsourced suggestions for plumbers and operates as an ongoing garage sale? But as is usual for anything coming out of Silicon Valley, NextDoor, has gone full Lord of the Flies except instead of kids it’s mostly old folks beating dissenters to death with their keyboards.
Here’s a typical discussion on my neighborhood’s NextDoor, in this case about a homeless encampment at our local park:
There’s an easy solution to all the hate and trolling: paid moderators. Such moderators could limit the discussion to the things NextDoor is good at: the aforementioned and uncontroversial pet reunification and plumber recommendations. Maybe those plumbers could be vetted too! Of course, paid moderators would make the website unprofitable. Instead NextDoor crowdsources the moderation to both get around paying any employees and to absolve themselves of the responsibility of dealing with the mess they’ve made.
I’m curious if any of you, our dear readers, use NextDoor? What have you used it for? What are the controversies raging in your neighborhood on the site? As for me I still peek at the site periodically, mainly to see if anyone needs bee help, but I’ve become really turned off by the vitriol. And I feel sorry for the people I see most engaged in these NextDoor debates. I suspect they are both lonely and suffering from depression.
I use it and check in a few times a week. I’m in soon to be suburban Houston (ie: rural but not much longer thanks to toll roads) and so I knew that I’d see plenty of hateful things but I think I was surprised at how easily it was said.
I usually hide convos that go south or even report some people. But, yeah, mostly for selling things!
I started out thinking it would be good…I hate it and refuse to use it any longer. People are A$$es the world over and they surface in some interesting places…like my neighborhood
I use it. …with the effect that what I once thought of as a peaceful, tolerant, cooperative neighborhood now can seem more like a cesspool of hateful people who think that returning misdirected mail makes them suspect and busybodies who only expect people they’ve known their whole lives to ever come to their door or even pause to look at their homes.
It’s demoralizing but I have to think the vocal misanthropes are the exception. Noisy but marginal.
Meanwhile, I have to object to having this described as an issue of age. I may be retired and have more time to read and comment but nothing about my age determines the content of my comments unless it’s more accumulated experience. It’s values and perspective that color the responses, my friend. And there are lots of people of various ages who lack one or the other.
I signed up for NextDoor with interest to find out if it was useful to me… I was not impressed, and indeed horrified at many of the interchanges, particularly how very vitriolic and negative people were about adding bike lanes to streets. Given how many bike fatalities there are in our neighborhood, I would have thought that there would be some spirit of kindness, but all I read was people more willing to condemn cyclists to death than to be willing to park in their own driveways!
I got all sorts of mail via my physical mailbox about NextDoor and ignored it. Maybe this was a good thing.
Used it at the outset for getting rid of unwanted junk but, as you note, it’s become a cesspool. In our area it’s been littered with anti-vax BS, “chem trails” idiocy, generic anti-government screeds, and just now, paranoid coronavirus conspiracy nonsense. I’m sure, if I looked, I’d find a longer laundry list of hateful misinformation and outright lies. I’d delete the app but I’ve decided it’s better to be aware of the extremist nuts in my neighborhood than to ignore them.
I tried it for a few months when it was fairly new, a few years ago. It had very little useful for me and almost nothing pertaining to my actual neighborhood. There were too many broad public service-type announcements for the whole city of 40K, and people worrying about things. No vitriol at that time.
I also object to this being described as an issue of age. It sounds like ageism maybe another stereotype you’ve been guilty of harboring?
I use it also to connect with my “neighbors.” Mostly I just skim it.
Unfortunately, it’s not just your neighborhood. As a non profit professional who works on the neighborhood/community level a lot, ALL the neighborhood Facebook groups in our town look like this a lot of the time. Every neighborhood has a few trolls just itching to cause trouble, and at least a handful of well meaning justice-minded liberals ready to take the bait/stand up to the grumps. My coworker has an acronym that I love: COWPACs, or Cranky Old White People Against Change. Unfortunately, the COWPACs are everywhere.
Did not realize how many hateful and miserable people comment on just about everything. Big topics in my area now are coronavirus and a newly dedicated Scientology building. Lots of speculation and fear mongering, then the vitriol, name calling and once in a while a compliment for someone’s good deed.
I have signed up for Nextdoor, and just scroll past the vitriol, as do most people, I believe. It does seem to come from people from age 30 – 80, though, in my neighborhood. So I do take issue with your stereotyping that these trolls are “elders.” Being a troll is a state of mind, not of body. As an aside, not sure how old you are, but if you are my age and 60 is within striking range, YOU are an “elder” to most of your fellow Angelenos and, indeed, Americans. Pot, meet kettle. But I guess we can blame things on the 80 year olds until we’re 80, and then once we’re 80 blame those grumpy old 100 year-olds for being the trolls. That works.
I left Nextdoor last fall and won’t reapply. I originally thought it extremely useful for lost pets and such but the vitriol coming especially from the university area next to my area trolled constantly starting arguments and millenials who think they know everything try to nastily shove it down your throat was more than I could bear. They were beyond normal. Surprizingly, the worst were from wives of prominent citizens. I posted a spot for help for a guy on the corner with his dog begging for money and I got sliced and diced. Reported. It was shameful. I live in one of the most wealthy parts of our city. How dare I ask others to help the guy. He didn’t deserve help. On one instance, it got to the point where if you didn’t use the politically correct word that they demanded then they attacked with vigor and reported to the mods that you were violating the TOS when you refused to bow down to them. I even had threats made against me. Of course those came from the most leftest from that university area. The site and management of the local areas is very poorly set up. The national mods (who BTW- are left of Disqus and Facebook) are a joke. They’ll lose market value along the way and another startup with better management control will take their place. The whole thing was set up for acquisition anyway so they don’t care about value, just numbers.
Will never go back on again.
I’ve been on our Nextdoor for several years and the best thing has been the General Contractor we found on the site (two bathrooms done, kitchen this summer). He and his crew are fantastic and I love that they all live nearby. I used to read most posts, but now only skim titles.
The site has been useful in dealing with noisy animals and neighbors, wild animal activity, identifying what the circling sheriff helicopter is saying and what part of the county is currently on fire. I have never looked at the current thread titled VOTE NO, just because I know people can get nasty.
What frightens me are the number of posts about “this driver cut me off” with an added description or photo of the car, often with the license plate clearly visible. Can’t say if there has ever been retaliation because of a post like that, but I do think it’s only a matter of time.