Since yesterday, there have been postings on Nextdoor from different “members” who just joined a few minutes prior. Each post is different, but there are great similarities. They’re glurgy, feel-good stories with bland, smarmy language. After reading just the second one, I knew it was bot-generated, and so did a lot of other members, and they said so in their responses.
But other members are swallowing them hook, line and sinker. They are responding “Isn’t it nice that this person is posting something so wonderful and positive!” If they continue to fall for this fake crap, what other fake AI stuff will mesmerize them?
Is anyone else seeing this tripe in their Nextdoor feed?
I sometimes think about joining Nextdoor but have not done so precisely because of these stories, and also because of stories about the actual non-bot neighbours.
I’ve mostly avoided our local Nextdoor since the time someone posted a promo for a pseudoscientific health grifter event at a local church and I responded, showing how it was nonsense. The Nextdoor moderator removed the comment and closed off further responses, because he believed in the “therapy”.
Sometimes bot-type posts draw bot responses. For awhile there, my Facebook feed was full of posts of obviously AI flowering and foliage plants, and the sheeple-bot crowd responded with comments like “Beautiful!” and “Wow”.
There was a story on my Nextdoor recently, illustrated with an eye-catching photo of a bloody leg. The post talked about how the person had been walking in the neighborhood when a Doberman ran up and attacked them. It mentioned briefly that people should keep dogs on leashes, but then went on and on about the magical dog-repelling device the person used to save themselves. Most responses were focused on just where that Dobe was and who it belonged to, as they should be, but when it was evident the poster only wanted to talk about the wonderful device, it was judged to be bullshit. I was annoyed they had slandered my favorite breed.
And yeah, we get a lot of religious glurge as well, plus plenty of meaningless “uplifting” type crap. All the usual dolts reply with their likes and emojis.
We have one very special person who posts, “Lock it up!” under any story about someone being arrested, but only if the suspect is black. It’s good to know about that guy.
Big prob, as noticed, is that people LIKE glurge, especially if it reaffirms them.
I mean, there are whole sites, instances, channels that are nothing BUT “uplifting” glurge — often LLM-written scripts illustrated with “AI” slop graphics — with the intent that the reader then share it in their socials.
(My current bugbear: a vid supposedly about Benicio del Toro and Anderson Cooper telling off another CNN anchor about Puerto Rico being American. Except the vid is exclusively LLM-narration and slop pics of the different people’s faces—the segment never happened. The YT page even explicitly states its contents are “uplifting fiction”. But because nobody goes to any front page any more but just links straight, people keep falling for it.)
We don’t have any real Nextdoor network here, though we have “scare channels” on Whatsapp for neighborhood watch. I lasted a day or so before leaving.
I mean, a “brown person” walking down a street in a country - which is by a huge majority Brown or Black - is simply not a reason to clutch the white pearls.
Also Dobermans rock. Just ask Higgens from the 80s TV series Magnum, P.I.
They’re actually quite sweet dogs, generally. My wife’s aunt had one that continued to believe he was a lapdog long into adulthood. It was entertaining to watch - legs everywhere.
Fun fact: the word “glurge” was actually coined on the Snopes board and is basically the onomatopoeia of this:
I remember reading as part of the Snopes ‘Glurge’ definition years ago that there’s usually a dark side to Glurge stories: “I was about to walk down a dark alley, then an angel appeared to me and warned me not to. Later I heard someone who went down the alley right after I was warned not to, got mugged. I was saved by an angel!”
So, how come the person who got mugged did not get an angel warning? Were they not virtuous enough?
Yes, and man do the people who love glurge hate when you point this out. “Person A was miraculously saved by God!” “Yes, but Persons B-Z died horribly. Did God hate them?” “STOP RUINING MY STORY!”
I went to NextDoor and typed a snarky reply to one of the glurgebot stories that it was as fake as a two-dollar toupee, and that only gullible people fell for it. We’ll see how long before the Hallmark/church crowd shouts me down.
When I notice bots on Reddit, sometimes they are brand new accounts. But don’t use that as an identifier, there’s also accounts that are years old, but if you go back they were posting something mundane like video games or puppies before they lost interest in reddit or forgot the password. Then some bot farm bought or stole the account and after a large gap they start posting about exclusively hot-button issues.
Oh yeah, I meant to reply to ask about this but I got busy. My question was going to be more “your friend got saved by an angel?!?” than the alley part.
