My neighborhood is having issues with break-ins and car thefts during the day, so neighbors have been keeping an eye out for unusual behavior or suspicious activity.
Someone posted just half an hour ago some early-morning photos of a guy coming into people’s side yards and driveways and looking into windows, then gesturing to another guy in a following van. The poster gave a description and asked folks to keep an eye out for the guy. FTR, the poster was following the instructions of our local police department in keeping his neighbors informed and copying the police department in his posts.
Man, the shitstorm that broke out! A poster or two accused him of being vile, suspicious, defamatory, you name it. The most hysterical informed that she was going to report him (to someone?) for posting “disgusting accusations”.
What gets into people? If someone came onto my property in the wee hours and was looking in my windows, you bet I’d be very suspicious.
The posting war is still ongoing. Nextdoor.com will need moderators eventually, I guess.
Our local nextdoor page had a long thread about people looking through other people’s garbage after they put it out to the curb. I tried to tell them that courts have ruled that that’s legal, but the discussion turned towards promising to shoot people who did that. This is California, people, there’s no “man’s castle” or stand your ground laws here.
We do not have “stand your ground”, but we do have a Castle Doctrine. It’s CA Penal Code Section 198.5, and it justifies lethal force within one’s residence. Of course, it doesn’t apply to garbage cans on the curb.
I think the biggest fights we have on our Nextdoor are people fighting over whether a lost dog or a dog in the middle of traffic is an “Urgent Alert” or not.
Wait, what exactly was said? Was it what you posted? A guy going down the street, looking into windows, and gesturing to another guy in a van? That seems really unlikely to get anyone stirred up.
Every summer there are fights about fireworks, the pro and con people get pretty hot about it. People also fight about bird feeders, we have bears around here and bird feeders attract them but some people won’t give them up.
Then there was the lady who complained about the “unsightly” Lost Pets signs being posted, and how she had moved to this area for its natural beauty blah blah blah. Omg she was torn to shreds. She deleted her account and hopefully has moved to Idaho or wherever by now.
The saddest are the lost pets. We also have a lot of coyotes around here, and when pets disappear I feel very sorry for the people but also mad at them, because what do they expect to happen (eta when they let the pets wander outside unattended)? I don’t post anything like that but sometimes people do. It is not always their fault though, coyotes can and do jump fences sometimes.
In my neighborhood, the largest and most heated discussion was whether or not people thought the new shopping center being built was going to have an In-N-Out Burger. Not whether or not it WAS going to have one, but if people BELIEVED it was going to have one. The voices of reason that said “just wait and see” were shouted down. It was bizarre.
In my town we have a community FB page, and apart from people asking others if their NBN (internet) is down, most discussion is about how developers are ruining the town with new housing estates and shopping centres going in.
For MONTHS there was a raging argument about whether a McDonalds store opening was going to be a good thing or a bad thing for the town, with about half the posters being pro and the other half agin. Geez, it got nasty at times…and I expect it will be resurrected when the first sod gets turned at the new shopping precinct.
Do you have to use your real name on Nextdoor? I’ve been thinking of joining to get out some of my annoyances anonymously. (Fuck your barking dogs, parking on the sidewalks, in front of the hydrants, not shoveling, illegal dumping, overgrown hedges obstructing the sidewalk, smoky, smokey fire pits… I could go on and on and on.) I can post that on my city’s facebook page but I use my real name there and the facebook page is… well, it’s fairly frightening. I mostly look on in horror and amusement at the meanness of my fellow city dwellers, the personal insults, the decades old grudges being laid out for all to see.
I live in San Francisco, and everyone on Nextdoor here is very conscious about how to post about suspicious activity: it must be actually suspicious (not just some black person you don’t know walking down your street), and the description can include race only incidentally, and must include other factors such as clothing worn, age, height, weight and so on (as best you can estimate them). If you have photos or videos to post, all the better.
And there is quite a bit of activity to post about, not just suspicious but actually caught in the act on CCTV video. At least it seems like a lot to me. People walk into garages that were left open for 5 minutes and steal a bicycle, or break into cars all along a street, or just test every car to see if it’s unlocked, or trespass onto private property for apparently nefarious purposes, not to mention the ubiquitous package theft. A fair number have been caught by the police, helped by the videos.
Maybe the OP’s neighbors aren’t familiar with the amount of small scale crime that goes on every day in just about every city. I can’t imagine otherwise why they would have raised such a fuss about a posting as described.
Nextdoor has what they call Leads, who are able to remove posts that break the rules by concensus of the Leads in the area. Or you can report offensive posters directly to Nextdoor, who may remove them from the site. It’s nothing like the moderated discussions we have here, it’s sort of self-moderated by the neighbors. Our biggest blowup recently was about illegal private fireworks, there were several posters who defended it and suggested that if it bothered us we should make other arrangements, like going out of town. The attitude was revelatory.
Yes, and they do that without ever any explanation (at least not to other people, I don’t know if the poster gets any feedback). It’s much too “deus ex machina” for my taste.
It’s a good idea, I think, for everyone on the site to remember that it’s primary purpose is, or will be, to make someone some money. We are already seeing sponsored posts and so on, which presumably provides enough for them to go forward with.
I get the impression that the character of any particular Nextdoor.com site totally depends on the neighborhood. Different neighborhoods can get obsessed about different things, but whatever it is, it usually gets blown out of proportion. The most common thing seems to be that, because every petty little crime gets broadcast, people are hearing about things that were always happening, but they didn’t know about before, so they think it’s suddenly new, and that the whole neighborhood is coming to ruin. (See this L.A. Times column.)
I got a flyer in mid May from the local community people and threw it into the trash. I’m not into shit-talking or reading about whose dog is shitting where.
It’s a crazy scary little thing. I went in under a different name just to look but I’ll keep it that way. It requires you put your actually address for the vetting, but you can change that to just the street once you’re approved.
Mine has people given to posts like “GUNSHOTS!!!” and “APPARENT HOMELESS WOMEN ON STREET!!!” and any # of “HISPANIC COUPLE IN CAR IN NEIGHBORHOOD!!”""
To be fair, if anyone heard gunshots in town in my area, freaking out would be entirely understandable.
I didn’t join the nextdoor group, though I did join the local FB town discussion. It’s about 60% lost pets, with most of the rest being ‘I have a misdelivered parcel, anyone know xx?’, organising litter picks, occasional petty crime reports and events. The only thread that I remember getting locked due to people getting too angry was about cream teas, and whether they should be served Cornish style (this being Cornwall) or if it was acceptable to serve them Devon style.
I moved here last year from a large city, and it’s still pretty funny to me, especially the fact that half the locals seem to think this place is ‘really dodgy’ and ‘a bit of a dangerous town’.
The majority of the posts on my neighborhood’s Nextdoor site are:
What was that sound?
Why is there a helicopter circling X area?
How dare they approve of new residential developments after I have moved in!
Coyote sightings
missing small pets (see above)
I am always amazed at the posts that get a lot of responses:
There were 50+ responses to a post advertising a back house for rent that didn’t allow pets. People were either on the owner’s side or complaining about landlords not wanting their precious fur-balls.
Six months ago the local high school students planned a walkout to protest the rash of school shootings and lack of any meaningful gun control. There was a very long “discussion” of the first amendment rights of the students to protest v. the second amendment rights of gun owners. Living in California’s conservative island of Orange County, there were a lot of people complaining that the school teachers were trying to turn their kids liberal.
Ditto. Also complaints about increasing crime due to people living in vehicles. Often people will complain about suspicious people casing the neighborhood, but when asked whether they reported it to the police, they say, “Why should I? They probably won’t do anything anyway!”
Fully half of the posts now seem to be people asking for recommendations for plumbers, electricians, exterminators, gardeners, and carpenters (always on the cheap). It’s quite helpful, but people never seem to search for previous recommendations. There may be 3 plumber referral questions in a day.
There’s also quite a lot of “I want to recommend my wonderful housecleaner!” It would appear that the housecleaner is providing kickbacks.
All in all, it’s a pretty useful site. Most of the time, nothing gets too heated. And I found a terrific cheap exterminator through it.
Totally understandable. Devon style is just ludicrous. You cannot spread jam on top of cream, it only mushes the cream down the sides of the scone.
Oh . . . erm . . .yes.
There is very little on nextdoor about my neighborhood. The immediate pod (two connecting cul-de-sacs) pretty much chat by e-mail, so no wider site is really necessary.
