The Rise of Fear-Based Social Media Like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Now Amazon's Neighbors (vox.com) 291
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Violent crime in the U.S. is at its lowest rate in decades. But you wouldn't know that from a crop of increasingly popular social media apps that are forming around crime. Apps like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Ring's Neighbors -- all of which allow users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby -- are some of the most downloaded social and news apps in the U.S., according to rankings from the App Store and Google Play.
Nextdoor was the ninth most-downloaded lifestyle app in the U.S. on iPhones at the end of April, according to App Annie, a mobile data and analytics provider; that's up from No. 27 a year ago in the social networking category. (Nextdoor changed its app category from social to lifestyle on April 30; on April 29 it was ranked 14th in social, according to App Annie.) Amazon Ring's Neighbors is the 36th most-downloaded social app. When it launched last year, it was 115th. Citizen, which considers itself a news app, was the seventh most-downloaded news app on iOS at the end of April, up from ninth last year and 29th in 2017. These apps have become popular because of -- and have aggravated -- the false sense that danger is on the rise. Americans seem to think crime is getting worse, according to data from both Gallup and Pew Research Center. In fact, crime has fallen steeply in the last 25 years according to both the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. David Ewoldsen, professor of media and information at Michigan State University, says these apps foment fear around crime, which feeds into existing biases and racism and largely reinforces stereotypes around skin color. As Steven Renderos, senior campaigns director at the Center for Media Justice, put it, "These apps are not the definitive guides to crime in a neighborhood -- it is merely a reflection of people's own bias, which criminalizes people of color, the unhoused, and other marginalized communities."
A recent Motherboard article found that the majority of people posted as "suspicious" on Neighbors in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood were people of color.
Nextdoor was the ninth most-downloaded lifestyle app in the U.S. on iPhones at the end of April, according to App Annie, a mobile data and analytics provider; that's up from No. 27 a year ago in the social networking category. (Nextdoor changed its app category from social to lifestyle on April 30; on April 29 it was ranked 14th in social, according to App Annie.) Amazon Ring's Neighbors is the 36th most-downloaded social app. When it launched last year, it was 115th. Citizen, which considers itself a news app, was the seventh most-downloaded news app on iOS at the end of April, up from ninth last year and 29th in 2017. These apps have become popular because of -- and have aggravated -- the false sense that danger is on the rise. Americans seem to think crime is getting worse, according to data from both Gallup and Pew Research Center. In fact, crime has fallen steeply in the last 25 years according to both the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. David Ewoldsen, professor of media and information at Michigan State University, says these apps foment fear around crime, which feeds into existing biases and racism and largely reinforces stereotypes around skin color. As Steven Renderos, senior campaigns director at the Center for Media Justice, put it, "These apps are not the definitive guides to crime in a neighborhood -- it is merely a reflection of people's own bias, which criminalizes people of color, the unhoused, and other marginalized communities."
A recent Motherboard article found that the majority of people posted as "suspicious" on Neighbors in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood were people of color.
In defence of Nextdoor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In defence of Nextdoor (Score:5, Informative)
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I agree as well.
- Selling items
- Finding contractors
- News on upcoming events
This is all I have ever seen on nextdoor, I use it a lot in two states.
Re:In defence of Nextdoor (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In defence of Nextdoor (Score:4, Informative)
I'll just leave these here:
https://twitter.com/bestofnext... [twitter.com]
https://twitter.com/worstofnex... [twitter.com]
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You know most of the things on the "worst" are fakes, trolls, and memes, right? Hell, they have the "Found jewelry, don't know what it is, looks valuable" meme (If you're not familiar, the picture included with such posts is of a buttplug).
The "best" feed seems to be mainly focused around trolling a user named "Susan" (and it's clear that Susan is a troll, so either the people running the feed are falling for it or they are Susan themselves). Outside of that, it's just the mildest FW: FW: FW: RE: FUNNY PI
The need for fear is real (Score:4, Insightful)
Those of us old enough to remember the Cold War days will know that in those times the threat of nuclear annihilation was both real and ever- present in people's minds.
WIth that threat gone, the citizens are too relaxed for the government's liking and have too much time to pay attention to the govenment's actions.
So the govenments and its media acolytes need a new fear element to occupy the citizen's minds. The financial crisis of 2008 was milked very effectively, the fear of losing the job being the main theme of the last decate.
But that is now old hat, and therefore the media will make sure that every shooting, every arson, every single crime is brought to everyone's attention to make sure they don't feel safe.
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Jeeze, start taking your medication again.
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Cats!!!!
One of our cats got out and after an hour of searching we posted on Nextdoor. Not more than 15 minutes later we got a phone call and met up with a person near our home who had seen the cat.
We found and retrieved our cat. During the 15 minutes after posting we had resigned ourselves to having lost him (only had him a couple of weeks, fully clawed, skiddish around people).
Nextdoor is also great for finding local contractors.
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If you only had him for a couple weeks then you might be right to be worried, especially if it's an indoor cat - could have gotten lost, or just decided he didn't like living with you (including that, depending on age, he might already be accustomed to the outdoors, and you're driving him stir crazy keeping him cooped up).
As someone who has had 40 years experience with cats that are allowed to go outside as they please, I'll tell you that they do get the urge to wander from time to time. As a rule, I try n
Re: In defence of Nextdoor (Score:2)
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It's also good for local crime reporting (I live in an urban area with considerable crime), finding services, and selling or giving away things.
Story: I had a 36" tube TV I wanted to no longer own (and it was on my 3rd floor, weighing about 200 pounds). I put it on Nextdoor as a "Party Pack": The TV, 2 6-packs of beer, bag of chips, salsa and queso, and a bowl for the chips. It worked!
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Really. Lost pets. Recommendations for local contractors of varying sorts. Babysitters. Heck, my neighborhood Nextdoor even has a Games Night post several nights a month.
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Also notice, no comment section on Vox. I'm sure it was easy to moderate the alt-right, but somebody calling them out for editorializing everything, well, that hurts.
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I have to concur. NextDoor is neighborhood social media site, and what makes it nice is the verified addresses/persons. That cuts down on the anonymous hate posting that show up on other local boards. It is good because most local news site don't cover minor stuff anymore, so it's nice to know when there is an uptick of break-ins, so that I can be more vigilant. But it goes beyond that, it allows for neighborhood announcements (tag sales, festivals) and also just sharing of information between neighbors. It
Nextdoor is about the plague of property theft (Score:5, Informative)
Around here at least, Nextdoor isn't about violent crimes like armed robbery, murder or rape, but the steady drumbeat of property crime which seems up compared to when I moved into this neighborhood 20 years ago.
People who criticize Nextdoor for this point out declining violent crime statistics, but that's not what people on Nextdoor are griping about. It's the relentless and often organized breaking into cars, garages and occasionally houses that goes on. Just recently there were 4 posts within about 8 hours showing the SAME group of 3-4 men breaking into cars and these waves are just about weekly anymore.
The racial angle of Nextdoor can be a problem, but nearly always the videos people post are factual reinforcement of that bias -- a majority of the time the people captured on security cameras committing property crime are black. So are people on Nextdoor racist for reporting "shady" blacks in their streets and alleys at night, or are they just responding the abundant factual proof that most of the property crime is being committed by blacks?
It always seems like people who oppose Nextdoor as some kind of racism-reinforcement system want to deny the preponderance of the evidence provided by crime victims, and often with some kind of hand-waving about racism forcing people into a life of crime or similar blame-shifting that doesn't hold criminals responsible.
Much of this would go away, of course, if the fucking cops even bothered to patrol for property crime or even better, used Nextdoor as an intelligence source to engage in saturation policing to bother catching what are very obviously organized groups. The total lack of police engagement on property crimes is a real problem, and unfortunately I think Nextdoor probably will wind up contributing to some kind of vigilantism. But it's not actually "caused" purely by hype from Nextdoor, but because the crime is a real phenomenon and the cops just aren't doing their jobs and Nextdoor enables a level of organization that wouldn't exist otherwise.
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I'm positive it's a localized problem. Nextdoor's (and this sort of site in general) whole gimmick is that it's localized. My NextDoor experience is entirely different than yours because of where were live. PLENTY of people are going to use them and not have any issues with fear-mongering against aboriginals because there simply aren't any aboriginals there. And some places are going to experience daily culture shock as a neighborhood shifts demographics. And some places really are going to have constant p
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"Nationwide statistics" that don't include what the GP posted about, because the police won't even BOTHER to investigate. We had our cars rummaged through a couple weeks ago (I still have not installed the cameras my wife demanded I buy). I didn't report it to the police. Why would I? I'd have to wait around till they showed up, write some stuff down, and then do fuck-all of nothing about it. They didn't take anything, and I told my wife at the time that they were looking for handguns. She did post it
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I concur. I'll also state that I've seen some fear-based Nextdoor groups, but since it's not universal, it's much more likely that it's a fearful populace that spreads (and relates) through fear, not a social media platform designed to facilitate fearmongering.
Re:In defence of Nextdoor (Score:5, Interesting)
i'm not defending the article, nor the standpoint that these things are stoking racism or fear in particular, but, anecdotally;
I got bullied by my neighbors into admining a facebook group for residents in our small "historic" neighborhood. Currently there are about 400 people in the group. Anyway, like you said, 95% of our posts are "Found this dog, no tags" type things, and it helps a lot of pets get back home. The other 5% are "my car got broken into last night." For a certain type of person, these posts are like crack. You see the same people responding to them with the same frustrated replies over and over again. The one individual that leaps to mind first had a breakin like 5 years ago, and never seemed to recover.
Now here is the funny thing, since we are a mildly affluent neighborhood, lots of people have video cameras, so people post video all the time of these crimes either in progress or near misses. Of the ones posted, about 80% of them have been a couple of fat white guys driving around at 4 am stopping and trying door handles. But a few have been teams of black guys coming over from the bad part of town to the place where there is stuff to rob (addresses posted when arrested).
Anyway, with all of that said, despite that "evidence" I have had to take down posts where people felt the need to report that a "Black guy is riding a blue bike down the street." Not acting suspiciously mind you, just riding. I have had to take down posts complaining about "that foreigner house" being painted yellow. That sort of thing. Like, I think when people are talking with their neighbors, they let down some of their defenses.
You know, the rub is, I don't think these people realize they are injecting race into matters around the neighborhood, or would consider themselves racist. It's just that issues of race are pervasive in this country, and they work their way into everything.
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Violent crime might be down but petty crime is skyrocketing. Package thefts, car thefts, car breakins, and burglaries are on the rise. My only annoyance for nextdoor are the posts like
Subject: ISO a used car
Body:
My daughter is going off to college next year and I’m looking for a car for her to be able to drive to and from classes. I’m looking for a used car that’s about three or four years old with only 10,000 miles on it and in great condition. Looking to pay no more than $500
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My neighbours have a WhatsApp group for "suspicious person/vehicle in the neighbourhood".
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Hmm haven't heard about Nextdoor. looks like it could replace Facebook as a community network?
It is about time for a replacement if it could focus on community instead of "me".
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We were out looking for our cat (didn't post it to Nextdoor) and then I saw a Nextdoor post about the suspicious teenager wandering the neighborhood (my son). Why was he wearing a hoodie in mild weather? (He usually wears a hoodie outside of summer) He seemed "out of it" and was probably on drugs (lol) Why was he looking around my porch (he actually talked to those people and told them he was looking for the cat). It seems it's often a bunch of people looking for an excuse to post something about crime
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"These apps are not the definitive guides to crime in a neighborhood -- it is merely a reflection of people's own bias, which criminalizes people of color, the unhoused, and other marginalized communities."
SJW Buzzword Score: 98%
It would have been 100% had he thrown in something about the alphabet people.
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As the article said, the broad stroke of crime is way, way down over the last 20 years or so.
WRONG!
The author explicitly refers to "violent crime", which is down on average. But the people concerned with crime and using these apps are concerned with vandalism, theft, drug use/sales/production, prostitution, etc. They turn to these apps because the cops don't do squat and they're sick of having their car windows smashed, their homes burglarized, etc.
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Now, I don't disbelieve the Toaster anecdote, but I'd love it if you had a link. It would be hilarious to read and use.
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LGBTqQIA+
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If you were truly woke, you'd know that all three of your examples were government ops.
Fuck man, you probably think we beat the Russians to the moon!
Fear is the mind-killer (Score:5, Insightful)
People that are in fear are not even able to understand that they have lost rationality. They will insist, usually aggressively, that they understand perfectly what is going on, when nothing like that is the case. And then you have the scum that uses this to profit, whether commercially or politically...
Re:Fear is the mind-killer (Score:5, Funny)
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You shouldn't have called them in the first place. They might not understand your sudden change of mind.
Re:Fear is the mind-killer (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't worry. Mexicans have _standards_!
Re:Fear is the mind-killer (Score:4, Informative)
Fear being a driver of media consumption is nothing new. Does nobody remember the unofficial slogan of "If it bleeds, it leads" for network news from decades ago?
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People do not need to be in fear to have lost rationality. Loss of rationality is merely the common condition, statistics-wise. Biases learned in childhood never really go away. That's just about the only thing the Communists get right. The Alt-Right understands this as well. Every now and again one of their sprogs gets ahold of the family armaments and blows away dead old dad and his bigoted views, but that rare.
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People that are in fear are not even able to understand that they have lost rationality.
Sure, like progressives fear racism, so they're unable to see that Vox writes only fiction.
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Thanks for demonstrating my point. Could not be clearer.
Wut (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wut (Score:5, Insightful)
In one case (from #worstofnextdoor), a woman posted a report of two young black men firing guns on a street corner. Another neighbor with CCTV coverage of that corner reviewed the tape and found two young white men playing with firecrackers.
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"Not all of what's reported is reported on these sites is facts."
That's true of everything. EVERYTHING. That's not a counter to OP's intended use of Nextdoor.
"In one case (from #worstofnextdoor)"
And #WorstofNextdoor is a literal distillation of the worst of the platform. It's disingenuous to suggest that the platform is generally bad because someone's compiled a small list of its users faults (relative to the whole of the postings on Nextdoor.
How about this--
1. Be an adult. Understand that many peoples' obs
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Knowing about crime is great, but you do that by finding crime statistics, not by looking at Nextdoor...
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What would happen if there were crimes that the police didn't collect information on?
Keeping people in a constant state of terror (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Keeping people in a constant state of terror (Score:5, Informative)
Good thought. It brings to mind that famous quote from Hermann Göring:
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
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Here we go again, what with the whole "OMG they're controlling us!"
Obviously they want what's best for us. I mean, just look at the efforts they make: In order to keep our teeth from rotting out, they spend millions of dollars putting fluoride in the water.
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Look how badly we handle things without their "help".
That 1% thing was itself a ruse to distract from the reality that via interlocking ownerships and directorships, it's a far, far smaller number.
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Whoever owns the rights to create money, owns the planet. However, since a civilized society requires some version of a monetary system, it seems to be a moot point.
People can own the planet, and others that live on said planet can still be free in some way. There's no form of nature, whereby there isn't a hierarchy of some form. Humans will always have to deal with the nature of humans, no matter how society grows and changes.
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As long as the internet companies doing this stuff are held fully legally liable for what is being reported fine. So bunch of people report an innocent persons and the authorities turn up and go nuts, well, as long as the police are prosecuted and those who filed false reports are prosecuted and of course the executives who promoted this idea to sell advertising, who sold the perversion of report your neighbour for what ever reason.
Lets make the social media companies, that use real people as targets, fully
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So bunch of people report an innocent persons and the authorities turn up and go nuts
Wow, what kind of rich enclave to do you live in? The police actually turn up (without first waiting to be sure any danger has passed)? Must be nice.
Depends... (Score:3)
I subscribe to the local Nextdoor feed. It's mostly people looking for referrals to have work done on their house. Next is notices about wildlife (bears, mountain lions, coyotes) in the neighborhood.Also get public service announcements from fire department, etc. Lost dogs are common (no lost cats, people just assume that the coyotes ate them).
I don't think I've ever seen a "suspicious person" post.
This is a quiet rural community. Might be different somewhere else.
Re:Depends... (Score:4, Insightful)
The key is to not live around assholes.
This is a non-story.
The headline should read: "Assholes complain that social media lets their asshole neighbors share their assholery."
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This is the most important comment on this story. We see it time and time again.
Is Nextdoor racist?
Is 4Chan evil?
Is Facebook homophobic?
No. Platforms are not any of those. Users can be. Get enough bad users together and they can create that kind of climate to others in their social group, but it's not as though Nextdoor sends you a Klan hood and an invitation to a cross burning when you register in a new neighborhood. You new racist NEIGHBORS might, but not the software platform.
Re:Depends... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Depends... (Score:4, Funny)
Right -- so it's discriminatory against ursine-, feline-, and canine-americans. Got it.
"+5 Furry"
OK, I'll see myself out...
Strat
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Just keep insisting that racists are everywhere, despite every poster in the story saying their experience is otherwise. When are you going to wise up to the fact that site like Vox are fiction sites?
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You are obsessed with thinking everything is an accusation of racism.
The post-property crime era (Score:5, Insightful)
People who are critical of these apps, and the home security cameras that enable them, are completely missing the point.
The popularity of Nextdoor and Neighbors, and the growth of consumer security cameras, are a direct result of the police ceasing to treat burglary, trespassing, and theft as crimes any more. Anyone who lives in a big enough city knows exactly what I'm talking about. In the "post-property crime" era, the police only bother with violent crime. If you are burglarized, if your car is broken into, or if your delivered packages are stolen, the best you can hope for is a police report to file with your insurance company. Otherwise, you're on your own.
Nextdoor, Neighbors, Ring and Nest cameras, etc., are all manifestations of a very old phenomenon in human societies - vigilantism. When the authorities refuse to fight crime, the citizens of the community band together to do something about it themselves. These apps and cameras give people the ability to coordinate and communicate with each other, and try to do something about the property crimes that the police and the courts refuse to deal with.
No one who uses these apps and these cameras gives two flips what people like Ewoldsen and Renderos think of them. As far as they're concerned, racism has nothing to do with it. They are just sick of being victimized by petty criminals, and they are trying to do something about it. Until and unless the authorities start doing the jobs, home-grown anti-crime technology will only become more popular.
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The problem with property crime is that it's often extremely difficulty to prosecute.
First they have to find he person. Often there is little evidence, and things like CCTV are only helpful if the cop happens to recognize the perp. We don't want them using vast facial recognition databases, right?
Say they do catch up with the person. Proving they did it can be very difficult. My car was broken in to years ago, and although they lifted fingerprints from the door but they were not of much help because if they
We can't all migrate to Canada (Score:2)
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I just bought an NVR with 4 camera heads off of Amazon for $350. I've paid more than that for a hard drive in the past.
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Funny, but that is how Guiliani drove down crime in New York. It turns out, that the people committing petty theft are the same ones that go on to commit rapes and murders. By intervening early, fewer graduate to the hard stuff.
My understanding is that crime is going back up, now that the Democrat leadership there has decided that they don't have time for the petty stuff.
NextDoor has a HUGE fake user problem (Score:5, Interesting)
NextDoor attempts to create the impression of safety by limiting visibility to your neighborhood and immediately-adjoining ones, and purporting to verify that users use their real names and live where they say they live.
It is - for the most part - BS.
I was banned from NextDoor for exposing the crazies that sign up for dozens of fake accounts (Pat McGroin, I'm looking at YOU! On second thought, I'd rather not...) and harass people, and for exposing NextDoor's lack of actually veting users.
Some are completely fake names. Some are actually posing a real neighbors who don't realize that their name is being used on NextDoor by somebody else.
We had one in our area who had at least a dozen accounts. He was/is unhappy with his HOA and management company. Apparently has nothing better to do than to harass others in his complex and neighborhood all day. I spoke to the HOA president and another resident at his complex, and they indicated that the guy is an all-around pest, disrupting HOA meetings, threatening neighbors, etc. (Yes, this one does it in person as well as online.)
He will pick some random user and harass them. For example, a friend manages a handyman business for her partner, and gets most of the business from NextDoor. Mr. "McGroin" (among a dozen more aliases) constantly posts complaints about the work. But of course, he's never been a customer of the handyman.
Another person (or perhaps the same) made posts advertising a hair salon. Using somebody else's phone number. And a photo lifted off the web from a hair salon on the other side of the country.
"Neighborhood leads" are typically realtors and HOA board members. You get the luck of the draw. Some actually do their "job" (for which they are not paid), some just don't give a shit. Do NOT ever lodge a complaint through the complaint buttons! That will reach the neighborhood leads. Instead, there's a form that will reach somebody at the corporate headquarters. When you get an email response, you will then be able to have an ongoing email discussion with an actual employee at headquarters. They will indulge you for a while, until you catch on that they really have no effective way to vet users and that signup is totally out of control. then they will find some excuse to ban you. Discussing the sorry state of their sign-up system publicly is good enough to get you banned.
When they start up in a neighborhood, they mail out postcards with sign-up codes. This serves as a reasonable measure of insuring that users actually live in their neighborhood. However, after the initial period of moving in to a neighborhood, it appears the self-serve signup system has no real controls. Somebody has to complain, and be VERY insistent, for somebody to be banned for multiple accounts.
Various police departments have various opinions, mostly positive. Contrary to popular opinion, PDs and city officials, etc. do not "spy" on users - at least not through their public agency accounts. They actually cannot read posts. They can only make public service announcements, and read responses to their posts.
Mr crazy (McGroin) posed as a local (female) TV new reporter, and with ANOTHER signup, posed as the producer of the morning news show. Neither one knew that they were "on" NextDoor, and neither lives in the neighborhood that "they" were signed-up in. Both solicited for users to meet them here or there for "interviews". Thankfully, they didn't meet them with a knife, etc. but just stood them up. Haha. Funny,
Look up the history of ex-CEO Nirav Tolia. A true piece of work. No wonder NextDoor is the way it is. Shit rolls downhill.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/th... [gawker.com]
FYI, I was offered to have my account reinstated if I would promise not to post about duplicates, impersonators, etc. I declined. I decided at the end of the day, it's just not safe to be on NextDoor.
And that is the ultimate irony.
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Crime is getting worse (Score:4, Insightful)
Want to keep your property safe from forceful entry? Random people trying to take things from around your house?
Police only report and respond to the most "violent crime" and then try and soften the reporting statistics on that.
The great part about online CCTV and online security is the whole world can then share in the reality of the crime.
Criminals from an inner city area doing crime in a once nice and safe part of a city?
Show the world the reality of a US city with no and poor police response times.
Show who the criminals are trying to get in.
Images from a crime criminalizes criminals.
When the police are held back from enforcing laws, people will have to show the real crime rates.
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A 7-11 near me has started posting pictures of people caught stealing. It makes me want to go more often to see all the new pictures (there seem to keep adding them).
Racism has fallen steeply in the last 25 years (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet people seem to think we are living in the middle of the greatest moral outrage in history. Maybe stop moving to the cities where people are naturally suspicious because everyone is a stranger? Crime is nowhere close to the main topic on Nextdoor in suburbs,
Re:Racism has fallen steeply in the last 25 years (Score:5, Insightful)
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Racism has fallen in general. Which makes the remaining racists very much more noticeable.
No, it makes claims of racism more and more outrageous.
For instance, the recent BBC firing of a "racist"
I'm not buying for a second that you fucks actually see racism everywhere. What I believe is that you fucks just love virtue signaling but accidentally dont have any real ones.
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But, Hillary didn't get elected.
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Honestly, it's not the main topic in the city either. My wife is on Nextdoor and most of the topics discussed are stuff for sale and lost dogs. Occasionally, someone posts about people breaking into their car/garage.
Wrong title to the article (Score:2)
It should say "The Rise of Fear based news stories in the quest for eyeballs"
Uncomfortable data (Score:3)
This is just petty theft data coming more into the open. We had our packages stolen, and the neighbors told not to bother with going to the police, since they would be powerless to do anything. I would see reports every week in our neighborhood, with little hope of ever solving this. In fact, even when relatively expensive items (laptop + phone + money) was stolen from a friend's car, they only did very little.
I understand that police is underfunded and understaffed in the city, and I do not blame them for being unable to look at smaller property crimes. Nevertheless getting your things stolen hurts, even if the values were not too high.
These apps just makes the truth more apparent. Blaming them for discrimination is just crazy.
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I understand that police is underfunded and understaffed in the city, and I do not blame them for being unable to look at smaller property crimes. ...
These apps just makes the truth more apparent.
And hopefully now everyone can get real numbers and evidence on how much petty property crime the cops aren't handling in your area relative to their funding and staffing levels. The next step is to take it up at the next couple of community meetings and start getting some recommendations and maybe even targeted examination of the crimes until it moves to another area.
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This is just petty theft data coming more into the open. We had our packages stolen, and the neighbors told not to bother with going to the police, since they would be powerless to do anything.
They might not be able to get your stuff back, but you should still file a report so the PD knows when and where it happened.
My local PD insists that they want to know about everything that happens, because that's how they determine where they need to patrol more, or link incidents to people they've already caught, etc.
A "false" sense of danger? Go figure. (Score:5, Interesting)
"These apps have become popular because of -- and have aggravated -- the false sense that danger is on the rise. Americans seem to think crime is getting worse..."
Wait, you mean the Americans that are forced to remove their shoes and pour out water bottles to get on an airplane?
The Americans who see "traffic" cameras everywhere around them?
The Americans who have to endure "random" citizenship checks along our borders?
Be careful when you accuse Americans of having a "false" sense of danger, because the US Government is the one turning the country into one big Surveillance State. They have justified spending trillions of taxpayer dollars in the name of security. If that does nothing but provide a false sense of security, then we've ran out of justifications to waste taxpayer money.
Either the world is a horrible evil place that requires all this security, or the world is a lot safer than the Government makes it out to be, and we don't need all this theater.
Information is dangerous in the wrong hands (Score:4, Interesting)
Ignorance is bliss...
Nowadays there is a huge amount of information out there, but people are not properly equipped to fully interpret and understand the information they are presented with.
A few years ago someone i know installed a software firewall which alerted him whenever unsolicited traffic was received, after that he complained that he was now being constantly attacked... The thought never occurred to him that this background noise was happening all the time and that he just wasn't aware of it before.
Stereotypes around skin color??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Um (Score:2)
A recent Motherboard article found that the majority of people posted as "suspicious" on Neighbors in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood were people of color.
Um, given the reality of crime statistics, there's no racism required for that.
(There could, of course, be some - it's just not proven in any way by what's being reported there in that sentence)
Anything is Better Than Facebook (Score:2)
If this were done outside social media... (Score:2)
Violent crime is down (Score:3)
I know: Correlation does not imply causation. But this trend [hni.com] keeps coming to mind.
consider the source (Score:2)
"Violent crime at its lowest in decades..." (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Here in the US, that attitude starts at the very top.
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Re:Blue is the best color (Score:2)
Re:Local crime isn't all that much of a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who's done payroll and was responsible for buying and posting the updated DoL posters listing all the workers' rights (which the law requires all employers to post in a place easy for employees to see), I think part of the problem is that there are just too many labor laws and they're too confusing [ca-osha.com]. While the main points like the minimum wage are easy to pick out, the rest of it is just an intimidating wall of text. It's worse if you're in a state which also has its own massive list of labor laws [ca-osha.com].
The vast majority of employees simply don't bother reading those posters, so don't know when their rights are being violated. Heck, it took me several days of reading and re-reading California's laws regarding employee shifts, rest breaks, and meal breaks [worklawyers.com] before I understood it well enough that I could be sure we were in compliance when assigning shifts and split-shifts. Our employees were fortunate in that I was honest, and took the time to explain it to anyone who asked (only a few did, and one was the CEO). But unless the employee has hired a lawyer to evaluate what their company is doing and explain it to them, I doubt any of them really understand everything in those posters. For the same reason, I suspect the vast majority of violations are actually because the employer doesn't understand the laws either, not because the employer was deliberately trying to short-change their employees as EPI is insinuating.
They picked those states because they're the ones (Score:2)
And you're trying to shift the blame for wage theft on the victim by saying they should have reported it. It's not that easy. A lot of those folks aren't in positions of power. They're afraid of losing their jobs.
Blaming the victim is a standard straw man argument popular with folks who want to do bad things. In the wors
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For example, most IT workers happens to be white males, but it is because most people suitable for the IT jobs (w/ suitable IQ & education & experience) happens to be white males!!! NOT BECAUSE RACISM!!!
Most cab drivers in my area happen to be Somalis. Is that because Somalis tend to be the most suited to drive cabs? I doubt it. It's because when one guy who happened to be Somali got a job, he told his buddies that the can company was hiring. Friends who happened to be Somali.
Good, bad or neutral, it's just tribalism. Both for the cab drivers and the white guys writing code.
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TFS said 'violent crime'. So it's possible that the people who might have clubbed you over the head for your wallet are now swiping your stuff behind your back.
Fighting crime is like playing whack-a-mole. Push it down here and it pops up somewhere else. Or in a different form. Not all crime is related to need or unemployment. Witness the videos of 'porch pirates' grabbing parcels and then jumping into higher end cars like BMWs or Accuras. It's a mindset that society owes people some sort of living with not