Racial Profiling via Nextdoor.com | Hacker News Reader

Racial Profiling via Nextdoor.com

m.eastbayexpress.com

64 pointskanamekun65 comments

We recently deactivated our account. We were excited about the idea of being able to informed of our entire neighborhood, not just our street. Instead, we found out that in our neighborhood of 8000, there are about 50 crazies that spend all day posting on Nextdoor, and everyone else had basically given up. In the real human interactions I have with neighbors, 'How's the weather?' has been replaced with 'Did you see that Nextdoor post? That was hilarious!'

Some gems in recent memory:

1. Someone posted an urgent 'BOLO black men with what appears to be a weapon or something to be used to break in to houses' accompanied by a picture of a man with a rake. Another neighbor commented, "That's my landscaper and he's been my landscaper for 10 years".

2. A heated debate over tearing down old houses and replacing them with bigger ones ended up with a guy crawling into someone's backyard, taking pictures of their house, and posting them and critiquing their design choices on the forum.

3. A neighbor created a small sculpture of stacked stones, each stone being about fist-sized. Another neighbor posted photographs and personal information, asking that he take the stones down, because if they fell on a kid, he would sue him.

4. Multiple occurrences where someone posted 'surveillance' video of dog poop not being cleaned up, which always resulted in another neighbor identifying the dog owner, and the dog owner almost always being an elderly woman, who embarrassingly had to indicate she ran out of poop bags but went back later to clean it up.

Part one sort of sounds like my neighborhood list serve in Washington, DC.

I had a similar experience. I don't understand how people find use out of Nextdoor - the signal to noise ratio (where "noise" is borderline crazy people) is just way too low. When I used it, I was instantly reminded of that Far Side cartoon where God is sprinkling "Jerks" onto the Earth, thinking "And just to keep things interesting..."

http://collectionofawesome.com/2012/04/05/farside-comic-jerk...

I never used Nextdoor but this sounds like typical online community behavior. How does one moderate a micro community without altering what it is representing?

Does NextDoor even have a way for people living in the neighborhood to be moderators?

Every neighborhood has one or more "lead" members, which is the nextdoor term for moderator.

When will people realize that they live in a "society" and they need to co-exist with others. The stone sculpture story made me chuckle; if this sculpture was on the creator's property why the hell would you ask him to bring it down? And how about letting children be what they are...children. This whole protective bubble in which they grow up is shocking to me. Talk about growing up with zero life experiences.

The dog one is understandable. The elderly people probably didn't forget, definitely not on multiple occasions. It's a good example of where shame should work.

Yeah, it's terrible, but deactivating your account is exactly the wrong thing to do if you're interested in fixing this sort of behavior.

Nextdoor doesn't make people be shitty human beings, but it is a local forum that augments or replaces the sorts of venues that people used to be shitty in -- town hall meetings, HOA events, neighborhood watch, political rallies, etc.

Arguing with people on the internet is (heh) usually a waste of time. But pushing for decency and respect within your neighborhood is not a waste of time if you value strong communities.

Nextdoor appears to facilitate neuroses in isolation, which was not the case with public meetings.

I don't have any data to back it up, but my theory is that Nextdoor allows bad behavior because people have been trained by millions of comment sections that confrontation on the internet is fruitless.

That's a misguided instinct when the people you are talking to live two doors down. Get a handful of people who see them everyday to say, "knock it off", and they usually will.

It's entirely possible for folks living in the same neighborhood to not actually see each other all that often, especially not in any sense beyond waving at each other from across the street.

Yep. I don't even know the names of my neighbors, and I've barely spoken two words to any of them.

Years ago, I had a couple of neighbors I'd talk to, but they all moved away. Had a few friends I talked into moving to my complex too, but they've all moved away as well.

Your community is broken. I'm sorry to hear that.

I know my neighbors and wish I didn't.

Town hall meetings, being somewhat limited in duration, do a better job of filtering out the peeve of the minute nonsense. Half the time the problem will resolve itself before the meeting.

Is filtering really what you want, though? It's trivial to filter out the nonsense from Nextdoor, too: just set up a bookmarklet that drops all the posts containing one of {sketchy, black, hispanic, male, teens, loose jeans, hoodie, 911}. Problem solved, amirite? We can name it sweep_under_the_rug.js

Yes, I want filtering, and no, I don't want to write my own javascript to do it.

It solves the problem for you, but the rest of your neighbors have to put up with it - and it further isolates you from the problems they face.

I view it differently. In the same way a lot of online forums shadowban people, I look at Nextdoor as a shadowban from real life. Here these crazies are, thinking they're having this change-making dialogue with their neighbors, but in reality, they're just posting to a void on the internet while the real life version of their neighborhood continues on. (Also, the forum moderator was deleting posts from anyone that was kindly pointing out "hey, this isn't real neighborly of you.")

But this is definitely not "a void on the internet". We have several police officers who post regularly on the forum. Local politicians use it. Local businesses use it. Special interests organize on it. Zoning departments publicize polls through it. The people on there are making a real impact (often a negative one) on the real-life community. Disengaging because it's "just the internet" is not a winning strategy.

The moderator problem is real, and I don't have an answer. Maybe Nextdoor needs to review the behavior of moderators and have a replacement policy when they're misbehaving.

In my spare time, I should make an app called "Racist NextDoor" where you post pictures of all racist residents within a neighbourhood, especially those making dangerous 911 calls.

In this example, are the blacks racist for assaulting Asians, or are the Asians racist for profiling blacks?

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dirty-secret-of-black-...

Who would you expose here, exactly?

> In this example, are the blacks racist for assaulting Asians, or are the Asians racist for profiling blacks?

Those options are not mutually exclusive; its quite possible for their to exist Black racists that target attacks against Asians and Asian racists that profile Blacks, motivated (or rationalized) by the fact that some Blacks have engaged in racist attacks against Asians.

Much like people and Yelp it seems that the "value" proposition is essentially blackmail-as-a-service: participate or else something bad may happen.

I've seen some of this, too. I "founded" the Nextdoor community for my neighborhood and stayed a lead after that. A lot of the success depends on the nurturing and moderation the leads do, and if they decline to actively participate, well, what you described is likely to happen.

This reminds me of the community meetings from Parks & Recreation to a very scary degree, just online. Is this really what people spend their time doing?

Also, I remember a friend of mine talking about how people on a Facebook page for her neighborhood went crazy... death threats were made over posts there, and police were called.

This is sad to read. People of every race--black, white, whatever--need to make an effort to get to know their neighbors. Simply saying hello to people when you're walking, introducing yourself, pointing out where you live, telling them about your pets, children, where you work or go to school, where you moved from, etc., can make a big difference in a community. I used to live in a very racially diverse apartment complex (more than 50% non-white). I was friendly with everyone and felt like the people I got to know were almost friends. Smiling, waving or saying hello to people forms a small bond that could help these overzealous people realize that if they reach out, they will see that they are over-reacting. By being friendly and getting to know people, we can learn that most people are not threats to us, and we can all be united in watching against the people who really are.

>we can all be united in watching against the people who really are.

Almost like a neighborhood watch, one could say.

I've met some nice neighbors via Nextdoor (and gotten help with some small things a couple times), but the discussions do tend to degenerate pretty rapidly (so much for posting under one's real identity having any significant impact on the quality of discussion...).

But anyway, since I live in a high-crime area, by far the most common type of post is someone describing how they were just robbed (oftentimes at gunpoint), or they just saw a car get broken into, etc. It does make me kind of paranoid since I never would have known about any of those crimes had I not been on the site. I feel like my other neighbors who don't use it are comparatively clueless about just how much crime there is even within a few blocks of us. I guess that could be considered a good or a bad thing.

Isn't knowing better than not knowing? You can prepare accordingly.

I, along with many other people have come up with the idea of Nextdoor.com and probably thought of this problem too. Because opening up a site for comments... Well, it seems that Nextdoor doesn't have a solution either. What is the purpose of the site if they are hurting the community more than helping it?

Like most technology tools, nextdoor.com amplifies tendencies already there. Lower cost of information exchange and actions tends to open up the extremes. The site in and of itself is not good or bad. But this is definitely an example of strengthening a bad trait.

Those are some impressive mental gymnastics. Most people would consider something which amplifies bad traits to be a bad thing.

I agree that the site is probably not intended to be bad, but that's quite a different claim from yours.

It's always a balance, see liberty (of all legal kinds) legal access to alcohol, etc.

It's about being mature and responsible and learning and mitigating bad behavior via feedback loops.

Exactly. It would be trivial to have a "flag" button that after a certain amount of "boy cried wolf" complaints Nextdoor either prevents people from making crime alerts or in some other way throttles them. If this sort of behavior is causing a ton of user churn Nextdoor needs to get something in place ASAP.

It could say something like "5 of your neighbors thing you are complaining too much, but hey, don't shoot the messenger!".

Signal to noise will always be a problem in online communities because of the one to many nature of them.

> Some groups have even actively silenced and banned the few vocal voices of color speaking up on the websites, according to records that I reviewed.

Looks like some kind of process for silencing voices is already present in the app....it's just mostly being used to silence voices that point out not all blacks are criminals.

"Most people would consider something which amplifies bad traits to be a bad thing."

This is only true if a thing _only_ amplifies bad traits.

This is a fair point, but in the present context, it seems like the claim is that nextdoor.com is _only_ amplifying bad traits.

At the very least, it seems like the present claim implies that bad traits are eclipsing the good ones. The reason I think this matters is because tech evangelism has a worrying tenancy to write problems off as existing prior to the technology, without honestly evaluating whether or not the technology is responsible exacerbating the problem.

I guess I just live in a less racist neighborhood. I've experienced none of these problems and Nextdoor is very useful for myself and my neighbors. Blame the idiots living in the neighborhoods posting these comments, not Nextdoor.

What neighborhood are you in?

That's a very good point. I think I phrased it that way because I believe it's part of a bigger issue at hand - namely that we have all these things reinforcing our bad habits and bad traits, and we don't really pay attention to it since it's so ubiquitous.

I can't think of many technological solutions to these types of problems - I say that because trying to ban those types of software generally is like playing whack-a-mole. You get rid of one and another one pops up.

The real solution is that people have to police themselves when interacting with technology - being judicious. I wish there was a good way to make that part of our culture.

Reading "Here Comes Everybody" is what inspired this line of though in me.

Edit: Especially since reading through the rest of the article: what's happening on NextDoor was happening on other sites: email groups and yahoo groups. I think there's bigger hubbub about next door because it's more visible.

I found out about nextdoor.com from reddit. I thought it was so bizarre people would want their full names, address and sometimes pictures broadcast. I wanted to see if I could get in with a fake address and name and they do require you to somehow verify you live there (they mail you a card or you link it to a phone number) so I just gave up. Lo and behold I get an email the next week saying my account had been approved anyone because "one of my neighbors verified I lived there".

If the address is linked to your credit card, then that counts as verification too. Unfortunately, even if you move and change your CC's address, I don't think they have a process to remove people (or re-verify them periodically).

I've been on Nextdoor for well over two years and have seen literally zero of these types of communications. Maybe because I'm in a racially diverse area (North Brooklyn, NYC)? All threads and replies I've ever seen are: mass transit notifications, crime notifications, lost animals, free junk, stuff for sale, asking for recommendations for local merchants.

I've got a social problem - I'll fix it with technology! Now you've got two problems.

This is exactly what happens in my. Sigh irbid on the other side of Oakland (Golden Gate). There are a few white residents that post suspicious person posts/images on what seems like every person that walks down the street. I've turned off all crime alerts on nextdoor because of the absurdity of it.

People whom get outside and actually examined "suspicious behavior" may be shocked to find normal, harmless people and that it was their own hobgoblins of their minds criminalizing people based on nothing more than their own fears, ignorance and prejudices, probably from watching too much TV and Hollywood movies rather than experiencing the real world.

Nextdoor should create a feedback system to incorporate this effect and help people calibrate. It could also bring in base-rate crime info to help make more accurate assessments of suspicious reports.

It sounds like this would be a target for some social activist data mining.

Scrape NextDoor, find the people who are posting weirdly racist screeds, and send a well dressed delegation to their doorstep to let them know that their name and identifying details will be posted on another site identifying them as racist bullies if they don't alter their behavior.

Or, scrap the doorstepping and just send an email blast to their employers, business partners, and facebook contacts.

If nothing else, they'll stop posting to NextDoor.

Yep, it's rude, crude and thoroughly within the reach of any group of activists that want to get some notoriety. It's also one of those things that will drive home just how panoptic our society has become.

Sad, I wonder why the neighbors don't know each other better. We found that organizing block parties was a wonderful way to meet people who have moved in and share with them experiences and stories. Our neighborhood has gone from probably 95% white to now 30% Indian, 40% Chinese, and some Russian and probably the rest typical western european decended whites. Through out that as people move out and people move in we try to make people feel welcome and they really do appreciate it.

I did not have a positive experience with Nextdoor despite being pretty excited about the service at first. First strike was people posting spammy/pyramid scheme type sale stuff. My attempts to contact the local admins did not result in any change. More spam kept being posted.

Strike 2/3, I did not want to reveal my full name when first signing up. One day I got an email informing me that my account was deleted (not just suspended) because I did not use a real name. There was no chance for me to remedy the situation.

Too bad. Anyone know of an alternative?

Sort of a weak article - no stats. It'd be much more useful if it simply stated things clearly. Something like "90% of reports are for Xs, while only 40% of the crimes are by Xs". Or even better, "out of n Xs, only m commit a crime". Then show incorrect biases there. (The only stat I saw was % of black population vs % of detainees being black - that's not so relevant without knowing actual crime rates. )

(Edit: I see why they didn't include this stat. According to [1], over 80% of suspects for various crimes were black. So that would explain why the police are pulling over a higher %, right? This still doesn't excuse base rate fallacy but sort of dismisses the one stat the article does provide.)

Or more usefully, provide better characteristics off which to classify. If race, gender, and clothing have no predictive power, demonstrate that and show what does.

Nextdoor could even build priors into the site, over time and help provide accurate predictions. After all, they have both the suspicious report info plus the actual crime info. Imagine if it would rate your post: "Based on your report of a male walking at 6am, the probability this is a criminal is 0.02%" That'd go a long way towards making people update internal models as well as making them look silly for using non-predictive characteristics. (Though if most crimes are committed by young males, it might be called out as ageist and sexist, but hey if that's reality...)

Plus you could grade individual users. So combining the base rate of crime, significant characteristics, and past performance of a user? "MaryX, given your past suspicious activity record, there's a 99% chance this post is incorrect."

Without this, all it takes is a busybody to report everything they see (and they can select on anything: race, gender, hair color, shoe size) and eventually get a correct hit. Then ignore the times they were wrong and point out how "see I reported this X and it was a thief!"

1: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/johnson/article/Oakland-crime-...

I like where you go with this in the second half, because I believe that racial profiling is pragmatically ineffective anyway. But I take issue with this statement: "If race, gender, and clothing have no predictive power, demonstrate that and show what does."

I think the burden of proof is on the person using those tools both to show that they have predictive power, and to show that the action being taken on that prediction is reasonable.

Put a different way: a couple of principles which I think most Americans probably believe in are: 1) innocent until proven guilty 2) no guilt by association (there are laws that allow restrictions on known felons associating with one another, but at least in that case, the association is based on convictions for actions the individuals have taken, not assumptions about a class to which they happen to belong due to who they were born to).

I don't like the idea that someone can look suspicious, without acting suspiciously. I know there's inevitably a lot of overlap and gray area between those two things. But what I'm saying is that even if you have some statistical model which you believe has good predictive power based on inputs of race and dress, and your model says that scruffy looking black men are more likely to commit crimes, you still don't get to investigate someone just because that person's a scruffy looking black guy.

(sidenote: I just noticed this reply sitting unposted in a tab I opened a few days ago, so this might not even get read, but it was already written, so whatever.)

What a drag this is. It's pathetic that humans always manage to misuse a tool for evil.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com