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>a comment with a picture of some random (again, person of color...) walking down the street from a Nest cam asking, "Did you see anyone like this? My bike was stolen too."...

This is a real problem. People are having their lives impacted in a materially negative fashion because of actions like this. Not just minorities either. Recently a female police officer walked into the home of a random black guy and blew him away for no reason. (Well, no good reason.) Not 24 hours later a picture of a white female, who had nothing to do with the shooting mind you, was being circulated around the world as being the shooter. The woman had done nothing more than go to work at a place where the unfortunate victim also worked.

Seneca said that a lie can travel the world before the truth can even get its shoes on. So this proclivity towards making much ado about nothing has been going on for a long long time if it's something that Seneca spent time observing. Given that reality, it has to be conceded that it's not necessarily because of these companies that your average drama king or queen is out pointing a finger at some random black guy minding his own business. But as far as low life corporate ethics go, these companies probably rank right up there with other pond scum of the internet age, like location "information brokers" and such.

>Seneca said that a lie can travel the world before the truth can even get its shoes on [...] not necessarily because of these companies that your average drama king or queen is out pointing a finger

That's a good comment. I agree with you. People have been toxic and irrational since forever, but perhaps our ability to reflect on these behaviors at arm's length on the internet is actually a good thing.

That kind of paranoid neighbor is nothing new. They would benefit from being social shamed and isolated. Connecting a whole network of them together is just about the worst thing I can think of.

Nothing reinforces crazy like an echo chamber.

If people are having their bikes stolen, that’s not paranoia. I would not want to live in such a neighborhood and it’s always a little shocking to me to see this type of commentary on Hacker News where low level theft and vandalism appears to be accepted as just how life is. It definitely doesn’t have to be.

yes, it can definitely still be paranoia even if there's occasional theft. We don't live in a utopia where crime never occurs, that doesn't justify a paranoid mindset.

It's akin to the constantly jealous boyfriend or girlfriend who keeps track of everything their partner does. Even if they catch one cheating eventually, it doesn't change the fact that the constantly suspicious state of mind is pathological.

Indeed. For many people, it's not just 'a bike', it's their only method of transportation to work, to the shops and across town. Price difference aside, it's like taking somebody's car.

The majority of low-level theft and vandalism is by bored teenagers in their own neighborhood.

The worst petty crime I ever had to deal with was living next to a middle school in a nice neighborhood in Houston. There were car windows smashed all the time by middle and even upper-middle class kids walking home from school and seeing something shiny in the passenger seat.

It sucks, but it’s not a good justification for being afraid of “those people.” Turns our those people is us.

In my neighborhood there are very few teenagers. The bike thieves, package thieves and car ransackers are either actual thieves (with lookouts), or addicts. People like to blame bored teenagers, but given my city has one of the lowest percentages of teenagers in the country but yet this happens, indicates it’s something else (proven by the pictures and videos posted by neighbors).

It's certainly not new, that's for sure. I do think that online communities have made the feedback loop much tighter, though. Previously, you'd have to find someone in person to express your crazy to. Now you can just go onto a neighborhood Facebook group or Nextdoor or whatever. I've personally found myself the subject of such posts, too, despite being a very average looking white dude. Simply because I have an older model car that I park on the street while living in a nice neighborhood, where the expectation is everyone should be driving a new Tesla, Benz, or BMW, apparently, and anyone else "doesn't belong."

Haha I’d like to hear more about that. Do you live in the Bay Area? I work at one of the tech companies and have noticed that it mostly seems to be new hires that spend a lot on cars. I think the VP in my org actually drives a Toyota. I really don’t understand the expensive car obsession around here.

I think this is a long time trend of kids in their 20s with more disposable income or poor financial judgement than anything else (count myself in that group in the past).

Nah, but where I live is more or less indiscernible from most of the neighborhoods that I've been around in the Bay Area/SV. I'm in south Orange county. My wife and I live in new development. The demographics down here are different but the people are still new-car obsessed. Our neighborhood is a handful of young couples, a handful of other working folks, and then probably 70% retirees, empty nesters, and foreign money. My hot take is they have more money than they do sense. There's also quite a few folks who don't work because they don't have to work.

So, I have a 2004 Scion xB. It's an "Orange Box." It's really hard to miss this car. Or, so you'd think. My wife uses it as her daily driver for her short commute but it's generally parked right in front of our place. We also have a newer Subaru but it's almost always in the garage because I work full-time remote.

One day, for whatever reason I can't recall, I had the Scion and my wife had the Subaru. I had some errands to run at lunch that day. When I got back home, someone had parked in the spot that the Scion usually occupies, in front of our place, and so I parked two blocks down at an open spot on the street. Someone was home where I had parked, had somehow managed to have never seen this Orange car that'd been parked on the street for the last 600 or so freaking days, and had decided that the car and myself were _clearly_ out of place.

So, maybe 30 minutes go by and I get a text to check out the Facebook group from one of our other neighbors that I'm friends with. This person had posted a picture of my car along with something like, "This person just parked their beater in front of our house and then took off down the street. We're thinking about calling the cops. Does anyone know who it belongs to?" So, I get on there and told them I live 5 houses away from them and question how they've managed to literally never see the bright orange car parked on the street anytime in the past ~2 years. And I said something like, "I like this car, I don't think it's a beater!" They never said anything back.

This is a very quiet, very safe neighborhood, where many, many people are around all throughout the day. There's been a single break-in the entire time that we've lived here that I'm aware of. I had thought about selling that car, too, but thought better of it and we decided to keep it. If people are going to judge me for having that car... Well, fuck 'em. I park my beater in front of their house all of the time now on principle.

" I park my beater in front of their house all of the time now on principle." Made my day!

Noise complaints are “no reason”?

At least try talking to people before calling the cops on them for making noise. What is controversial about this?

I think that some people have either had bad enough experiences themselves, or have heard of incidents, where they fear confrontation. By talking to someone who is engaging in an annoying (to you) or antisocial behavior, you are opening yourself up to retaliation by that person. If you just call the police anonymously then the target doesn't know who to retaliate against.

Of course, a much better strategy is to go out of your way to be neighborly, get to know the people around you. That way if someone is having a party a few houses down, instead of calling the cops you can grab a couple six packs and head on down and join them.

This might work if you live in a decent neighborhood. I lived in a shitty part of town in my teens and both of the neighbors on either side of us were total degenerates. One dealt drugs out of his house and the other had zero respect for people’s sleep - played loude music at 2 am and had druggies hang around the house. Talking to ether one was pointless. I usually just called cops right away and for the most part it worked well.

It’s a game theory situation in the context of not being acquainted with your neighbors.

If you go to them directly and they aren’t receptive, you lose goodwill (or stay at par, at best).

If you then call the cops, you lose at lot more goodwill, probably into the negative, possibly with more adverse consequences to you if someone decides you are discriminating against the partiers for some reason other than “I am disturbed by the noise”.

If you call the cops first, and they don’t know it was you, you win (if the cops shut it down).

The optimal solution is, of course, to get to know your neighbors and establish goodwill before any of this.

Absent that, I don’t think law enforcement ignoring complaints is a good solution, because many people aren’t going to be content with “there is literally nothing you can do if your neighbors are making your home unlivable.” Those people, if they can’t move, will resort to rash actions or non-state “settlers of questions”

It can be pretty risky to knock on a door to tell someone to keep it down. You have no idea how they might react. Knocking on random doors can be very unsafe in typical urban environments, unless it’s someone you already know.

Having spent a lot of my adult living in pretty impoverished urban environments, and having knocked on a lot of doors for both personal and professional reasons (as a neighbor, and as a social worker) - I think the risks are pretty overblown.

Talk to your neighbors.

Definitely talk to your neighbors instead of calling highly armed and confrontational people who can kill someone or toss them in a cage because of something affecting your quality of life.

I don't particularly want someone who has already proven themselves to be rude and inconsiderate to know my name, face and address. The kind of people who don't care about how their actions impact other people are precisely the kind of people I always strive to avoid - not get to know on a first name basis.

Not every culture is the same in what they consider rude; not every socioeconomic group is the same in what they consider rude; not every person is the same in what they consider rude.

Consider talking to people and trying to understand them before you cast judgement on them. Cultural relativism really isn't that hard.

Honestly, I might if I think it's just women, but for crying out loud does anyone anywhere want to go confront any man about something like this? No one wants to go tell some big guy to stop begin an inconsiderate prick. And if his cultural background leads him to truly believe he is not being a prick, that just makes the situation FAR more frightening.

If his cultural background is that no one in his culture has ever called him out for being inconsiderate I can see how he might make this mistake.

There really is no risk at all. This is such an unfounded fear.

It's more risky to call a group of armed individuals with a violent history to go to your neighbor's door. Why would you ever put that sort of risk on your neighbor? The most important political relationships we can form are those with our neighbors, why would you damage those relationships by leveraging state aggression against them for something as trivial as a noise complaint?

Should people talk more to their neighbors and try to hash things out? Sure. Personally I would very rarely ever call the police.

But at least see the point of view of someone who might very legitably not feel comfortable knocking on someones door. A single person, with no family now has to run the risk of retribution with no help. Live with that fear everyday their neighbor might attack them directly or indirectly.

this is the exact paranoia the creator of the thread was talking about. If knocking on a neighbours door causes anxiety we might as well all wrap ourselves in styrofoam and never leave our apartments.

I've spent time in very impoverished (aka high-crime) areas and never once did it occur to me to be scared of knocking on my neighbor's door.

In fact, that's one of the first things I will do when moving into a new place, not only to socialize and build goodwill but to ascertain any potential threats and establish that I am not afraid to unload shells onto anyone breaking into my home.

In the most ghetto of ghetto places, your neighbor is the only person you fuck with. Neighborhood gangs are no joke. Only in Whiteville, America are we afraid of our own neighbors.

Decades of creating distrust in impoverished minority communities, and the government's still done a better job at keeping the affluent disunited than the poor.

Next-door only has two uses in my condo community: trolling the HOA, and selling crap. Nobody really gets on the thing except every now and then, and then there are some people who are retired and just sit on it all day long. Basically pointless. Go talk to your neighbors. Just to know them in person.

i've avoided nextdoor and the like by simply getting to know some of my co-tenants directly. we trade info in person and through texts. walking my dog helps me meet folks farther afield. through that little network, i hear about stuff in about a two/three block radius around where i live (not everything, but enough).

we have the usual low-level urban issues: traffic accidents, snoopers, taggers, petty theft, teenagers doing dumb things, and mentally ill folks being weird nearby, but nothing so serious to fear-monger or overly worry about (yes, be alert; no, don't suspect everyone).

it saddens me that a few nearby buildings have newly put up fences, as if that promotes anything but isolation. it doesn't keep bad people out but will keep good samaritans out in case of emergency.