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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

We had a pretty epic one about someone posting about a very, very suspicious white car going around the neighborhood at 3:30 am, pulling up to houses, etc. A long list of comments about how everything is going to hell, things aren't like they used to be, this is why you should buy a gun, blaming the local officials and political party, etc. Finally, a post:

Hi Tom, that white car is mine. I have delivered your newspaper every day for the last 5 years with it.

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I think that is an exception. Most of what I see is heads up about people casing houses and testing car doors, usually with a short video demonstrating and backing up the claims. It’s also helped with youth vandalism.

I don't think that we can judge whether that's an exception without going through a lot of data, esp. since different neighborhoods aren't likely to be at all consistent, esp with age and regional differences. I used to see a lot of cases of old racist neighbors jumping to conclusions or confabulating a bigoted story from a few inconclusive pieces of evidence that mostly amounted to "a black person is present in our neighborhood so they're probably a criminal." I don't look at NextDoor anymore.

We had a similar one in my area that turned out to be a food-delivery guy.

In many areas, NextDoor appears to be a glorified, technically-incompetent mailing list populated by pathetic NIMBYs. There was someone on there seriously complaining about a chirping bird outside his window in the morning.

NextDoor is also underhanded and thinks nothing of bringing harassment down on its users by

1. Spamming a user's neighbors without that user's permission, pretending that the user is "inviting" neighbors to join NextDoor.

2. Publishing users' addresses by default. This one ranks as one of the most offensive and idiotic privacy violations on a major platform today.

  Publishing users' addresses by default.

I have never seen users identified automatically by anything more detailed than general neighborhood.

Hahahahaha, I was imagining it was something like that and it was confirmed at the end. I see posts like this in our Nextdoor too. What's silly is .. the area I'm in forgets this. So it gets reposted probably every 2-3 weeks, sometimes by the same person.

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