How Nextdoor might react to the Rapture

I have written before about how the neighborhood app Nextdoor seems to be an outlet for people who like to complain and go off on tangents responding to other people’s posts.

Jay Martel writes about how people might react on the app if the Rapture signaling the End Times was to occur and the chosen were suddenly whisked up into heaven.

Does anyone know what’s going on in the Smithfield area? People flying around, hellfire, terrible traffic.

Inconsiderate driver partially blocked my driveway with his car, then flew up into the sky before I could get him to move it. Super annoying! What is wrong with people???

Anyone else experiencing a power outage? And hundred-pound hailstones?

These three suspicious men dropped out of sky in front of my house, on the 400 block of North Jones, hung out there for a bit, then ran toward my driveway blowing horns and flew off, heading toward Oakwood. They were wearing white hoodies, feathery wings, halos. Doorbell camera fortunately caught the whole thing. Be on the lookout—they may be the porch pirates who’ve been stealing our Amazon packages.

Anyone know of a reliable house cleaner? Can’t deal with flakes.

Have this ongoing dispute with my neighbor about his tree growing out of control over my fence, dropping staining seedpods all over my newly tiled patio (see photo), and he finally agreed to meet about it. But then he doesn’t show up! I go over, and his wife says he “ascended to Heaven.” Seriously? Some people will do anything to get out of their obligations! #neednewneighbors

Very suspicious man with wings seen on North Elm yelling about end of the world. Hate that mental patients are just free to harass whomever and the police can’t do anything about it.

Anyone notice the lake of fire blocking access to the park? You’d think the crazy property taxes we pay would be enough to keep a damn lake from burning!
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Irresponsible motorists floating away have left their cars in the middle of my street, causing endless traffic jams. Tried calling city to get them towed but spent twenty minutes on hold. Typical.

Nextdoor discussion about lizards

On Jimmy Kimmel’s show, he had actors recreate a Nextdoor community thread based on what people posted after someone asked for help about what to do with a lizard that had entered their house and hidden somewhere.

I have seen many threads like that on Nextdoor. It starts when one person posts a real problem they have encountered and asks for advice. While a few responders offer helpful suggestions, others use the opportunity to post unhelpful tangents or boast about something that is only mildly related or even make snarky comments.

Enactment of an actual Nextdoor debate

There is something quite irresistible about the Nextdoor app that is meant to be used by people living in a small community to exchange information, seek assistance, provide alerts, and the like. But like all social media, what starts off as a simple post often leads to the discussion going off the rails, with tangents, non sequiturs, pedantic and nitpicking comments, jumping to conclusions, casting aspersions, ascribing unpleasant motives, and sometimes even name calling.

In this clip, actors play out an actual thread where all those elements are visible.


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The good and bad of Nextdoor

If you live in the US and a few other countries, you may have joined the group known as Nextdoor. It is a place where people can share information about their neighborhoods and get to know what is going on locally. Most of the time it involves lost and found pets, petty crimes, alerts, and requests for information and assistance. In that respect, it is useful and can serve to bring people in a community together around common interests. But as Andrew Anthony writes, like all social media, it has a dark side with people voicing stereotypical views.
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How social media messages can escalate rumors

The recent scaremongering about Haitians in Springfield, OH arose from someone on Facebook passing on a fourth-hand rumor that turned out to be false. It illustrates how dangerous it can be to pass along rumors that can adversely affect identifiable groups pf people.

The neighborhood message board Nextdoor is one that I am a member of and even that I rarely read the posts. But yesterday I saw one that immediately brought the Springfield incident to mind.

It started when one person posted the following:

Hello everyone, I just wanted to ask if anyone has heard about people snatching up children? My daughter overheard a man on his phone telling the person on the other end to be on the lookout and to keep an eye on the children! This is very scary! Any thoughts on this?

It is also not clear what response the poster was seeking or what she was scared about. But the post spawned a variety of responses, with others responding that people should always be vigilant about their children. Then one person made the leap to sex trafficking and Mexico.
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The source of the false Haitian rumor apologizes

I am not active on social media but do have an account on Nextdoor, that connects people living in a small geographical area and thus supposedly consists of one’s neighbors. In theory it helps people get to know their neighborhood by sharing information about it. I do not check the feeds that often but occasionally see posts where people report something that they ‘heard’ about and asking if anyone else has too. Some of these posts contain speculations that are bigoted or at least sail close to that line. Sometimes other people call them out on it but often it just disappears into the ether. Some posters seem to see themselves as small-time investigative journalists and deliver ‘scoops’ by being the first to relay some juicy morsel of information, often in the form of a rumor.

Apart from so-called ‘influencers’ who use social media to try to reach huge audiences as part of their business model, most social media users tend to use it largely to communicate with friends, family, and affinity groups of people who share similar interests. This can give a feeling of intimacy, that you are only talking to a small group, and thus one might be more inclined to spread baseless gossip, not realizing that your network is connected to the much larger internet and could, given the right conditions, explode your post into the general public consciousness, if it is picked up and relayed by people with much larger audiences.

That seems to be what happened with the ugly story about Haitians in Springfield, OH eating people’s cats and dogs. The person who first posted a rumor without any evidence on Facebook now regrets what she did.
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Making new friends as an adult

Friendships are important to one’s well being, even for introverts like me, with quality being more important than quantity. It is easier to form friends when one is younger, during one’s school and college days, when one is thrown together with peers for extended periods of time with few responsibilities and relationships can develop organically. But once one starts working and settles into a nuclear family, it becomes more difficult to form new friends, since work place friendships can be tricky to handle. Also, when one starts working, one tends to move to different locations and lose not only the physical proximity that is conducive to maintaining existing friendships but one has fewer opportunities to make new friends.
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Measure B’s defeat shows importance of each vote

Readers may recall a recent post of mine where I described the heated emotions about the move to add a bike and pedestrian trail in the small town of Del Rey Oaks that I live in that would provide easier access to a small body of water accurately called the Frog Pond. Opponents of the move had put on the ballot an initiative known as Measure B that would have prohibited the trail and the vote was held on June 7th. Since California routinely allows mail-in voting, it takes a long time to get the final results and just this past week the official results were announced and Measure B had been defeated, which means that construction of the trail will proceed.

The result was a squeaker, with 387 ‘Yes’ votes and 399 ‘No’ votes, a narrow margin of 12 votes. Noteworthy was the fact that the total number of people who voted was 799. Since the town has a population of only 1520 with 1216 registered voters, the turn out was 65.7% of registered voters, more than twice the countywide average of 31.1%. This shows the intensity of the feeling that the Frog Pond generated. Leading up the the election, the only people who came to my door to canvass were those on both sides of this issue, not any of the candidates for office. Also, the overwhelming amount of literature that I received was about Measure B.

Of the 799 people who voted, for unknown reasons 13 did not vote on this particular issue, greater than the margin of the result. In big elections, it is is easy to feel that one’s vote does not matter and decide not to bother. It is small town elections that reveal the importance of voting.

Patriotic symbolism as theater

I was chatting at my local bridge club with a visiting couple from out of town and they mentioned that they do not watch sports because of the protests during the playing of the national anthem. As long time readers of this blog know, I think patriotism is a bad thing and so am not a fan of the symbols used to promote it such as national anthems or flags. But in the US, those two symbols are fetishized as being somehow sacred and any sign of disrespect is enough to bring down strong disapproval. Look at how football players kneeling during the national anthem created such a brouhaha.
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The age of the faux expert

Where I live there is a small regional airport and from my window I can see planes coming in to land or after taking off. On the Nextdoor neighborhood community discussion board there was a post by someone claiming that the airport does not follow standard aviation rules for which direction to take off and land depending on the wind direction, giving as the source for their complaint the responses they got when they did a search on Google on “what direction do planes fly with NW wind”.

Really? This person thinks that the people working in air traffic control and the pilots have no idea what they are doing and that this person knows better than people who do this for a living and who are well aware that lives depend on them getting it right? In response to the complaint, one commenter posted “Monterey Airport is HIRING!!! They are looking for employees just like you. Currently nobody knows what they are doing 😂😂😂 instead of criticizing maybe you should go help out.”

This illustrates the problem that we have, that people think a quick Google search makes them an ‘expert’ on pretty much anything. We see this most clearly with medical treatment, especially with covid-19. It is one thing to go on the internet and seek out information so that you can be better informed and have more meaningful discussions with your health care professionals by asking more pertinent questions and being better able to appreciate their answers. It is something else entirely to think that your judgment is now superior to that of those who do what they do for a living, day in and day out.