Facebook neighborhood groups are the worst thing ever

meant to say mine is nextdoor

― computer champion (harbl), Saturday, May 23, 2015 1:46 PM (8 hours ago)

i signed for nextdoor wanting to be on the W. Oakland one where my practice space is because we've had some break ins, but it forced me into the one where i actually live, which is a combination of shelves for sale and suspicious person rummaging through garbage at 2am

Edgewater group won't hold a candle to Cape St. Clare (no googleproofing -- name and shame). Anne Arundel Co really did become racist fuckhead central in the last 15 years or so -- you hear more western PA and Texas accents, too.

I understand that for a lot of people, Facebook is for nostalgia and reuniting with your old schoolmates, but why, twenty or thirty years on, has it not occurred to the conspicuous consumption crowd that some of us are still loyal to our old communities and don't need to hear your "there goes the neighborhood" scare stories. Especially when those tactics were old forty years ago.

Then there are people who grew up in a very progressive and pro-labor community and who somehow think the current residents want to hear their smug libertarian politics.

How can someone live in proximity to the black community throughout their childhood and not absorb ANY knowledge of or appreciation for that community and its values - not to mention being utterly ignorant about the implications of integration. For example, it's not black people's fault that the mall closed down - as if money rains from the sky wherever YOU go.

Was sick of and alienated from these people the first time around. Also appalled that their ignorant children live in expensive new-construction homes because living in a 1960's split level is for "ghetto" people.

I wanted to alert local residents: on Tues afternoon around 5 pm I saw a man in the courtyard area between 2 buildings in this area, who appeared to be looking in ground floor windows, kind of lingering and staring at various apartments. He was carrying what looked like a collapsible cane (maybe for breaking windows?). By the time I got outside to investigate, he was gone. I recognize most of the people who live in the buildings in my area and I definitely did not recognize him. Just a heads up to be alert for prowlers, lock windows when you're out, maybe leave a radio or TV on, etc.

my facebook neighborhood group is

1) punks yelling about yuppies gentrifying the neighborhood
2) yuppies getting mad that punks keep breaking windows and pepper spraying business owners (yes, this really happened last week)
3) me writing and erasing x50 times a message saying PUNKS YOU ARE THE REASON IT IS GENTRIFYING IN THE FIRST PLACE but never posting it
4) the really cool city councillor for our hood answering ppl's questions and generally being awesome

1-3 = dud, 4 = k-classic & poss. the best thing abt facebook for me right now imo

To the asshole who left this note:

I just had to put my dog down yesterday and it was such a joy to come out to my car today and find this note. Thank you. Beautiful timing. Also, I didn't touch you're fucking car. Lastly, if you are so god damn worried about your bumpers get a fucking garage. You do realize where you're parking, right??? If I had a dime for every mark on my bumper from people parking I'd be a millionaire. You're truly an idiot.

http://i.imgur.com/V3Pgezk.png

Suspicious person 1d ago
D*** R******** from Grand Lake
There's an African American male about 5ft 5inch tall balled real thin build walking around here with a shirt no underwear he was hiding in my yard behind my door my husband chased him off he might have went in someone else's yard make sure you watch your children keep your door locked windows locked ect..... Just be careful an be aware oh an one more thing he seemed to be high with a green shirt no pants no underwear but had on shoes an socks he look to be in his 20s

balled?

balled, with no hare.

ect....

kind of pleasing Springsteen album track vibe to that North Little Rock one

Wel now, ol' Wesley Dinwiddle fell out of the swinging door cage
Bout lost half a foot, man, it's been a coon's age.
How ya doin', Harrell, you been keeping real busy?
How bout you meet me tonight in Atlantic City.

Naw these look safe as hell. What could go wrong.

http://i.imgur.com/cNOb74M.jpg

I feel bad now.

http://i.imgur.com/18XpwkB.jpg

The other night we were at a bar in the area and a guy came in asking if people wanted to buy ink cartridges. Is this a code for drugs? Or is this the new bar selling trend? I've seen people trying to sell roses and other romantic items for people to give their ladies, but this was new for me. Any ideas?

It's the new "car stereo": ink cartridges.

jjj: i quoted your first post on my neighbourhood's facebook

someone asked me what a tax refuser is, i said i would ask you

what is a tax refuser?

I had a good time winding up my local Facebook group last year around Guy Fawkes' night

http://i.imgur.com/dHjuaHd.jpg

'D3bbie Fr4m3' is no relation

it went on a lot longer than that - 250 comments, then i got banned.

I like the guy who threatens to call the police on charges of 'wasting people's time'. Can't remember if I managed to prntscrn the part where I said I'd heard a series of loud bangs coming from outside, and on being told it was fireworks replied 'I'm closing my front door all the same'.

I just got in an argument with a cop on my neighborhood group who was saying that it was good "broken windows" policing to target bikes as much as possible. They're ridden by the criminal element.

Also, a number of people are upset about a corner where there are just too many newspaper boxes, and a taxi stand that had a lot of taxis lined up at it.

we had a guy kicking up a fuss about a pedestrian crossing being built (along a very dangerous and busy piece of road which many pedestrians use every day) because it would hold up his car.

Class-A trolling there, dl.

File under: Surely_some_mistake!

Hello All,
Frequently I see garbage like mattresses, box springs, on the corners of Jayne and Perkins, Warwick and Perkins, and at the end of Lee at Vernon. I'm always puzzled given that the garbage is located in front of multi unit buildings, with I imagine hundreds of people passing it daily...and yet the garbage remains. Do folks not know it's quite simple to report it to public works? Are people oblivious to it because they've passed it so many times? Maybe they're thinking since they didn't put it there, they're not responsible for calling it in. Please folks, if you live close to where the garbage is, call it in to public works and they'll pick it up. We all pay tax dollars to receive this service

I live at the end of Warwick near Euclid and there's an apartment building across from me that's on the corner. The balconies face our building.
About once every week there's a woman who throws parties and is extremely loud. She's sits on her balcony, drinks and smokes cigarettes to all hours.
Not sure if she knows how loud she is but it echoes.
Anyone else hear her? And if you know her please quiet her down or find her a boyfriend.

I think I mentioned this elsewhere, but I'm actually now a member of a *secret* facebook group whose purpose has become in large part to make fun of the main neighborhood groups.

Classic. I need to start one of those for my burg.

Ohhhhhhhhh they are sooooo terrible.

Recently:

Long clusterfuck thread about nanny-shaming
Long clusterfuck thread that started as a parody of the nanny-shaming thread and somehow turned into someone insinuating that it's Jewish people's fault that the neighborhood Barnes & Noble is closing because they let their kids destroy the books and toys

nextdoor, Jesus Christ I wish I didn't know how many monsters lived near me

It's amazing how many innocuous topics are a bat signal for xenophobes.

Here's Nextdoor in a nutshell:

'did anybody hear that noise'
'somebody was casing my house'
'kids are selling newspaper subscriptions'
'I was burgled yesterday when I left all my ground floor windows open'
'_____ new restaurant is great'
'you're an agent of gentrification'
'you're the real racist'
'I've lived here for ____ years and ACTUALLY you're the racist'
'all of you are racist'
'free chunks of concrete in my driveway, you haul'

Nextdoor ultimately booted me for not giving my real name, which turned out to make my life much more peaceful.

today it was

"two suspicious men were walking by my house. i asked them what they were doing, they said they were going for a walk. i stared at them as they walked away. they stared back! i felt very uncomfortable..."
"they might be ILLEGAL ALIENS, there are so many MURDERERS being allowed into this country. here's an article from the WSJ with statistics."
"my friend was MURDERED by someone she wanted to help, don't let your guard down. RIP to my friend i miss her every day."

Just checked it out for laffs, and it has the strangest way of assigning neighborhoods. I'm not even in the same zip code as the one they assigned me.

the West Oakland nextdoor is apparently highly "entertaining" and trollable, but my neighborhood is burglaries, nanny shares, and lost chihuahuas

I'm NO Golden Gate, and as I've said it's been quite some time since I looked at it.

Conversely my hippie neighbor who's lived here for just over a year organized a block party last saturday afternoon that turned into a pretty nice way to acquaint myself with some of my neighbors. He did make everybody stand in a circle to bond, but otherwise it was quite enjoyable.

'you're an agent of gentrification'
'you're the real racist'
'I've lived here for ____ years and ACTUALLY you're the racist'
'all of you are racist'

West Oakland is apparently a lot of that too.

just got a nextdoor post emailed to me, filed under "crime and safety" (the only post emails i receive from them.) subject: LEMON THEFT

I'm a member of our local "Remember Our Neighborhood?" group where people post photos of the new highway back when it was still the old highway, etc.

There's a big thread about what was on the corner before Walgreens came along. Was it a Chinese restaurant? Was it a Sambo's? No, Sandra Beatty Walker, the Texaco station was up the hell a ways.

I found a picture of the Chinese restaurant and posted it, because, hey, welcome to my wheelhouse.

20 posts later, the thread's still going with "I'm pretty sure it was a McDonald's..."

the Nextdoor app has lot of lolz points for one crazy in our neighborhood who's always going on about bank tellers fucking with him, someone tore down his American flag, ect. Also, a LOT more racists surrounding us than I would have imagined. Many posts along the lines of "saw a black guy walking down the road. STAY ALERT PEOPLE."

There was one back for my dad's neighborhood where someone was popping off with "There were MEXICANS slowing down and LOOKING at our HOUSES."

Which was followed by someone saying, "We were HAVING a NEIGHBORHOOD YARD SALE, if you didn't HAPPEN to NOTICE."

My neighborhood has a really awful bougie/gentrification group that's basically white ppl getting incensed abt squatters and queers and POC but in of course really thinly-veiled ways

I started my own for the neighborhood a little over a year ago and it's almost 1000 deep and ppl ask advice abt where to do or find stuff, or they barter or sell things, we have fun food conversations, it's rly quite wonderful!

v proud bcz the South Philly-based group that it was spun off of is filled with weird creepy assholes who say awful shit all the time and my awesome posi West Philly group is p self-moderated

Large pheasant or exotic Chcken

View larger photo For last two days this bird has been at our feeder eating Sunflower seeds at various times... Has someone lost this bird? We are on Palm Ave

veganism is popular also at the extreme right of the bay area, in hitlertown which is named after an austrogerman vegetarian and pamphleteer of the early 20th century

a common joke in hitlertown seminaries in the 1950s was that they never had enough seed for birds because it all ended up being fed to the choirboys

that's amusing sarah but i deeply believe that sharing lost/found pet info is the one good thing i've seen in action on facebook

^One friend's lost dog search went nationally viral in the UK a couple of months ago because of FB and Twitter, and the dog finally turned up on its ninth day out. Granted, the friend in question is a fairly well-regarded journalist/presenter but she was bowled over by the kindness of strangers and the amount of reach they helped her to achieve.

My hometown group is generally pretty OK, probably because it has links to the local historical society. Lots of former C-average-and-below doofs posting about secret wilderness party locales of days gone by etc, surprisingly little racism (but what little there is comes from posters who are provably, quantifiably stupid for reasons like the one just noted). One notable thread did attempt to out the paedophilia of a recently dead local businessman who'd moved from the area 20 years previously, but it got taken down by a rather dim version of the group's Nice Police on the grounds that his kids might see it.

Like, would you ask someone to bake you a free cake? Would you ask someone to come decorate your house for the party for free?

Judging by some of the shit that gets posted over at r/choosingbeggars, there 100% are people out there who would ask for that for free as well. "I know lots of other parents who I can recommend you to if you do a good job!"

But lol yes, I would be deeply concerned about who would take up that offer.

To be fair, they're not saying it's a kid's party in the initial request.

Someone has posted a picture of a cloud they saw yesterday and is implying it looks like the Queen 'flying high to meet her Prince'.

sorry, 'join her Prince'. They've already met.

It does look a bit like the Queen flying like Superman actually. Every time I take another look I find it funnier

🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

Imagine if the Queen looked a bit like one of the seven dwarves, and was also a cloud. It's kind of uncanny actually.

I've just seen another Queen cloud via Twitter but it's shit compared to our one

Astonishing moment a cloud resembling Queen Elizabeth floats over English town just hours after she died https://t.co/LLtvpYSKRb

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) September 9, 2022

lol, please share yours, kinder.

Let me try it

https://i.imgur.com/fbwwtrV.jpeg

looooool

Hahahaha an amazing leap

Zooming across the sky

so does everyone turn into a cloud when they die? is every cloud a dead person? or only famous people? how famous do you have to be to be a cloud?

I caught a photo of this one shortly after Bush Sr died

https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/images-41__700.jpg

Not Facebook, but our neighborhood email group might as well be Nextdoor for how obnoxious it is. A couple nights ago someone let off what were very obviously fireworks in the alley, complete with sizzling, crackling and whistling sounds, but we are now on day two of absolutely rabid, frothing at the mouth arguing about whether or not they were gunshots and how violent our area is.

Im having the best day on my neighborhood facebook group because I dared to say dogs are allowed to bark.

I CANT ENJOY MY GARDEN Because my neighbors two doors down have a doG!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You should show up at their door WITH AN AXE!

Our neighborhood email chain is all in a tizzy today because someone had a robin build a nest near their front door and the mail delivery person on our route left a note that they'd stop delivering until the "dangerous animal" was removed. The person sent an email asking if someone might be able to help her carefully relocate the nest, since she didn't want to just destroy it, but from the sounds of the outraged responses you'd think she suggested nuking the nest from orbit.

Our Facebook group has gotten really over-moderated in the past few months. The mods lock down and delete any posts with potentially argumentative or controversial topics. That could be on topics ranging from a non-fatal shooting that occurred down the block last week to someone getting mad that their neighbors had left a plate of leftover hot dogs out for wildlife and pets to possibly ingest.

https://i.imgur.com/hTEOS6M.jpg

I was there.

Anyway, we had never had a nightmare-level Facebook group. There were very occasional off-color remarks by heavy Trumper types and mild comments skirmishes on some relatively weightless topics (such as the hot dogs). But no one was really getting TOO fired up. So I made a post in the group ASKING why posts were getting locked down and deleted, which was promptly locked down and deleted.

Wow I don't know what world you folks are inhabiting because this all just sounds pretty bizarro-world to me. I am on decent terms with my neighbors and haven't heard anything this bizarre. Hot dogs on a manhole I know, I know, it's serious.

I heard if a robin nest is moved the mom abandons it so maybe thats the outrage? This could indeed not be true.

Yeah, I've heard that before too, but no idea as to the truth of it. It was just the out of scale responses. The person asking the question was looking for help/advice and was clearly approaching it from a, "hey I don't want to disturb these birds if possible but also I need to get my mail". And only one of the responses was even helpful, most were along the lines of, "How dare you! Stupid moron, leave it where it is".

Sounds like a local Facebook group.

I've been trolling mine hard today. People complaining about dogs barking in yards (as I said above) and one woman said they should be crated so I replied "OH YHOUD RATHER HAVE YOUR DOG LOCKED IN A TINY CAGE FOR HOURS THAN OUT IN THE FRESH AIR?????'

I've also implied that everyone who wants to call animal control is pro-dog murder.

Im having a great time tbh.

I am actually quite sympathetic to all the neighborhood group complaints about our town switching from meters to a parking app. I fucking hate those apps.

Honestly, I dont love the idea of a dog barking all day either but the way they instantly piled on the poor woman, I couldn't resist trolling.

xp I feel like were just going to get rid of coins at some point

I was just talking to a neighbor who also moved from the city, but before me, about how when your neighborhood is quiet, there's this natural human tendency to look for stuff to be interested in. So you start thinking extremely dumb shit like "huh, I've never seen that car parked in front of my neighbor's house before," or "I don't recognize that kid playing with Emily across the street." I feel like I have to actively guard against that kind of thinking to avoid becoming one of those people.

Oh yeah, that's a big part of it. Suburbia. Our nextdoor app is 90% "There's a man walking down our street I've never seen before" and the response is always 'Call the cops"

Oh and they have a little template to describe the person:

Height
Weight:
Clothing:
Physical appearance:

Just say black. Jesus.

Oh and you know it's not a white guy when they start with "There's a gentleman walking down my street..."

When did 'gentleman' become code for 'Im racist and scared'

gunshots and how violent our area is.

Haha, this like Chicago social media par for the course. Fireworks v. gunshots, why is there a helicopter, lost/loose dog, can anyone recommend a plumber.

WHO'S CAR IS PARKED IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE IT'S BEEN THERE FOR 3 DAYS I'M CALLING THE POLICE TO HAVE IT TOWED

I hate those parking apps too. Large portions of our town switched over to those, but they also didn't bother putting in paystations in many places. So if you are visiting and don't have the app, there are areas consisting of 4-5 square blocks where you are absolutely fucked because there isn't anywhere else to pay, unless you know where to walk to get to one of the few stations.

Also, when my parents were visiting from out of town, they drove us all to dinner at a restaurant, when they parked I had to add their license plate to the app to pay for their parking. I ended up having to completely delete the app and reinstall to get their car to quit popping up as the default for months afterwards.

xp - clearly Andy the Grasshopper lives in my neighborhood! lol

with rare exceptions, my neighborhood mailing list is so wholesome and positive it's kind of disgusting ... mostly people loaning each other tools, finding lost pets, and hosting chili cook-offs and pancake breakfasts

^^^ things that are boring but good, relatively speaking

Not gonna bring lols when I'm bored at work tbrr

I've been trolling mine hard today. People complaining about dogs barking in yards (as I said above) and one woman said they should be crated so I replied "OH YHOUD RATHER HAVE YOUR DOG LOCKED IN A TINY CAGE FOR HOURS THAN OUT IN THE FRESH AIR?????'

I've also implied that everyone who wants to call animal control is pro-dog murder.

hero!! also belated happy bday sunny

Aww i get mean when im bored.

Thank you for the birthday wishes, lovely <3