Skip to main content

Thinking Nextdoor

Interesting essay on how loneliness can lead to abuse:

Totalitarianism in power found a way to crystallise the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being. Through the use of isolation and terror, totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness, and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda.

Unrelated to what this essay is about, the abuse of loneliness as a concept made me think about the Nextdoor IPO which is basically a platform for busybody neighbors to do their meddling without being stigmatized. The nosiness likely stems from loneliness - social media and the gratuitous over-sharing with legions of "friends" does not fill that void. That leaves the space open for a Nextdoor where you can get closer to the action, engage with people in physical proximity and not feel alone.  

I don't know about totalitarianism but creating societal conditions where a large number of people feel habitually lonely is definitely good for business. Offerings will arise to fill that aching void nothing can fill so in effect the market opportunity is infinite. The Salon story summarizes the road to hell paved with good intentions well: 

It is baffling to think this all started on a digital platform. While this incident is not your average day on Nextdoor, it is worth wondering if the internet enabled its outcome. Nextdoor was supposed to provide users a sense of community, but under the anomic influence of online communication (a condition known academically as the online disinhibition effect), Nextdoor sometimes more resembles 4chan.

Perhaps that explains the appeal of Best of Nextdoor: It shows the levity of the oft-charged online world. Some of the finest Best of Nextdoor posts consist of non-urgent "urgent alerts" that users receive on their phones, including a recent "urgent alert" from a worried mom asking if the neighborhood should be concerned about the song “Gucci Gang” by Lil Pump.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more