WTF Nextdoor? Over 130 clicks to disable email and push notifications?

This seems like the least of the negative impacts nextdoor encourages.<p>i removed myself after months of watching people on this app become more and more paranoid, feeding off each other.<p>the breaking point was when someonea put out a warning that someone had knocked on their door at 7:00pm, “the wife and i were eating dinner when the rude knock came. we crept over to the window, peeked out, and didn’t recognize the person. be careful!”<p>the person knocking turned out to be a 16 year old girl who lives three blocks away who unfortunately got a flat tire and was hoping to borrow a phone to call her dad.<p>we live in an incredibly safe wealthy suburb and these people “crept” to a window like they’re in an old west shootout and decided to put out a warning on nextdoor about a little sixteen year old girl.<p>we still laugh just thinking how crazy these people must have looked while creeping from their kitchen to peek out a window in one of the safest areas in the state at a time of day when people are still out mowing their lawns.<p>nextdoor somehow just adds to these people’s already insane creeping paranoia.

NextDoor: home of the dumbest people on the Internet. They must be proud of that.<p>There are occasionally things I want to see on there: a new Costco going in where the OSH Hardware used to be, or whatnot. So I got the daily email digest. One email per day -- tolerable.<p>Then it stopped coming. I wrote to Support, and their guy <i>swore</i> it was still being sent! I said &quot;no, it&#x27;s not. I looked in Spam and Trash.&quot; He swore again that it was going out, and I should &quot;check with my email provider.&quot;<p>I asked &quot;How do you <i>know</i> they&#x27;re going out? Did you look in the Sent folder?&quot; He got all sniffy and said &quot;We are unable to disclose anything about our internal operations.&quot; Ooh, big secret!<p>So I wrote to the Nextdoor handle on Twitter. They told me there was an experiment going on. I asked if they could take me out of it. They did and all was good again.<p>Except other people on Nextdoor were also unhappy about being in the experiment, and asked me how I got out of it. I told them; they tried it; Nextdoor now refused to do it for them.<p>Think about it -- almost every site on the Web is trying to get you to sign up for a daily email. Nextdoor already has one, and they&#x27;re trying to take it away.

Nextdoor wins my prize for the scummiest human manipulation to increase user signups I&#x27;ve witnessed.<p>I live in the UK in a cul-de-sac with about 25 houses in the street. We&#x27;ve lived here about 4 years and have a dog so we have bumped in to all the neighbours and know all of them by name at least.<p>I get a note through my door from NextDoor claiming to be from a neighbour in my street with a name that we did not recognise. Apparently this neighbour had signed up for NextDoor to keep our street safe and exchange important information yada yada yada...<p>Needless to say it&#x27;s total horse shit - none of us are using their scummy platform and have absolutely no desire to.<p>So they&#x27;re preying on people&#x27;s fears, and hoping that some kind of FOMO plus the fear of being stabbed in your sleep if you don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s going on in your street will get people on to their platform.

Patron has a similar issue. Subscribing to a creator by default opts you into all types of notifications from them, and notifications are configured on a per-creator basis with no global override.<p>Worse, if I remember right, the page’s entire state (for all the creators) was represented in a single, slow HTTP request that was fired off when any checkbox was changed. Unchecking checkboxes quickly (faster than 1&#x2F;second) would lead to undefined behaviour as requests get processed out of order and earlier requests would override some of the latter ones, silently undoing your work (since the earlier request has more remaining checkboxes - remember that every request represents the entire state of the page).<p>Absolutely dumb design on so many levels.

Probably the darkest UX pattern I&#x27;ve seen in a while... It&#x27;s not spam per say so I&#x27;m not sure if this can be reported to the FTC, but it sure is a dirty move. Whoever designed is either evil or had was forced by an evil organization who would do anything to make their stock go up after a rough SPAC introduction.<p>Does anyone know if this can be reported to a public agency?

A few reactions:<p>Although you can just turn off notifications at the app level, this is annoying because it means you can&#x27;t won&#x27;t get notifications for emergency&#x2F;safety notices, people messaging you directly, etc.<p>The number of relevant agencies will vary by your location, and in my 10 years on ND I have only received an agency notification once or twice. However, I think agencies were only introduced a few years ago, so things could be different in the future.<p>If you don&#x27;t want to be bothered, use the website on your phone, not the app. And set up an email filter for anything from Nextdoor. If I need to communicate in real-time with anyone (to arrange pickup details for a for-sale item), I tell them to text me instead of DM.<p>On a related note, you can change your news feed preference among three settings. But if you choose something other than their desired algorithm, it informs you that this preference will be set for the next X days (45 or 90, I forget). I have never seen a preference that tells you up front that it will respect your wishes for some number of weeks before reverting to the default. Insane.

Maybe this should be posted to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;assholedesign" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;assholedesign</a> .<p>It is a waste of time trying to educate assholes, avoid them.

We desperately need a revised CAN-SPAM[1], with two additional fangs: additional prohibitions on these sorts of dark patterns (designed to exhaust users into submission), and the opening of individual standing against companies that spam (so that individuals can directly sue these misbehaving companies rather than waiting for the FTC to un-capture itself).<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003</a>

NextDoor continues to spam you even after unsubscribing from everything. Some how every month I get a random new email, and some how another new email subscription is enabled in my account.<p>Also, advertising on their platform brings almost $0 ROI. The only benefit was a decently ranked back link.

I would probably just try document.getElementsByClass(&#x27;selector&#x27;).forEach((el) =&gt; el.click()) in the console

Just wanted to share that I’ve been using OpenPhone for dealing with text spam, and I really like it so far: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openphone.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openphone.com&#x2F;</a><p>The only trouble is that some services can verify that the number isn’t a “real” number (how do they do this?!) but it works most of the time.<p>I’ve slowly been transitioning as much as possible to it. Phone calls even work great, and you can take them right through your laptop.<p>It doesn’t solve the problem of push notifications, but it’s semi related to the problem of being spammed. (I set my phone to permanent “do not disturb” mode long ago.)

I just went through this and the unsubscribe links in emails are slightly deceptive.<p>They only cover that specific type of notification and have a toggle switch on the form that makes it confusing as to whether you&#x27;re subscribing or not.<p>It took about a week to fully stop the emails because different &quot;types&quot; of notifications kept coming in.<p>Shady stuff.

I remember finding out about next door and being excited because it seemed like such a good idea on the surface. It&#x27;s so sad to see how poorly executed the whole thing is.

Honestly, email notifications and the concept of &quot;unsubscribing&quot; is a big fad. 9&#x2F;10 services that I try to unsubscribe to, end up asking confusing questions, and instead of ubsubbing me at once, they will rather ask me which topics I&#x27;m interested in.<p>So much for the email &quot;privacy&quot;. I guess I&#x27;m better off not giving two shits about it.

I find the paranoia in suburbia amazing. I have a coworker who bought a new house in a brand new development. He works as does his wife, but his mother lives in the home as well.<p>The first thing he did was install 7 cameras with motion sensing alerts. I asked him what he was protecting against and he came up with vague comments about burglars etc. (FYI the crime rate in our town is very low, and especially low in his neighborhood and the surrounding older neighborhoods).<p>So he spends all day getting alerts as the cameras mis-diagnose moving shadows (caused by the sun) as &quot;movement.&quot; All the new construction in the neighborhood triggers the cameras frequently, and eventually he disabled most of the alerts.<p>I think our society has done such a thorough job of feeding us &quot;fear porn&quot; that we are all ready to assume the worst.

I&#x27;m reminded of a similar pattern in Atlassian&#x27;s email notification preferences -- multiple pages of multiple checkboxes for every product in their portfolio, with no clear &quot;unsubscribe all&quot; option available.

Meetup suffers from a similar issue, where one cannot perform bulk changes to all the subscribed groups, which becomes unwieldy when one has over 100 subscribed groups.<p>Apart from this, it happened just a few months ago that these settings suddenly stopped working, so I received several non-solicited emails from notifications that should have been disabled.<p>Issues like this could have a significant negative impact in user experience and retention, in my opinion

How can I remove my email from their database if I never opened an account? Once I lived in New York city and thought I will use this service but then I moved out. Unfortunately I started to signing in. Then they wanted to send me a confirmation snail mail. But I don&#x27;t live there any more. And my registration is stuck in a limbo since like 10 years. I can&#x27;t login because I have no password nor confirmation that I live in the NYC...

I had to close my account to stop it. Also, it seems mainly people complaining about how a school bus drives through their neighborhood, etc.

Mailbox providers should build in an unsubscribe feature that actually works on a local level. Essentially which creates a filter and doesn’t show you the emails. It’s optimistic to let the spammers handle the unsubscribe feature. AI is getting good enough to have two buttons “unsubscribe from all” and “unsubscribe to emails like these”

I tweeted this exact thing to them last month and they basically acted surprised I didn’t like it.

This was the same issue I ran into after signing up. Each notification &quot;type&quot; required a separate unsub link to disable, and there was no visibility on when it will stop sending me emails.

I literally cannot find a way to have the app installed and not get pushes 2&#x2F;3 times a day. This started a few months back - I tweeted them about it and got no response. Painful.

The west side Denver nextdoor is mostly people crying about fireworks or posting videos of porch pirates. I couldn&#x27;t find the value in it so I stopped using their service.

All I know about Nextdoor I’ve learned from The Neighborhood Listen. Hilarious podcast starring Paul F Tompkins where they do sketches based on real nextdoor posts.

Next door is a dreadful system that is so overloaded with advertisements that its almost useless. Im very surprised facebook hasn’t developed a local-focused platform

I stayed clear of them when they started canvassing my neighborhood.<p>It seems more like a place to gossip. If I want to connect with my neighbors, I just go knock on their door.

WTF LinkedIn? I need a ton more clicks to disable all their bullshit notifications on there, and it&#x27;s even paged!

Nextdoor has earned my award for the worst example of human manipulation to boost the number of user signups that I&#x27;ve seen.

My email provider has a way to deal with that with very few clicks (&quot;mark all email from this domain as SPAM&quot;)

Having looked at both: if you think Nextdoor is bad with its paranoia, check out Neighbors by Ring.

The worst part is that they regularly add new notification topics that you also have to go back and disable.

I created a filter to dump their emails in the trash... it was the easiest way

Thanks OP. If not this post, I wouldn&#x27;t go there just to see it myself. While there (it wasn&#x27;t easy to find where these settings are), unsubscribed from most of the email and push notifications. Hopefully, I will remember occasionally launch the app to see _some_ useful posts...

Just use sub-addressing, then discard all emails send to that address.

That&#x27;s why I never signed up in the first place

I just blocked their domain entirely.

Bahaha, is that a record?

The people who use NextDoor deserve the worst experience on the Internet