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When Nextdoor, the social network for neighbors to share local news and concerns, is made public at a valuation of $ 4.3 billion, it will be listed on the Nasdaq under the symbol TYPE Stock Exchange. This week’s announcement is part of Nextdoor’s effort to lose the reputation of letting some users behave the other way around.
His mission now it’s “cultivating a friendlier world where everyone has a neighborhood they can trust” and has had it since 2019 warned its users against getting scolded and annoyed with “reminders of kindness” generated by artificial intelligence that appear if they write something nasty. This April, he added anti-racist notifications in the United States after local outbreaks by the Black Lives Matter movement.
But “kind” has two meanings: to be kind and helpful, and a group of like-minded people to each other. The old English word “cynd” is defined in a dictionary as “class or race distinguished by innate characteristics,” originally nobles who were to behave noble. For Nextdoor and its emerging rival Facebook Neighborhoods, here’s the friction.
Nextdoor faces the problem of all social networking platforms. They link people to vast networks, triggering a flow of information, providing entertainment and encouraging company, but they can accentuate the hard part of human nature.
People join other people, especially strangers and those they dismiss, often with incomplete evidence, as adversaries or enemies. From Facebook released at Harvard University in 2004, a digital innovation aimed at enabling friendships has encouraged tribes at war.
Most neighbors have a strong incentive to get along. Homophilia, or Aristotle’s principle that “people love those who are like themselves,” is encouraged by living close by. Like a to study said, “geography is the physical substrate on which homophilia is built.”
Most work pretty well for Nextdoor, where there is a lot of discussion about stray cats or who knows a good electrician. My experience with the WhatsApp group for our street, the technology used in many micro-neighborhoods, is overwhelmingly positive and sometimes warms the heart.
Many groups, whether on Nextdoor, Facebook, or messaging apps, entered their property during pandemic closures. The streets where people only vaguely knew their neighbors were born with offers of mutual help.
Prakash Janakiraman, a co-founder of Nextdoor, argues that the network is different from others in being built around “utility, not affinity.” You don’t have to look like neighbors to want to share information with them – it’s helpful to get to know other people if letters are diverted or if you need a parking permit. The material of everyday life creates much of its value.
Local disputes can spill over into Nextdoor. “I am legally allowed to sunbathe naked in my garden. Please stop calling the police! ” to read a featured post on Twitter’s “Best of Nextdoor.” But deeper tensions arise when, as in westerns, a stranger enters the city.
Despite their emphasis on utility, neighbors share an affinity and an identity of interest, especially when threatened. Stolen cars, apartment thefts and door-to-door scams are some of the discussion points of my district’s Nextdoor group. This is natural for personal protection, but it causes strong feelings.
The danger is evident in the US, where white users have posted material on how to see black people around the world warned of the alleged risks of the crime. The history of segregation in the country does not help: a guest article from Nextdoor date a 1949 deed about a Los Angeles home occupation that banned “anyone other than white or Caucasian.”
This was aggravated after the murder of the police George Floyd last year, when local moderators of Nextdoor deleted posts that supported the Black Lives Matter movement under anti-politics rules introduced in the forums. The company changed his policy and added anti-racist notifications.
He has recruited more volunteer moderators, offered them anti-racist training, and supervised the most thorny issues internally. Your approach is guided by Jennifer Eberhardt, professor of social psychology at Stanford University, who he argues that making people slow down and think before reacting with anger or fright helps curb hostility.
But Nextdoor has only 60 million users and faces tensions between caution and growth. He has a new Facebook competition, with his 2.85 billion monthly users and predatory instincts. Facebook is deploying Neighborhoods in some U.S. cities, with a similar design and a family promise to “keep relevant and friendly interactions between neighbors.”
Artificial intelligence can calm some anger: Nextdoor says its indications, based on scanning draft messages of sentences that have already been marked, have had reduced racial profiles at 75 percent. But if machines could solve the aggressions, Twitter would be a quieter place.
The future of Nextdoor is based on the meaning of a word. Will the neighbors be friendly or will they be triggered by threats to their class? An ambiguity that goes back to the Middle Ages is not easily resolved.
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