Your Neighbors Are All Watching Each Other's Ring Videos—Are You in the Chat?
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If your office is anything like ours, the chatter around the coffeemaker (ok on Slack) isn't about the latest cabinet appointee or what's streaming on Netflix. Not when we have a front-row seat to the greatest real-life drama of all: notifications in the "Neighbors" section of our Ring camera apps.
If you don't have a Ring camera, first, our thoughts and prayers are with you and your packages. Second, here's what you need to know: There's a Neighbor's section on the app where you can post videos and updates/advice/warnings/PSAs for the people in your area, letting them know that there's a lost dog circling the block, say, or that a porch pirate has been stealing packages. (A "Neighbor" post that Senior Commerce Editor Marina Liao saw, for example, warned of a "Grinch" among them, showing a grainy image of a man in a hoodie next to the complaint "this trifling thief stole my baby diapers.")
But while the impetus of the Neighbors feature seems to be offering up-to-the-minute news you can use to locals, what it really does is harness the power of technology to let every single one of us, no matter how introverted, become the neighborhood busybody. Liao herself admits, "I'm obsessed. I click into every notification; I'm nosy."
And with good reason! If she hadn't clicked, she would have missed the good Samaritan displaying ultrasound photos they'd found on Seventh Avenue, saying "please contact so I can get these back to you." Now she can look at all her neighbors and wonder who's expecting.
If you go to Neighbors.ring.com you can see posts from all over the country—like the time a squirrel ran through an office, causing the squirrel-phobic worker to leap atop her desk shrieking "Close the door! Close the door!" (And no, it's not staged—those screams of terror are too real.)
Die-hard fans enjoy the push notification feature that alerts them each time a neighbor posts. "My husband turns his off though because it annoys him," Liao admits. "But I enjoy seeing it because I'm paranoid and I watch too much Law and Order SVU."
Liao's husband isn't the only one who would like everyone to say less, please. Reddit is full of people asking how to disable Neighbors notifications. "My neighbors notifications are daily reminders that there are coyotes in my area, and at least ten people a day think they're the first one to announce this," griped KittyandPuppyMama. (Hear us out "Mama": surely your neighbors just don't want Kitty and Puppy to become coyote food.) Annoying repetition is also at the heart of this complain: "I don't need an alert every hour sent to me that my area is under drought/fire warning," writes Rush_Limbaw.
The most poignant observation came from TrixieNoms, who wrote "I used to think I lived in a good neighborhood. And then I bought a Ring Doorbell...And then the Neighborhood Alerts started happening. Suddenly I’m privy to cars being broken into only miles away from my home, more lost pets than I could count, packages being yoinked… 😔 Sometimes I feel like my mind was better off when I was blissfully unaware of all the shenanigans in my area."
And yet, Trixie wasn't asking for advice on how to disable the notifications. She'd come to the forum because she wanted to feel like people were watching all of this happen alongside her, like she's part of a community. And after all, isn't that what Neighbors are for?
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