Residents Rail Against Rotten Neighbors Online

By Jenny Paul, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Jul. 8–Stories of yappy dogs, nosy neighbors and noisy night owls aren’t relegated to block party conversations, now that aggravated neighbors can air grievances in an online venue for all the world to see.

RottenNeighbor.com allows anyone with an Internet connection to post and view comments about their neighbors. The Web site, founded a year ago by San Diego Internet marketer Brant Walker, allows room for both positive and negative posts.

But true to the site’s name, about 80 percent of the comments are about “rotten” neighbors, Walker said.

“If you’re being a good neighbor you’re not really drawing attention to yourself,” said Walker, who started the site because he was annoyed by a pungent odor coming from an apartment across the hall from his. “If you’re being a rotten neighbor, you are.”

The site began using a national database to post the locations of registered sex offenders in May, which visitors appreciate, Walker said.

“People love it,” Walker said. “I mean, how much more of a rotten neighbor can you get than being a sex offender?”

Although the site has about 300,000 posts from users around the world, it’s just beginning to catch on in smaller metropolitan areas like Pittsburgh, where the site’s posts about registered sex offenders outnumber user-generated content.

“It pretty much had just the people who were listed as sexual predators,” said Adam Garrettson, 38, who began surfing the site six months ago when his brother-in-law told him about it. “There really wasn’t anything else listed.”

Garrettson said he decided to post comments about his neighbors last week after hearing about RottenNeighbor again on a local radio show.

“A couple houses in the area are for sale,” said Garrettson, who has lived in his Washington, Pa., neighborhood since 2002. “If people are going to check this out, might as well tell them what’s in the neighborhood.”

Unlike many other users, Garrettson decided to commend his friend, Sean Bradish, for being a good neighbor. He said people should know that Bradish always seems to be ready to help neighbors who are in a pinch.

“You could be one of the kids in the neighborhood, and their parents aren’t home, and they always seem to be willing to watch the kids,” Garrettson said. “It seems like the people who do good never get any accolades or any praise for what they do. If you’re going to have negative and positive on the site, then you definitely should point out who the good people are.”

Garrettson posted a warning about other neighbors, whom he declined to name. In a post titled “Nosy,” he said his family “can’t do anything without this family checking us out.”

People using the site should be careful what they say, said Pittsburgh attorney David Strassburger. Because the site’s owners act only as a host for information and don’t moderate or edit comments, users can be held liable for the content of posts. If users post false or harmful comments about people, even anonymously, they can be sued, Strassburger said.

“People sit at their computers, and they bang away on the keyboard and they say things in e-mails and in chat rooms that they would normally not say,” he said. “You need to take a deep breath and think about what you’re writing, because there’s risk. You’re not protected.”

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