As Nashville grows, so do its online communities. For residents of Music City stomping grounds like Donelson and Bellevue, online kiosks in the form of public and private Facebook groups are where many Nashvillians new and old are meeting their neighbors. The pages can be an invaluable resource for Music City newcomers looking for home-repair and restaurant recommendations, or how to identify whether a house pest is a brown recluse. And for longtime locals, these hyperactive online communities have become virtual town halls for voicing concerns, sharing memes riddled with parochially esoteric in-jokes, busting front-porch package thieves and spouting off NIMBY opinions on hot-button issues, ranging from scandals at City Hall to a murder-rage-inducing hatred of hipsters on Bird scooters.
For some members of these groups, the online back-and-forth between local armchair quarterbacks simply offers another outlet for killing time on the internet. But for many in the communities they represent, the pages yield real-life benefits, and in some cases, consequences.
The many IRL benefits of community-based online crowdsourcing are undeniable. Wilson County’s wildly popular Hip Mt. Juliet Facebook page connects more than 70,000 suburban Nashvillians. In 2015, 75 of them, participating in a viral campaign on the site, donated three truckloads of food, water and thousands of dollars’ worth of supplies to homeless families displaced by that year’s Harding Inn abandoned-building fire, according to The Tennessean.
In early 2017, when my tiny, newly adopted, not-yet-microchipped 2-month-old kitten went missing, I spent five fraught days and sleepless nights going door to door, posting paper fliers to telephone poles and combing the streets and back alleys of my neighborhood in a desperate needle-in-haystack search. But it was thanks to posts I made across Nashville’s various vigilant lost-pet Facebook groups — like Nashville’s Lost & Found Pets and Skippy Lou’s Lost & Found Pets pages — that I was reunited with my furry friend, who was found four miles from home.
“There’s not a week that goes by that we don’t help someone find a lost pet,” East Nashville Facebook Group creator and administrator Paul Nicholson tells the Scene.
The East Nashville Facebook page, unlike Hip Mount Juliet, is a “closed group,” meaning it’s accessible only to community-approved, ostensibly local Facebook users. The group is among the largest — and arguably the most influential — online communities serving Davidson County. Nicholson says 40 to 50 percent of the group’s nearly 53,000 members are active within a 30-day window.
“The active-user count blows me away,” he says of the group, which he founded as successor to the old East Nashville Listserv in 2008. Nicholson now runs the group with the help of eight other moderators. “When we saw those inflated numbers, we thought, ‘I bet a lot of these are spambots.’ And they’re really not — it’s pretty amazing.”
Many times the Facebook group has brought out the best in the East Nashville community, like when East Side vegetarian eatery The Wild Cow had its tip jar stolen. That inspired some group members to stop in and offer dollars and cents out of their own pockets — those small donations totaled a sum greater than what the restaurant’s staff would have made had the tip jar not been taken.
Or in 2017, when beloved local musician and East Nashville character Todd “Toddzilla” Austin lost his Forrest Avenue home and seven cats to a fire. The Lockeland Springs property fell under a historic overly that required Austin to salvage nearly a third of the structure in order to rebuild, a cost the musician couldn’t afford. So East Nashville group moderators started a Change.org petition and circulated it on the site.
“Everyone helped ToddZilla get his house approved to be rebuilt with new materials instead of having to go by Lockeland regulations,” recalls moderator Sara Meissner in an email to the Scene.
“[There was] the lady who needed formula for her baby, and the community came together to get it for her,” fellow moderator Angela Woods recalls via email. “Many people come together for homeless people.”
“We also really go out of our way to help local businesses in the neighborhood promote themselves,” Nicholson adds.
But the group’s robust numbers and rapid-fire activity haven’t always raised the tide for every ship in East Nashville’s rapidly swelling harbor. As is common with online communities, the good-natured information seekers, earnest local-business boosters and good-Samaritan pet rescuers are posting their status updates and comments in a hive that’s also home to a loud handful of cynical trolls and snarky keyboard warriors with an insatiable hankering for internet drama.
“I’d say the vast majority of [group members] who are active are very good-natured, they’re there to help,” Nicholson explains. “They’ve got a fun attitude. They’re a lot of times kind of silly. But we try to keep real negative behavior and people who are clearly stirring the pot, we keep those at bay.”
But some local business owners have found themselves on the receiving end of acerbic posts and comments from the group’s more negative-minded members. And some think the moderators could have done more to mitigate criticism, claiming that it has hampered their reputation and hurt their bottom line.
Last year, twin brothers and developers Andy and Chad Baker — owners of pet day care, boarding and grooming chain The Dog Spot — sued two East Nashville Facebook Group members, Jamie Bayer and Bari Rachel Miley Hardin, over posts made in the online community. The suit, which sought damages to the tune of $2 million, alleged that the pair was guilty of libel, false light publicity, misrepresentation, fraud and intentional interference with a business relationship via some posts, which were later deleted, accusing Dog Spot staff of killing multiple dogs. The Baker brothers denied those accusations. The suits against Hardin and Beyer were later dropped. Meanwhile, in a separate suit against the Bakers, filed in 2017, a former customer alleged that employees of The Dog Spot’s East Nashville location were responsible for the death of her dog, a chihuahua that was attacked by larger dogs placed in the same pen. In November, a judge found in favor of the dog owner. The Dog Spot’s East Nashville day care and boarding location has since closed.
Family-owned Greek and Italian casual bistro PizzeReal opened in the Five Points neighborhood in 2004, years before its 11th Street location became some of the most prime real estate in town. Speculation over how the often-quiet eatery has weathered farm-to-table restaurant gentrification in the neighborhood has made PizzeReal a bit of a recurring punch line on the East Nashville Facebook page. Some posts about the establishment have resulted in threads that are hundreds of comments long — some from old-school loyal customers, but many from detractors and trolls looking for a laugh.
“We [give local businesses] a forum to interact with their most frequent guests in a way they don’t always get to do,” Nicholson says. “The PizzeReal story is an example of that. While it felt like a lot of people were down on the place, a whole lot of people were also really into supporting the business that had simply not been on their radar before the discussion on the group.”
Said discussion is the one that followed an open letter that Athena Koumanelis, daughter of PizzeReal owner Paul Koumanelis, posted in the group in January, essentially accusing its more sardonic members of cyber bullying, calling the restaurant’s East Nashville meme status “a source of never-ending anguish.”
“I checked the East Nashville Facebook group, and sure enough came across a long thread where we were accused of being drug dealers, money launderers, mafia, and other kinds of criminals,” Koumanelis wrote. “These types of threads, bashing my family’s business, appear with astonishing regularity on social media, seemingly out of nowhere. And I wonder — why is this? This negativity has impacted my family in the worst way, and we haven’t done anything to deserve it.”
“It does feel that there are people who are actually targeting us,” Koumanelis tells the Scene. “It definitely does lead to careless jokes.”
Nicholson (whom Koumanelis also appealed to privately) says: “We — myself and the moderators — can kind of take that one-off and be like, ‘You know what, it’s not our responsibility to have nobody ever post a negative review about your business on the group.’ But at the same time, here’s our recommendation: If you want this to go well, here’s how we recommend you respond. If you want to respond defensively, go for it. But here’s how we think it would be helpful for you.’ ”
Koumanelis took that advice, and says the resulting thread — predictably sprawling, and perhaps uncharacteristically more civil and sympathetic — helped PizzeReal’s relationship with the online community, along with generating an uptick in foot traffic.
The post “obviously got a lot of attention,” she says. “And there weren’t as many negative comments on that one, but it did bring in more business for a while and everything.”
“Overall, having the East Nashville Facebook Group is a good thing,” Koumanelis adds. “A lot of people post when they’re looking for recommendations or someone to help them with certain things, or about lost pets — a lot of stuff like that. It is a good way to communicate with other people in the community.”
D. Patrick Rodgers also contributed reporting to this story.
