I signed up with my parent’s address when I was settling their estate. I picked up a few hundred bucks on stuff that would have gone to the landfill. I deleted that account once the house sold, and have never been contacted again via email. The people who bought the house might be inundated with postcards, but I wouldn’t know.
For my local area account, it’s mostly helpful:
Lost pet
Found pet
Lost/found keys/wallet/phone/purse
Local school/cub scouts/brownies are having a fundraiser
Garage sale announcements
Requests for handyman/dentist/doctor recommendations.
Less helpful, but usually amusing and easy to ignore:
Was that a gunshot!?!?!? (During the last week of June - apparently people can’t figure on July 4th is coming until they change their wall calendar)
OMG!! My Ring camera picked up a minority!
Ads for local real estate agents - this seems to be where NextDoor is making most of their money. Saying something bad about realtors seems to be the only bannable offense. (Some people belatedly realized Prop 19 in California was a bait-and-switch sold as helping seniors keep their property taxes low when moving, but really was about removing the exemption for reassessment when inheriting property so as to force more home sales and increase inventory. They complained about the governor. When someone else pointed out the governor had nothing to do with it - it was a ballot proposition paid for by a realtor front-group, they got banned for being too political).
Makes me appreciate Nextdoor’s very easy-to-use Mute button (ignore function):
One trick ponies who post multiple times a day on their pet issue: My first mute was someone opposed to a proposed apartment complex who posted the same thing 5-6 times per day with slight rewording.
Jerks that just regurgitate whatever Fox News told them to be pissed off about for the day. Dude, we’ve all seen your hand-stenciled “Let’s Go Brandon” yard sign, you’ve already proven you’re an asshole.
The city councilman who “solicits constituent opinions” with ludicrously biased push-polls.
I find it best to sign up for the daily digest emails, and only login to the actual site when something interesting shows up in the digest. Or go to specific sections when I have a need, like looking for a used item or trying to figure out whose cat keeps visiting my cat.
I’m a big fan. Just this week I’ve gotten a solid recommendation for a physician, and a guy who volunteered to come over with a chainsaw to cut down a tree that fell on my fence.
Sure, there’s stupid stuff, but no one’s making you read it.
Last week an alarmed lady on NextDoor found her steel bird feeder pole bent in half and all her seed and suet feeders broken and empty. She wanted to know if a pack of raccoons would do this, and how she could defend her feeder against a gang of raccoons.
Hilarity ensued. Anyone with a bird feeder in this neck of the literal woods knows that only bears do this.
Come to think of it, my NextDoor is reliably entertaining.
When I was in it, the Leads seemed very lax on this point to me. Once in a great while, a post or conversation would get disappeared, but it didn’t happen often. This is one of the reasons I left, there were supposed to be rules, but nobody was enforcing them, and nobody higher up seemed to care (because there was no way to let them know).
At least on my feed, banning is for really extreme behavior i.e. being an absolute racist asshole or threatening someone. There are plenty of heated discussions where some people go off the rails but usually their comments are just deleted. Trying to argue about that can also lead to banning. And, occasionally, people will apologize for losing their temper.
I’ve been on Nextdoor for several years. I’ve found it really useful for finding home maintenance folks. I’ve probably made posts 5 times. One was to find someone to cut up a limb in my yard (a nice guy 2 streets over did it) and others were about kittens that had been dumped in my yard (I found homes for 4 in the past 2 years). Being able to keep kittens out of the city shelter makes the site worthwhile to me.
But, yeah, just don’t engage with the political or public health threads. Many, many of the people in any area are idiots.
I’ve gotten good recommendations for plumbers, therapists, CPA’s, estate lawyers, and electricians on NextDoor. When my daughter’s boyfriend lost his wallet in the area, I put the word out (no luck). Lately the local coyotes have been killing people’s pets within their fenced yards, so that’s good to know. People will post what pharmacies have boosters available today. New restaurants will announce openings. People will alert neighbors that a restaurant suffered a break-in and could use some business. I’ve found it to be pretty useful, and ignore all the crap.
The ones that really bug me are “I saw some crime being committed, but didn’t report it because the police won’t do anything anyway, but watch out for the bad guys!”
I agree with most of what’s said here. Some useful info and a lot of crap like “I saw a suspicious car drive by!”
I have to add that two years ago our local teachers went on strike, and Nextdoor became impossible. Long threads with long rants taking either the teachers’ side or the district’s. Lots of pointless bickering.
Probably not. I suspect the person who got banned was really banned for biting the hand that feeds i.e. realtors.
Once I pushed back on one of his “polls” by pointing out the issue (newly introduced “No Parking” restrictions on street sweeping days) wasn’t a strictly binary choice (get ticketed at any time during no parking hours vs. eliminate all parking restrictions) and he had left a huge excluded middle, pointing out what a neighboring city does (parking enforcement follows the sweeper - if the sweeper has to go around your car you get a ticket, but once the sweeper has cleaned your street you can park, even during the hours posted no parking) was a very reasonable compromise. Got a generic “thanks for your input” comment. Of course I couldn’t actually vote in the poll because there were only two choices, maintain the “unfair” new status quo or revert to way things were before. There was no “try something else that makes more sense” option.
What caused me to mute him was the asinine push-polls about “Should the school district be allowed to diverge from providing a quality education by including CRT?” and “Should BLM be allowed to disrupt our peaceful community with protests that can lead to violence and destruction?”
Helicopter? Yup, tho’ they say “why is the ghetto bird flying around.”
Arizona in the last year passed a law that you had to be pulled over to use your cell phone, leading to a ton of “OMIGOD, someone is parked in front of my house!”
Wow is that a slow loading site. And either I can’t figure out how to navigate it, or there isn’t much of anything there.
The digest link says I don’t have one yet, check back later. Which I suppose makes sense as I just signed up.
The news feed seems to be mostly full of people just saying hi, here I am; interspersed with notices of VFW dinners, and with a whole lot of ads – about every third thing in the news feed is an outside ad. The longest conversation I can find is about lint dryer traps and seems to have been set off by an ad.
There doesn’t seem to be any topic for agriculture, in this heavily agricultural area; or even for gardening; just one for sharing the harvest. Which doesn’t appear to have anything in it.
The list of topics looks to me like it’s some sort of boilerplate list somebody at nextdoor came up with, and then added a list of schools to, including one that’s been closed down for two years. [ETA: and most of the others are Old Order Mennonite schools; which are not going to have anybody on Nextdoor. I’d expect most local people to know that.] Most of the topics I checked (including the one for the closed school) don’t seem to have any posts.
Will check the digest when I’ve got one, and see whether there’s anything in there.
So far I am not impressed. But at least nobody seems to be going on about people they think don’t belong, or about vaccine misinformation. That may however be due to apparently nobody talking about much of anything at all.
Last night there was a heated discussion about thievery.
Some trumpican yayhoo was complaining that hooligans tried to steal her inflatable Santa from her front yard, and she told all that she went outside locked and loaded ready to dispense frontier justice (this is AZ, after all) to the dirty varmints.
At least some people pointed out that shooting someone over an inflatable Santa was a bit excessive. But others chimed in that all thieves should be shot, and that putting their heads on pikes where the Santa was would serve as a warning all. The best way to stop crime is to shoot people, according to my neighbors.
Some wag wondered if the authorities would let the homeowner mount the thief’s head above their mantle.
I’m going to take a wild guess that in addition to all the other problems with shooting people over a plastic Santa, said hooligans were probably children.
– my group seems, as near as I can tell, to have said nothing at all since yesterday.
Around this time of year (EVERY year), there’s a series of indignant “Someone cut my Christmas lights!! Why would anyone who’s god-fearing and loves Christ do that??!!”
Then there are 30 posts telling them that it was probably rabbits biting threw the wires.
I did have one year, my doorbell rang, and when I went out, I found two bulbs had been removed from my string, which was out. The bulbs were set nicely on the ledge.
I had the politest hooligans that year. I put the bulbs back in and never had another issue.
