Out of curiosity, is there any way to see what’s being posted in one’s neighborhood prior to signing up? I’m curious about the folks in my neighborhood, but not enough to create an account.
A running theme on my Nextdoor group is that anyone who drives through the neighborhood kind of slowly is definitely suspicious and is certainly casing the neighborhood. There was one such thread with dozens of replies along the lines of “OMG that sounds fishy! Definitely report him to the police!” He turned out to be the newspaper delivery guy.
I wonder if the speeding threshold is lower than the suspicious threshold such that there just isn’t any actual way to drive through the neighborhood without triggering a Nextdoor post. Maybe there’s a window where you both a speeding and a suspicious post for the same drive!
You say that like it’s a bug not a feature. 
You pretty well summarized the entirety of social media. Especially as to current events but for a lot more besides. Sad.
SDMB and the other few long-form systems can rise above that sometimes. Sometimes.
Most of the time-otherwise, battened down as I am, I would never have anyone to ‘talk to’. Now I have hundreds of them (SDMB)
I joined Nextdoor early enough that I am a Lead for my neighbourhood, essentially a moderator. I can validate new members and vote on reported posts, but can’t edit or remove anything.
It’s a lot of garage sales, lost pets, and stolen bikes. Basically the stuff that you can stick up on a pole on the street. I rarely go on.
One of my biggest beefs about Nextdoor is this. Nobody reads previous posts in the thread, and maybe only part of the OP. This is encouraged by the policy of only showing two posts at a time (sometimes one post and one reply) and requiring folks to click (repeatedly if there are a lot of replies) to see more than the last two replies.
Another is that the OP of the thread, if the thread is going badly for him (example below*), can just delete the entire thread with no trace. These are both made possible/necessary by the crappy platform they use, whatever it is.
*One young guy posted a thread with a video from a dashcam or something, supposedly showing other people driving/parking badly in the neighborhood. Someone else pointed out that in the video they failed to stop at a stop sign and were speeding. Next day, entire thread was gone.
I actually forgot to mention that in my last post, about the “suspicious” person that turned out to just be the newspaper delivery guy. Long after someone posted “Hey, I know that guy, he delivers the Sacramento Bee”, people still continued posting “You should report him to the police”, obviously without having read the previous replies.
It’s interesting to read everyone’s tales. Now I know my neighborhood is pretty normal. 
It is sort of depressing to know a lot of your neighbors are idiots but I find it useful and just ignore all the “usual suspects”.
If it hadn’t been for Nextdoor, I would have had to call animal services to pick up a small kitten someone dumped on my porch a few weeks ago. It needed to be hand fed and it only took a couple hours to find someone who was willing to do that. It’s definitely worth having access for those types of situations. (And I locked the thread to keep people from giving me advice after I’d posted that the situation was resolved. Yes, people not reading the entire thread is annoying.)
I have a list of lawn folks I will be calling tomorrow to get some estimates to have the bushes in front of my house trimmed. I found the plumber and electrician (both local guys) I’ve used on there. So, for me, the good outweighs the bad. And I’m keeping an eye out for that crazy lady who is stealing solar lights out of yards. 
That’s not what you’re supposed to do on a message board?! No wonder people keep getting mad at me here. 
I live in a rural area and was curious, so I filled out the requested stuff only to find my area has no Nextdoor group. They encouraged me to get my neighbors interested blah, blah, blah.
I haven’t signed into my nextdoor account for a while so just did to see if my neighbours are as weird as some of yours. The top thread is someone looking for nappies (diapers) for a chicken so it can be kept indoors and not be bullied by the other chickens.
Oh God yes, this makes the whole thing very difficult. (practically impossible on my phone, so I stopped trying)
Wow, I had no idea how lucky we are to live in a well-educated (college) town. Our NextDdoor ain’t that bad. I read it for the occasional “Free crap (Weber grill, boombox) on the curb at 1984 Mockingjay Lane.”
Oh, but also for the inadvertent humor, like the woman who takes a webcam shot of the top half of her face and that’s the image for any “For Sale” item she posts.
…
I did sign up with a fake name, but “Anselmo Pederastie” hasn’t bothered to snark on anyone yet…
Apparently not too many of those well-educated folk reads for content.
I refer to my ND group as The Vigilance Committee. 99% of their posts are
What was that sound?
Why was there a fire truck on Main Street?
Did anyone else hear a gunshot?
My power has been off for 30 seconds. Is anyone else affected?
A helicopter flew over my house! What is going on?!
A car drove slowly past my house. Should I call the police? (Yes!)
Here is a pic of a car that did not stop completely at a stop sign. Is this your young daughter? You should have a serious talk with her.
Please stop shooting fireworks! Won’t someone think of the pets and vets with PTSD?
And now lots of Covid hysteria.
I read the digest from my local group rather than delving into it on a regular basis. The level of stupid in there is quite depressing. Aside from the posts about people acting suspiciously, walking along the street randomly trying car doors in case one’s been left unlocked, and complaining about bonfires and fireworks, the rest seem to post stuff along the lines of “I found a debit card, did anyone lose one?”
This is my take. Just like with SDMB, I can choose what I want to engage in. Baby/bathwater, and all that.
I have a private text thread with about 5 neighbors in my building, and it’s small for a reason. None of this NextDoor crap for us. The examples shared above are pretty typical. I tend to be the building fact-checker and it’s an uphill battle.
One issue is a lot of our crises are potentially real so I have to fight my own panic as well as reassure others, and if it’s real - say so but calmly like “yeh sky’s falling in over there, but only a little, I’ve got a call in, just walk around it, ok?”
Sounds like about half of my local group.
A favorite topic is something to the tune of “How to tell if a house in your neighborhood is a drug house/trap house.”
I want to scream at them that nobody is using a 300k house in the well-off, white suburbs as a drug house. They’d sell it tout suite, and buy a ratty house elsewhere, even if they inherited the house. Not to mention all the paranoid, jittery white people who they’d have as neighbors who are willing to call the cops on people right and left.
Or “Why is the police helicopter circling!!?!?”. Turns out that 90% of the time it’s either a traffic helicopter covering an accident on the nearby freeway, or like today, it was a commercial helicopter emplacing A/C units on the top of the high school building (or something similar).
I’d be tempted to post snark. Something like, “You mean that black helicopter? Good, I’m not the only one who sees it!”