My next door neighbor is a bona fide “Karen”. She is a super nosy, aggressive and bossy middle aged woman, and she annoys the hell out of me. The last time my SiL came by my apartment, I received a complaint from her the next day that she had parked in a sloppy manner and straddled the line between spaces. The fact that she even knows my SiL’s car and notices her comings and goings is creepy to me. 
Yes, very easily. But it’s really not as bad as you’re thinking. We’re relaying the worst of it but it’s not all bad. I’ve gotten great recommendations for plumbers, exterminators, handymen, mechanics, restaurants, etc. Help with missing cat, neighborhood news.
What does this have to do with the Nextdoor website?
Yeah, I’m griping about some simpletons who annoy me, but there’s good stuff too.
We recently had to get rid of more than 40 large retaining stones because of a landscaping project we’re doing. I advertised them as free on Nextdoor, and within a couple of hours some folks with a pickup truck showed up and lifted them up and hauled them all away.
Before that, we had a buttload of used moving boxes filling our garage, and I did the same thing. Advertised them as free, and within a few hours they were all gone.
I also check to get recommendations about local servicepeople (though I cross-check their recommendations against yelp), and that has been very useful, too.
Well, Nextdoor is infested with Karens (male versions as well).
So… not unlike the SDMB then !
ETA: …and i see others have made the same point ! The irony.
Nextdoor isn’t all bad- it’s actually fantastic for local recommendations for services, tradespeople, etc…
Restaurants are kind of hit or miss; you’ve got to keep in mind that a lot of the time, the people recommending restaurants have different dining priorities than you might. I mean, I tend toward a high quality and interesting focus when I’m looking for restaurants. Things like price, portion size or the “comfort” of a restaurant are much less important to me. But on Nextdoor, you’ll find a lot of people who’ll recommend and upvote places that have mediocre food because they serve a lot of it, and that food is both “comfortable” (i.e. not too spicy, intense, or unusual), and the place itself is comfortable. There’s a barbecue place I’m thinking of near me that’s a perfect example. Barely mediocre barbecue at best, but it’s got the bog-standard menu for bbq places, its prices are reasonable, and the place is more salt-of-the-Earth than a lot of others. And it gets recommended in every thread about good barbecue places nearby because everything about it is good but the food. Which is kind of the exact opposite of why I might recommend somewhere- my idea of awesome might be a sketchy taqueria that serves mind-blowing tacos, but where nobody speaks English and the place is clearly being run on a low budget.
So you have to keep that kind of thing in mind when you’re looking at Nextdoor for matters of taste and personal opinion
I took the plunge and signed up.
My newsfeed is some lost and found dogs and a stream of advertising for “one weird trick to defeat amazon prime”. And somebody asked a question about a police response to what was almost certainly an MVA nearby. To which nobody had a response.
It’s a bit interesting to me that the site can’t really tell / show me what they consider to be my “neighborhood”. They gave it a reasonably descriptive name that would suggest it’s a 2-3 mile chunk that I’m on the near periphery of, but the news feed and the few other sections of the site I’ve delved into include stuff from 3 blocks away and stuff from 20 miles away across unremitting dense suburbia. Which 20 miles is most assuredly not my “neighborhood” by any reasonable definition of the word.
I also live in a rather non-neighborly area, so my experience here may be wildly atypical. But it will be interesting to watch.
Yeah, I’ve got my actual neighborhood listed, but the threads encompass what seems to be a sort of roughly circular shape that is about 4-5 miles in radius, and I live in what I’d describe as the middle-suburbs of Dallas (it was the outskirts in the late 1960s).
I’d have thought that 2-3 miles would be the outside limit of what I’d think of as “my neighborhood”, but apparently it’s twice that on Nextdoor.
Nextdoor serves an initial post only to people who are set to receive posts from the neighborhood where that post came from. But, when people in neighboring neighborhoods follow up on that post, it gets served to people who care about the neighborhoods from which the followups were posted as well, transitively.
Repeat for a while, and you’ll see hot-button posts walk failrly quickly across a large metro area.
Kinda defeats the “hyperlocality” of it all, but it drives “engagement”, which is what social networks are graded on, so its what they do.
Much like discussions about HOAs. You always see complaints about HOAs which are run by tinpot dictators who see the HOA as their own private fiefdom, which impose huge fines on members (and sometimes even non-members) who violate their rules, and which even manage to seize members’ property. However, as I’ve said in the past, I have never had any problem with my HOA, which has provided me with many needed services, and even on the few times when I got a complaint from the management company it was always settled amicably.
The town/small city near where I used to live continues to be a cesspool of scams and crime according to Nextdoorites.
One warrior mom just posted about suspicious young women (“3 white 1 black”) supposedly walking up driveways and peering into windows in her neighborhood.
“I saw them walk up my driveway and then immediately turn around. I’m not gonna play with anyone. It’s all fun and games until you’re mistaken for a threat. I have small kids in my house to protect.”
So if they come back, she’s going to open fire and ask questions later?
Someone posted on NextDoor around me about a car that drove into their cul-de-sac and parked for a moment, then turned around without using anyone’s driveway. Obviously that’s because they wanted to keep their license plates from being recorded by a camera, not because of not wanting to trespass on someone’s driveway
Way too many idiots who use stupid Subject lines like “Hi” or “Who knows”. I’m not clicking through on that.
Reviving this thread with another complaint. I can’t figure out why some threads get “disappeared” there.
A neighbor a block or two down had her house broken into and the place was robbed and ransacked. We saw the police cars down the street. She posted about it, and detailed what happened (they got in through an unlocked side gate, then broke through a door into her garage - they were caught on her Ring). I was happy she was keeping her neighbors informed, and as a result of her thread, we put a lock on our side gate and took some other greater security measures.
Then after a day, her entire thread was disappeared. I can’t imagine why; she didn’t discuss ethnicity, nobody responded with anything derogatory or political or controversial. If I hadn’t happened to see the post before it was taken down, we might not have taken the security steps that we did.
What the hell?
maybe (big maybe) … it was too much of a “how to break into many houses in this sector” thread?
Or maybe she decided she overshared and deleted it herself? Concerned her insurance company would find fault in what she stated?
Hmmm, that could be. Other threads discussing prowlers and crime disappear, too, though. I always assumed it was because the conversations started straying into touchy areas.
And now a second break and enter crime a few blocks away, showing the exact same M.O. There’s a long thread about it and I think I’ll print it out before it gets disappeared, too.
According to what I’ve read about Nextdoor moderation, content can be reported if it violates Nextdoor’s Community Guidelines.
Per Nextdoor:
Members commonly report posts that contain:
Incivility, personal disputes, shaming, or discrimination
Over-posting
Posts better suited to a direct message or a group
Non-neighborhood related content.
Your situations seem to involve over-moderation.
Could you complain about this?