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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

http://nextdoor.com is the leader in this space.

Nextdoor is not so supportive and useful as it is positioned. They mostly for seniors, house owners to keep an eye on security in their neighborhoods rather than to really help each other, IMHO.

I’d say Chummy (https://chummyapp.com) is the social network of local reciprocal help Neighbourly is heading to become. The major differences between the most popular social networks in the US, though, got illustrated there: https://chummyapp.com/why-chummy/

I didn’t like having to give them my real address or phone number. I hope the Google version of this is a little more lenient, but I doubt it will be.

Would you prefer all users be allowed access to any neighborhood group they choose?

Yes. Otherwise you end up with carve outs like happened to a friend in Bellaire, TX. The City of Bellaire uses Nextdoor to send out emergency alerts and other useful information, but the citizens and not the city decide the Nextdoor boundaries for "City of Bellaire".

So my friend who lives in a neghborhood of condos that the snobs in million dollar homes intentionally left out can't get the alerts from his own municipality.

No, I would prefer that they just use my geo-location.

I wouldn’t even mind if they asked me every couple of months or so to verify my location.

And how would they verify it?

Spoofing geolocation is possible too.

Big deal. How many people are actually going to go to the trouble to do that to talk to people in my neighborhood where they don’t even live?

I could have easily tricked Nextdoor into doing whatever I wanted to. But shouldn’t have to waste my time.

Yeah, I'm on to check out nextdoor right now and see how many problems it solves for.

I joined a few months ago and found it is mildly useful, and I consider that a compliment. It works for what it is, doesn't try hard to be something it isn't, and actually makes you feel a bit more part of a community. I think the key in using it is to not treat it like reddit/facebook/whatever, and avoid having discussions with people except in a polite manner. Flaming out in a discussion with some other geek on the other side of the country is very different than pissing off your neighbor that is a prominent figure at your kid's school.

I was very wary of it, but now feel ok recommending it with that provision. Tread lightly ;)

I use it (lightly), but found it mostly full of useless information like neighbors freaking out because a car of minorities drove through their neighborhood and looked suspicious.

Then, I found this Twitter account that just shares all of the hilarious things they see on Nextdoor and it is pretty funny: https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor

I joined too, because of their aggressive (in a nice way) marketing effort: every user who joins is encouraged to invite 3+ people, to whom physical paper postcards will be mailed out.

I was skeptical at first, but it turned out to be more than I expected.

In some ways, it's a downside: turns out I'd rather not know what kind of opinions my neighbors have on issues like housing projects and public transportation, and have PSA with security camera pictures in the feed whenever a suspicious (read: minority) person walked past someone's home.

On the other hand, perhaps it's for the better not to live in a bubble.

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