Hacker News Reader

>The firm operates a website that enables members who live in close proximity to communicate with each other, offer goods for sale and organize virtual neighborhood watches.

Hmmm I wonder if forcing people to be social is a good thing.

Why can't Facebook coordinate something like this?

Theoretically, couldn't they look at each person's ip address and determine that they are in the same neighborhood and force those people to interact?

View on HN

My understanding when I last played with Nextdoor a couple years ago was that they do address verification either through mailing you a postcard or some sort of phone numbers/credit card check. And then you can only interact with people in your neighborhood, or the adjacent ones.

While Nextdoor is technically a subset of Facebook the same way snapchat's disappearing pictures and twitters character limit also is, having a restriction/focus makes the product more compelling to certain people.

There are a lot of small apps/products out there that I was wondering the same thing - why doesn't Facebook try this, they have all the data and 1000's of engineers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com