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Comment by askafriend | Hacker News Reader

This is why I'm bullish on Nextdoor.com for making inroads into local news and local reporting. I think they're well positioned and best incentivized to pick up the hyperlocal online distribution.

Facebook, Twitter, Snap, etc are all too saturated with content that's scoped so globally that local content has a tough time penetrating through. Nextdoor on the other hand is built for local and has the perfect geographic and privacy model to take things really really local in a way that others can't.

They'll be able to make money in a way that independent local newspapers can't, but they'll also hopefully be able to drive demand enough to incentivize local journalists, reporters and even super engaged citizens.

Nextdoor doesn't fill this use-case super well today, but I think they can pull it off if they choose to focus on it. They certainly have all the right ingredients.

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Nextdoor suffers a lot of the same problems of traditional social media, the ease of spreading dis-information.

Recently our city council was proposing a special assessment against each property in our neighborhood of about 100 houses to rebuild our roads. The project was estimated to cost each tax payer $50,000 in a neighborhood of houses where the values range from $150,000-$250,000. Yes, they wanted to take $50,000 from each home, in addition to normal property taxes that should pay for infrastructure, to rebuild our road.

One of the councilman’s wife (someone that most would think is informed) was posting on Nextdoor claiming the special assessment was something the residents of the neighborhood would vote on and that residents should vote yes on the special assessment to beautify their neighborhood and that anyone who votes no clearly doesn’t care about their neighborhood. The problem with this is the special assessment clauses in the city ordinances do not provide a mechanism for residents to vote. It’s purely a vote of city council members. So here we have a city councilman’s spouse spreading falsehoods about how city government works. I reported the posts and countered them both with citations of ordinances and recorded questions about the process at city council hearings but because she has a large following and more ‘influence’ in the Nextdoor sphere I was labeled a liar and crazy person that doesn’t care about his neighborhood. Nextdoor did nothing to stop the dis-information.

I’m aware it’s only one anecdote but I find it hard to believe that Nextdoor can become any reliable source of local news when it’s so easy to post and spread straight up falsehoods on the platform.

I hope they voted yes and paid 50k?

fwiw, separate from the topic at hand, your experience of shockingly large road/sewer bills coming due is rapidly going to become normal. for a walk through of the math check out about three minutes of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVaEmg-S-j0&t=10m50s

most of these american exurban developments of 50 - 250 homes, with no other meaningful town or tax base, down winding side roads and cul-de-sacs, got built starting in the 80s and really ramping up in the 90s. they are all 40 - 60 year infrastructure financial time bombs.

the math never worked, it was just built on a long enough horizon that everybody got to assume it would be someone elses problem.

I sense some Strong Towns in this comment!

that anyone who votes no clearly doesn’t care about their neighborhood

It's exactly this kind of assertion, combined with followup attacks which is degrading public discourse in 2019.

I reported the posts and countered them both with citations of ordinances and recorded questions about the process at city council hearings but because she has a large following and more ‘influence’ in the Nextdoor sphere I was labeled a liar and crazy person that doesn’t care about his neighborhood.

Fits the general pattern to a T. Might makes right. I have the most followers, therefore I am right. I have control of the forum, therefore I am right. How is it the general population doesn't have a basic grasp of epistemology? In 2019, it seems like fully half of the population thinks might makes right is intellectually worthy!

What if you wrote up a pamphlet and started talking to people in person?

Eventually that’s what happened. A couple of neighbors organized and put out pamphlets to have an in person meeting with one of the councilmen to get things set straight as to how the process would move forward. Participation was quite high which really gives me hope that the world isn’t completely broken.

As of now the plan is to put out a millage for vote across the whole city to cover several city infrastructure projects.

Sadly, completely expected. Nextdoor should be called 'busybody'. IMHO the negatives outweigh the positives.

The real problem is that Nextdoor has no incentive to fix it, in fact they have a disincentive. Their business model seeks posts that spread like wildfire, pitchfork-ism and the like.

I discuss our local situation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734501

I guess if Nextdoor wanted to get in on that, they could hire journalists, but it is a reasonable outlay of money if you want to scale it, and something they don't currently do. Journalists need editors, and people to manage them who know how to hire the good ones, and probably other stuff that someone like me unfamiliar with the industry isn't even thinking of.

This is not something that can be 'crowdsourced'. Any citizen that sits through some portion of a city council meeting is probably there because they're interested in - and opinionated about - some local issue. This makes them less than ideal 'reporters'.

I think that this problem, that you fear will cause no local reporting to happen, will cause local reporting to still happen. It's just that the local reporting will be poor quality.

Nextdoor? Really? Why not Facebook? Most neighborhoods seem to have a group on Facebook.

About the only thing I've found with Nextdoor is that many of my neighbors are scared of strangers and everybody hates how everybody else drives.

I just checked them out. Looks like their German clone nebenan.de (pretty much a direct translation of "next door") is the winner here. My neighborhood (southern city bowl of a pop 200k town) doesn't yet exist on nextdoor, while nebenan lists 1767 "active neighbors"

Interesting, I just had a look at nebenan[0] and I was pretty much expecting to see a Rocket Internet[1] logo. No such logo, but it was founded by one of Rocket's main cloners[2] so that seems to be the model here too. Nice that they're so subtle with the name.

An interesting twist is that they seem to be involved with senior-citizen organizations. Maybe older folks are more likely to get involved?

As much as I dislike this German cloning model, and find it sad as there's a lot of real creativity in Berlin, I think a service like this might stand a better chance in a country with strong laws around privacy and slander.

[0]: https://nebenan.de/about (in German)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Internet#Controversy

[2]: https://www.ksta.de/wirtschaft/nebenan-de-und-wirnachbarn-co...

[Edit: link formatting]

The average age is certainly not low. I've seen a lot of people I'd guess are quite a bit above 40 or 50. Barely anyone significantly younger than me (33).

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