Comment by sgwealti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgwealti | Hacker News Reader

I joined this a few years back and at first it seemed like a really nice concept. Two things turned me off to it:

1) Way too much email. There is no weekly digest so you are either going to get daily emails for the different categories/types of notifications or none at all. I got sick of all the email and unsubscribed.

2) It really started to depress me seeing all the racist posts and petty complaints people in my neighborhood were posting. Up until then I thought of most of my neighbors as nice people. After seeing all the "suspicious black teenager seen on X street" posts and other awful petty stuff I started to feel like I would rather not know what they think. Basically Nextdoor makes me feel like I live in a neighborhood of racist, bullying busybodies who have way too much time on their hands.

Exactly my experience. Turns out my neighborhood is full of kooks. One of my favorite threads is a group of neighbors encouraging everyone to boycott the local Von's until it stops being so "ghetto". In retrospect I think nextdoor might be a good way to scope out a neighborhood when you're in the market for a new house.

Doesn't work like that. You have to verify your residence in order to join that neighborhood.

Agreed on the second item. It's sort of like Facebook - I liked people better before I saw what they post. In both cases I suspect that a lot of it has to do with the kind of people that are predisposed to post things.

That said, it's not all bad. It can be handy for recommendations for tradesmen, lost & found notices, and that sort of thing.

Way too much email. So you go to turn it off.

And find that there's no "Stop sending me email" button. Instead, click, click, click, TWENTY TIMES to turn off or change email notifications:

https://twitter.com/FireBeyond/status/572889977589141505

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_NQZfsVAAI3VPn.png

Email notifications are totally configurable. I've set mine to "urgent alerts" & "free stuff" only, and otherwise just get daily digests.

These are things I thought of when I heard of it a few months ago. Sad to hear they are true.

I was discussing the email problem with a friend a few months back. Without researching further, I just assumed they pivoted the business to become a spam farm.

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