Why neighbourhood social media platform Nextdoor is taking off

The Sightgeist by Glen Le Lievre

After I joined the neighbourhood online platform, Nextdoor, I boasted to my son that I’d discovered a local mechanic, a bargain bookcase and the fact that one neighbour was freaked out by huntsman spiders. He replied that his neighbourhood group got to vote on the name of a new craft brewery down the road.

OK, some neighbourhoods are funkier than others but neighbourhood social media is the place to be right now.

Nextdoor arrived in Australia a year ago and it’s slowly spreading through suburbia by the old-fashioned route where residents receive an invitation and password in the letterbox to join the platform. It’s like being given the keys to the city. Or, at least, the local hall.

Online communities have been around for a while — Facebook Communities and WhatsApp groups (maximum 256 members) — but they have come alive in the past few weeks as the world retreats and communities bunker down. Lately, the posts in my digital neighbourhood have been offers of help to shop, walk dogs or check on people. Facebook communities have been conducting guerilla campaigns for toilet paper and, if you believe in that much-quoted exponential curve, this might be the moment the neighbourhood becomes ascendant. They’re making neighbourhoods great again.

And part of the reason why street chat is getting cred is because big social media is losing its mojo. Facebook has been trashed as a place where Russian spies run American elections, terrorists post manifestos and multinationals share your life so they can sell you stuff you were looking to buy a month ago. Twitter has become the home of trolls, baiters and an angry president, and Instagram has devolved into a place where self-anointed influencers work their butts off to get followers who will earn them a free meal/holiday. As the mega media commoditised our friendships, more of us turned to smaller, curated communities such as WhatsApp groups for families and friends or Reddit communities of interest. And, more recently, the neighbourhood platforms switched the digital generation on to the charms of the village.

With policies such as “be helpful, not hurtful” and don’t get on your soapbox, Nextdoor has been described as Twitter for old people and, indeed, these groupings have old-fashioned aims. It’s less about showing everyone how hot your bod looks in a bikini and more about sharing everyday information. Less posture, more postal. Local news, not fake news.

The chit-chat, gossip and gripes that once ­echoed in cafes and butchers’ shops are delivered to inboxes but also collected in bestofnextdoor, a site that lifts the curtain on suburbia. “I left my front door open and my beloved Roomba escaped,” posted one neighbour, with a drawing of his lost robot vacuum cleaner. “Somehow a cat got into my house, maybe two months ago,” was another post. A vegan posted a request for neighbours to stop barbecuing meat on their balconies during the hours she jogged around the area.

Neighbours are good and bad but they are real in a media environment that has been buffed, manipulated and exploited. And, of course, this has not gone unnoticed by the giants of social media. Just last month, Facebook launched a program to train community leaders on how to accelerate community networks.

No doubt the community noticeboards will be absorbed by global players or reconfigured in their own image. They might use local sites to harvest more granular information on our lives. But we know them now, not as well as they know us, but we know their game.

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