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Is Nextdoor.com the new Facebook?

What is supposed to be a platform for neighbors is now a place for restless people to vent

Hoang Samuelson
4 min readApr 30, 2020
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

Besides Instagram, I don’t normally venture into other platforms very much. In fact, I wasn’t aware that Nextdoor.com even exists until last year, when a former colleague and friend of mine told me about it. “It’s very helpful,” she said, when I asked her if I could use the site to find a babysitter.

Indeed, Nextdoor.com’s mission is to help deliver a connection to your neighbors, who you might not see on a regular basis. On their website, the mission statement states, “Nextdoor is the neighborhood hub for trusted connections and the exchange of helpful information, goods, and services.”

So I signed up for an account, but never found a good babysitter, and didn’t log in again for quite some time. It wasn’t until the other night when, out of curiosity, I decided to log back in to see if anyone knew how to find a dog breeder (we’ve been thinking about getting a dog), that I began to see how the site has morphed into a very familiar place, one that I said goodbye to several years ago — Facebook.

Nextdoor’s platform is very similar to Facebook — there are chat options, direct messaging options (an inbox, if you will), a Home button where general postings are…

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Hoang Samuelson
Hoang Samuelson

Written by Hoang Samuelson

Features Editor @ Chowhound. Former lead editor @BooknBrunch.com. Writer of food, family and fiction. Based in Portland, OR. More at hoangsamuelson.com

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