In my opinion, having met some of the team, I think Nextdoor is doing things the right way. The require real names and real addresses, which encourages real community building and discourages bad behavior (tho obviously what some consider bad is not bad tonothers). There is a more neighborly feel to the site, and depending on the community it can be can be pretty active and valuable. And the team seems genuinely committed to positively supporting community. On the downside I find the whole system to be less well designed for any given purpose than other services, but overall it’s pretty functional.
There is, as far as I can tell, no revenue model, and that leads me to be worried about the sale of personal data for advertising or other purposes, since obviously the data that they’re cultivating is the highest value “hyper local” stuff they can get. I haven’t checked their policies, but you probably should before signing up.
