Nextdoor: Neighborhood Network Ratings and Reviews

Nextdoor App

I was recently told about this app and I instantly went on my play store and looked it up, read a few of the reviews and comments about the app, because I’m not one who just down loads just any app to my phone because there are some of these apps that are really just trash and there are usually a lot of those scammers on a lot of those apps like What’s App. I wouldn’t download that app to my phone if they paid me money to do it, just a bunch of scammers on the app, but anyway I am really enjoying this next door app. I have connected to a few of my neighbors that live around me and I also find the app very helpful in very many ways so I would definitely recommend this app to anyone else that’s looking for a app that connects you to other people who are interested in keeping their neighborhoods safe and it’s really good to see how people communicate with each other through the app. So I love it so far and I’m looking forward to meeting many more of my neighbors regardless of where they live. And another thing that I really find very great about this app, is that there are also so many people who are also interested in just helping other people out regardless of their ability to pay for the services or the items that they are offering. It’s a really great app for sure and it’s a really great way to help people out.

Options on the app

I love this app for so many reasons. I like knowing about car break ins, and things to be aware of for safety of my children at specific times in the day when people mention strange people in the neighborhood.
I love responses I get about experienced neighbors have had with specific out patient care like doctors, dentists, and other providers in the area. This app is great for new comers and very welcoming. We learn about good restaurants, outdoor activities, and good vendors etc.
The reason I gave this a low rating is because I would live the option to hide specific posts about animals on the lose, or families looking for their animals, and everyone letting each other know when their animals came home or when/where they were located.
There have been SO many posts that I wish that there could be a separate option within this app to view the “animals on the loose” posts. It would streamline pertinent information for those individuals who are looking for their animals, and if one was wandering ppl can post in this specific area and allow non-animal owners, or those of us who aren’t seeing lost animals, to streamline the information on the page.

Buggy, SLOOOOW, and where is everything??!

Nextdoor has become increasingly slower and buggier, and options that were easy to find before are now hidden and take several clicks to locate. You can swipe and swipe and swipe before the screen will actually scroll. Clicking on a post or image? Hurry up and wait, and half the time now the whole app freezes up. Even typing a comment is a monumental effort … I’ll have the entire sentence typed before it shows up on my screen. Then there’s the censors and moderation. I’m a neighborhood lead and have been for several years. I petitioned hard to become one. But then Nextdoor decided to dump a bunch of random people in as moderators. Many have absolutely NO idea what the rules regarding content even are! They’ll flag one word comments like, “Really?” as public humiliation. Because it was directed toward them or their pal. *true story* It’s frustrating to those of us who originally were tasked with this responsibility. Nextdoor’s auto-censor algorithms are utterly ridiculous too … flagging words like “stupid” or “jerk” and reminding us to be “nice.” 😐 Nextdoor: you have an awesome thing going here, great idea overall and content, but PLEASE bring back the earlier format! Speed things up, minimize the constant barrage of irrelevant ads, and go back to neighborhood leads only instead of all this random crap. I don’t expect a response to this review … Nextdoor isn’t real keen on that sort of thing either unfortunately.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for sharing your feedback, neighbor. We’ve recently redesigned the layout of Nextdoor to focus on the features that Neighbors use most based on our research and user feedback. This article should be helpful in navigating the new layout: https://nxdr.co/3oACmw2. If you have questions along the way, please let us know, here: http://nxdr.co/socialcare. We've shared your thoughts with our team, as hearing from neighbors like you helps us improve.

Very Petty in my Opinion

I wish I could give this app zero stars. It is too draconian and it has too many perfectionists, in my opinion. If you post the wrong question or word it incorrectly, even if you mean no harm, someone will come and rub it in your face. I have posted honest questions that were meant to be innocent questions, and one of my recent questions attracted a whole lot of bad comments and negativity, even though it was not meant to be a negative question… and even though I decided to delete my own post later on, my account was still suspended anyway. This is beyond petty in my opinion. On top of that, I kept on trying to change my email and I was met with nothing but glitches. Also, when I tried signing out of my account and signing back in, it signed into a duplicate account that I had accidentally created months ago… but I could not get back into my original account with a profile picture, description, and everything. So I just decided to deactivate my account for good and I might not ever come back, even though there are some benefits to having an account with this app. I also do not think that you should have to give out your “exact” address to have an account, this is ludicrous in my opinion. In my opinion, you should also be allowed to use a middle name instead of a last name. I honestly have no idea how this app has gotten so many great reviews, especially with all of these frustrating glitches that I had to deal with.

Scrolling hitches

Update: I uninstalled the app (which said it would delete its data), restarted my phone, then reinstalled it. The first couple of times I ran the app, scrolling was smooth again. What was quite weird is: I didn’t have to log into NextDoor again. So it kept some of my data, somewhere (key store?). It did ask for permission to send notifications again. Anyway, let’s see if the scrolling problem builds up again.

April ‘22 The scrolling hitches are still there. If you keep the panel moving slightly, even by dragging up and down, it will scroll smoothly through pages and pages of content. But the moment the panel stops completely, you cannot scroll at all for 3-5 seconds. Not can you hit buttons. The app doesn’t heat up the phone, so it’s not stuck in a loop. It just goes idle, and forgets to poll for input. Obviously, QA would have noticed this. So it must be an issue w iPhone 8, only. Maybe a bad assumption about equal update rates everywhere? I’m on the latest OS.

March ‘22: The last few versions have a performance bug where scrolling hitches, and buttons are unresponsive for a moment. No other apps on my iphone8 are doing that. I love the service and seeing local posts. Also, it would be nice as an admin of a group to be able pin/unpin posts in the app. Right now, you can only do that on the web.

Beware! Absolutely NO REGARD for your personal information!!

I used this app to get help from the local community about an ongoing neighborhood issue. My post got a lot of views in a very short time but a disgruntled neighbor reported me for not using my real name so they disabled my account. I discussed the difference between real name and legal name with them. They don’t understand that for a lot of us, we have the legal name on paper and the name our friends know us by. That’s the name I had put in my Nextdoor App and I consider it as my real name. What’s even more ridiculous is that they asked me to EMAIL a copy of my driver’s license to them for verification. Do they not realize how insecure e-mail is and how common identity theft is? If this is how carelessly they treat our information, I can’t imagine how careless they are with our other information they collect by just using the app. They also said they tried to verify me but couldn’t from their records. I was shocked to hear that they used my information, without permission, for their own verification. I would have never signed up for this app if I had known that they’d be using my information for their own use. I am worried that they are selling my information to third parties for profit. I have asked them to delete all my information from their system but i am still waiting for a response. At the basic human level, why should we allow them to dictate how one wants to introduce oneself?

Developer Response ,

Sorry for the trouble this has caused, neighbor. Our Member Agreement requires every neighbor to use their real name. Neighbors may report accounts they feel are using a false name, leading to temporary suspension while we work w/ you to verify your account. We’d be glad to help sort this out - pls get in touch: https://nxdr.co/apps.

These guys have no clue how to write a decent app

They’ve “revamped” the app so now you can only see the latest few of your saved items, anything past the few they show is now completely inaccessible. The new app design is awful, it takes a bunch more taps and scrolling to do what used to just be a couple taps. I primarily use this for the stuff for sale, and they’ve completely messed it up, tons more painful to use and everything is much harder to use! The app is very spammy, because you don’t have anyway to exclude topics you aren’t interested in, only to “follow” to see everything. For example, it seems like half the posts are about pets, which I have no interest in, but also no way to disable. There's no way to disable notifications for just one thread, so any thing you ever do or participate in, you'll get harassed and inundated with a barrage of notifications for any active conversation. The only other alternative you have is to never participate in any thread to avoid the barrage of notifications. Yeah, that's an incredibly "smart" way to build a social-type app. Not! And even though the app supposedly has notifications settings, it seems to ignore them because I keep getting notifications for types of things I’ve clearly disabled. Because of this I have to keep notifications for the WHOLE app turned off, which means I don't see important stuff going on, which really makes the app pretty useless to me.

Developer Response ,

Hi Phoenix2000, we appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with us. While it's not possible to exclude certain keywords from your feed, we do understand how that could be a useful feature for neighbors. Regarding being unable to turn off notifications for certain threads, we recommend using the "hide" function for any specific threads you don't wish to see notifications for. To do this, locate the post and select the dropdown arrow next to the author's name and select "hide post," then you will no longer see notifications for the post. Lastly, we'd like to take a look at your notification settings to ensure they're working properly - please get in touch with us, here: http://nxdr.co/socialcare. Thanks again for your review - hearing from neighbors like you helps improve Nextdoor, and this is great feedback that we've shared directly with our team.

Way too many updates

This is 11 updates in about a month. You should not be fixing this many bugs in production software, and I certainly don’t see that many improvements wing made. Version history should be an honest change log, not just the same canned text every time. My internet service is capped and for me to consume over 1Gb per month just for updates to one app is totally unacceptable.

Previous review:
This is my weekly review of what’s new in this update. Oh, never mind. Can’t find anything mentioned. So I won’t waste time updating the app. This is a revision of my original review. The version history for this app’s last 25 revisions is the exact same text. If you are adding features, then let us know what they are. If you are fixing bugs, then you need to do more internal testing before releasing the change to the public. I need to know what is changing before wasting my time and internet bandwidth on non-applicable updates. This app is useful to me and works well. However, I am annoyed by numerous apps that do a weekly update. Please do more internal testing so you don’t have to update all the time. I really don’t see much in improvements from week to week. I have a slow internet connection, so dealing with 50 apps that need updating all the time is a major pain.

Bad monitors

So, apparently posting truthful and honest review about someone who is scamming, elderly folks, I’m Social Security, for thousands of dollars is frowned upon by the monitors who I’m sure are his friends. My post is removed for bullying the way provided proof of what this man did to my 79-year-old father on Social Security. This man after several years posted an ad for working on peoples houses which caught my attention right away because I’ve been looking for this man he spent over $5000 of my dad‘s money and never did the work. I have checks to prove it in the house that has no repairs done, after posting on this man’s ad that he should do the right thing he private messaged me trying to give me excuses for why he scammed my dad imagine my surprise since my name is not the same as my dad‘s name and I wasn’t in the area and he scammed my father. How does he know who my dad is he must’ve done some research himself. He knows what he did, the monitors deleted my post and said that I was bullying him not bullying him. He bullied a senior citizen on Social Security and stole over $5000 of his money. How am I bullying this man asking him to do the right thing they removed my post that just makes me mad because that means that this app is not for the negative only for what is happy and lucky and that’s not how the world works so one star for me for not doing the right thing, don’t censor people that are trying to warn others from scammers that’s wrong

Developer Response ,

Thanks for sharing your experience, neighbor. Our guidelines are intended to ensure conversations remain civil, relevant, & neighborly. Content should only be removed if it violates our guidelines: https://nxdr.co/3Fkd77a. If you feel your content was removed in error, please get in touch: https://nxdr.co/apps and we'll take a look.

Cannot block nuisance neighbor on Platform

I started posting a fun fact Friday related to my industry on this platform to draw in potential clients to view my page. There is a particular neighbor that comments on every single post anyone makes and the comments they make are always unrelated and sometimes inappropriate. These comments are condescending and annoying. I attempted to block this person as they were commenting false news/political things/controversial topics, I just don’t want that spread throughout my page because they comment something on every single post. Even going as far as making their own posts mocking other peoples posts. I do not expect Nextdoor to do anything with this person’s account. However, after blocking this individual they are still able to see, react and comment on posts I make. You also are not able to delete other peoples comments on your post. This person is a real neighbor, I didn’t grow up in this area but a friend who did was bullied by this person. I wish to continue advertising on this platform I do enjoy it but this person is ruining it for me and there’s nothing I can do about it. I tried blocking them and I report their comments, I don’t want to respond and feed what they’re doing. If this person continues harassing our community on this platform, without the ability to actually block them then I’m going to discontinue using this platform.