In Halloween 2017, a 3-year-old Chicago boy named Ryan missed his chance to go trick-or-treating because an illness landed him in the ICU. So his mom took to the neighborhood-based social network EveryBlock with atouching request: Would Ryan's neighbors be willing to re-create Halloween three days later? The yeses poured right it.
And when an elderly couple's basement flooded in Columbus, Ohio, in 2014, they posted urgent requests for assistance onFacebook,Twitterand the neighborhood-based siteNextdoor. But it was the Nextdoor connections who actually showed up.
Advertisement
"It was like living in an Amish community, and somebody had rung a bell, 'cause people just came out of the woodwork to help," the grateful husband toldThe Verge.
Stories like these explain the draw of locality-based online social networks. Nextdoor is by far the biggest of these networks, with private community sites operating in more than168,000 neighborhoodsacross the United States (up from40,000 in 2014), and thousands more in the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands. But there are also sites likeNeighborland,E-Democracyand thousands of private neighborhood Facebook groups.
To join most of these neighborhood sites and groups, you need toprove that you actually live in the neighborhood从论坛管理员或获得许可,那一步t ensures that topics and interactions stay local. You also have to use your real name, a buffer against the ugliness that online anonymity often provokes.
Advertisement