Nextdoor River Heights
A History
I felt like we hit the big time with our 2016 River Heights community garage sale when we had an actual food truck at the event! :)
Back in 2014 a friend in Florida told me if I started a Nextdoor neighborhood like hers she and I would both get $25 Amazon gift certificates. And so it began.
And, no, it wasn’t much money in 2014 either.
I selected the boundaries. There weren’t any other Nextdoor neighborhoods in Menomonie at the time so I could put them wherever I wanted. I walked door to door inviting everyone in River Heights to sign up. Less than half of the families chose to join at the time but it was enough to build some community.
The point was to have a social media page that only residents of the neighborhood could join, where we could talk about lost pets, local crimes, events, etc. We also planned community garage sales through the site for several years.
Over time, more and more Nextdoor neighborhoods popped up. Today, almost all addresses in Menomonie are within the boundaries of one neighborhood group or another.
To the east there is Nextdoor Fryklund Dr/24th Ave.
To the north there are 13th - 16th Ave and Old Menomonie Nextdoor neighborhoods.
To the south we have Lower Ingalls/430th St and
To the west, Westbank.
It turns out that the corporation that hosts these social media sites is Nextdoor Holdings, Inc. in San Francisco. It has had its share of controversy according to Wikipedia. Gradually, Nextdoor has become more and more invasive, with ads and public service announcements. Also, now that it lets you receive messages from other local neighborhoods, it can be very confusing and hard to work with.
During COVID, at one point, I got so frustrated with the agenda expressed by some of the psa announcements, that I tried to delete the whole online “neighborhood.” Guess what. I can’t.
There is no delete button in the control of the founders and leads!
So I created a monster that I cannot kill. That said, Nextdoor River Heights is still useful when you want to communicate with others in your neighborhood. Each person needs to make their own decision about whether or not to be a part of it. If you play with the settings, you have some control over who you post to and what you see on your newsfeed, but it is still very confusing.