Before technology we used to converse with our neighbors. Waking up and taking out the trash was fruitfully partnered with a nice conversation with whatever neighbor was out as well.

Technology has used creative destruction to successfully eliminate these nice relationships between neighbors.

A new app has become the forefront of this revolutions. The app is called Nextdoor and it has taken Marin by storm. Parents, kids, police departments, and other groups use it for a variety of different things.

From students advertising themselves as tutors, to parents selling spare items they have around the house.

Just by posting a brief advertisement onto the feed, hundreds of people in the area can view the offer.  This is exactly the method senior Ben Berman used.

“I posted an ad on the app one day and within minutes I had people messaging me to tutor their kids. It’s been my part-time job the past few weeks” he said.

Other beneficial knocks this app has on Marin’s front door is its useful ability for neighbors to offer up loose items they have laying around the house for a good offer to other users in their community.

By opening the app, you have entered the world of online shopping. One user offers up a backpack, another says they are looking to buy a used 2007 or newer Honda Pilot, another throws out an ad for used woodworking tools. It’s explosive.

Tom Brown a San Anselmo resident, used the Nextdoor app as a way to get rid of an old bike of his, a quick and easy way to make a few extra bucks.

Not all parts of this app are beneficial.  Parents seem to use the app to catch their kids doing suspicious things, and it has become a hub for people in the area to gossip about what’s going on around them.

Publically displaying one’s opinion towards something current and local is not necessarily a bad thing, until a line is crossed. When one parent singles out children who are not their own, I believe they have crossed that line.

A social app is certainly not the place for parents to be posting about catching teens participating in questionable activities. There is definitely a better place to do so where they do not humiliate the teens in front of hundreds of local parents and app users. That place is in real life, by confronting the teen or their parents face-to-face.

I don’t think it would make me stop participating in whatever activity I was being posted about. Instead I would just have lots of anger towards whoever wrote about me. It wouldn’t “teach me a lesson.”

There are many pros and cons to this app, however, it is not beneficial to our community. It has become a place where judgment seems to be far too common. And the benefits, such as the ability to advertise tutoring services, and sell spare items, are easily done through multiple other social media apps.