When they started mentioning WhatsApp, I did have the briefest thought that this could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor.
There's certainly opportunity. NextDoor comments here are of mixed quality. And the NextDoor feed seems to have the ad saturation cranked up unpleasantly high.
> Thus, the WhatsApp group was born. At first this was just a place to announce when we’d be out having stoop coffee, but we soon realized people wanted to connect over more things than just coffee. So we ended up converting the group into a WhatsApp Community where we could have chats dedicated to certain topics or groups and plan other types of events together.
> This could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor.
This is kinda funny from my perspective. In most of the world WhatsApp reigns supreme to such a degree, that advertising for it would have the same pointlessness of a Coca Cola ad. In LATAM every neighborhood, department building, workplace and school has a multitude of Whatsapp groups.
The good and functioning ones are: work related, have people that organically have become dang or are too small to receive "manual" spam / random petty fights. The "manual" spam is people sending MLM scams, annoyingly advertising their side hustles, political or religious message chains. People also will fight publicly because someone may or not have flirted with someone else's husband. Forums are eternal.
The only thing like NextDoor here is SoSafe, a community safety app, which quarantines the crazy people that see an "undesirable" taking a walk and wants to call the cops.
I agree that this would be a pointless exercise in advertising WhatsApp, but this is a kinda funny comparison. Coca-Cola is advertised like crazy. Unlike WhatsApp, advertising is an essential part of how they maintain their dominance. They don't have the network effects of WhatsApp.
BTW, good comments, and sorry for the meta aside, but please be careful when quoting. I said:
> When they started mentioning WhatsApp, I did have the briefest thought that this could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor.
But the quote of a fragment of that, without ellipses, and somehow capitalized, looks like a verbatim quote of an entire sentence, which changes the meaning substantially:
> This could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor.
The difference in meaning is irrelevant to your comments, but, in general, others who come along will see and respond to quotes, so quotes take on a life of their own, while remaining attributed to a person (who didn't necessarily say that).
Even before we had some unelected mentally ill person making Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and then still handed them unprecedented powers to disassemble our government... and a whole lot of people seeming fine with that...
The signs of a populace with wildly conflicting values, a lot of anger, a lot of mental illness, and a lot of cognitive problems and knowledge deficit... has been apparent in online comments for a couple decades.
One thing with NextDoor might be that it's developed a reputation. So that many people expect that the typical post will be some alarmed retiree posting a doorbell cam photo of a "suspicious person" going to doors on their street, who was obviously delivering packages while being nonwhite. In real life, most people would minimize interaction with the alarmed person, not install an app to get more of it.
Another thing with NextDoor is that some aspects of the experience are really user hostile. Besides the ad saturation-bombing, and the user interface that could use some cleanup and straigtening-out, there's things like 2FA (for Nextdoor!). I'd love to see numbers on how many users that 2FA alone cost them, and what they got in return. A UI cleanup is possible only if it's not overruled by the people doing the ad saturation, where user confusion just means more opportunity to show ads (until those users dont' come back, and don't bring their friends, but that's someone else's KPI this quarter).
In the rest of the world (London, at least), WhatsApp is used for communities/building developments. It's the exact same NextDoor hell, but just with more instant messaging.
There's certainly opportunity. NextDoor comments here are of mixed quality. And the NextDoor feed seems to have the ad saturation cranked up unpleasantly high.
> Thus, the WhatsApp group was born. At first this was just a place to announce when we’d be out having stoop coffee, but we soon realized people wanted to connect over more things than just coffee. So we ended up converting the group into a WhatsApp Community where we could have chats dedicated to certain topics or groups and plan other types of events together.