I recently signed up for Next Door because the flyer I received made it sound like a cool site for neighbors to keep in touch about happenings in the neighborhood. Well, that was a big fat lie. This site is essentially a place for neighbors to spy on, or rat on other neighbors. And if you happen to be a minority simply walking through the neighborhood, you are assured to have some little bitty report you.

"There's a suspicious person that keeps looking at the house across the street. They're African-American and have been taking photos of the house for the past 10 minutes. I'm not sure if they're casing the house, so I contacted the police non-emergency number" -What was left out of this delightful posting was that the house across the street was FOR SALE.

"There's two suspicious African-American men who have been parked in a van down the street from me. They're just sitting there on their phones and I'm not sure if they casing the neighborhood, so I called the police non-emergency number." -Absent from this report is that the van was a DELIVERY VEHICLE.

Oh, there's reports on neighbor's yards, neighbor's cars, neighbor's pets... even reports from apparently whacked-out right-wingers who hate everything and everyone around them. They always make outlandish claims like "people lining up around the block at a recently vacated building to apply for welfare," or "the liberal city council wants ISIS to move to Portland," or "the liberal governor wants open borders" and other such nonsense.

As of this writing, I have deleted my profile on Next Door.