Would you be interested in a product to better understand your local environment? Almost like a decentralized CNN for your neighborhood?

There is something already. It’s a website and mobile app called Nextdoor.com. People post local news, happenings, ask for recommendations, market things, etc. There’s also Patch which is solely local news oriented.

There are very few new ideas under the sun unfortunately.

We already have that – actually two different ones.

“the XXXX Patch” for my local neighborhoods

and

Nextdoor -

which does pretty much the same thing.

Mostly the newsgroups are (a) people whining about their neighbors, (b) people looking for lost dogs, or© people selling things.

I stopped reading it because there was never any real news.

@elbanditoroso Do you drink Coke?

To me Nextdoor feels like Facebook repurposed for local. I’ve never used Patch but it also looks similar.

I’m thinking more like TV. This is the most accessible format to everyone, and easiest to create content. I’m less interested in the format of traditional news, and more that of general happenings, whether they be news, memes, or a business that wants to get to know the local crowd.

I’d say TikTok actually has some elements I’m interested. If you’ve ever used it near a college you can get a feel for how students are feeling in many cases, study spots you’ve never heard of, or just a general empathy for the people around you.

I’d say being visual is a strong focus here. And using a visual method to help people understand the people and happenings around them.

The same way a simple 140 character tweet became the town square of the world, I believe there’s something original to be done here with augmented video clips.

If you’re interested, take a look at how the Snapchat Map was the best way to understand some US floods imo. It’s a really interesting new medium to take advantage of.

This is what I was referring to

https://www.wired.com/story/it-took-a-natural-disaster-for-me-to-understand-snap-map/

@janbb we must have been typing at the sametime

^^ Yup

Not really. If it’s fully distributed, I suspect the quality and consistency of the content will be low. Maybe some communities would do well with it, but I suspect a very large majority wouldn’t.

Everyone has that person (or twenty) that they end up having to block on Facebook because they’re clearly bored and pumping out way too much worthless crap into the system. The same kinds of things seem to happen with neighborhood-based apps. You get some over-enthusiastic weirdos who create too much noise to the point that the tool becomes pretty worthless. Sure you can block these people, but it become a chore and people just delete the app. There’s enough to manage in my life and the potential benefit (medium-to-low) of such an app is not balanced out by the hassle factor IMO.

In my opinion, what’s missing in the ‘local news’ online offerings is editorial control.
There is nothing to stop people from publishing false, misleading, or badly written articles to these sites, which make them not much more than local facebook as noted above.

Real news requires some journalistic professionalism that is often lacking in citizen journalists however well-intentioned they are.