When neighbors start talking good things happen. It's not just a

cliche it's also the pitch for next door which is a social networking site

that connects people in the same geographic neighborhood.

But as next door has learned over the last couple of months, when neighbors start talking,

they often talk politics.

And sometimes bad things can happen.

Things can get kind of ugly.

Rebecca Hialweil has a story for RICOD.

Hey Rebecca.

Hey, so a bit of context, some people may have vaguely heard of Next Door.

Tell me what is Next Door in a few sentences?

Basically the idea is to connect people in a given neighborhood and ideally the platform would be used to help people find a lost dog or a babysitter or general neighborhood things like supporting small businesses.

But it's also pretty big. I think next door says it has more than

219,000 neighborhoods registered in the US, which is obviously a lot. And it

seems to be working out well enough that now Facebook is announcing it has a similar model that it's testing called neighborhoods.

And this has gotten particularly big right during the pandemic. I know I personally have started looking at it more.

They say they have 10 million users now in the US?

Yeah, I think that was the number.

I think people are just spending more

reliant on local institutions now.

And you make a good point.

I mean, the site is popular because the lost dog,

...