For anyone looking for a taste of Nextdoor’s weirdest, silliest posts — from fireworks complaints to paranoid neighbors spying on each other — Jenn Takahashi’s @BestofNextdoor Twitter account has everything.
Best of
Takahashi, who lives in
Q: How did you get the idea for BestofNextdoor?
A: I first joined
A neighbor had written an absolutely delicious post accusing us of rearranging her lawn gnomes at night and she was not happy about it. To top it off, the lengthy post was “signed” by every single member of the entire lawn gnome family (and there were quite a few members!).
This apparently didn’t deter the lawn gnome rearranger because she started posting about it daily. I was obsessed. This became part of the daily routine for both of us — she would post her accusation at the same time every day, and I would come home and read it every day. It became a reminder to me to not sweat the small stuff.
Eventually, I moved to another neighborhood, where I found that the
Q: Do you have a favorite
A: Definitely Seahawks Cannon. I had only had the Twitter account for a couple months when I came across a tweet from someone saying that a
Q: How many submissions do you get?
A: Hundreds a month.
Q: What are some recurring themes?
A: Something that always surprises me is how often people try to use
Another recurring theme is, for some reason, a lot of
Q: Have you had interactions with
A: Yes, they are not amused.
Q: What do you think makes
A: These people actually live next to each other! It’s one thing to get in fights with anonymous randoms on Twitter but getting into explosive arguments with people you know, in front of your entire neighborhood, when you literally have to live next to these people every single day? That’s a whole new ballgame.
Q: Do you make money from it?
A: I’m extremely protective of this account and the community it fostered so I have been very selective about making money from it. In the five years I’ve had this account, I’ve only accepted one partnership deal — with Netflix to promote the film “The Woman in the Window.” It was the perfect partnership to me because it was literally about crazy neighbors and I felt like it was something that my audience could enjoy. Other than that, I’m happy losing money from this account because the community makes it so fun to run.
Q: There is some darker, racist stuff on
A: Yes, unfortunately. This is something that I’ve struggled with in the past — I understand why people sometimes send these horrific posts to me but at the same time, I don’t want to amplify that negativity into the world. It’s important to me to stay true to why I started this account in the first place —
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