Facebook and Nextdoor at least has voice of the people, however wrong it is. It truly has both sides opinions. It captures the zeitgeist. I'll take that over any elite-class, university-brainwashed, liberal arts people writing about stuff through their biased lenses
I have some bad news for you. “Elite-class, university-brainwashed, liberal arts people” write about stuff through their biased lenses everywhere, including Nextdoor.
I think you're missing the point, both of you. It's not people's opinions I'd be interested in 50 years from now; it's just what they were talking about. Everyone might have an opinion about some event, but it's the event itself I'd want to know.
How many historical nextdoors are you aware of? For me, none. But is that because they don’t exist or just that no record survived? Social media is secret society.
The point isn't that those people aren't contributing, it's that you get multiple perspectives, even if all of them are skew. You can get extremely accurate positions with many highly unreliable datapoints. because even if they're individually highly inaccurate, where they overlap (and/or where their centroid is) is more accurate than any individual measurement.
Except that 100 people are Nextdoor are not doing the "oversight of courts, local councils and school boards" except in exception circumstances.
They probably aren't even reporting the final numbers in the local council election.
Assuming NextDoor's dataset is around in 100 years (probably not) there will be some topics well represented. But you are going to have huge gaps in others.