> Yeah, it's wild that it's now treated as an authoritative source, especially by some news organizations.

> It's as good as asking a neighbor what happened with a loud noise down the street. Sometimes you'll get something good, sometimes it'll be completely wrong.

Asking my neighbors if they know what some loud noise was or about some local disturbance has been extremely reliable in my experience. The one time someone gave me an explanation about something which wasn't mostly right they qualified it with something like "So-and-so said it might be such-and-such but I don't know if it's true".

You must have an exceptional neighborhood. Everywhere I lived, here's a handy map of "actual cause" :: "what the neighbors said it was"

Car exhaust :: gunshot Appliance delivery truck liftgate :: gunshot Transformer explosion :: gunshot Garbage truck :: gunshot 787 at 25000ft :: complete ruining of peace and quiet Any police activity :: probably someone robbed a bank

For the record, my city has (statistically indistinguishable from 0) homicides and bank robberies and, by American standards (I know, I know) no particular issues with gun crime.

I can imagine it being different in a city. I'm in a fairly quiet suburban area.

One time I heard a loud boom. A few hours later I saw a neighbor outside and asked if he'd heard it and if he knew what it was. He told me a house a few neighborhoods over had exploded. I was a bit skeptical of it but he turned out to be right.

exploded? the house... exploded? like, a gas leak or something?

Drug lab is more probable than a gas leak.

Sources:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/942043/laboratory-incide... - meth lab incidents are down to about 900/yr and have been far higher in the past (presumably because the labs have moved to things besides meth)

https://rpgaspiping.com/blog/critical-safety-tips/gas-safety... (286 natural gas incidents per year) - I've tried to find a more credible source for this number but keep seeing it cited in various places and have no better source, higher or lower.

> Drug lab is more probable than a gas leak.

I can’t tell if you’re trying to demonstrate the problem you have with your neighbors ;)

It was a gas leak, not a drug lab. The utility failed to fix things in a neighborhood where there’d been reports of leaks for years: https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/08/17/eversource-fine-gas-exp...

Yep. The utility had gotten reports of gas leaks on that street previously and didn’t fix it.

Downdetector is nice because it answers my question of "is anyone else having issues with this?" When it takes AWS an hour to even acknowledge "increased error rates", and tells me that everything is a-ok in the meantime, I want another perspective.

Twitter's search used to be my go-to for this - a search for "AWS down" would typically be very illuminating - but it's tough to get it to genuinely spit out the most recent tweets with a keyword these days.

The New York Times just posted a news flash ... citing Down Detector :-P

It's as good as asking a thousand neighbors if they heard anything down the street.