Tips for Using Superhood

We recommend that you first follow your own neighborhood to ensure you get useful information relevant to you. Your home area appears in the app in dark blue. Note that common city-wide news also appears in your neighborhood's newsfeed.

You can later add the entire city, your summer cottage, and other areas of interest as separate newsfeeds. Choose topics for each area according to your interests to keep the news useful.

You can follow other neighborhoods from the "Add Neighborhood" button in the main menu. Let the app find them automatically using your device location, or search for them by name or by scanning the map.

You can also draw your own areas if your local area extends across different neighborhoods, postal code areas, or cities. Note, however, that too large an area makes the newsfeed harder to follow; it's better to follow multiple separate neighborhoods instead.

When you open the app, it checks for and displays the recent news from your home neighborhood in the full-screen "Today" view. Scroll through the news by swiping up (or down to return to the previous article) until all the news has been browsed. You can also exit the "Today" feed by swiping left or right.

Once you reach the main view, you'll find the app's various functions above the newsfeed. The map, event calendar, activities, lost pets, lost and found items, challenges, feed filters, and other functions can be found as icons at the top.

Below the functions, you'll see the neighborhood newsfeed, where you can read, like, or comment on posts. You can also share the posts to other apps or send them to friends. By liking the posts, you can quickly find your favorites later using the "Liked Posts" filter.

You can easily switch between neighborhoods by swiping left or right in the newsfeed. You can manage the feed topics in the "Hood Settings" view, which you can access, for example, by long-pressing the "My Topics” filter button.

Don't open the app for nothing; let it notify you if something important happens in your neighborhood. You can find the notification settings via the bell icon at the top of the main view. Choose the topics you want to be notified about from your hoods, and turn on push notifications. This way, you’ll stay informed about all the important things in your neighborhood.

The notification pause setting lets you define the minimum time the app waits before the next notification. The default pause is four hours.

Local businesses can publish coupons or other perks in the neighborhood newsfeed. You'll notice the perks from the "Grab Coupon" or "Buy Now" icons in posts. By grabbing a perk or purchasing an offer with MobilePay, Apple Pay, or another payment method, you'll receive a coupon to redeem the perk or product from the business that published it.

Your active coupons are saved in your user profile, which you can access from the main menu or via the shortcut button in the bottom right corner of the main view.

Use the coupons by swiping and confirming at the local businesses.

You can find challenges from the newsfeed, identified with the challenge icon. Challenge posts show the location where the challenge can be completed. When you're at or near the challenge location, tap the "I'm Here" button and follow the instructions. After completing a challenge, you may receive a perk or coupon from a local business nearby.

You can manage your newsfeed by blocking disruptive users or accounts. Tap the username at the top of a post, then tap the block icon in the corner of the panel; blocked accounts’ posts will no longer appear in your feed. Blocked users cannot see that you've blocked them.

Similarly, you can mark your favorite accounts by tapping the star at the top of the user info panel. With favorite accounts and the favorites filter, you can quickly find the most important things in your newsfeed.

You can manage the blocked and favorite accounts in your user profile.

At the top section of the app, you'll find the newsfeed quick filters: "My Topics," "Offers," and others. By tapping them, you can quickly see relevant things in your area. For example, the Offers filter shows posts from the local businesses.

You can find the search function and more detailed filters via the magnifying glass icon in the upper right corner of the main view.

You can share Superhood posts to any other channel, like other social media and messaging apps. Simply tap the "Share" button at the bottom of a post and choose the app to share the link to.

You need a user account to comment on posts or publish posts yourself. Note that you can save coupons and benefits without an account, but by creating an account, your coupons are preserved even if you switch devices.

You can create an account from the app's main menu. Tap the menu icon in the top left corner, then tap the user profile icon. You can create a Superhood account using an email or your Apple/Google account. With email sign-up, you'll receive an email that must be confirmed within 15 minutes.

When creating your user account, you get to choose your username, which is in the format of name@place. You can choose any name and place you want. Also, set a profile picture for your account so your posts look better.

In Superhood, you publish your posts by default to the place or area where you are; you don’t publish to followers or a group like in other apps. Your post's location is only visible to others if you enable the "Show Location" setting before publishing.

Publishing to neighborhoods farther away is also possible, but remote posts are more limited to prevent users elsewhere from spamming various neighborhoods.

A post is started from the New Post button in the bottom left corner, after which you get to choose what kind of post you want to publish.

Superhood is a channel for all things local. You can publish whatever you want, but here are some examples of useful posts:

- Warn, start discussions, or delight your neighbors about local matters with photos and text
- Notify neighbors and area followers about yard sales or other events you're organizing
- Post about lost and found items or runaway pets; even people living farther away may notice your post
- Find buyers for your sale listings; publish a link to any marketplace listing
- Add an event you're organizing to the neighborhood event calendar
- Publish puzzles with "Puzzle and Place" game posts
- Give quick feedback to the city with photos and thumbs up or down icons

If you organize recurring activities, hobbies, or services, add them to the app’s activities section.

In Superhood, # hashtags work as a way to share posts on a specific topic across the entire country or world. For example, with the #bird tag, you can publish bird sightings, and all users following #bird will see your post in the #bird feed.

You can follow hashtag feeds by finding and tapping the hashtags from newsfeed posts or by searching for them using the search function. Otherwise, hashtags do not affect the order or discoverability of posts, so there's no point in using them without purpose.

You can manage the neighborhoods you follow from the neighborhood list in the main menu. Drag them to change the order, edit settings, or remove them by tapping the menu icon next to the neighborhood name.

If you move to another neighborhood, you can change your Superhood home neighborhood. First, find your current home neighborhood's settings and change the category setting to something other than Home. You can only have one home neighborhood at a time.

You can find neighborhood settings quickly by long-pressing the "My Topics" filter button in the main view. You can also remove your old home neighborhood altogether.

Once the old home neighborhood has been changed or removed, you can set your new neighborhood’s category to Home from the same area settings view. Note that you must be physically in your new home neighborhood when setting it up as your home.

The home neighborhood appears in the app in dark blue; other neighborhoods and areas are green.