SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Nextdoor (NYSE: KIND) announced a suite of new product features, which encourages neighborly interactions and promotes neighborhood vitality. The updates build on Nextdoor’s previous efforts to foster a welcoming platform, helping fulfill the company’s purpose to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on.
The new neighbor features include a pop-up reminder that leverages predictive technology to facilitate constructive conversations and a notification and appeals system to increase transparency around moderation decisions. This new predictive technology expands on Nextdoor’s previously launched features that add moments of friction within the platform, which help slow people down, mitigate implicit bias, and ultimately foster more productive conversations online and in the real world.
“At Nextdoor, we believe innovative product solutions that bridge technology and social science can help cultivate a kinder world,” said Kiran Prasad, Head of Product at Nextdoor. “Our platform is unique in that we champion quality of engagement over quantity at any cost. We understand that neighborhoods are made up of diverse people with differing viewpoints and see Nextdoor as an essential building block for creating stronger, more vibrant communities both online and offline.”’
Constructive Conversations Reminder
Nextdoor’s new “Constructive Conversations Reminder” reduces negative responses that are likely to occur during heated conversations. This is the company’s first step into predictive technology by using machine learning to anticipate when a comment thread may become heated before a neighbor contributes. More specifically, the ML model considers the full conversation rather than individual comments. When a comment thread shows certain indications of becoming contentious, a reminder will pop up before a neighbor writes a comment with tips on how to set the tone for a more empathetic discussion.
Hidden Content Notifications and Appeals
Nextdoor is also rolling out a “hidden content notifications and appeals” process to provide more transparency into the moderation process. Going forward, neighbors will receive an in-app notification if their post or comment was hidden, with an explanation of which guideline it violated and a chance to appeal the decision by submitting the same content or an edited version for additional review.
Community moderation is an essential part of the platform to ensure neighborhoods on Nextdoor reflect thriving neighborhoods in the real world, and that content reports are handled in a timely manner. Volunteer moderators can vote on whether or not reported content in their neighborhood should be hidden for violating Nextdoor’s Community Guidelines.
Timing and availability
The Constructive Conversations Reminder has begun rolling out to neighbors in the U.S, while the hidden content notifications and appeals will begin rolling out globally in the coming weeks.
Continuing to cultivate kindness through technology
Nextdoor’s efforts to keep interactions on the platform safe and productive are a balance of human review and technology, both of which work to detect content that violates the guidelines. These innovative features are rooted in social psychology and were developed in partnership with key experts and academics. Nextdoor continues to partner with leading academics and experts in the fields of social psychology, equality, and civic engagement on its Neighborhood Vitality Advisory Board. Learn more about Nextdoor’s efforts to cultivate kindness.
- As of the end of 2021, Nextdoor had over 233,000 active community moderators globally. All reports of misinformation, racism, or neighbor profiles are sent directly to and handled by Nextdoor’s trained Neighborhood Operations team to ensure consistent and objective outcomes. Last year, only 0.34% of total content was reported for being harmful, and therefore sent to staff for review.*
- The Kindness Reminder, introduced in 2019, and Anti-Racism Notification, launched in 2021, automatically detect offensive or racist language in written content and encourage the author to be more thoughtful and edit their comment before it is published.
- The company’s inaugural Transparency Report from 2021 noted that neighbors who encountered these reminders edited or withheld their post or comment on average over 34% of the time.*
- The company’s efforts to promote neighborhood vitality resulted in Nextdoor’s inclusion in the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list for the second consecutive year.
Learn more about the company’s product and policy initiatives to foster a holistically inclusive platform on the Nextdoor Blog.
**Source: Nextdoor Transparency Report 2021.
About Nextdoor
Nextdoor (NYSE: KIND) is where you connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you so you can belong. Kindness is core to our purpose: to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on. Neighbors around the world turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, get things done, and build real-world connections with those nearby — neighbors, businesses, and public services.
We believe connecting with others is a universal human need. That truth, and the reality that neighborhoods are among the most important communities in our lives, have been guiding principles for Nextdoor since the beginning.
Today, neighbors rely on Nextdoor in more than 285,000 neighborhoods around the world, including the United States (nearly 1 in 3 U.S. households), the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Canada, with many more to come.
Nextdoor is based in San Francisco. For additional information and images: nextdoor.com/newsroom.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward looking statements regarding our future business plans and expectations. These forward looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual results due to a variety of factors including: our anticipated growth, including our ability to scale new neighbor growth, our ability to grow engagement by our existing neighbor base, and our ability to increase monetization of our platform; our ability to scale our business and monetization efforts; our ability to expand our business operations abroad by opening new and expanding within existing neighborhoods outside of the United States; our ability to respond to general economic conditions; our ability to manage growth effectively; our ability to achieve and maintain profitability in the future; our ability to access sources of capital to finance operations and growth; the success of strategic relationships with third parties; and the effect of COVID-19. These and other potential risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from the results predicted are more fully detailed under the caption "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021 filed with the SEC on March 15, 2022, our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ended March 31, 2022, expected to be filed on or about May 10, 2022, and our other SEC filings, which are available on the Investor Relations page of our website at www.investors.nextdoor.com and on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. In addition, please note that the date of this press release is May 3, 2022, and any forward looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this date. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events.
