Nextdoor Holdings, Inc. 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. 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. 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. 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.