Building on the Kindness Reminder, and our effort to encourage respectful conversations all across Nextdoor, we’ve begun testing a new feature called Kindness Tips. This new feature will appear for neighbors who’ve repeatedly posted content that violates the community guidelines, and will require the neighbor to review all 5 tips before they can continue on to compose their comment. 

The educational tips and product experience were informed by social and behavioral science, and reviewed by researchers at SPARQ, a behavioral science research group at Stanford University.

This feature will:

1. Appear for neighbors who have repeatedly had content removed
2. Show periodically when these neighbors respond to a neighbor’s post
3. Require the neighbor to walk through the Kindness Tips educational flow. It cannot be dismissed until completed
4. Slow the neighbor down, and help them reflect on what they want to say and how they want to say it. It will not prevent them from commenting
5. Put the neighbor back into the comment composer after completing the Kindness Tips walkthrough

Here is a sample of what the Kindness Tips may look like:

Additional notes

1. Since we regularly test various designs, neighbors may see a slightly different version of these tips in the product.
2. We are slowly introducing Kindness Tips to neighbors on a rolling basis.
3. While we hope Kindness Tips will be effective at encouraging more thoughtful conversations, we don’t want to overwhelm neighbors with this education. We are only planning to show Kindness Tips to a neighbor once per month, though that may change based on observing neighbor feedback.

What is changing? 

1. A very small number of neighbors may occasionally see a series of screens with tips for having constructive conversations when they start to post or comment
2. Only neighbors with repeated content removals will see the Kindness Tips

What is not changing? 

1. All neighbors with active accounts will still be able to post, comment, and participate in neighborhood conversations
2. The Kindness Reminder. Kindness Tips are an additional feature Nextdoor is adding, the Kindness Reminder isn’t going anywhere
3. Nothing about how content is moderated is changing with the roll out of the Kindness Tips

Why has Nextdoor made this update?

While a very small group of neighbors repeatedly post content that violates Nextdoor’s guidelines, those posts and comments account for a large proportion of reported and removed content. Nextdoor sees an opportunity to help educate these neighbors about how to have conversations with their neighborhoods in a way that is kinder and more connecting, creating stronger local communities that have open and inclusive conversation. 

Questions or feedback? For any questions on these changes, check out the Help Center article: About the Kindness Reminder and Kindness Tips. For any bug reports or feature requests, please report them to Nextdoor Support to ensure they are connected to the correct team.