December 15, 2022 · Last updated on April 30, 2025
Moderator Academy: Voting & Appeals
# Community Guidelines
# Moderation
# Moderator Academy
# Online Community
Voting is the primary action taken by neighborhood moderators
Team Nextdoor
Nextdoor's community moderation system relies on healthy, consistent voting practices. That’s where neighborhood volunteers—Leads and Review team members—like you come in! Neighborhood leads and reviewers vote on whether or not reported content should be removed from Nextdoor for violating the Community Guidelines. Based on these signals, and a few of our own, our system then takes the appropriate action on the content in question.
Voting on reporting content
In order to properly vote on a piece of reported content, you must first understand what the rules are. To that end, we strongly encourage you to be familiar with the Community Guidelines and with how to recognize potential bias and discrimination. If you need a refresher, check out two earlier parts of Moderator Academy:
🚨 Important note: If you do not believe you can vote on reported content in accordance with our community guidelines, or in an unbiased manner, please opt out of being a neighborhood lead or reviewer. Moderators who display a repeated pattern of voting against Nextdoor's community guidelines are subject to removal from the neighborhood moderation program.
Once you're comfortable with the rules, voting itself becomes a simple practice.
Click through the slides below to learn how to use the voting tool:
Voting best practices
Voting on reported content is not easy! There will always be a lot of subjectivity to navigate, so go easy on yourself knowing that you're contributing to your local community in a way that most people are not able to.
It's important to remember that every neighbor who has joined Nextdoor has agreed to abide by Nextdoor's Community Guidelines and Member Agreement, and that no single moderator can remove a piece of content on their own (it requires consensus from a group of folks.) As such, voting to remove content that has been reported for violating the community guidelines is not an act of censorship.
It takes a lot of courage to report a piece of content for violating the community guidelines. As such, neighborhood leads and reviewers should never reveal the identity of someone who submitted a content report. Similarly, the identity of the moderators who voted on a piece of content should never be revealed to the content's author, or any other neighbor. Please help us in building a strong moderator community by respecting and maintaining each other's privacy in this volunteer role.
What to expect after you vote
As mentioned, a piece of reported content needs to reach a consensus before it can be hidden from view in a neighborhood.
Once you vote, the content will move into the Moderation History section of Lead tools/ Review tools for reference. It will remain in Review Queue for other moderators to vote on if more votes are still needed to reach this consensus.
If a piece of content reaches enough vote consensus for a removal, the content will be hidden from view and the author will automatically be notified of their opportunity to appeal the decision.
Hidden Content Notifications & Appeals
The ability to appeal a moderation decision is an important part of creating a more transparent, welcoming, and respectful neighborhood atmosphere. It helps to repair the damage between an author and the community by focusing on mediation and agreement, rather than pure punishment. Here's how it works:
Reviewing appealed content
A different set of neighborhood moderators will review the appeal, and vote on whether or not to restore the modified content back to their neighborhood.
