Name: Nextdoor CEO tells us how social media platforms need to stop chasing growth at all costs
Uploaded: 2021-10-13
Duration: 3 min 21 s
Description: Sarah Friar: Our communities 'want to see Nextdoor as a welcoming platform.'

Sarah Friar: Our communities "want to see Nextdoor as a welcoming platform."

Nextdoor CEO tells us how social media platforms need to stop chasing growth at all costs

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Nextdoor CEO: Platforms should be more responsible

when you look at what you've done so far and you've instituted various things on the platform. What has been toughest so far along the way so that going from talk to do um so important cannot underscore enough. And when we go talk to our neighbors were here all the time, they want to see next door as a welcoming platform. But what is welcoming mean? So some of the toughest decisions have been like that trade off between engagement and growth versus slowing people down. And I don't think enough platforms are doing that by the way. So for example, in working with folks like to take out, we work actually with Doctor jennifer Eberhardt out of stanford with her spark lab, we have instigated things that slow people down. So one of the first things we did actually want to do with racial profiling. So to your point, we will represent what's going on in neighborhoods. We instigated a flow that when you want to put something up on next door that begins to look like reporting a crime, we actually start to explain, first of all, make sure that it's really a crime right? Walking in the neighborhood is not a crime. How are you describing the person don't use race, used clothing and so on, describe exactly what they're doing. And just in doing that we took down instances of racial profiling almost 70 per cent and today it's small, it's .002% of all posts fall into that. Another just a quick one for you is what we call kindness reminder, which is actually an infrastructural thing. So when we see something happening, where we know this is a piece of content that will get moderated, right? We all are in tech, we have all goes and machine learning and so on. Why wait to after the fact we actually put something right in front of you as you're typing the first one with kindness reminder and it says, hey, great communities are created with kindness. Um, it looks like what you're writing will get moderated in the future states. There's a better way of saying it. And so it's doing a couple of things it's taking from this brain, right? Which is where all we all are biased, where biases sit and bringing you back here, your frontal lobe or you're taught how to deal with bias. The second thing we're doing is where humans don't like the feeling of being reviewed negatively in a future state. We all want to be good in the moment. And so again, we see over a third of people rewrite what they're saying, right? They stopped with the you moron, what the hell are you doing? And they say it a little bit more politely now that could impact engagement, which, you know, in the end, you often feel like you're being held to growth and engagement and at any cost, right? And I think that growth at any cost mentality is what's really damaging us in terms of areas like social media. So I'm really appreciative to folks like sciatica because she gives me so much courage to lean in, right. We ban the statement White Lives Matter. We actually didn't ban Blue Lives Matter. All lives Matter, but we banned them in as a retort to Black Lives Matter. But we put up again using that interstitial a little conversation to say, hey, do you know why all lives matter can feel very hurtful to someone so often. It's just about a little bit of education. A little nudge. People want to be their best selves, but often it comes from a place of ignorance.