The heyday of Nextdoor saw the neighborhood-focused social app thrive as a hub for connections, local recommendations and coordinated responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. But after years of slowing growth and accusations of toxic content, the platform began to falter. Now, returning CEO Nirav Tolia is on a mission to revamp Nextdoor not by restoring it to its former glory, but by pursuing an entirely new path focused on hyperlocal news and A.I. features.
“The reality is you don’t bring a founder back to incrementally change something, you bring a founder back to reboot something,” Tolia, who co-founded Nextdoor in 2010, told Observer. “And rebooting, in many cases, is more difficult than booting.”
Tolia stepped down as CEO in 2018 shortly before Nextdoor went public. The company, which connects more than 100 million neighbors and had 21.8 million weekly active users as of August, has since struggled to regain its footing. Its stock price has fallen more than 80 percent since its IPO.
Returning to the helm required Tolia to adapt to a very different challenge: rebuilding rather than creating from scratch. “You first have to stop the momentum, which takes a ton of energy, and then you have to actually start the momentum in a positive direction,” he said.
Rebooting Nextdoor
In July, Tolia unveiled a reimagined version of the social network, designed to make Nextdoor more local and more useful. A new alert system warns residents about emergencies like severe weather or power outages, while partnerships with more than 3,500 local publications bring geographically tailored news directly into users’ feeds.
A.I. sits at the heart of Tolia’s turnaround strategy. A new Nextdoor A.I. agent draws from the platform’s vast archive of posts to provide contextual responses to user questions. The technology also powers personalized feeds and offers writing suggestions, including “kindness reminders” to encourage civility when users draft posts.
Curbing negativity is a major focus for Tolia’s team, which aims to counterbalance complaints with more uplifting or informative content—such as community events and local news. Although negative posts make up less than 1 percent of all content on Nextdoor, Tolia said they “punch above their weight” by dominating the tone of discussions.
“We want to make sure that, with things like the kindness reminder, they are expressing themselves in a constructive way,” said Tolia. “But the real solution for us is to consistently introduce content types that are not about complaining, but that are about delight.”
As A.I. becomes more deeply integrated into daily life, Nextdoor sees this as a pivotal moment to strengthen real-world community ties. Encouraging users to connect with their neighbors and engage in local life is “something that I think can have really lasting impact, particularly in a world that’s losing its connection to the physical world,” said Tolia.
Early feedback on the redesign has been largely positive, according to Tolia. Still, he acknowledges that Nextdoor—which has yet to turn a profit—faces a long road ahead. “We’re in the early stages of a big turnaround,” he said. “We’ve now created a good foundation, but we’re very far from cracking the code.”
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