Christopher Doyle is bringing a small-town vibe to the big city.
As managing director of Nextdoor Canada, Doyle helps residents get to know their neighbours, what’s going on in their community, and offers the connections Torontonians crave.
Six years after launching in Canada, he says the hyperlocal networking platform is used by one in three GTA households, offering users local news, information, conversations, recommendations and opportunities to connect with people nearby.
“We know more than ever about national and international political issues, but do I really know about the bylaw change in my neighbourhood? Or a street closure? Or what’s being built on that lot on the corner?” he asks. “The health of the community starts with being well-informed about what’s going on around me, and out of that comes supporting neighbours.”
Doyle speaks from experience growing up in St. Marys, Ont., a town of about 7,000 near Stratford — the kind of place where people wave to each other on the street, and don’t lock their doors at night.
His mother was a secretary at the local parish while his father started a local newspaper at their kitchen table, inspiring Doyle to pursue a degree in journalism.
After working for TSN and CBC, Doyle spent a few years at Twitter, now X, before being tapped to lead Nextdoor Canada as it entered the market in 2019.
“Other platforms fall into the algorithm trap where it’s just engagement for engagement’s sake,” he says. “I liked that this platform is about community, not clout.”
Founded in San Francisco in 2008 and launched in the U.S. in 2011, Nextdoor seeks to combat declining community engagement in the digital age, though it hasn’t avoided the challenges that plague social networking platforms.
After facing criticism for contributing to political polarization, stoking fear among users and enabling racial profiling, Nextdoor overhauled and relaunched this summer.
Now, the company leans on partnerships with local newspapers and businesses to strike a balance between user-generated content and more credible sources.
The Star recently spoke with Doyle from his home office in Whitby about the latest iteration of the platform, how the changes are designed to build on its original mission, and why knowing your neighbours is good for your health.
Why did you pivot from media to social media?
At CBC I was responsible for integrating brands into their biggest sports properties, like Hockey Night in Canada, the World Cup and the Olympics.
During the 2014 Winter Olympics brands were coming to us asking for help with social media integrations. They had these big budget commercials and advertising campaigns and saw social media as an extension of their investment, and that’s when the light bulb went off, like “wow, this is the future.”
A colleague had joined Twitter Canada and eventually brought me over to help with their partnership portfolio. This was in 2014, and at the time I was working with celebrities, athletes, sports teams and broadcast companies, trying to explain to them why they should have a Twitter account.
Is that where you gained an appreciation for community building?
Community is at the heart of everything I’ve done, and I owe that to my parents, who both had jobs that involved community building. Twitter in the early days was a global community built around interests, and we were building community every day there through our partnership portfolio.
What do you make of X now?
It’s such a different place when I left in 2019, when it was still called Twitter. I’m not a regular user anymore, but I do think there’s a lot Nextdoor had done that other platforms can learn from, like our focus on real, verifiable people, not bots and trolls and anonymity.
I show up on Nextdoor the same way I would if I met you at a local barbecue or at the arena during our kids’ hockey game. Like “hey, I’m Christopher, I live in the neighbourhood with my four kids.”
It’s about making real connections with real people, understanding what’s going on in the area, and connecting with local businesses.
Is that what attracted you to Nextdoor?
Absolutely. I believe you can use technology for the betterment of humanity by helping people connect over the internet.
Before Nextdoor came to Canada in 2019, they hired people from all different tech platforms, including a few people I knew from Twitter. When I met with the founders, they said they wanted someone with experience in building community on social platforms.
They talked about how technology connected us with people from all over the world, but that people don’t know their neighbours or what’s going on in their area, which is often more important. That really resonated with me.
There’s a whole bunch of research and studies that show how knowing your neighbours leads to healthier, better communities. It helps people feel safe, it helps your mental health, and I think Nextdoor fills a lot of those gaps.
How do you provide that to users?
When you go to Nextdoor, your address will connect you to everything in your neighbourhood.
Your main feed is where you get a lot of information directly from neighbours, but you’ll also now see local news from verifiable publishers based on where you are. You’re going to get connected to local businesses in your area, and you’ll be alerted about anything urgent that’s happening in your neighbourhood.
You can also expand that out. Say you’re going to be travelling for the day to another area, you can see the alerts around where you’re going; anything from safety alerts to road closures to weather and traffic.
What do you see as the relationship between news and online communities?
News is core to a local community.
That’s part of why I’m so excited about this transformation of the Nextdoor platform, which is built around real time alerts and local news.
Nextdoor was bringing the user generated content — neighbours discussing a local event or something happening in the area — which is vital, but we also need the verifiable news story. It’s the perfect marriage.
For example, there was a storm in my neighbourhood, and a tree got knocked down and was blocking the street. Neighbours were on the platform talking about it, but now I can also get broader context around how the town is dealing with it, or how many other trees went down in the area.
We know local news is vital, but the business model hasn’t been working, which is something Nextdoor is trying to help by giving publishers access to people in neighbourhoods across Canada.
User generated content has created controversy. Are these changes an attempt to address it?
A hundred per cent.
You might come to Nextdoor and see neighbours discussing something in a way that isn’t helpful — that’s how I’ll put it — and these changes are meant to say, “there’s important things happening in your neighbourhood that you need to know from a verifiable source.”
Trust and safety are super important to us. It’s why we’ve built the platform around making sure you are who you say you are, and that you live in the neighbourhood.
At Nextdoor we have something called the Kindness Reminder that comes up if you’re making a post using words typically in reported content. It’s just a pop up that says, “That post looks like it’s something that typically goes against our guidelines, do you want to rethink it?”
The platform redesign is also intended to make some of that valuable community-based information easier to find. That’s a common use case for Nextdoor, like ‘hey, can anyone recommend a plumber?’ or ‘What’s the best pizza place in the area?’
Especially when people come to a new community, there’s a lot they need to know, like ‘how do I enrol my child in school? Can anyone recommend a local doctor that’s taking new patients?’ Those are common questions, and we’re making it easier for people to find those answers.
Now you can ask those questions, and our AI can unlock the brain of the neighbourhood by surfacing relevant information from those conversations. We’re testing that in six U.S. cities right now and hope to have it available in Toronto soon.
Why do you believe community is so important?
Loneliness is an epidemic, and it’s so damaging to people’s health and well-being. Not just their mental health, but every part of life. There’s research that says it’s as bad for your health as smoking.
Why is it happening? Because we’re not as connected to each other. We might be connected online, but we’re not really connecting with other people in real life. We saw that during the pandemic of course, but I would argue we’re still feeling the effects of it — all of us, across age groups.
It’s important that we get back to those connections that matter, meeting with people in real life, supporting people. Research has shown that even the smallest interactions, like waving to your neighbour or saying hello to a stranger on the street, can help combat loneliness.
It can also lead to a more meaningful connection, which we see forming every day on Nextdoor, where people meet and connect over a common or mutual interest, an activity or something about their family, or just sharing some information about what’s happening in the area.
That’s what we’re doing at Nextdoor; making sure people have a place to go when they need to connect with somebody who happens to live nearby. That’s what it’s all about.
