Our Fireworks Reminder Ran at Twice the Scale This Year. The Results Held.

Every summer, fireworks light up the sky…and the Nextdoor feed. Some neighbors love the show. Others spend the night comforting a panicked dog, and the conversation between the two camps can heat up fast. One neighbor kicked off this season by joking that the annual "fireworks wars" had arrived, asking whether people were complainers or defenders of late-night explosions.

That seasonal spike is why we run our fireworks reminder. When a neighbor starts composing a post about fireworks that looks like it could turn heated, we show a brief prompt asking them to consider how their words might land, with the option to edit before publishing. Nobody is blocked from posting. The reminder just creates a moment to pause.

What two seasons of data show

The reminder ran from June 18 through July 7 this year and was seen 37,283 times, more than double last year's volume. Views peaked on July 5, the day after the holiday, at 10,909. That peak was also more than double the same day in 2025.

The number we watch most closely: 19.5% of neighbors who saw the reminder chose to edit their post before publishing. Last year, that figure was 19.2%. The scale doubled and the effect held steady. Whether the reminder was appearing 500 times a day in late June or nearly 11,000 times a day at the holiday peak, roughly 1 in 5 people who saw it revised what they were about to say.

Two seasons at nearly identical rates, with the second at twice the volume, tells us the effect is repeatable. A well-timed prompt keeps working as it scales.

What's next

We turned the reminder off on July 8, as we do at the end of every fireworks season, and it will be back next summer. We'll keep studying what the data tells us about how small product decisions shape conversations between neighbors.