27 ms·

What do I think about Community Notes?

• aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
• xigoi 3y ago
  So if I understand correctly, Community Notes are a feature that allows you to add notes on others' posts and vote on them? How is that different from comments?
  • pjc50 3y ago
    It's explained in the article, but the voting system is much more complicated and attempts to converge on ideologically neutral results. Whereas the voting on twitter replies is limited to likes and downvotes, with no clear connection to how high that appears in the results.
• troupo 3y ago
  This really begs the meme with a guy pointing at a butterfly and saying "is this crypto". The rest of the analysis seems to be even-handed, but the intro...
  • douglaswlance 3y ago
    The author is a co-creator of Ethereum. He's one of the most well-known voices in crypto. Almost every post on his blog is about crypto.
    • pavlov 3y ago
      If you own the nail factory, even cooking will start looking like a problem best solved with lots of hammering. (Apologies to the person who actually manufactures nails. I know it’s not fair to compare your useful industry to crypto.)
    • troupo 3y ago
      And that somehow makes his invalid comparisons valid? Someone else said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37292374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37292374
  • throwaway2990 3y ago
    I almost stopped teasing because of the intro.
  • myrmidon 3y ago
    I think that is a bit too harsh. IMO the author made good points for his "this is a good example of applied crypto-values" viewpoint, and also stated quite clearly what he ment by that (i.e. "algorithmic" moderation, transparent and retraceable results). It was absolutely worth reading-- this was a genuinely interesting blog post, not some cryptobro pushing the latest scam-- don't be discouraged from reading this!
  • BlueTemplar 3y ago
    And it would only have required to call it "decentralization(-adjacent) values"...
  • TimJRobinson 3y ago
    It makes sense though. The whole point of crypto is to build open, transparent systems, without a central authority, that can't be manipulated. This is a really really hard problem. Most crypto projects fail on one of those axis, so it's worth studying the project that have those properties and actually succeed.
• Analemma_ 3y ago
  An uncharitable but not exactly incorrect summary of this would be: most people love Community Notes; Vitalik really wants some of that goodwill for crypto (which is desperately lacking it), so he insists the two have a common philosophical and/or functional heritage. I think this is nonsense and he's trying to hitch a dead ox to a live one, but it's his blog and he can do as he likes.
  • paulgb 3y ago
    A more charitable view is that Vitalik is intellectually curious about areas where math/systems meet governance, and that interest led him both to crypto and to writing this blog post. I’m a total crypto skeptic but I didn’t find the brief mentions of crypto to detract from the rest of the post.
    • enlyth 3y ago
      Agreed, I'm also not invested in crypto but Vitalik seems like one of the genuine people in the space. It's the unfortunate attraction of the Ponzi grifters and get-rich-quick influencer types that tainted the whole ecosystem.
      • Pxtl 3y ago
        I'd say "co-opted" more than "tainted".
      • colesantiago 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • flkenosad 3y ago
          Can't be both genuine and rich?
          • colesantiago 3y ago
            No you can't. There is no such thing as a genuine or kind million/billionaire.
• epolanski 3y ago
  > Community Notes are not written or curated by some centrally selected set of experts; rather, they can be written and voted on by anyone This reminds of a Michael Scott's quote from the Office which I find brilliant in it's irony: "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information."
  • veavo 3y ago
    We already know the political slant of "experts". Making "experts" write the community notes would lead to them being as untrustworthy as "fact checkers".
    • gmerc 3y ago
      Great exhibition of terminal trust decline. “Expert” is a label, it means what people decide it means. Ultimate societies have inability to foster trust will be terminal and unlike why the crypto bros think, technology will not safe us.
    • tyre 3y ago
      "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
      • blfr 3y ago
        Usually until someone bothers to check. Like the field of psychology which surprisingly often produces results about very successful liberal-endorsed interventions (head start programs or growth mindset) that reliably return weaker results as they're tested more and finally stop reproducing altogether. These, sometimes massive, failures do impressively little to tame the smugness of their proponents.
        • ruszki 3y ago
          You’ve just described the scientific method. That’s how it is intended, and that’s currently the best way to make decisions according to our knowledge. Failure is completely normal.
• bandrami 3y ago
  Community Notes is literally the one good thing that has happened to X in this whole thing.
  • pavlov 3y ago
    Community Notes was introduced in Jan 2021 as “Birdwatch”, so it precedes the Musk acquisition.
    • astrange 3y ago
      They did expand it so it applies to ads, which is inexplicable when you're trying to get more ads.
      • boffinAudio 3y ago
        .. but perfectly reasonable if you're trying to avoid being embroiled in political agitprop campaigns by known bad faith actors whose money you nevertheless enjoy receiving ..
        • astrange 3y ago
          That doesn't seem to have much to do with a note on a phone game ad saying nothing in the ad shows real gameplay.
    • bowsamic 3y ago
      It's utilised far more now than it was back then
      • Hamuko 3y ago
        Which also leads it to being wrong far more now. My favourite example is the community note on Musk's block removal tweet, which argues that App Store wouldn't let them do it. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1692558414105186796 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1692558414105186796 And if you actually open the App Store rules link, it says "To prevent abuse, apps with user-generated content or social networking services must include [...] The ability to block abusive users from the service". As in, X needs the ability to ban users from X. It seems to me like community notes are a great way to push whatever reactionary narrative someone manages to cook up when they oppose the person tweeting / the topic at hand.
• exo762 3y ago
  Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37142890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37142890
• lucideer 3y ago
  It's great to see a deep analysis like this. Recently Community Notes has been opened up to a significant enough % of the Twitter populous that you're starting to see a very large quantity of "spurious" notes (argumentative / sarcastic responses that aren't addressing facts - more appropriate as actual replies), with even one or two examples of such notes being approved, in many cases I'd guess because approvers found them entertaining rather than useful. That's lead to criticisms of CN as something "in decline". I hope that's not the case - spurious notes don't actually do any harm (and are often very entertaining), but dismissal of CN as a system would: loss of reputation would mean a dilution of the impact of fact checks & context provision on rebutting misinformation. Another possible concern is, while it seems obvious to most that CN isn't a feature that would have been conceived under Musk, and it's interesting to see it continue to thrive now, one wonders how long it will be tolerated (the example from the first screenshot in this article is telling). In possibly related news, Musk has recently shown an interest in influencing elections[0] in Ireland (Twitter EU HQ) in direct response to talks of EU "misinformation regulation". [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1695545217133490453 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1695545217133490453 (Gript Media is a far-right publication based in Ireland)
  • 2795dhh 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • lucideer 3y ago
      The use of the word "censor" is a very common misdirect by those who want to control narratives to dismiss any attempts to regulate their control. From Musk's perspective, "free speech" is speech he has exclusive censorship rights over, as an individual, rather than any democratic body. In reality speech can only ever be as free as platform owners' intend it to be (be that platform digital, trad private media, or even state broadcast) - Musk takes issue with EU citizens having a say in his level of control over such speech. I'd recommmend interrogating anyone's use of the word "censor" to see what their own record of "censorship" is - everything is mediated/controlled/"censored" in some way by someone (Google filter bubble, etc.) - the only question is the democratisation of access to such controls. Community Notes may be more efficient than "bureaucrats" but I can't see any evidence that it's more accurate - it will almost certainly be more short-lived.
• chownie 3y ago
  The article repeatedly makes effort to assure the reader that the left/right dichotomy wasn't hardcoded but instead "emergently" appeared, then never goes into any detail about how that happened exactly... It's weird to me that the left right divide happened to appear, rather than a faith based/non faith based, or an authoritarian/liberal, etc dichotomy. Is there no public data on this we can use to prove it's true, just trusting the org at it's word?
  • jl6 3y ago
    Not sure about proof, but the left/right dichotomy also “emerged” in the real world in most countries. It’s not the only axis of variation that we see, but it’s a dominant one. Since Twitter is part of the real world, the users may have arrived with a pre-existing propensity to group themselves into left/right tribes, and then the mechanics of social media bubble formation accelerated the polarization process.
    • phatfish 3y ago
      Once a "tribe" gets big enough it starts to force others to pick a side. Inevitably the system reduces down to two. In politics voting methods can defuse this somewhat by allowing the smaller tribes stick to their own values and not loose out too heavily in the power grab. First-past-the-post amplifies the larger tribes, proportional representation (or similar systems) can partially reduce their effect.
    • gostsamo 3y ago
      left/right appears only where nothing else is allowed. in the countries where the rule is not "winner takes it all" there is a spectrum.
      • pjc50 3y ago
        But the spectrum still ends up being "left/right", with some subdivisions over "red vs green" lefties.
        • 3y ago
• bowsamic 3y ago
  Community Notes seems to be increasing in usage as X becomes more toxic and full of conspiracy theorists. I personally think there is a causation here. The frequency at which damaging content appeared on my timeline (just a few days ago I de-activated my account) has ballooned within the last few months. It got to the point where it was constantly serving me videos of fights or even quite often animal torture. There is also an uptick in hate, e.g. overt racism, accounts that have a lot of followers and openly ask for ethnic cleansing against non-whites, etc. Elon has turned X into "anything" (though, I know more left wing people who are still getting suspended, esp. if they criticise Musk), and Community Notes has become a "release valve" allowing the old liberal twitter to regulate posts on X and prevent the entire platform from becoming the next 8chan. If Community Notes are maintained at their current pace, there is the potential for X to continue on a kind of life support for the majority of "normal" people. If Elon starts to limit Community Notes, e.g. if they start being used on his posts too much, then I think that X will surely die. X already smelled bad before Elon bought it, and its stench is intensifying. What was once a nice information platform with subcultures of toxicity and hate, is now perceived as a place where one cannot escape the worst parts of modern internet culture. Community Notes is the only thing stopping it from collapsing into fanatic esotericism.
  • mschuster91 3y ago
    > There is also an uptick in hate, e.g. overt racism, accounts that have a lot of followers and openly ask for ethnic cleansing against non-whites, etc. Not to mention the constant bot spam. Musk promised to "get rid" of it, and yet I have to block about 10-20 bots shilling porn via follows and likes on completely random tweets and replies a day... and they're all following the same 3-4 templates for their activities and bios. Had Twitter any moderation staff left, it would take a couple minutes to write a regex to catch these porn bot bios and to take all of their accounts down at once.
    • bowsamic 3y ago
      Yep, sometimes I would be having a conversation with someone and suddenly the bots come and start liking all of our tweets for a good 10 minutes, then suddenly they go again after they realise that they aren't getting a bite. Never had that on old twitter.
• skilled 3y ago
  The few that I have seen have been pretty good. I also like that they can be added to Ads, and many Ads running on Twitter right now have community notes because they're clearly saying one thing while the product does something else.
  • the_only_law 3y ago
    Yeah I’ve been surprisingly impressed. I remember the first thing I saw like this was Instagram’s fact checking which almost immediately turned into nonsense with people leaving fact check posts for obvious shitposts and memes. The community notes on the other hand, seem to be well place, pretty informative, and in a few places surprisingly detailed.
  • Liquix 3y ago
    Damn that's crazy. Users seeing ads, watching them in their entirety and writing about them?! An advertiser's wet dream. Unparalleled engagement
    • pc86 3y ago
      Not when it boils to basically "this is a video of a completely different product that costs 25x more than this one, don't buy this."
      • thomastjeffery 3y ago
        Unless the fake ad was actually intended to drive traffic to the original product, which is an obvious perverse incentive introduced by this tool.
        • moron4hire 3y ago
          Do you think they know we know they know we know?
    • TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
      I think there was a time you could comment on Reddit ads as well, but eventually advertisers seem to disable the feature due to negative comments.
• tomcam 3y ago
  > what interests me most about Community Notes is how, despite not being a "crypto project", it might be the closest thing to an instantiation of "crypto values" Wut
  • rpgbr 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • elonismygod 3y ago
    It's the best they can do since pure decentralization doesn't usually work (things tend to chaos). So a appearance of decentralization with the light hand of Twitter's management on top, ready to slap the anarchists, sounds awesome to some people.
  • padolsey 3y ago
    Yeh it's bizarre. I guess, inevitably, he is viewing everything through a crypto-centric mental model of the world. Round-peg-square-hole thinking. Community Notes are not truly permissionless, trustless, or decentralized. The algorithm is ~transparent but controlled by Twitter, and subject to its community policies and impulse changes. Community Notes are as decentralized as twitter itself. Not really "crypto", even by a long shot. It's moments like these I find it hard to not see crypto as an all-consuming knowledge cult. Every avenue of life and analysis becomes imbued with crypto thoughts. Quite scary.
    • nvm0n2 3y ago
      It's somewhat decentralized. It's at least a lot more trustless, decentralized and permissionless than what the media came up with, which they call "fact checking" but is basically just a bunch of self-anointed ex-hacks who hired each other into a bunch of deceptively named quasi-institutions, and who aren't checked or held accountable by anything at all. Yes, the actual software runs at a single location. But apparently it's open enough that you could in principle run it in a distributed manner. As you can even cross-check the data and compute the same results deterministically, you could theoretically even do it as a blockchain, although it's unclear why you would. But you could, if there was value in P2Ping such a thing. In that sense, Vitalik's point does land.
• samyar 3y ago
  they are great
• snowwrestler 3y ago
  It seems like an entire generation has grown up believing that vote features on the Internet exist to improve quality, because that's what they were told by the websites who marketed those features. Members of a prior generation may remember that voting features were introduced explicitly to improve engagement, not quality. Those little triangles next to this comment are there to give you something to do, and thereby hopefully increase the chance that you'll feel invested in this site to come back. Not to discover the truth, improve awareness of facts, or build community. Voting is a mechanism by which people express their values. If people know facts and value them, then a voting mechanism will deliver facts. But if they don't, then it won't. I will say it seems to take an impressive lack of introspection to spend thousands of words expertly fact-checking how Community Notes works, and yet still conclude that fact-checking by experts "seems risky." Vitaly's personal values are expressed most clearly here: > ultimately I come down on the side that it is better to let ten misinformative tweets go free than it is to have one tweet covered by a note that judges it unfairly It should be noted that he is less sanguine about letting misinformation run free when he is complaining about inaccurate press coverage of cryptocurrency. (Pretty much like anyone who complains about inaccurate press coverage, honestly.) It's always easier to be sanguine about someone else's misinformation that affects other people.
  • lysecret 3y ago
    Have you heard of Boaty McBoatface ?
  • patrickmay 3y ago
    > Those little triangles next this comment are there to give you something to do, and thereby hopefully increase the chance that you'll feel invested in this site to come back. Well put. Have an upvote. ;-)
  • keiferski 3y ago
    Yes, I think the voting system is probably the single worst idea that has been implemented online in the last 15 years. It's made everything into a shouting match where the objective is to push your opinion to the top while burying the ones you disagree with. Forums never had this issue and there was no way to downvote an unpopular forum comment, other than banning the poster entirely. There was a lot more room for friendly debate.
• elonismygod 3y ago
  [flagged]
• pjc50 3y ago
  > deep learning vs crypto is a clear divide of rotators vs wordcels. the former offends theorycel aesthetic sensibilities but empirically works to produce absurd miracles. the latter is an insane series of nerd traps and sky high abstraction ladders yet mostly scams Can anyone translate this from meme to English please? Also, it would seem to be a very anti-crypto statement for Vitalik to be posting?
  • tinco 3y ago
    No, it's common knowledge most publications on crypto in general are scams, and Vitalik has always been critical about money grabbing schemes. Vitalik's project Ethereum has been hurt a lot by "shit coins" (alternative cryptocurrencies that have money grabbing as their sole objective) as if there had been a magical way for regular users to become aware of which crypto technologies add something material to the space and which not, the space as a whole would be a lot healthier. The other part of that sentence about crypto is a funny self jab though, apparently he's conscious about the research rabbit holes and mathematical abstractions the Ethereum team went through to get for example staking to work. Had Ethereum not been near the top of every crypto exchange, and Vitalik not been somewhat of a known person, how difficult would it have been for the average crypto-interested person to tell Ethereum's "insane nerd traps and sky high abstraction ladders" from the scams?
  • nvm0n2 3y ago
    Luckily there's a website for that: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel Shape rotator = someone who can rotate shapes in their head, a proxy for IQ. Someone with good mathematical or STEM skills and who feels unvalued for it. Wordcel = someone good with words/rhetoric who feels like their skill in this field isn't valued enough / it doesn't get them far enough.
    • rideontime 3y ago
      This whole time it was just about IQ? Are shape rotators just disgruntled Gifted Kids?
• l0ngyap 3y ago
  [dead]
• major505 3y ago
  I really like community notes. It's been a while in Brazil they are being used to check politicians who always lie in their post and try to rewrite history. Its like a small note of shame in their posts, and it seens so far they been using it in politicians in all sides of the political spectrum.
  • lobocinza 3y ago
    It's so sad that the same politicians want to regulate all kinds of information sources to "combat" disinformation ("fake news").
    • major505 3y ago
      Oh yeah. Under the guise of fighting fake news and protect the kids. It's always the same couple of lazy excuses.
• a_person_2017 3y ago
  Does anyone know what blogging / wiki platform this is on?
  • tornato7 3y ago
    It's mostly custom-made by Vitalik: https://github.com/vbuterin/blog https://github.com/vbuterin/blog
• drngdds 3y ago
  Amusingly, the community note he cites complaining some LGBT books were obscenity and therefore illegal to distribute to children is misinformation in itself. Obscenity is a very high bar to pass and there's no way the linked materials would be considered illegal obscenity in the US.
  • BlueTemplar 3y ago
    I guess that a "free nipple" isn't technically categorized as obscenity even in the USA ?
  • pessimizer 3y ago
    I don't know if it is amusing. It was used as an example of a highly polarized comment that would have a difficult time becoming a community note.
• Pxtl 3y ago
  Community Notes are a neat idea but a) Twitter has too many overlapping actions. Community Notes is just "credibility-oriented reply" in the same way that retweet is "quote tweet without comment". When you see a tweet you disagree with and wish to correct, there are now three different ways to register that disagreement -- QT, Reply, and Notes. That's kind of clumsy. I feel like from an ergonomic perspective, better integration and surfacing of credibility scores as related to replies (and better integration of the QT and Reply features) would've been cleaner. b) I'm done with X/Twitter now that it's a monument to Musk's internet poisoning.
• CamelCaseName 3y ago
  I've seen quite a few bad notes, either flat out incorrect or on jokes or shitposts. It was much better when it was applied on just a few tweets but much higher quality. Just another thing Musk has ruined.
• dherikb 3y ago
  It's better than any other alternative that I saw until now.
• lbhdc 3y ago
  https://tsjournal.org/index.php/jots/article/view/100 https://tsjournal.org/index.php/jots/article/view/100 There has been some interesting research done around the effectiveness of false information labels. I wonder how much of their findings extend to community labels?
• mellosouls 3y ago
  Community Notes will likely have some of the same pros and cons of wikipedia. Community Notes are not written or curated by some centrally selected set of experts; rather, they can be written and voted on by anyone ... It's not perfect, but it's surprisingly close to satisfying the ideal of credible neutrality... Well, that's the optimistic pro. But the con is that if a particular demographic is more drawn to contributing to those notes (or comes to overwhelm Twitter itself), we will see the same problems of bias we see on Wikipedia in (say) social-cultural subjects which - whatever it results in - is certainly not "credible neutrality".
  • mmq 3y ago
    Users can rate community notes.
    • emilecantin 3y ago
      90% of the article is about HOW the ratings are taken into consideration...
    • Hamuko 3y ago
      Which sounds like a pretty terrible idea in itself. At least to me, it would sound pretty chaotic if the edit that wins out on Wikipedia is the one that receives the most votes by other Wikipedia users, and if you wanted to get something on Wikipedia fixed, you'd need to gather enough people to support your fix over the previous version. I've ran into issues with Wikipedia mods ignoring sources and going off whatever priors they had, but at least then I was able to just passive-aggressively berate them on the talk page to get them to bend.
      • MichaelZuo 3y ago
        What's the alternative method for credibly neutral decision making on a public internet site anyone can participate in?
        • Hamuko 3y ago
• ryukoposting 3y ago
  A very interesting article. It seems like the Community Notes system is built on (in my opinion) a very mathematically sound model. It seems far less susceptible to biased "mob actions" than a conventional upvote/downvote system, even if it's not impervious to such actions. "Bias" exists in the eye of the beholder, so it's unreasonable to expect any content rating system to be perfectly unbiased. Community Notes and crypto share a common thread of "complicated math that makes it both extremely powerful and totally opaque to 95% of people." Honestly, that's a pretty weak relationship for how much page-space it got in the writeup. Looks like Vitalik is writing a crypto blog, so I guess you gotta appeal to your readers. Great read nonetheless.
  • chrisco255 3y ago
    The association with crypto wasn't merely about the math aspect, but also the principles of open source verification of the algorithms and credible neutrality.
    • ryukoposting 3y ago
      True, but that "95% of people" part is key. The auditability of open source doesn't matter (matters less?) to non-technical audiences because they don't have the knowledge, time, and/or wherewithal to audit the code themselves. As a result, they have to defer to a third party to do the auditing. At best, a truly independent third party auditor has a mild philosophical incentive to recommend an open-source product over a closed-source one of similar quality. In practice, it's far more common for third party "stamps of approval" to be meaningless gold stars purchased by corporations to aid in marketing their product. A great example of this is the iF Design Award.
• yankput 3y ago
  > But what interests me most about Community Notes is how, despite not being a "crypto project", it might be the closest thing to an instantiation of "crypto values" that we have seen in the mainstream world. Huh? I didn’t see any MLM or pump-and-dump in the community notes
• Yhippa 3y ago
  Someone alluded to this in the comments here, but this does strongly remind me of the Slashdot moderation method but much more sophisticated. That was my favorite site moderation method. Giving meta judgement/commentary on things felt like a privilege and not a given.
• pastacacioepepe 3y ago
  I was positively surpised by Community Notes. That's until I witnessed a correct, factual note, removed from a @NATO_ACT tweet[0]. The removal was probably due to brigading of the "Not Helpful" feedback button, but for how good the Notes concept is, it doesn't take into account such a common opinion manipulation strategy. Wikipedia is facing similar issues, and I see the same happen with the flagging feature on HN. .0: https://twitter.com/NATO_ACT/status/1692565516924112916 https://twitter.com/NATO_ACT/status/1692565516924112916
  • preisschild 3y ago
    I remember the note, and it was removed because information in it was factually incorrect.
    • pastacacioepepe 3y ago
      NATO wars of aggression are a fact. NATO assuring Soviet leaders not to expand eastward "one inch" is backed by documents provided by the National Security Archive, a trustworthy organization. Please provide sources to prove the information was factually incorrect.
      • amai 3y ago
        Soviet leaders on the other side „…promised that the Kremlin would introduce democracy, respect human rights and recognize the right of countries to self-determination.“ „ But then, the reform process in Russia slowed and distrust began to grow. “ „ Leading Clinton to ultimately decide to expand the alliance. In doing so, the West didn’t break any treaties…“ https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-is-vladimir-putin-right-a-bf318d2c-7aeb-4b59-8d5f-1d8c94e1964d https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-e...
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > NATO assuring Soviet leaders not to expand eastward "one inch" is backed by documents provided by the National Security Archive, a trustworthy organization. Binding international commitments heritable by successor states are made in formal instruments, treaties and the like, for a reason. Other representations apply at best to the specific parties and narrow contexts where made, until and unless they are solemnized into a treaty. To the extent such a representation was made to the USSR prior to and in the context of efforts to get the Soviets to the table on terms for permitting German unification, it would not be binding beyond that process unless included in the eventual treaty, which is was not, and it even more clearly would not be something that one ex-Soviet successor state could, after pursuing and then abandoning pursuit of NATO membership itself, claim any entitlement under, especially against the interests of other former ex-Soviet states. To the extent the existence of such representations might be fact, it is very much not relevant context to much of anything happening since long before Twitter existed.
• amai 3y ago
  https://pol.is https://pol.is mentioned at the end of the article seems to be very interesting.
• soerxpso 3y ago
  I wonder how reducing factions to a single axis impacts notes on tweets about matters that the two "teams" haven't really picked their sides on yet. During the first weeks of covid, it seemed like "this is a nothingburger" and "this is a huge deal" weren't statements that had a left/right connotation yet, but were statements that people passionately disagreed about. How does the algorithm behave when a note is highly controversial, but that controversy doesn't seem to be correlated with users' single-axis leanings? Anarcho-capitalists and radical leftists strongly disagree on the vast majority of things, but both groups passionately support defunding the police (for very different reasons). Would the algorithm unfairly see a false note as having "bipartisan support" when these two opposite-radical groups manage to have their biases line up?
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
  I think the biggest problem is treating "polarity" as a single axis. Many subjects align that way in practice, but the ones that don't are important. It's nice to see some effort behind distributed moderation, but this is still too centralized to realize that dream.
• hndamien 3y ago
  Community notes needs to carry a record on the user who get noted.
• drones 3y ago
  > Currently, participants are slowly and randomly being accepted, but eventually the plan is to let in anyone who fits the criteria. Once you are accepted, you can at first participate in rating existing notes, and once you've made enough good ratings *(measured by seeing which ratings match with the final outcome for that note)*, you can also write notes of your own. I think twitter is especially fortunate to have the audience diversity it has to make this work - there seems to be a good mix of both left and right wing leaning users. A consensus model with such diversity encourages compromise. I feel like the strength of using this model is that it's low stakes - at the end of the day it's a tweet. People are willing to make concessions, because it's a tweet. As soon as, say, money is involved, I think that willingness to find a middle ground goes away.