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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

It's a really smart idea. Look for agreement between people who often disagree as a signal of truth. Like you point out, it's probably a stronger signal of less divisive, less polarizing info than truth. But still decentralized and not biased right or left (biased center, effectively.)

I think it will only work if they can keep the bots out. Otherwise it will be gamed like everything else.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation seems like the envitable outcome of this system.

I don’t see that.

What parent is suggesting is that only the subset of things which are agreed by two parties who, demonstrably, disagree on most things, are approved and noted.

You’re not going to get “a fetus becomes human life at 4.5 months” out of such a system

Interesting example. Because the hardcore on both sides have zero percent agreement on that. To some people a fetus isn’t a person until intended birth, so how would a birdwatch context work on something nonfalsifiable like this?

Presumably it would not approve anything, and thus have nothing to say, which is probably the best outcome.

How then do you decide on the sets of things to allow it to moderate or not? That sounds like a bootstrapping problem since it is a question people will disagree on.

This is my concern as well. The idea here seems to be that the thing that offends the least must be fact.

This behaves very differently for falsifiable vs. non-falsifiable information, but the end result is not something in which I'd place much stock either way.

Edit: to be clear, from Twitter's perspective, this is excellent, i.e. this is precisely what a revenue-motivated entity would want. It's the rest of the world that I'm concerned about.

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