What do I think about Community Notes?

> 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.

The attempt to argue that any community-consensus system is "crypto" is absurd.

It seems like we're still at quite early stages of collective intelligence amplification. It would be cool to have a Community Notes for HN. It would be awesome to automatically find consensus on comments and posts that lack attention. I suppose the votes are currently behind a private API on HN. It would be cool to play with sliders for the thresholds and see what different content floats or sinks. It's great to see Vitalik poking around with this sorta stuff, with less than 200 lines of Python code - I'd love to see it vastly simplified. I'm glad he pointed to Polis also recently. Really interesting stuff.

Edit: Actually it occurs to me, you might be able to use ML to infer cross-partisan support from arbitrary sources like HN comments and posts. Especially if trained on Community Notes. Might need to absorb some HN audience specific preferences / biases though.

> it might be the closest thing to an instantiation of "crypto values" that we have seen in the mainstream world.

May I have the list of those values?

One option would be to show more of these notes but also make their rating public. For example, “you may find the following note helpful, although only 65% of diverse users did”. But all in all, it’s already a great feature.

In reference to the article's question: "could we turn Community Notes itself into something that's more like an economist algorithm?" My answer would be: no, as soon as you add an economic incentive to a system such as this, you break it, by adding an immediate and direct incentive for abusing and gaming it. FWIW that's why I think the concept of "credible neutrality" applied to money is a fantasy, like a neutral weapon (as soon as it is used it has, by definition, to have taken a side).

Great write-up. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during the white-boarding, trying to figure out which tensor math would be useful to solve this.

I like them a lot for the moment. I predict it's going to be shit when people learn how to game the system though

had no idea this was algorithmic, figured it was a team of mods searching for the stuff

> This is a difficult issue, but 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.

That seems strictly worse, to me. If you have a good tweet with a bad note, you have 1 piece of good info and 1 piece of bad info. If you have 10 tweets with bad info and no notes, you have 10 pieces of bad info. Community Notes does not seem to be able to address that issue in its current form as it seems to require notes not be very controversial and, as discussed in the article, many things these days are quite controversial. Or, in other terms, if you want to spread misinformation on Twitter and trivially defeat the lame mitigation that is Community Notes, you just need to make it controversial.

If public users can vote on a note’s usefulness, then you will have brigading. If an algorithm isn’t resistant to that sort of manipulation, which the example in this article leads me to believe is suspect, then I don’t see how this will be particularly useful at this point.

They are great

Like most of Musk's ideas, this one is "good but doesn't work". When he's got good people around him, they turn that into "good and works!", but when he's left unchecked we get dumb bullshit like Community Notes, which any idiot could see the problem with: Musk himself.

Just, as an example, not casting any aspersions...

If your community is made up of people who either lean right, politically, or are far right, politically, then your Community Notes feature could still "work" in that there would be strong disagreements between whether Trump is a literal God King and whether Biden's policies are actually doing what fiscal conservatives want. You would get a spectrum of beliefs and you could get "corrections" that bring you CLOSER to a truth, maybe (splitting the difference between "empirical" and "some shit you made up" brings you further from truth, but let's press on), but you still won't get any real "fact"-checking. You'll just get a big fat "actually, you're an outcast in this society for this view" sticker on your thoughts.

In the name of fairness, you can replace the above thought experiment constituents with leftists and the result is the same. Notes that urge users toward or further from "defunding all police", or "abolishing the second amendment", etc.

And then, of course, the reality is in the middle-ish. I will make a firm contention, here, that Twitter IS more politically right than left and it shows in the platform's third-party observed metrics, as well as the content of the Community Notes. But I also think that the political classes of twitter are a much smaller portion than, say, the J/KPop stans, the Swifties, or the product people (individual creators selling things, like webcomic artists rather than, say, Tommy Chong's weed gummies). So there's a strong raft of leftist politics, it's just that they aren't the ones who engage in Community Notes. Children, Fans, and the chronically overencumbered do not tend - at least in the metrics I've seen (and screamed as "duh" by my brain) - to engage in policing misinformation. So you end up with a Community Notes that settles on 'rightness' via a right-leaning community consensus, rather than any actual facts. Which is... not the intended effect. Now, granted, it's less biased than other systems I've seen, but that doesn't excuse the amount of bias it ends up displaying, practically.

So the issue is that without the general public, or at least representation for all of its demographics in proportion, you don't get closer to truth, you just get closer to community consensus. It's a utility that works BEST at consolidating viewpoints into mass-appreciated ones, and has a limited tendency toward truth as a side-effect.

So why is the general public not proportionally represented on Twitter? Like I said: Musk. Whether you appreciate it or hate it, his personality is polarizing and a lot of people just won't engage with it. They left Twitter and it surged right. Again, not to it's complete subsumation as a lot of media would "have you believe" (more likely, media leaves out unnecessary details and people run with that to make it feel like it was intentionally dishonest), but it's observably more right, politically. Source: all third party reports, and spending every single day on twitter with 16 separate accounts specifically for monitoring trending content.

So, unfortunately, he built a really cool little thing that does actually work! But it worked better for old twitter, and doesn't particularly work well for getting "facts", now. All types of people have to engage and you only get all types of engagement if you aren't so hyper-focused on your own dumb bullshit.

Instead what he made was the best little shit-stirrer for his echo-chamber. Great, if that's what he was after. But hilarious if he was actually trying to get something approaching "truth".

How cool that Vitalik was involved.