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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
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.
Subset of IQ. You can find high-IQ people who struggle specifically with shape rotation. Not clear if this is an artefact of "what questions get deemed to be part of IQ" or not, but I wouldn't base a division of society on it.
I've never interpreted the distinction as being primarily about IQ, but about how that intelligence is applied. Rotators engineer physical reality, wordcels engineer social dynamics. I think the rotator disgruntlement comes from the fact that wordcels have the capacity to extract more value than they create. It is much harder for rotators to extract more value than they create. This is complicated by the fact that rotators, particularly in tech, are building systems deployed by wordcels to extract value from society (e.g., ad-tech).
It's not, really. It's more about a political divide, with STEM vs liberal arts being used as a proxy. There are some people who don't want to give up the chauvinistic, pre-#metoo era of the tech industry. Clinging to the meritocracy myth is a coping mechanism.
Ultimately, it's telling on one's self that one is a bad communicator. One might generally perceive any use of -cel neologisms to be a projection of the speaker's own feelings of impotence.
> Can anyone translate this from meme to English please?
"ChatGPT, invent some jargon to make people who've bought in feel like insiders, while making ungullible people^W^W I mean haters keep a safe distance."
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".
Wikipedia is WAY worse because they enshrine particular editors over particular sets of pages (esp. political ones) to make sure the edits only go the way those people want.
Anyone can review community notes and mark them as useful/not useful.
I don't know if community notes takes this into account, but you could weight bias according to how a contributor has voted in the past and medianize the output to prevent "dogpiling" or "brigading" from one side or the other.
>For a note to achieve a high intercept term (which is the note’s helpfulness score), it must be rated helpful by raters with a diversity of viewpoints (factor embeddings)
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.
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.
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.
Under no circumstances do you "gotta hand it to them", but Musk took the private beta, US-only Birdwatch, renamed it to something less cute (but ultimately a more pragmatic name), and launched it more broadly.
I think the point is that while he doesn't really deserve credit for developing the project, he was in charge when it was rolled out. He could have easily killed the beta project as having failed or a leftover project from the people that used to be there.
Sure, he can get credit for not making a bad decision in this case and defaulting to a good outcome. (He met the minimum benchmark a product manager would be expected to do, but let's not overstate his part)
When it comes to a product decision, those are very different in my book. The default position should be not to change or intervene. In the case of a new product or feature that means not shipping the product unless it is tested along the way and continues to meet predefined targets. Anything less risks committing resources to a project that at best isn't valuable and at worst is a net drain on the company.
In this case, Twitter after Elon acquired it decided to continue with the beta feature. I have no idea how that decision was made internally and can't peg it on Elon, though I can assume he had the authority to spike the project if he wanted to. Assuming Twitter has competent PMs, they made the active choise to move the project out of beta when the testing phase was complete and they evaluated whether it met goals.
Alas, twitter is has never been like "every single company", and I presume it would have languished in it's pre-musk state for many more years before it got cancelled.
I don't see any reason to think so. As an early Birdwatch/CN contributor and also a long-time user of the API, I've always thought their back end stuff was pretty great. API v2 also rolled out pre-Musk and was actually great until he crippled it with absurd limits. I'm not going to pay thousand$ for the privilege of churning out free network analysis; last time I checked you could only collect 1500 tweets/month before a very expensive meter started running on your API calls.
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.
It's a good way to push any "status quo" narrative. Community Notes present themselves as true, so naturally people don't question the things that they link to. I've seen posts before where many incorrect Community Notes come and go on that same post.
It is the standard internet psychology: someone says something that seems dubious or they are generally a dubious person, a "sensible" person or agency (Community Notes) comes along with a lot of popular support to offer a rebuttal, a vast majority then assume the latter is true without bothering to check. The act of professional sounding, assumedly popular rebuttal, given with sources, is enough for people to accept a random thing as a fact. Almost no one checks the sources.
.. 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 ..
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.
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?
I think this is easy to explain by considering that the meaning of left/right constantly changes over time. For example, how would you characterize somebody who is pro free speech, anti war, anti hegemony, pro equality of opportunity, in support of a color-blind society, and so on? 20 years ago that would have been an absolutely textbook liberal, today that is no longer the case.
So when we say left or right we're not really referring to any sort of static values, or even fundamental values. It all just keeps shifting and often in self-contradictory ways. So the terms just become a proxy for the ever-shifting divides in society. This makes it essentially a tautology that any fair sampling of society will end up divided on those terms.
The changing of left/right over time is largely because much of American society views politics through the lens of Democrat/Republican. On a broader level, economic left/right and authoritarian/libertarian haven't moved, but both parties kinda rotate around them over time. At the moment I'd say both democrats are moving slightly further left, and both parties are moving more authoritarian.
To me, it appears clear that the divide is not really left/right; my understanding is that the algorithm basically reduces a high-dimensional "alignment" of a user/note to a 1-dimensional "polarity", and this simply happens to somewhat coincide with the US party split.
I think this is almost to be expected if you have a 2 party political system, because each party is trying to align with as many voters as possible; so you can fully expect that the republican/democrat split is a "good" cut through alignment space.
Basically, the algorithm explicitly looks for the "best" polarity axis (i.e. the one that contains the most information about whether a user is going to find something agreeable or not), while a 2 party political system implicitly alignes across such an axis (as an emergent property of party-politics-shifting).
> this simply happens to somewhat coincide with the US party split
That's not my reading. The negative polarity is clearly the US Democrats, but as Vitalik notes, the opposite polarity isn't anything obviously specific to the Republicans. His posts for negative were simply the first three posts and they're all of a very consistent political ideology and region. But he had to cherry-pick posts for positive polarity to try and sustain the claim that this is the opposite of the negative polarity, as Brazilian politics and Tesla people isn't something anyone would have picked if asked to guess what the posts would be about ahead of time.
Then there's the clear content differences between the positive vs negative polarity posts. The negative polarity posts are all highly subjective opinions, usually about the tone of what some famous people said. Their references are simply left-leaning US media articles which are themselves opinion. They could be easily disputed and frequently are. The positive polarity posts are cherry picked for the purpose of making a point, yet are mostly specific factual claims with hard data and references, except for the second, which is apparently disputing the claim that child trafficking doesn't even exist? I don't see any way to dispute any of the claims in the positive polarity notes. You'd have to fall back on "well that may be true but in wider context..." type responses.
So it's not really clear exactly what this algorithm is picking up on. The differences may just reflect the inherent nature of politics in which left and right are often presented as polar opposites, but which in reality is more like the left being relatively homogenous and consistent at any given point in time, whereas the "right" is more like a coalition of people who aren't on the left than a specific set of policy or cultural concerns.
> which is apparently disputing the claim that child trafficking doesn't even exist?
The troublesome part of that note is that "the movie accurately depicts" the issue. The following note has "these books are obscene." The first is a little bit different in that it is straightforward and factual, but with the (missing) context of the tweet it was probably thought to be an irrelevant insult i.e. I bet the tweet wasn't about the proportion of black children in single-parent households.
It's obviously a party split in a way, but to my eyes it isn't about assigning people to a party - it's finding people who hate current parties rather than people who love them. That is to say: polarized individuals. I think it's an accident of history that people who despise Republicans currently have their opinions fairly well-represented by the Democratic Party, but on the other side, people who hate Democrats aren't very well represented by the Republican Party. The Democrat-hating base is unruly, and I think it contains far more people who also dislike or are neutral toward Republican politics and politicians.
That could be. It's not clear from the note what movie is being referred to. The lack of context makes it harder to interpret.
The last post reflects ideological values, but appears to be a factually unambiguous claim about US law. The images show cartoons of men sucking each other's dicks. In law "obscene" is used to mean something like "overtly sexual", which at least the first book clearly meets.
No, obscene doesn't mean that. Obscene material is illegal material, not adults-only material.
edit: so saying that the books depicted explicit sexual acts would be indisputable, but the determination that the books were obscene would happen in court. And if drawings of two people sucking each other's dicks were judged obscene, a lot of things would instantly become illegal in that jurisdiction.
That's a circular definition (the law is defining what's illegal, so the category it defines cannot itself be defined as that which is illegal). Though the actual legal definition in the USA isn't much better.
I think the claim in question is about the first amendment issue. If the material was judged obscene then it could still be allowed, or disallowed, or disallowed in some contexts (i.e. schools, what's in dispute here) but such laws wouldn't get tripped up by the bill of rights.
It's not a circular definition. "Obscene" is a term used for content that has been deemed illegal. It is not a general term for sexual content. It is not a term for content that is illegal sometimes but not other times. It is not a euphemism for material that is restricted to adult consumption, or for explicit pornography.
more charitably, but still repetitious: when one says that something is obscene, that's saying that it should be illegal in any context; that it has no value. A drawing of two people sucking each others dicks has surely met that bar in the past - information about birth control has met that bar in the past. But I do not think the suggestion was that drawings of gay men having sex should be illegal, what was being suggested was that it is not appropriate for children. That's not a question of obscenity.
Obscene in the context of the first amendment protections is defined by the Miller test regardless of how any laws define obscenity. The third prong alone is a high bar to clear in this case and its what makes the claim far from factually unambiguous imo.
> Whether a reasonable person finds that the matter, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
They are not categories, they are contexts, and educational texts can have value within any or all of those contexts. In fact being educational or informative could inherently be considered to be of literary value.
Many people rightfully complain about the lack of specificity and clarity in the third prong, but that is even more evidence for why it is a bad community note because there is obvious room for interpretation and the note leaves none. Thus, even if you agree with its conclusion, it lacks sufficient context which is one of the voting criteria.
I'd be very careful though about drawing conclusions about what exactly polarity means here because 3 examples are not nearly enough-- especially for conclusions like which polarity is more "fact based".
My viewpoint is that the polarity in the algorithm should be akin to a principal component in alignment space (because of how the algorithm works), and you would expect the political parties to be split along a very similar axis in a 2 party system (an emergent property-- if they were not, one party could gain voters or improve cohesiveness of its voter pool by shifting its alignment).
I think on re-reading, I'm not strongly disagreeing with you indeed. I think it's just that the article says the positive polarity posts don't map cleanly to Republicans, whereas the negative polarity posts do map cleanly to the Democrats, so how much does it really coincide?
Not a direct answer, but years ago a friend of mine tried a similar experiment by taking a bunch of polarizing questions and then doing principal component analysis on the results. He came up with two axes (the maths would spit out a number of axes, but the rest were low-salience). The top one was very similar to "left/right".
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.
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.
No, not really. There are different types of centrists, religious vs liberterian right, and even some socialist religionists. The world is a tat bit more complex than the loud minorities want to make you believe.
It's also one that is insufficient, you just have to look how often fascist-like parties are classified "right wing" (while they are centrists), or the likes of Gandhi and Stalin get put in the same "left" box, while they are polar opposites.
Unless I have misunderstood it, this algorithm sounds particularly bad, because it's either only able to see the world through a single dimension, or worse, it's even forcing it into the same dimension (criticizing from competent mathematicians/staticians would be welcome).
But in the end, I guess it doesn't change much : it's worse than useless, just like Twitter and the people that use it, for the last decade and counting.
Feel free to run the matrix factorization code on the data, and then try to interpret the resulting latent dimension it finds for yourself! And also, you can read the code to verify that it really is running a matrix factorization rather than hardcoding a particular left/right split.
One could argue that a particular question will always have a left/right-ish divide of some kind, even if people may disagree which is which. In many cases on social media discourse, it comes down to pro-establishment vs. anti-establishment (which previously would usually have been seen as right vs. left but now is generally seen as the reverse).
Anecdotally, most community notes I've seen appear to take the form of "anti-establishment claim -> community note refuting the anti-establishment claim". But what's nice is that when it's the opposite, they still seem to work well.
Both faith based/non-faith based and authoritarian/liberal views will often, if not exclusively, be interpreted as falling along the left/right axis by many people. It's simply a matter of interpretation and bias.
What exactly would it look like to be an authoritarian liberal?
Americans have a particularly confusing form of "liberal" today, but at least my understanding of the two terms has them pretty specifically at odds with one another. I'm not sure how an authoritarian would have centralized so much power when the focus is on individual rights and freedoms.
It's just a language issue. "Liberal" in the US doesn't mean the same thing it means in other English-speaking countries. Americans coined the term "neoliberal" to talk about what other people just call "liberal." In the US, "liberal" just means that you vote for Democrats, and that you're concerned. It's not a distinct ideological stance.
That really makes the distinction of am "authoritarian liberal" pointless at that point. One is a ideology and the other is a political party, the combination of the two is completely irrelevant as any party could align with one specific ideology.
There's the classic right wing economic liberal who is pro free market, but you also have the bottom wing civic freedoms anarchist liberal (which is indeed anti-authoritarian/fascist top wing). Both anarchist and fascist are centrists in the usual left vs right sense.
P.S. But you can add more dimensions, it's just that you cannot go below two without having nonsense as a result.
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.
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.
> All the actors in crypto are bad and you should not trust what they say, even Vitalik.
To someone in good mental health, Vitalik has written 4k words giving an accurate overview of the Community Notes algorithm and its context and was peer reviewed by two others, one of them the lead ML engineer at Twitter. The first sentence in your reply reads like a paranoid delusion and the undertone of anger makes it concerning. You should take a break from whatever echo chambers you frequent and reflect on your mental state, perhaps with the guidance of a specialist.
I don't think the thousands of people who lost their life savings and have been scammed would agree your assessment.
Perhaps those who lost their savings and are affected by ransomware by crypto should they see a specialist for the amount of damage that crypto has caused them in getting their savings wiped out due to the speculative nature of crypto that Vitalik has helped to build.
No amount of technical talk, ad hominems, or you fawning wax lyrical over Vitalik will change this fact and my statement still stands.
That's the thing, it's literally just facts. And yes, even after experiencing loss, it's even more unhealthy to lose one's ability to judge new situations rationally.
> "And yes, even after experiencing loss, it's even more unhealthy to lose one's ability to judge new situations rationally."
So this is what you said when one of your family members persistently begged to you for money because they gambled it all on crypto?
It's a fact that millions of people have lost their life savings, got rugpulled, had to pay extra on 'fees', had their work destroyed due to ransomware and got their 'tokens' drained over Vitalik's creation, Ethereum, he is the one who got rich in this pyramid he orchestrated.
I think he shouldn't be immune from criticism regardless of what he's rambling on about, you seem to think that he is above criticism because he is some sort of technical intellectual with humility. The law and regulations doesn't care.
It's morbidly unhealthy to be blind to a person's bad actions, ignore all the effects and suffering their actions has caused and to take a bullet and defend that said person.
I think you're being overly charitable, because he's not really interested in governance writ large. He long ago decided what he thinks the best government system is, and sees everything political through that lens: is this good for my system, or is it bad.
He never actually questions his own system, because he's ultimately an engineer. He's clueless on social structures or systems.
> He never actually questions his own system, because he's ultimately an engineer. He's clueless on social structures or systems.
I'm sorry, but that is a false dichotomy and downright ridiculous assessment. Being a good engineer does not disqualify you from deeply understanding social organization or dynamic systems.
I am an engineer and those two topics are among the most critical which guide my work. I'm obsessed with these topics. Being an engineer makes thinking about these things easier, not harder.
Are you next going to proclaim that actors are clueless about politics?
He questions his own system constantly, but he's necessarily committed to it (modulo modifications and extremely rare overhauls), because his identity is tied up in what he's built, and he can't just jump to something new without losing a huge amount of himself.
Vitalik has written philosophical posts about technological and economic systems for years now. The idea that he is some sort of Machiavellian mastermind trying to siphon goodwill via an overly-detailed technical analysis blog post is hilariously inaccurate.
I think this is too uncharitable. I'm not a cryptocurrency booster, but Vitalik has consistently been a philosophical explorer of ideas he finds interesting in this space, and this seems genuine, not an attempt to "hitch a dead ox to a live one". Most of the article has nothing to do with cryptocurrency at all.
Here's my take as someone who works in the space: Vitalik is a thought leader. Devs in crypto highly respect him. His blog at vitalik.ca is mostly concerned with crypto and crypto-adjacent topics, it being the active focus point of Vitalik's research and development. He's been writing about crypto for 10+ years. If he wants to draw attention to community notes on his blog, he's probably primarily doing it just for the fun of thinking and writing, but as a nice side effect, I'm sure he wouldn't mind if devs in crypto took inspiration from community notes, particularly when it comes to building crypto-native social networks.
Sure, I had the same thought, but after the initial comparison he mostly stops talking about crypto and examines the topic properly, so worth reading the rest of the article.
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.
> 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."
Only if you take the label "expert" as given and not itself subject to fact checking.
Very few people have a problem with expert fact checking, if that person is actually an expert. Hence why most people will listen to specialists doing work on their home, or their accountant when receiving tax advice. It's not controversial and doesn't differ by political stance. In this case Vitalik is clearly qualified to read, understand and explain ML Python; he is agreed upon by all to genuinely have expertise (relative to the average layman at least).
The reason that expertise has become so controversial nowadays is due to the left's habit of automatically labelling any academic or civil servant an expert, and continuing to insist on the unquestionable nature of their expertise even after widely publicized and very basic failures. To other people expertise is something you have to prove via unambiguous and exceptional results, not merely assert via title, and the public sector's general lack of quantifiably positive results makes academic expertise frequently subject to dispute.
>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.
What are you basing this on? Was this written by some website owner, or is that just how you feel about it? Given you can engage by either voting or replying, I feel like voting is much more about molding and curation than engagement. Replying is a much stronger form of engagement: people can see that it is you specifically who engaged, and you can express your opinion more fully.
I agree that "quality" is subjective and so isn't the right concept, but it's about a community shaping a platform's content based on the average of their preferences and therefore making it more likely any of them will want to continue using the community in the future. It of course doesn't necessarily optimize for truth, but it optimizes for the feedback loop of a site's users turning the site into what they want to see and being more likely to use (and vote on) the site more actively as a result. I disagree that the mere act of feeling like you're making a difference is what's actually enticing to people and what brings them back.
> 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.
How can you conflate someone expressing an opinion on their "micro-blog" to their followers who have opted in to hear such opinions with the idea of having tweets arbitrarily interjected with "expert opinions".
Even though Vitalik is one of the world's experts on crypto and cryptocurrency and blockchain systems, he would never suggest to be given the authority to directly annotate incorrect tweets about crypto with his own expert opinion. It's pretentious to believe that such a thing is desirable or could ever be neutral. Such a system is ALWAYS capturable and corruptible. So of course it's risky. That's why free speech being a social and cultural value is as important as it being a law for governments to respect. Meaningless is the law if a culture is too prudish or too conforming to begin with.
If Vitalik wishes to persuade people away from bad opinions about crypto, doing so at his leisure on his own micro-blog or regular blog is certainly a preferable option to acting as some sort of Minister of Truth.
> 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.
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.
Reddit would not have ever been a good site without voting. Because of that it became one of the best places for finding information on a wide variety of topics.
This comment is cynical to the point of ignoring reality.
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.
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.
> 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.
As a relatively uninvested onlooker with regards to “NATO bad/good” (but heavily leaning to “bad”): I found this to be a surprisingly compelling counter argument to the anti-NATO messaging on James Baker making false promises regarding expansion etc.
Just wanted to give props to a well-crafted argument - even if I’m a bit irked for apparently getting caught in the “countries act like people” cognitive shortcut that usually drives me nuts when it’s about economics.
The German unification should not have been allowed then.
Basically it took you 158 words to say: Don't trust NATO.
Also this doesn't change the fact that the information is factual and correct. Might not be relevant you say, I say it is, but that's where we enter the territory of opinions.
> Basically it took you 158 words to say: Don't trust NATO
No, the USSR was a big grown up country governed by people that understood the difference between representations prior to neogitarions and treaty commitments and who choose what was and was not important to pursue in a treaty once they decided to engage in that process, and not only choose to sign treaty without any restriction on NATO expansion, but who did not include the issue in negotiations toward the treaty at at all, per Mikhail Grorbachev, the Soviet leader who signed the treaty.
> Also this doesn't change the fact that the information is factual and correct.
The standard for notes is to provide relevant context.
> No, the USSR was a big grown up country governed by people that understood the difference...
So to rephrase it: never trust NATO's word.
> The standard for notes is to provide relevant context.
And I say it is relevant. NATO claims to be strictly a defensive alliance, the note adds contextual information to show that NATO is both expanding and waging wars of aggression.
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…“
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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"
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.
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.
It has a central authority that can and has taken down community notes that were disagreeing with their narrative. Seems like the opposite of decentralization.
That piece reports that the note in question was not taken down by a central authority in Twitter, and was instead voted down. You gotta read the correction at the bottom.
this is not what vitalik is saying. he is saying that the output of the algorithm has not been modified after the fact. he explicitly mentions the possibility of vote brigading and fake accounts, both of which are well within elon's capabilities.
Was it? Vitalik's essay studies a case where that was alleged, and it was found that Twitter hadn't intervened. The note appearing then disappearing was organic and driven by user interactions. If you or Gizmodo want to claim otherwise, this is the standard of proof now expected. That's the power of decentralized systems - you can audit them!
Looking at that specific note, it's obvious that the note was extremely open to dispute and that's why it was voted down. You don't need to invoke the spectre of The Terrible Elon to explain that. The medical establishment has by their own admission created an endless torrent of false claims about vaccine safety, so it's something where you just aren't going to get bipartisan consensus about anything at all.
Well, the point of the article is that you can verify that claim because Twitter provide enough data to reproduce their calculations, so to claim otherwise you will have to assert that all the numbers and data being supplied are faked.
>Community Notes are not written or curated by some centrally selected set of experts; rather, they can be written and voted on by anyone, and which notes are shown or not shown is decided entirely by an open source algorithm. The Twitter site has a detailed and extensive guide describing how the algorithm works, and you can download the data containing which notes and votes have been published, run the algorithm locally, and verify that the output matches what is visible on the Twitter site.
The fact that you need an account (meeting a certain degree of "reputation"-esque criteria) is what makes it (in theory) much more difficult for your neighbor's botnet to vote.
It's become extremely common in tech discourse these days to label anything anyone sees that involves any level of "direct democracy" / "community consensus" (both age-old pre-computers ideas) as "crypto-esque", as if Bitcoin was the first time humans applied consensus.
It's a concept with many names. When I studied economics in college there was a course called social choice theory, which was about all kinds of "preference aggregation" and voting systems.
I believe fact checking should be done by experts, contracts should be written and enforced by humans, politics should be left to elected politicians, and and central banks are the least bad stewards of currencies.
I don't think I'm alone to share all of this not-so-closely-related beliefs, so there perhaps a connection. I guess first of all its rooted in a fundamental trust of humans and human institutions more than anything. I think if you ask people "do you think politicians can generally be trusted to work for the common good of their constituents" then those who strongly agree probably also agree to some extents on the above issues.
I doubt you're alone but my suspicion would be that you're in a very small minority.
> a fundamental trust of humans and human institutions
These are two separate things. In general, those who primarily trust the former do not place the same level of trust in the latter, and vice versa. Finding those who trust in both seems a rare thing.
> I think if you ask people "do you think politicians can generally be trusted to work for the common good of their constituents"
It's been my observation that many people who vote do so on a "least worst" basis. National statistics bodies collecting data on levels of trust in public representatives rarely post figures above 50%.
Appeal to authority is generally classified as a subconscious flaw. When its conscious & deliberate, given the history of authoritarianism in the world, it does come across... oddly.
What is not understandable here? Crypto is all about decentralization, Community Notes embodies that value (obviously not ideally, because Twitter still can decide to do whatever).
Community Notes is “decentralized” only in the sense that it’s derived from the collective action of multiple users. Do Hacker News scores embody the values of crypto? If not, why not? Because Community Notes uses more complicated math for its weighting system? How can we make that claim and not end up going back to the early days of Slashdot and declaring its user-driven moderation system to embody the values of crypto? Oh my god, was Commander Taco Satoshi all along?
Community Notes is an interesting example of collective moderation, but it’s an example of collective moderation, a long-standing thing that has nothing to do with decentralization as I think most people understand the term. The objection here, I think, isn’t to Vitalik’s interest in it — it’s to the “if all you have is a cryptocoin, everything looks a blockchain” mindset.
If “crypto values” literally just means “decentralisation” then just say decentralisation. It’s weird to invoke something that adds absolutely nothing to the comparison (unless, say, you’re trying to hype it up)
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.
This is the guy that thought that a simulated(on traditional CPU) quantum algorithm could be faster than a traditional algorithm.
This is the guy that thought of Ethereum because he disagreed with a balance patch in an MMO and thinks that in a blockchain mmo you could just fork it.
Every take he has is about cryptolibertarian ideology and should be treated as such.
> 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."
We already know the political slant of "experts". Making "experts" write the community notes would lead to them being as untrustworthy as "fact checkers".
Painting all experts with such a broad brush leads to what is an epistemic waste land in which you are cut off from everyone else's knowledge, since you can dismiss any belief you dislike by simply declaring it expert knowledge.
I don't think he's painting a picture that all experts are automatically wrong about everything just because they're experts. Rather, that "experts" are as morally biased as any other person (it turns out that 8 years of university doesn't fundamentally change anything about the human condition), and that they shouldn't be granted unchecked epistemological authority over subjective matters. Someone who knows the truth and has a political agenda is not less likely to lie than someone who doesn't know the truth and has a political agenda, and that's even the case if you assume that all experts do magically know everything about their field.
Often the problem is that the guy who has made something his career posts incorrect things more often than the guy who hasn't. Some of the reasons for these are:
- self-interest
- intentionally since it protects their interests
- accidental since they've spent so much time they need it to be meaningful
- accidental since they want to please their fellow experts
- intentionally since they want to go with the herd
- selection bias towards being someone who cares about this very much goes with lack of aptitude
- historical bias
- most people are better equipped than experts to spot paradigm shifts because experts are over-indexed on the status quo
- no field expertise
Ultimately, it's up to you how you weight people's opinion, and may each person's epistemology serve them appropriately.
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.
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.
First, shoddy research getting published because it matches authors' and reviewers' bias is not some immanent part of the scientific method.
Second, that is not what the comment was about. It was about repeated debunking of reality's supposed liberal bias from which its fans consistently refuse to learn.
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".
> while it seems obvious to most that CN isn't a feature that would have been conceived under Musk
This isn't obvious at all. A big part of why Musk got upset with Twitter under its previous management was his dislike of centralized journalist-driven fact checking. He might not have come up with the algorithm but you can't claim it's living on borrowed time whilst simultaneously criticizing it for scaling up too fast.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Animal torture? I get tons of hilarious animal shorts on Twitter but never animal torture. I train the algo by liking these vids. I do get fight, real estate, web design, shuffle dance, and guitar vids for the same reason. Could you perhaps be feeding the algorithm? Why would you get more than one or two after downvoting? And are the torture videos downvoted or removed by staff? Mind posting an example?
I don't know but it shouldn't even be a possibility to train the algorithm to give animal torture videos
> Why would you get more than one or two after downvoting?
How do you downvote on X?
> And are the torture videos downvoted or removed by staff?
Again I don't know what "downvoted" means in the context of X. I can't see any kind of score or anything. In my experience they are not removed by staff unless the animal is mammalian.
> Mind posting an example?
I've deleted my account, but I wouldn't post them here anyway
Okay then yes I was doing that and even so the content was still appearing more and more rapidly. I know many others who've had the same problem specifically with animal torture videos. Frankly, the platform is not fun when there is always a good chance of seeing animals being tortured. I think I'm being downvoted because people think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not. Here's an article about it https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cat-dog-torture-video...
Do you have any actual evidence that muting or blocking an account "trains" the "algorithm" to show you fewer accounts like that, or is this just based on your own observations? If the latter, can you share your data?
Purely anecdata and common sense. A large commercial enterprise can’t survive that kind of thing for very long. My Twitter feed has been aggressively G-rated from day 1
> 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.
Post-Elon takeover the amount of bot spam I encounter has definitely decreased. I'm not sure the claim of Twitter moderation is accurate, since before the takeover the problem was still present.
The problem got so bad in YouTube Comments that eventually third-party tools [0] were developed to help purge spam.
I agree that if you had a team monitoring spam they could write rules to drastically reduce spam. It's always going to be a cat and mouse game, but if the cat side was more proactive it would definitely lead to a better experience.
Urgh, yes. YouTuber HeavyDSparks has had a long running scammer campaign against him with people naming themselves with unicode characters of numbers in circles and posting "Whatsapp me" replies to legit comments. That even someone like him with > 3M subscribers can't seem to get ahold of a YouTube CSR who can raise an issue with backend/anti-fraud developers to check for accounts using this pattern is mind-boggling and only speaks for the dysfunctionality of Google today.
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.
Certain people I follow always have a bot spam comment on every post. They put it in the hidden replies, and next post they make gets a very similar comment from a different bot.
> 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
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.