[HN Gopher] What do I think about Community Notes?
___________________________________________________________________
What do I think about Community Notes?
Author : fbrusch
Score : 294 points
Date : 2023-08-28 10:27 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vitalik.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (vitalik.ca)
| tomcam wrote:
| > 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
| meowface wrote:
| It's explained in the next few sentences:
|
| >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.
| hgsgm wrote:
| I don't have a Twitter account. How do I vote on a Communinty
| note?
|
| Do I vote in the same or different place where my neighbor's
| botnet votes?
| meowface wrote:
| 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.
| whitepaint wrote:
| 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).
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| 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.
| whitepaint wrote:
| It is not about moderation. It is about arriving to ONE
| truth. That's how it's similar to crypto and different from
| HN scores.
| tomcam wrote:
| [flagged]
| afavour wrote:
| 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)
| eric_cc wrote:
| A decentralized system that arrives at a shared consensus.
| whitepaint wrote:
| > If "crypto values" literally just means
| "decentralisation" then just say decentralisation.
|
| It's not. I should have added more examples. Another one -
| how do you arrive at a single truth?
| elonismygod wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Transpire7487 wrote:
| [flagged]
| rpgbr wrote:
| [flagged]
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Exactly, this is just what we called "crowdsourcing" a decade
| ago.. nothing even remotely to do with crypto, its mindset or
| values
| BLanen wrote:
| 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.
| remram wrote:
| Isn't _the entire point_ of blockchain and proof-of-work to
| prevent forks?
| eric_cc wrote:
| Absolutely not. Forks are extremely important. Where did
| you come up with that idea?
| lucideer wrote:
| 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.
| alkonaut wrote:
| 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.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _I don 't think I'm alone_
|
| 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%.
| eric_cc wrote:
| So you're a self-aware villain. That's pretty neat.
| rhyme-boss wrote:
| 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.
| padolsey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/twitter-x-elon-musk-vaccine-bronny-
| james...
|
| May be it's the false sense of being decentralized that
| makes it like crypto?
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > it was found that Twitter hadn't intervened
|
| At least, that's what the centralized authority says.
|
| No one outside Twitter can verify that claim.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| 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.
| ambrozk wrote:
| 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.
| untitaker_ wrote:
| 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.
| Yhippa wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| 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...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| And it would only have required to call it
| "decentralization(-adjacent) values"...
| douglaswlance wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And that somehow makes his invalid comparisons valid?
|
| Someone else said it better:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37292374
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| I almost stopped teasing because of the intro.
| myrmidon wrote:
| 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!
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| 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.
| drngdds wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I guess that a "free nipple" isn't technically categorized as
| obscenity even in the USA ?
| samyar wrote:
| they are great
| ryukoposting wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > 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.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| > 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.
| patrickmay wrote:
| > 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. ;-)
| [deleted]
| lysecret wrote:
| Have you heard of Boaty McBoatface ?
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| meowface wrote:
| >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.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| 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
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| colesantiago wrote:
| [flagged]
| xk_id wrote:
| > 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.
| colesantiago wrote:
| 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.
| xk_id wrote:
| > fawning wax lyrical
|
| 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.
| enlyth wrote:
| 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.
| dee-bee wrote:
| I'd argue it's the design of crypto, the "crypto values"
| themselves, that make the space so welcoming to grifters.
| Emphatically including YC.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I'd say "co-opted" more than "tainted".
| colesantiago wrote:
| [flagged]
| flkenosad wrote:
| Can't be both genuine and rich?
| colesantiago wrote:
| No you can't. There is no such thing as a genuine or kind
| million/billionaire.
| paulusthe wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If your arguments rest on projecting internal states,
| beliefs, and motivations on people you disagree with,
| they're worthless.
| hgsgm wrote:
| 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.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > 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?
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| flkenosad wrote:
| Many engineers question thier own systems more than anyone
| else. How can you sag that with a straight face?
| practice9 wrote:
| You can omit the crypto stuff while reading, the post is still
| useful without it. For one, I didn't know that Community Notes
| work this way.
|
| Quadratic funding is also interesting in its own way, you don't
| have to use crypto to implement it
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I'm assuming the dead ox is crypto
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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.
| jxf wrote:
| 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.
| l0ngyap wrote:
| [dead]
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| > 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."
| pessimizer wrote:
| It reminds me more of democracy, where anyone can be a
| candidate and anyone can vote on a candidate.
| enumjorge wrote:
| With the last couple of election cycles in the US really
| emphasizing the "anyone" aspect.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Many/most People only support democracy when t is perceived
| their "team" is the one that controls said "democracy"
| veavo wrote:
| We already know the political slant of "experts". Making
| "experts" write the community notes would lead to them being as
| untrustworthy as "fact checkers".
| alkonaut wrote:
| You mean that the more people know about something, the more
| they tend to have certain opinions? That's interesting.
|
| I wonder if I myself should try to align my views with those
| who know more, rather than those who know less?
| xvector wrote:
| Unfortunately, the uneducated and uninformed tend to hold
| the strongest opinions.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| blfr wrote:
| It's not the more they know, it's the more credentials they
| have. Which is not the same, often wildly so.
| gmerc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
| [deleted]
| blfr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| blfr wrote:
| 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.
| lkrubner wrote:
| 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.
| soerxpso wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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?
| austenallred wrote:
| > deep learning vs crypto is a clear divide of rotators vs
| wordcels.
|
| "deep learning vs. crypto is a clear divide of math people vs
| creative people."
|
| > the former offends theorycel aesthetic sensibilities but
| empirically works to produce absurd miracles
|
| deep learning doesn't seem like it should work to people who
| are entrenched in theory, but somehow it produces great
| results.
|
| > the latter is an insane series of nerd traps and sky high
| abstraction ladders yet mostly scams
|
| crypto is full of interesting technical challenges but mostly
| produces scams.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I haven't felt quite that out of touch in a while; thanks for
| the translation.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Luckily there's a website for that:
|
| 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 wrote:
| This whole time it was just about IQ? Are shape rotators just
| disgruntled Gifted Kids?
| pjc50 wrote:
| _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.
| tinco wrote:
| 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?
| bandrami wrote:
| Community Notes is literally the one good thing that has happened
| to X in this whole thing.
| pavlov wrote:
| Community Notes was introduced in Jan 2021 as "Birdwatch", so
| it precedes the Musk acquisition.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| That is he did what every single company does: takes a beta
| project launched to a limited audience and rolls it out to
| a wider audience.
| flagrant_taco wrote:
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| They did expand it so it applies to ads, which is
| inexplicable when you're trying to get more ads.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| .. 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's utilised far more now than it was back then
| pjc50 wrote:
| .. because replies were destroyed by prioritizing
| blueticks. Community Notes is the new "ratioing" for bad
| tweets.
| Hamuko wrote:
| 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
|
| 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.
| bowsamic wrote:
| 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.
|
| EDIT: I am unsure why you were downvoted
| dherikb wrote:
| It's better than any other alternative that I saw until now.
| exo762 wrote:
| Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37142890
| lucideer wrote:
| 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
| (Gript Media is a far-right publication based in Ireland)
| 2795dhh wrote:
| [flagged]
| lucideer wrote:
| 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.
| 2795dhh wrote:
| [flagged]
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| _> 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.
| chownie wrote:
| 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?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I think it would be authoritarian/libertarian. Liberal is on
| the left/right axis and you could have authoritarian liberals.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| 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.
| flagrant_taco wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| jaybaxter wrote:
| The code is open source:
| https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes
|
| The notes and rating data is released to the public every day:
| https://twitter.com/i/communitynotes/download-data
|
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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".
|
| http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/eigenvectors
|
| It would be interesting to repeat this today, either with the
| same or different questions.
| myrmidon wrote:
| 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).
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| _> 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.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > That's not my reading.
|
| I'm not sure where you actually disagree with me.
|
| 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).
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| 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?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| 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.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| 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.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| It's meant to be an educational text, no? It doesn't seem
| to fit any of those categories.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| meowface wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| The first thing that comes to mind is this classic Jonathan
| Haidt TED talk:
|
| https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
| jl6 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| But the spectrum still ends up being "left/right", with
| some subdivisions over "red vs green" lefties.
| gostsamo wrote:
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| 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.
| somenameforme wrote:
| 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.
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The article repeatedly makes effort to assure the reader that
| the left/right dichotomy wasn't hardcoded but instead
| "emergently" appeared,
|
| No it doesn't. It's _explaining_ that to you. It 's explaining
| code that is available for you to read yourself. It is not
| trying to sell you anything.
| FiloSottile wrote:
| The article claims all data and algorithms are public, are you
| saying that's not true or that the data is doctored?
|
| To me, the examples make a convincing case that the emergent
| [-1, +1] range ended up aligning with what most people call
| right/left.
| elonismygod wrote:
| [flagged]
| mellosouls wrote:
| 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".
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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.
| ewi_ wrote:
| > I don't know if community notes takes this into account,
| but
|
| That's most of the article. If you're asking yourself that,
| you should read it
| jaybaxter wrote:
| Indeed, it does this!
|
| >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)
|
| https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/under-the-
| hood/r...
| mmq wrote:
| Users can rate community notes.
| Hamuko wrote:
| 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.
| emilecantin wrote:
| 90% of the article is about HOW the ratings are taken into
| consideration...
| lbhdc wrote:
| 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?
| major505 wrote:
| 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.
| bowsamic wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| 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?
| bowsamic wrote:
| > Could you perhaps be feeding the algorithm?
|
| 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
| tomcam wrote:
| > How do you downvote on X?
|
| Click ellipsis, then block or mute
| bowsamic wrote:
| 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...
| rideontime wrote:
| 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?
| tomcam wrote:
| 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
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Always crypto scams.
| xigoi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| a_person_2017 wrote:
| Does anyone know what blogging / wiki platform this is on?
| tornato7 wrote:
| It's mostly custom-made by Vitalik:
| https://github.com/vbuterin/blog
| soerxpso wrote:
| 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?
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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.
| skilled wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Damn that's crazy. Users seeing ads, watching them in their
| entirety and _writing about them_?! An advertiser 's wet dream.
| Unparalleled engagement
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Unless the fake ad was actually intended to drive traffic
| to the original product, which is an obvious perverse
| incentive introduced by this tool.
| yankput wrote:
| > 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
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-28 23:01 UTC)