The Making of Community Notes (2024)

It's a very interesting design space. How to design public forums where people can share ideas and eventually improve their knowledge collectively.

There are very successful instances of that, for instance MathOverflow.

But I don't know what can be achieved when a good chunk of participants don't agree on some basic rules beforehand, such as logic and good faith. It's a bit like consensus with byzantine failures, maybe there's an impossibility theorem here and large social network should be limited to cat videos.

It's a useful piece, thanks for posting it.

Flagging of misinformation has become a controversial topic but for me personally it strikes me as odd to even do such a thing at all. Or rather, if there's a need for such a system it suggests the platform has already failed, in that people are not able to use it discerningly, whether because of the posters, readers, system, or some interaction thereof. If they are able to do so, why have it?

I've posted this elsewhere but the nature of community notes makes it a bit murkier. If Platform A introduces misinformation flags, you can always compartmentalize it as the platform inserting itself into the conversation one way or another, but with something like community notes, you're left wondering at some level "what happened here?" in a way that's similar to upvotes or downvotes.

The point about people trusting community notes I'm not sure what to do with either. Other studies I've seen cited elsewhere suggest that there's a very high false negative rate, so are they doing what they're supposed to? How are people interpreting the unflagged posts?

The whole thing seems well-intended at some level but also missing the forest for the trees or something. I don't want community notes or misinformation flags, I just want discourse and I want to be able to ignore certain sources of posts and be more exposed to others.

It's an interesting idea and I'm not even sure I'm objecting to its implementation. I guess it's more so that I feel like there's an overconfidence in all of the misinformation flagging methods, and this overconfidence is maybe taking attention away from more serious problems, like how people consume and evaluate information, or how information networks are being controlled.