Comment by anileated
1 year ago
I do not deny your experience and I saw many useful community notes before. It took me seeing this case to understand that it is actually a bad idea, for the reasons I mentioned (illusion of absolute truth while being open to manipulation & showing no history of controversy).
Also, it is not technically decentralized, it is Twitter (a centralized platform)… If it were truly fully decentralized, it would be vulnerable to such attacks even more, right? If you are up against a totalitarian government controlling the 2nd most populous country, there can always be more people who claim the false correction. There was a minority of people who got the correction fixed, and if it was actually decentralized then how would they be able to?
> it is not technically decentralized, it is Twitter (a centralized platform)
Community notes are generated by users and not the platform it's not perfect but better than having a mainstream media oligopoly deciding what is truth and what isn't.
> If it were truly fully decentralized, it would be vulnerable to such attacks even more, right?
The algorithm tries to prevent this kind of abuse. "the Community Notes rating algorithm explicitly attempts to prioritize notes that receive positive ratings from people across a diverse range of perspectives". See Vitalik analysis: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.h.... But from what you're telling it looks CCP found a way to game it.
Good point that the algorithm tries to compensate for the perspectives, but I’m sure it still comes down to a popularity contest.
Generally, the platform determines the algorithm of which note wins, so that’s centralized. The algorithm depends on what kind and how many users vote and how. Those users exist on the platform which requires registration and can deny any given user. Centralized.
Further, no guarantee that the actual algorithm in production matches the one made public, but I guess they have no reason to lie here.
> from what you’re telling
It’s not just me telling, the tweet has been up so far and community note does its best to awkwardly convey the controversy that would’ve been otherwise completely lost due to the ill designed way community notes work.
> Good point that the algorithm tries to compensate for the perspectives, but I’m sure it still comes down to a popularity contest.
It isn't clear if polarization score have only one dimension where it would be great to capture US culture wars but fail to capture nuances outside of that or if it's more complex than that.
> Generally, the platform determines the algorithm of which note wins, so that’s centralized. The algorithm depends on what kind and how many users vote and how. Those users exist on the platform which requires registration and can deny any given user. Centralized.
Yes, not perfect but still better than the traditional media oligopoly.
> Further, no guarantee that the actual algorithm in production matches the one made public, but I guess they have no reason to lie here.
The algorithm and the data are open. It is reproducible.
https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes
https://twitter.com/i/communitynotes/download-data
> It’s not just me telling, the tweet has been up so far and community note does its best to awkwardly convey the controversy that would’ve been otherwise completely lost due to the ill designed way community notes work.
I checked the tweet (https://twitter.com/MOSSADil/status/1745921315498811752) and at least now the community notes show a different content:
> Original video, which provides a better look at the plate (鄂F1573警),indicates that the video was shot in Hubei, China.
>> https://x.com/ken2009_/status/1227476618014330880?s=46
Many here are biased against Elon and Twitter for political reasons so they are too quick to pass judgement.
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