If you work at a social media website or YouTube (or know anyone who does), please read the text below:
Community Notes is one of the best features to come out on social media apps in a long time. The code is even open source. Why haven’t other social media websites picked it up yet? If they care about truth, this would be a considerable step forward beyond. Notes like “this video is funded by x nation” or “this video talks about health info; go here to learn more” messages are simply not good enough.
If you work at companies like YouTube or know someone who does, let’s figure out who we need to talk to to make it happen. Naïvely, you could spend a weekend DMing a bunch of employees (PMs, engineers) at various social media websites in order to persuade them that this is worth their time and probably the biggest impact they could have in their entire career.
If you have any connections, let me know. We can also set up a doc of messages to send in order to come up with a persuasive DM.
Don’t forget that we train language models on the internet! The more truthful your dataset is, the more truthful the models will be! Let’s revamp the internet for truthfulness, and we’ll subsequently improve truthfulness in our AI systems!!
Why haven’t other social media websites picked it up yet? If they care about truth, this would be a considerable step forward beyond.
This sounds a bit naive.
There’s a lot of energy invested in making it easier for powerful elites to push their preferred narratives. Community Notes are not in the interests of the Censorship Industrial Complex.
I don’t think that anyone at the project manager level has the political power to add a feature like Community Notes. It would likely need to be someone higher up in the food chain.
Sure, but sometimes it’s just a PM and a couple of other people that lead to a feature being implemented. Also, keep in mind that Community Notes was a thing before Musk. Why was Twitter different than other social media websites?
Also, the Community Notes code was apparently completely revamped by a few people working on the open-source code, which got it to a point where it was easy to implement, and everyone liked the feature because it noticeably worked.
Either way, I’d rather push for making it happen and somehow it fails on other websites than having pessimism and not trying at all. If it needs someone higher up the chain, let’s make it happen.
Sure, but sometimes it’s just a PM and a couple of other people that lead to a feature being implemented. Also, keep in mind that Community Notes was a thing before Musk. Why was Twitter different than other social media websites?
Twitter seems to have started Birdwatch as a small separate pilot project where it likely wasn’t easy to fight or on anyone’s radar to fight.
In the current enviroment, where X gets seen as evil by a lot of the mainstream media, I would suspect that copying Community Notes from X would alone produce some resistence. The antibodies are now there in a way they weren’t two years ago.
Also, the Community Notes code was apparently completely revamped by a few people working on the open-source code, which got it to a point where it was easy to implement, and everyone liked the feature because it noticeably worked.
If you look at mainstream media views about X’s community notes, I don’t think everyone likes it.
I remember Elon once saying that he lost a 8-figure advertising deal because of Community Notes on posts of a company that wanted to advertise on X.
Either way, I’d rather push for making it happen and somehow it fails on other websites than having pessimism and not trying at all. If it needs someone higher up the chain, let’s make it happen.
I think you would likely need to make a case that it’s good business in addition to helping with truth.
If you want to make your argument via truth, motivating some reporters to write favorable articles about Community Notes might be necessary.
Good points; I’ll keep them all in mind. If money is the roadblock, we can put pressure on the companies to do this. Or, worst-case, maybe the government can enforce it (though that should be done with absolute care).
there is an issue with surface level insights being unfaily weighted, but this is solvable, imo. especially with youtube, which can see which commenters have watched the full video.
If you work at a social media website or YouTube (or know anyone who does), please read the text below:
Community Notes is one of the best features to come out on social media apps in a long time. The code is even open source. Why haven’t other social media websites picked it up yet? If they care about truth, this would be a considerable step forward beyond. Notes like “this video is funded by x nation” or “this video talks about health info; go here to learn more” messages are simply not good enough.
If you work at companies like YouTube or know someone who does, let’s figure out who we need to talk to to make it happen. Naïvely, you could spend a weekend DMing a bunch of employees (PMs, engineers) at various social media websites in order to persuade them that this is worth their time and probably the biggest impact they could have in their entire career.
If you have any connections, let me know. We can also set up a doc of messages to send in order to come up with a persuasive DM.
Don’t forget that we train language models on the internet! The more truthful your dataset is, the more truthful the models will be! Let’s revamp the internet for truthfulness, and we’ll subsequently improve truthfulness in our AI systems!!
I don’t use Xitter; is there a way to display e.g. top 100 tweets with community notes? To see how it works in practice.
I don’t know of something that does so at random, but this page automatically shares posts with community notes that have been deemed helpful.
Oh, that’s great, thanks! Also reminded me of (the less official, more comedy-based) “Community Notes Violating People”. @Viliam
Thank you both! This is perfect. It’s like a rational version of Twitter, and I didn’t expect to use those words in the same sentence.
I don’t think so, unfortunately.
Found a nice example (linked from Zvi’s article).
Okay, it’s just one example and it wasn’t found randomly, but I am impressed.
I’ve also started working on a repo in order to make Community Notes more efficient by using LLMs.
This sounds a bit naive.
There’s a lot of energy invested in making it easier for powerful elites to push their preferred narratives. Community Notes are not in the interests of the Censorship Industrial Complex.
I don’t think that anyone at the project manager level has the political power to add a feature like Community Notes. It would likely need to be someone higher up in the food chain.
Sure, but sometimes it’s just a PM and a couple of other people that lead to a feature being implemented. Also, keep in mind that Community Notes was a thing before Musk. Why was Twitter different than other social media websites?
Also, the Community Notes code was apparently completely revamped by a few people working on the open-source code, which got it to a point where it was easy to implement, and everyone liked the feature because it noticeably worked.
Either way, I’d rather push for making it happen and somehow it fails on other websites than having pessimism and not trying at all. If it needs someone higher up the chain, let’s make it happen.
Twitter seems to have started Birdwatch as a small separate pilot project where it likely wasn’t easy to fight or on anyone’s radar to fight.
In the current enviroment, where X gets seen as evil by a lot of the mainstream media, I would suspect that copying Community Notes from X would alone produce some resistence. The antibodies are now there in a way they weren’t two years ago.
If you look at mainstream media views about X’s community notes, I don’t think everyone likes it.
I remember Elon once saying that he lost a 8-figure advertising deal because of Community Notes on posts of a company that wanted to advertise on X.
I think you would likely need to make a case that it’s good business in addition to helping with truth.
If you want to make your argument via truth, motivating some reporters to write favorable articles about Community Notes might be necessary.
Good points; I’ll keep them all in mind. If money is the roadblock, we can put pressure on the companies to do this. Or, worst-case, maybe the government can enforce it (though that should be done with absolute care).
I shared a tweet about it here: https://x.com/JacquesThibs/status/1724492016254341208?s=20
Consider liking and retweeting it if you think this is impactful. I’d like it to get into the hands of the right people.
I had not heard of Community Notes. Interesting anti-bias technique “notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings”. https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/about/introduction
I’ve been on Twitter for a long time, and there’s pretty much unanimous agreement that it works amazingly well in practice!
there is an issue with surface level insights being unfaily weighted, but this is solvable, imo. especially with youtube, which can see which commenters have watched the full video.