Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, shares his insights on the progress and potential of Community Notes in a comprehensive blog post.
Initially known as Birdwatch, Community Notes serves as a fact-checking tool embedded within the X platform. Its purpose revolves around adding contextual annotations to tweets, aiming to provide valuable insights.
Community Notes are predominantly added to tweets that attract significant attention, particularly those focused on contentious political topics. Vitalik, who interacts with individuals spanning the political spectrum, believes these annotations provide valuable insights.
Aligning with crypto principles
Vitalik notes with curiosity that although Community Notes may not be classified as a “crypto project,” it aligns with certain “crypto values” within the mainstream sphere.
In contrast to expert-curated content, Community Notes embraces inclusivity by enabling everyone to author and vote on the notes. The transparency of the algorithm, which governs the display of notes, is openly outlined on the Twitter website.
Moreover, users have the freedom to download the data and independently run the algorithm to verify its results. This unique approach prioritizes impartiality and ensures the continued utility of Community Notes, even when faced with contentious situations.
How Community Notes works
Further description of Community Notes shows that it enables users meeting specific criteria to participate in fact-checking and adding context notes to tweets. Participants can rate existing notes and write their own based on reviews from other members.
The unique algorithm prioritizes notes with positive ratings from diverse perspectives. It involves creating a matrix of user-note ratings and calculating scores for helpfulness and polarity.
The algorithm aims to identify cross-tribal approval and prevent biased notes. Additional mechanisms are included, like adding pseudo-votes, adjusting thresholds, and running multiple models. The process involves complex Python code and openness for testing and verification.
In essence, the “Community Notes rating algorithm explicitly attempts to prioritize notes that receive positive ratings from people across a diverse range of perspectives,” Vitalik notes.
Standpoint on Community Notes
The Ethereum co-founder wrote that the algorithm behind Community Notes is complex, involving a version for academic papers and a real version with various executions and coefficients.
This complexity contrasts with algorithms like quadratic funding, showing the difference between economist and engineer approaches. Engineers’ algorithms are pragmatic, while economists’ algorithms aim for simplicity and optimal solutions. The question is whether Community Notes can adopt a more economist-like algorithm.
Also, he adds that in the current state of Community Notes, its ability in absorbing polarizing properties and provide higher helpfulness to non-polarizing posts is questioned. A simplified implementation revealed that “Good” notes with moderate polarization received higher average helpfulness than “Good but extra polarizing” notes.
Vitalik says that the idea of having an “economist’s algorithm” would provide a clearer mechanism for penalizing polarization.
Other concerns and thoughts
He further notes that Community Notes can be manipulated by brigading. This involves someone who disagrees with a note encouraging a highly engaged community or fake accounts to rate the note as “NOT_HELPFUL.” This tactic could quickly shift a note’s perception from being seen as “helpful” to “polarized.”
To prevent this vulnerability, Vitalik says it requires more thorough analysis and effort. One potential enhancement could involve using the algorithmic feed to randomly assign notes to raters via the “For you” feature. This way, raters can only rate the notes they’ve been assigned, minimizing the potential for coordinated attacks.
He also says that Community Notes should be a conservative tool and shouldn’t be involved in every tweet made out there. “I do not think it is the goal for every misinformative tweet, or even most misinformative tweets, to receive a corrective note,” he said.
“Even if less than one percent of misinformative tweets get a note providing context or correcting them, Community Notes is still providing an exceedingly valuable service as an educational tool.”
The objective of the feature is not to fix everything, but rather to emphasize the presence of various viewpoints. The purpose of Community Notes is to remind people that seemingly convincing posts can be incorrect, and individuals can easily verify information through basic internet searches.
Conclusion
Finally, Vitalik believes that Community Notes serve as a noteworthy tool aimed at identifying and promoting unity across polarizations. He adds that similar concepts like pairwise quadratic funding on Gitlabs and Polis exist.
He further stated that while this emerging field is valuable and encourages academic exploration, it’s not fully decentralized.
On this, he says that the transparency offered by Community Notes is valuable for preventing manipulation and recognizing platforms that prioritize fairness, and he sees a potential for significant growth and usage as the concept behind Community Notes develops especially for social media platforms.
