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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

> The social media mogul said Tuesday that Facebook and Instagram will shift to a community notes model

I'm curious, what are HN's opinions around community notes on X/Twitter? I find them to be pretty good (and sometimes quite funny) but I wonder what others think.

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Ultimately: It can take some time for community notes to correct misinfo posts; by the time community notes gets to it, the firehose has ten more misinfo posts community notes needs to fix, the people who saw the original post rarely see the community notes correction, and given the algo has a massive temporal bias the original post was probably on the way out of new viewers feeds anyway.

Its a good system that should exist. It could probably be made better by finding any way to help it act faster (e.g. the moment a post is even in the process of community notes voting, attach a temporary banner like "The Community Notes people has suspicions about this post, it might be misinfo, we're doing our research").

I am not sure about that. I see a lot of posts that get CN proposed for bogus reasons that never see the light of day. This is usually done by interest groups who view CNs as another avenue of their strategies. These interest group CNs almost never see the light of day so I would strongly advocate for not putting warnings just because a rando attempted to put a CN on a post.

Imagine every post by Donal Trump getting a CN from a Democratic activist group or vice versa, every post by Kamala getting a CN by a Republican activist group. Every single post will have a warning on them if you get what you are proposing.

Use AI for all posts that have 10k views and do a scan for similar posts with embeddings

The best thing about community notes IMHO is that you get notified if something you liked previously has been community noted. Gives you a chance to reassess.

Yes same I think they're generally quite good and add important missing context to posts.

> I'm curious, what are HN's opinions around community notes on X/Twitter?

I notice that there are influence groups who are trying to play them, but so far I haven't seen them be successful. I see tons of proposed notes from certain groups but rarely do I see them actually be shown on X, so I guess it is robust in a way.

The main place it doesn't work is on popular polarizing accounts. For example, generally the followers of Elon Musk like him so if you try to correct him there, a bunch of his followers will just say the note is wrong even if it isn't, they vote out of loyalty to Elon. So polarizing large popular accounts generally cannot be community noted. Same applies to most political leaders.

So community notes is for correcting plebeians, not for the patricians.

Yikes. That almost seems worse than doing nothing. The presence of community notes for plebeian matters will make it seem like politically popular figures are never in the wrong.

It just gives the appearance of checks and balances - and that is exactly its purpose.

Yes, it's useless on really polarizing topics like Israel/Palestine, Russia/Ukraine, immigration, and Elon Musk.

But it's really good when it's nerds debunking other nerds. It could maybe even be something that future peer-review systems can take inspiration from.

I'm not really a twitter user (I just get posts from friends occasionally), but I think community notes is actually an awesome feature for a social network.

Community notes don't work when there are small number of users for a particular topic.

For example, Indian Twitter/X user were posting with old/unrelated/fake photo/video saying Hindus are being killed in Bangladesh (after change of fascist government that was under controll of the indian government), hindus homes were burnt. None of them are true, but there are not enough Bangladeshi Twitter/X users to community note them.

>None of them are true

Maybe the community notes are working as intended.

"Hindus in Bangladesh Face Attacks After Prime Minister’s Exit": https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/world/asia/bangladesh-pol...

Community notes is the main reason I have not migrated to bluesky.

I'm really giving Bluesky a shot and I want it to succeed, but it really needs to be something more than a stronghold for the left. Maybe I've been put into some bubble already, but the vast majority of posts there are political. Some of the people there as rabid as their right-wing counterparts are on X.

I find it really hard to find posts that are not people raging/venting about Trump, Musk, some other right wing billionaires or left-wing cause. X is, ironically, more diverse on this front.

idk what you are doing but my feed on bsky is mostly stuff that I'm interested in. The only time I saw stuff about Trump and Musk was when I didn't follow enough people or didn't subscribed to feeds.

Programming, mostly. Perhaps I'm not following enough people, though.

> The only time I saw stuff about Trump and Musk was when I didn't follow enough people or didn't subscribed to feeds.

Yeah, that pretty much sums up the dominant topic of discussion there.

If the goal is to prevent, or limit the spread of "misinformation" community notes is a failure. I see community notes merely as additional context on what is now a wide open machine for spreading any information, regardless of truth.

I think they're potentially good, but are used nowhere near enough. So many posts on X simply do not have community notes attached, even though they contain misinformation and lies.

this reads like a twitter post.

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