> what interests me most about Community Notes is how, despite not being a "crypto project", it might be the closest thing to an instantiation of "crypto values"
Yeh it's bizarre. I guess, inevitably, he is viewing everything through a crypto-centric mental model of the world. Round-peg-square-hole thinking. Community Notes are not truly permissionless, trustless, or decentralized. The algorithm is ~transparent but controlled by Twitter, and subject to its community policies and impulse changes. Community Notes are as decentralized as twitter itself. Not really "crypto", even by a long shot. It's moments like these I find it hard to not see crypto as an all-consuming knowledge cult. Every avenue of life and analysis becomes imbued with crypto thoughts. Quite scary.
It's somewhat decentralized. It's at least a lot more trustless, decentralized and permissionless than what the media came up with, which they call "fact checking" but is basically just a bunch of self-anointed ex-hacks who hired each other into a bunch of deceptively named quasi-institutions, and who aren't checked or held accountable by anything at all.
Yes, the actual software runs at a single location. But apparently it's open enough that you could in principle run it in a distributed manner. As you can even cross-check the data and compute the same results deterministically, you could theoretically even do it as a blockchain, although it's unclear why you would. But you could, if there was value in P2Ping such a thing.
It has a central authority that can and has taken down community notes that were disagreeing with their narrative. Seems like the opposite of decentralization.
That piece reports that the note in question was not taken down by a central authority in Twitter, and was instead voted down. You gotta read the correction at the bottom.
this is not what vitalik is saying. he is saying that the output of the algorithm has not been modified after the fact. he explicitly mentions the possibility of vote brigading and fake accounts, both of which are well within elon's capabilities.
Was it? Vitalik's essay studies a case where that was alleged, and it was found that Twitter hadn't intervened. The note appearing then disappearing was organic and driven by user interactions. If you or Gizmodo want to claim otherwise, this is the standard of proof now expected. That's the power of decentralized systems - you can audit them!
Looking at that specific note, it's obvious that the note was extremely open to dispute and that's why it was voted down. You don't need to invoke the spectre of The Terrible Elon to explain that. The medical establishment has by their own admission created an endless torrent of false claims about vaccine safety, so it's something where you just aren't going to get bipartisan consensus about anything at all.
Well, the point of the article is that you can verify that claim because Twitter provide enough data to reproduce their calculations, so to claim otherwise you will have to assert that all the numbers and data being supplied are faked.
>Community Notes are not written or curated by some centrally selected set of experts; rather, they can be written and voted on by anyone, and which notes are shown or not shown is decided entirely by an open source algorithm. The Twitter site has a detailed and extensive guide describing how the algorithm works, and you can download the data containing which notes and votes have been published, run the algorithm locally, and verify that the output matches what is visible on the Twitter site.
The fact that you need an account (meeting a certain degree of "reputation"-esque criteria) is what makes it (in theory) much more difficult for your neighbor's botnet to vote.
It's become extremely common in tech discourse these days to label anything anyone sees that involves any level of "direct democracy" / "community consensus" (both age-old pre-computers ideas) as "crypto-esque", as if Bitcoin was the first time humans applied consensus.
It's a concept with many names. When I studied economics in college there was a course called social choice theory, which was about all kinds of "preference aggregation" and voting systems.
I believe fact checking should be done by experts, contracts should be written and enforced by humans, politics should be left to elected politicians, and and central banks are the least bad stewards of currencies.
I don't think I'm alone to share all of this not-so-closely-related beliefs, so there perhaps a connection. I guess first of all its rooted in a fundamental trust of humans and human institutions more than anything. I think if you ask people "do you think politicians can generally be trusted to work for the common good of their constituents" then those who strongly agree probably also agree to some extents on the above issues.
I doubt you're alone but my suspicion would be that you're in a very small minority.
> a fundamental trust of humans and human institutions
These are two separate things. In general, those who primarily trust the former do not place the same level of trust in the latter, and vice versa. Finding those who trust in both seems a rare thing.
> I think if you ask people "do you think politicians can generally be trusted to work for the common good of their constituents"
It's been my observation that many people who vote do so on a "least worst" basis. National statistics bodies collecting data on levels of trust in public representatives rarely post figures above 50%.
Appeal to authority is generally classified as a subconscious flaw. When its conscious & deliberate, given the history of authoritarianism in the world, it does come across... oddly.
What is not understandable here? Crypto is all about decentralization, Community Notes embodies that value (obviously not ideally, because Twitter still can decide to do whatever).
Community Notes is “decentralized” only in the sense that it’s derived from the collective action of multiple users. Do Hacker News scores embody the values of crypto? If not, why not? Because Community Notes uses more complicated math for its weighting system? How can we make that claim and not end up going back to the early days of Slashdot and declaring its user-driven moderation system to embody the values of crypto? Oh my god, was Commander Taco Satoshi all along?
Community Notes is an interesting example of collective moderation, but it’s an example of collective moderation, a long-standing thing that has nothing to do with decentralization as I think most people understand the term. The objection here, I think, isn’t to Vitalik’s interest in it — it’s to the “if all you have is a cryptocoin, everything looks a blockchain” mindset.
If “crypto values” literally just means “decentralisation” then just say decentralisation. It’s weird to invoke something that adds absolutely nothing to the comparison (unless, say, you’re trying to hype it up)
It's the best they can do since pure decentralization doesn't usually work (things tend to chaos). So a appearance of decentralization with the light hand of Twitter's management on top, ready to slap the anarchists, sounds awesome to some people.
This is the guy that thought that a simulated(on traditional CPU) quantum algorithm could be faster than a traditional algorithm.
This is the guy that thought of Ethereum because he disagreed with a balance patch in an MMO and thinks that in a blockchain mmo you could just fork it.
Every take he has is about cryptolibertarian ideology and should be treated as such.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html