[ryukoposting]

A very interesting article. It seems like the Community Notes system is built on (in my opinion) a very mathematically sound model. It seems far less susceptible to biased "mob actions" than a conventional upvote/downvote system, even if it's not impervious to such actions. "Bias" exists in the eye of the beholder, so it's unreasonable to expect any content rating system to be perfectly unbiased.

Community Notes and crypto share a common thread of "complicated math that makes it both extremely powerful and totally opaque to 95% of people." Honestly, that's a pretty weak relationship for how much page-space it got in the writeup. Looks like Vitalik is writing a crypto blog, so I guess you gotta appeal to your readers. Great read nonetheless.

[chrisco255]

The association with crypto wasn't merely about the math aspect, but also the principles of open source verification of the algorithms and credible neutrality.

[ryukoposting]

True, but that "95% of people" part is key. The auditability of open source doesn't matter (matters less?) to non-technical audiences because they don't have the knowledge, time, and/or wherewithal to audit the code themselves. As a result, they have to defer to a third party to do the auditing.

At best, a truly independent third party auditor has a mild philosophical incentive to recommend an open-source product over a closed-source one of similar quality. In practice, it's far more common for third party "stamps of approval" to be meaningless gold stars purchased by corporations to aid in marketing their product. A great example of this is the iF Design Award.