What do I think about Community Notes?
Like most of Musk&#x27;s ideas, this one is &quot;good but doesn&#x27;t work&quot;. When he&#x27;s got good people around him, they turn that into &quot;good and works!&quot;, but when he&#x27;s left unchecked we get dumb bullshit like Community Notes, which any idiot could see the problem with: Musk himself.<p>Just, as an example, not casting any aspersions...<p>If your community is made up of people who either lean right, politically, or are far right, politically, then your Community Notes feature could still &quot;work&quot; in that there would be strong disagreements between whether Trump is a literal God King and whether Biden&#x27;s policies are actually doing what fiscal conservatives want. You would get a spectrum of beliefs and you could get &quot;corrections&quot; that bring you CLOSER to a truth, maybe (splitting the difference between &quot;empirical&quot; and &quot;some shit you made up&quot; brings you further from truth, but let&#x27;s press on), but you still won&#x27;t get any real &quot;fact&quot;-checking. You&#x27;ll just get a big fat &quot;actually, you&#x27;re an outcast in this society for this view&quot; sticker on your thoughts.<p>In the name of fairness, you can replace the above thought experiment constituents with leftists and the result is the same. Notes that urge users toward or further from &quot;defunding all police&quot;, or &quot;abolishing the second amendment&quot;, etc.<p>And then, of course, the reality is in the middle-ish. I will make a firm contention, here, that Twitter IS more politically right than left and it shows in the platform&#x27;s third-party observed metrics, as well as the content of the Community Notes. But I also think that the political classes of twitter are a much smaller portion than, say, the J&#x2F;KPop stans, the Swifties, or the product people (individual creators selling things, like webcomic artists rather than, say, Tommy Chong&#x27;s weed gummies). So there&#x27;s a strong raft of leftist politics, it&#x27;s just that they aren&#x27;t the ones who engage in Community Notes. Children, Fans, and the chronically overencumbered do not tend - at least in the metrics I&#x27;ve seen (and screamed as &quot;duh&quot; by my brain) - to engage in policing misinformation. So you end up with a Community Notes that settles on &#x27;rightness&#x27; via a right-leaning community consensus, rather than any actual facts. Which is... not the intended effect. Now, granted, it&#x27;s less biased than other systems I&#x27;ve seen, but that doesn&#x27;t excuse the amount of bias it ends up displaying, practically.<p>So the issue is that without the general public, or at least representation for all of its demographics in proportion, you don&#x27;t get closer to truth, you just get closer to community consensus. It&#x27;s a utility that works BEST at consolidating viewpoints into mass-appreciated ones, and has a limited tendency toward truth as a side-effect.<p>So why is the general public not proportionally represented on Twitter? Like I said: Musk. Whether you appreciate it or hate it, his personality is polarizing and a lot of people just won&#x27;t engage with it. They left Twitter and it surged right. Again, not to it&#x27;s complete subsumation as a lot of media would &quot;have you believe&quot; (more likely, media leaves out unnecessary details and people run with that to make it feel like it was intentionally dishonest), but it&#x27;s observably more right, politically. Source: all third party reports, and spending every single day on twitter with 16 separate accounts specifically for monitoring trending content.<p>So, unfortunately, he built a really cool little thing that does actually work! But it worked better for old twitter, and doesn&#x27;t particularly work well for getting &quot;facts&quot;, now. All types of people have to engage and you only get all types of engagement if you aren&#x27;t so hyper-focused on your own dumb bullshit.<p>Instead what he made was the best little shit-stirrer for his echo-chamber. Great, if that&#x27;s what he was after. But hilarious if he was actually trying to get something approaching &quot;truth&quot;.