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Community notes isn’t scalable.

So when you have people like Musk constantly posting by the time a note is added the value of it has long since diminished.

Also your left/right wing argument is entirely something you’ve invented.




I agree with the first part totally, and you're probably right I invented something there. I only meant that free speech / "more information helps" seems to resonate with the right, and censorship seems to resonate with the left. Not so?


Censorship of books seem to resonate well with the right.


And rewriting books resonates with the left. Is this a game of left/right tennis I've walked into?


Depends what you mean in regards to rewriting. If there's a position that runs counter to our current scientific consensus, I think it should be updated to reflect the current consensus, but when I was reading my history/physics books they would cover what people believed at a particular time period. I don't see any issue with that. We're always learning more about the world around us. We are not an omniscient species.

Unless there's a more specific example you can think of w.r.t rewriting.


Sounds like you haven't heard of the re-writing of books in the interest of over-enthusiastic DEI. There's non-fiction and fiction examples. Salman Rushdie described it as "absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed" [1].

Apparently children's books can't use the word "black" or "white" any more. And in the children's book "Witches", a witch posing as “a cashier in a supermarket” now poses as “a top scientist”. It's blunt-force rewriting by patronising leftists. Witches are not meant to be role models for little girls. It doesn’t matter where they work.

[1] https://x.com/SalmanRushdie/status/1627075835525210113


Neither the left nor right are monolithic enough to make those generalizations. The anti-communism suppression of the McCarthy era is a counter-example of that resonance & plenty of left wing examples of the exact idea of "more speech is what is needed to extinguish bad ideas." Those are counter examples to demonstrate it is not a monolithic group in neither time nor space.


> "Community notes isn’t scalable."

Of course it's scalable. Community notes are written by people, so increasing the amount of people writing notes means it's scalable. Users find the added context helpful, so more notes are rated by more people more often. That's the definition of scale.

> the value of it has long since diminished.

No. The note remains forever on the tweet. There is no "diminishing". Anyone who has interacted with that post in the past is notified about the note. Our own Prime Minister here in Australia has had a few of his posts community noted. Politicians love to make bold claims about how awesome they are. They are note magnets. It's not a perfect system, but it's a good system.


> Anyone who has interacted with that post in the past is notified about the note.

Having read or seen a post seems to be the most important part. That is not defined as part of "interacted". AFAIK, most X posts are viewed once and then never viewed again. It is a tiny fraction that actually "interacts" with a post. Hence, the value is diminished since the majority of people that read a post are never informed of the community note.

Per X: "Community Notes sends notifications to everyone who has replied to, Liked or reposted a post after a note starts showing on it." [1]

[1] https://communitynotes.x.com/guide/en/contributing/notificat...


> It is a tiny fraction that actually "interacts" with a post...Hence, the value is diminished

Are you claiming we're in "information danger" because community notes isn't there to watch people post things in real time? Exactly how much of a pre-school do you want the internet to be? Do you want a school teacher looking over your shoulder as you type?

As you should know, interaction with a post by liking or replying, means the post had the most impression on that reader. The people you're worried about who don't interact, you have zero data on. You don't know whether they disagreed with the post, disbelieved or otherwise unaffected by the post. In fact, we do have some data. The post made such little impression that they didn't bother liking or replying.

People are not damaged goods after reading an untrue post online. The internet contains endless examples of disputed information, corrected only after the first post is read. For example, right here on HN. This place historically contains the following pattern:

  "I think X should Y because Z"
  Later that day or week, someone counters:
  "actually, you haven't considered A or B in your reasoning of Z, which points to Y being inadequate". 
In other words, the claim or suggestion that community notes is "diminished" because it isn't correcting misinformation as it spills from our keyboards, is an irrational claim.




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