Following on my from my recent post on free speech at X/Twitter that exposed how poor X is at free speech and how the Hive blockchain is hugely superior.. Here's an update in response to Musk's latest brainwave - no X money for you if people disagree with you!
I have continued to follow the saga of Elon Musk's adjustments to X with interest, especially considering that he is tackling the problems that we at Hive have already mostly tackled. In particular, he advertised himself and the X network as being a place for free speech, which would effectively 'save the world' - this is Hive's back yard. Today he has announced yet another step down the continual slippery slope of censorship by announcing that monetisation on X will be revoked for posts that have 'community notes' written for them. What does this mean?
Remember back when Musk was claiming that Twitter had been totally blackmailed and controlled by the ADF for years? They were pressuring advertisers to stop advertising if Twitter didn't censor posts for them. We'd better hope that community notes is a robust solution for discerning both genuine community intent and the truth or he's just created a system that makes the ADFs job even easier for them.
Free Speech
In my experience, there really are only two meaningful positions when it comes to being a 'free speech advocate':
You support absolute free speech, which means you personally allow for all people, everywhere, to say whatever they want, whenever they want - without fear of being punished for it.
You like the idea of free speech but are troubled by what some people say and you want to control some people, eliminating their free speech in some situations.
Option 1, absolute free speech, is - to me - the only real free speech. Option 2 is an absurd caricature of free speech, which amounts to virtue signalling at best or evil at worst. This is because there is no practical way to censor 'some' people 'some of the time' without the situation becoming a power struggle of opinions and individual egos/wills. Who is to say which view or person is wrong/dangerous? Typically, it is the most powerful person/group who ultimately gets to decide this - which is a situation that comes with absolutely no guarantee that their decision will be correct or even safe.
Elon Musk has claimed in the past that he is a 'free speech absolutist', but this was clearly untrue, since everything he has done at X has been based on option 2 and not option 1. The websites that run on the Hive blockchain come far closer to free speech absolutism than X/Twitter ever has done or is likely to.
So given that we know that Elon falls into the group of people who want to control free speech while virtue signalling that they are super pro 'definitely bro' supportive of free speech.. Where does this leave us?
I have already written on why the monetisation at X is deceiving and terrible compared to Hive, so all that remains is to explore this issue of demonetisation of tweets that have attracted a 'community note'.
This new 'feature' apparently makes sense to some people, who are tired of seeing 'online celebrities' getting rich from peddling lies. That's understandable, but they are short sighted here. There's no way to prevent this without also stifling the behaviour/expression/growth of accounts that actually do stick to the truth. Do you honestly think that a world that enables liars to get paid due to community viewership (support) won't also use the control systems put in place to similarly warp the flow of information in the X community?
"Well, Community notes is transparent and not controlled by Elon Musk"
Oh ok, cool - that's perfect then - a flawless system.. The first ever created, nice! ;)
Forgive my cynicism but I am old enough to have seen the evolution of Wikipedia - a system that was claimed to be similar to X's community notes - a community driven system of discerning truth. The problem is that (as even Elon Musk has publicly agreed), Wikipedia has long been entirely corrupted behind the scenes. You only need to experiment by making an update to a page on Wikipedia to any topic that some group somewhere might have a vested interest in - to discover how quickly your comment is rejected/overwritten and how the people involved are not even remotely interested in actual truth.
Digging into community notes?
So how well does community notes do at this challenging problem of throwing a question at 'the community' and said community then spitting out 'absolute truth' (or close to it)? This is the core of the problem because if the X community is biased, ignorant, in denial and/or bribed then the demonetisation of posts based on community notes is a recipe for disaster - at least from the perspective of X being the useful tool for finding 'facts' that Musk says he wants it to become.
My own investigation into this topic was somewhat thwarted at the first hurdle - I can't join the community notes group because my phone isn't running on a 'trusted network'. There is no list of trusted networks, so I can't tell you why that is! The fact that my phone's network is one of the biggest in England seems to be irrelevant. 'Sorry, you can't join our truthy club' because of 'reasons'.
Not a good start. (see the page on this at X here).
Ok, so the only other option I have for investigating this is to look at the source code for the algorithm that is used to manage the community notes feature, since it's public in Github here. Note: The page on X that is meant to point to this Repo, actually doesn't - I had to find it in a search engine.
I have a couple of problems with this source code atm, which hopefully people on Hive can help me with:
- I don't use Python, which is the language used to write the code.
- I am exceptionally busy with other projects and don't have a lot of time throw at analysing their code atm anyway.
Maybe someone on Hive that knows python has time to go through the source code and to write an appraisal of it, highlighting flaws/risks etc?
Please do if you can!
Diversity!
But wait, there's a page on X that explains how they ensure that community notes are reliable - this one on diversity of perspectives
This is the only page I've so far found that gives any description of why anyone should trust Community notes, so it's kind of important. Here's the full page as it stands:
Community Notes aims to identify notes that many people on X will find helpful, including people with different points of view.
To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Community Notes takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives.
Community Notes assesses "different perspectives" entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Community Notes does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from X such as follows or posts). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it's probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view.
This approach has a number of benefits. First, it reflects the reality that people’s views can be nuanced, rather than defined by demographics. Second, in support of our focus on transparency, it allows people working with Community Notes public data to replicate, analyze and audit how Community Notes works, as it allows Community Notes to run entirely on publicly available data.
We are constantly evaluating ways to improve this approach (and welcome suggestions) This current method has shown promising results in helping find quality notes: in surveys of people who use X in the US, the majority of respondents found notes that earned a status of "Helpful" by Community Notes contributors to be “somewhat” or “extremely” helpful — this includes people from across the political spectrum.
In addition to the approach described here, we also work to understand specifically how helpful notes are to people from different political perspectives. For example, by analyzing X's follow, like, and repost graphs. It's important to note that these analyses don't directly impact the ratings of specific notes. Instead, they serve as a quality measure that links to specific notes and aids in refining our open-source algorithms. Learn more here.
So in summary, they find people who 'usually disagree' and if they agree on an idea then the idea is taken to be 'probably true'. Uhm.. Well, that's not really how truth works at all is it? That might be a good enough way to filter out a certain perspective of truth from fiction, but it's never going to even remotely come close to being reliable. Could it be reliable enough to justify demonitisation? No! lol.
Transparent algorithms seem great on the surface, but they always have a weak point - they can be studied and gamed. The only possible way to prevent people gaming this algorithm is to rigidly enforce KYC type identities, where every user is known and there are no bots. X does not have this environment and the presence of bots is abundantly clear. With the rise of AI systems it should be abundantly clear that gaming community notes using AI bots might actually be relatively straight forward.
In the middle of all that noise, is there a way for Elon Musk himself to manipulate the outcome of the algorithm in such a way? Of course - he even has super advanced AI! lol.
Summation
I do know that I have seen comments thrown up in X within community notes that amount to nothing more than unsubstantiated opinion - so I am unclear exactly how the community notes amount to much more than just another reply posted under the original tweet that has been boosted to be the 'official community position' (that you weren't part of deciding on and which probably doesn't reflect or consider all possible views/evidence).
The algorithm X is using to manage the notes is likely not that hard to game.
All of this means that the already hard to achieve monetisation on X just got even harder to reach for most people and even more possible to manipulate for those with the resources to do so.
Please don't rely on X as a source of truth alone. Always question everything and develop your own intellect, it's part of why you are alive on Earth in the first place!
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
Read My User Guide for Hive Here
Powerful insights into the Hive blockchain are available at my website, Hive Alive.
Including the only way to track downvotes on Hive - The Untrending report
Good analysis. When I read your post about X, I followed you and rated a community note that was helpful but false.. it disappeared! Open source works against them here because, as you said, it can be gamed. Hive has its own version of Community Notes: Hive Power. And this can be bought and gamed through bots. I've been trying to recommend, and may just get to coding, a customizable view of posts based on the user's priority and not just what the whales prioritize. BTW if you know one please tell me, where I can filter out votes from certain accounts or calculate the votes as 1 point per user, as an example. Or even do something in the same spirit as the X community notes and weight votes according to how much I tend to agree with that account. If everyone has a different algorithm then it is harder to game it.
What you are pointing out is why I feel that Reputation really can't be determined by the opinions of anonymous others. Our assignment of reputation to an account is based on our personal values, and these vary from user to user, as you point out.
Assigning 1 vote to 1 account is actually assigning 1 vote to one bot, not to one person. Some Hive users have in excess of 10k accounts. Absent some application of criteria to sort which accounts are the only accounts some user uses isn't ever going to work, because it's not how users use accounts. Unless users can be convinced to claim a certain account is their 'human' account, sorting which of their accounts are bots and which are human isn't going to work.
Good luck figuring out how to achieve your goals. Sorting that dilemma is beyond my abilities, and I will spend my efforts on things I think I have a chance of achieving. However, it may well be possible to assign a reputation score to accounts based on their history and how you feel about that. It won't be sorting people, because some people run multiple accounts, but they tend to run each of those accounts in a certain way, and that may enable you to assign a reputation score to those accounts that is meaningful to you.
If I had a one vote per account ranking configured then it would eliminate accounts doing an inhuman amount of work or other indicators of automation, like instant votes and such. Since that would be my preference, it might not be worthwhile for somebody to set up to game it. Nothing is perfect, but we don't have to make it easy for people to fool us.
Dan from Blocktrades is working on a system to allow people to manage a network of trust which will also contain evidence of people's knowledge too - not a social credit system, but kind of an equivalent to that for your own uses. It allows you to track who you know, what you trust about them and why you trust that about them too. It should be possible to integrate it into a variety of Hive tools, but we don't have a huge amount of info on it atm.
Thanks! Open source is a double edged sword when it comes to security and algorithms that can be exploited - it helps people to identify flaws but also to exploit them, yes. Are there more people interested in developing a better X for free? Or more interested in scamming? Going by the stats I see in the real world, I'd say the latter by far.
HP also has it's own version of the problems too, yes - however, at least we don't brazenly say that 'the hive community has decided that Y is true' and then remove earnings based on that. There is a similar process at play, in that the community reaches a 'consensus of stake weighted voting' - but we know that this is not evidence of accuracy or inaccuracy of the information involved since it can be totally biased by the amount of wealth people are holding. In contrast, X is presenting it's notes system as part of 'the world's best true discernment system'. Historically, Steemit used to promote Steem's voting system more as a method of valuing content financially and less as a way of 'discerning truth'.
The UI features you are describing are something that the SPK network is interested in. I know that @starkerz talks about custom ranking algorithms regularly and wants to see the ability for people to write and share their own ranking algorithms so that we finally get to see the content that we want to see - plus, communities can reward content in the way that they choose too. That isn't live yet though. The algorithm at 3Speak.tv currently puts less weight behind the stake weighted voting than other sites do though.
Ranking of 1 vote per account is not something I've seen implemented yet, but I agree that it would be interesting to see - although, not that useful since anyone can have an unlimited number of accounts at present.
Dan from @blocktrades explained to me that he is working on another project in the background that implements a decentralised trust / reputation system that should overcome a lot of the problems that we are discussing here, I'll make a post on it at some point soon - I'm not sure he has time to right an update atm. I only know some of the details, but maybe he'll reply to that post. :)
Hive has achieved a good balance on this very difficult issue.
I think that comes down to it's roots as an anarcho project, which is designed from the ground up to empower everyone in an equal way. People like the feeling of that and recognise it as something to protect. :)
Nice Quote!
No, it sure isn't. If the sun is in the sky, it is day. Seeking disagreement about that isn't the best way to ascertain the facts, because, for many similar things to day, rational people should all agree as to the facts, and including diverse opinions only guarantees less factual conformance. It really isn't possible to avoid having opinions as to facts, which is what Musk seems to be attempting to do, at least for the record.
Thanks!
It's certainly a part of the design that many will disagree about... Does that then mean that they are right when they reach consensus that the cybertruck looks like 1 1980s homer simpson scifi mobile? 😂
I've recently read that Musk considers the cybertruck a mistake today. I spoke to a Rivian owner recently, and they were very pleased with it, which greatly reduces the market for the cybertruck, IMHO.
Except for people that just want to look like that.
As to community notes, that description of how they are determining the acceptability of notes sounds great for purely subjective topics, but counterproductive regarding matters of fact, that will necessarily incorporate the views of folks that are incapable of agreeing as to facts. That is where I feel it is necessary for someone to use their best judgment, rather than remaining so open minded that if someone says that days are some kind of trick rather than the time when the sun is shining that opinion requires consideration. That just creates a market for schizos, loons, and spooky well-poisoners.
Omg, yeah dude. I am going to use my free speech to rag on this guy a bit. I feel like Elon was such an outcast growing up that he desperately wanted to be liked by the cool kids. Obviously, it was impossible for whatever reason. I mean, I know what it's like to be awkward as a kid growing up in the early 80s being really into computers.
He managed to make himself extremely wealthy and thought to himself, "I am going to own the haters now", so he bought Twitter. I actually do believe that in his own mind, he thought that he was a free speech absolutist - that is - until people started to troll him, make fun of him, and say things he strongly disagreed with. Then all of those strong feelings of being picked on came rushing back in from before he was rich.
This might be completely off, but when you watch the way he behaves, you can really get the vibe of a bullied kid who just wants to be cool and liked.
Great post, by the way. Over and over again I keep seeing people out there who are unaware of Hive, talking about how things should be like x,y or z not realizing that there is already a place where they can have what they are talking about. It is really frustrating sometimes that we are so invisible to the masses.
Thanks! Well, Musk's background is certainly not what a lot of people think it is - similar to Donald Trump. Musk's family were very wealthy from rare stone mining in Africa and were connected to a network of other such people. I can feel the influences in him but would need to spend time with him personally to have a clue as to what he is truly aiming towards. I think, though, that regardless of his intentions, the work with AI brain implants seals the deal for me.. Definitely more problematic than helpful for humans.
I knew that his mother was a model but I didn't realize that they were wealthy from mining. Pretty wild! Even so, it reminds me of when I was hanging out with a client in Virginia who owned a game company with 100 employees and lived in a huge mansion in the best part of Alexandria. He and his wife were going on about how they were just 'comfortable'. He was hanging out and having dinner with people like Bill Gates which made his wealth seem dwarfed. I imagine that's what Elon must feel like now with his insane wealth. Growing up rich seemed normal to him, but this is basically God mode.
I had relatives who were a bit like that, yes - they live in their own bubbles and obviously they know it, because they choose it over and over again.
The competitive mindset is a huge stumbling block for personal and world evolution.