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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
As a Canadian I’m glad we have Andy on the show to represent the great north
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Andy said @26:55
It’s that like if there’s the Elon Musk school of CEO-dom, in which I learned about this concept of seagull management. No, it’s actually a style of management in which the manager is nowhere, but then they swoop in, crap all over everything, make a lot of noise, but then they fly off again for another few weeks. So basically you only have to deal with them during the period in which they are in the office actually crapping on everything, but then you can fix everything or ignore the stuff that they told you to do, and that’s pretty much Elon Musk’s management style.
Really? Does anyone think that everything wonderful at Tesla, Space X, etc. happened because Elon Musk swooped in and crapped all over everything?
Twitter’s Community Notes are a brilliant way to address any dubious claims that sprout up in social media. Rather than censor the claim, the Community Note presents an evidence-based way to address the “error”. Having claims just spontaneously disappear because some sub-contractor – with a political or non-political axe to grind – can obliterate a message, suspend an account, or banish a user is just wrong. That’s how Twitter and FB got into terrible trouble from 2016-2020. It’s how major true stories got gaslighted from social media – a kind of election interference. Imagine if we had actually had an open evidence-based discussion in October of 2020.
Community notes is an inspired design: a model that other social media networks are now adopting. This education-oriented mechanism was not created by some seagull honking, flapping around, and creating a mess. it happened through brilliant leadership and brilliant engineering. Thank god these corporate cubicle “fact-checkers” will no longer able to crap on legitimate discussions.
IMHO, Andy’s swooping dismissal of Elon Musk is way out of line. His “seagull management” joke would not stand up to a community note. 
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Completely agree with Jason on the cost of Vision Pro. It is simply too expensive for a typical Apple user, regardless of the fact that Apple users are reputed to have more disposable money. And Apple’s disinclination toward multiple user accounts means that each user really needs to have their own to get the benefits of it (guest mode not withstanding). At current prices, that’s simply too expensive.
I might also suggest that requiring an iPhone is also a deterrent. I’m interested in Vision Pro, but I’m not buying an iPhone just so I can use the device. But it doesn’t change the sticker shock at the cost.
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I know he’s been vocal about not liking it for a while now, but I’m genuinely trying to understand Alex’s most recent complaint about the Photos app in this episode.
He said something along the lines of it defaulting to select mode, particularly when searching, but all he wants to do is tap photos to open them.
I’m on 18.2.1, using the Photos app, and that’s exactly how it works for me, whether I’m searching or not. Does anyone know what this “defaulting to select mode” means?
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I had the same thought. I went and tried it after he complained about it. I couldn’t reproduce it.
I found Alex had a rough attitude this week. Specially during his disagreement with Andy.
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The discussion of the Photos app arose during MBW #939 back in September. Here’s the pertinent part from the transcript: Alex and Doc Rock:
0:31:04 - Alex Lindsay
And it’s just, and so I find I’m still pretty frustrated with it. So I would go back to 17 like that you know like I hate I hate. I hate photos, like I just, and I used to love it. And the new one is just I, just I. Every time I open it up, I’m trying to get over it. I know that maybe we’ll talk about this. Change happens and I’ll be like it’s great, but I feel like they changed too many things at one time and it’s mostly just that I just want to select photos, like if they did all the other stuff that they were doing with all these collections and everything else. That’s fine. If this photo selection just worked the way it used to, I wouldn’t care. Like you know, it’s that it keeps on saying, oh, you want to select the photo and I’m like no, no, no, I want to tap on it and have it come up to the whole screen. Thank you very much. And that seems to be some weird mode that I don’t know how to get into automatically, and when I open it, the only thing I want to see is the gallery.0:31:54 - Doc Rock
Yeah, so there’s a toggle now, right, if you’re in the mode. So I know what you’re talking about, because this is me yesterday and I kind of figured out what the delta is. So at the very top, if you look up and you see the word select, you’re in select mode. But if you I mean you see the word cancel, you’re in select mode. So if you cancel that and tap, it goes full screen, like what we’re used to. But if you see the word select, it thinks you have already selected a bunch. But if you click on the next thumbnail and just hold your thumbnail for a second, it actually goes full screen, but not really. It goes kind of quarter screen, which is dope because it’s big enough for you to see what’s going on. But the options are there if you’re ready to take action.
The discussion was precipitated by an article Jason Snell wrote in Six Colors: In iOS 18, Photos brings Collections to the fore.
It felt like Alex was insisting it defaults to select mode though. Unless he’s hitting it by mistake, I’m not sure how he keeps having this happen.
As an aside, I also don’t really like the new Photos app. I don’t hate it. But I wouldn’t say I like it, and it didn’t really make my life easier. It made me wanna use it less. But I appreciate the improved search (although the search was already pretty good even before the update)
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Community notes are basically just a popularity contest, and these days on Xitter that means the Elno bros are the ones most popular, which likely explains why you, who appears to be an Elno shill, are so happy. Please go shill for Elon somewhere else.
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Took me a few days then it was fine
Community Notes are a popularity contest. One can use evidence to support their claim, but whether that claim is surfaced isn’t dependent on the validity of said evidence.
Community Notes are also slow. Fake news is often disseminated widely before notes are surfaced. I’m not anti community notes, but it isn’t the panacea you’re making it out to be.
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Ideally you need a mix of the two. Fact checking isn’t necessarily censoring, when the facts are added to a post, like a community note. On the other hand obviously illegal posts still need to be censored (removed)…
I’d trust fact checking notes through an organisation like Bellingcat over community notes every time. Nothing wrong with having Community Notes as well, but how can you tell in the note, whether the person making the note has any experience/knowledge in the domain they are commenting on? How can you tell if they are unbiased?
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Merely a popularity contest? That hasn’t been my experience. The evidence-based Community Notes about Hailey Welch’s meme coin launch in December was certainly a timely and decisive warning. ChatGPT is the first place I go when I hear something contrary to my common sense experience. Here’s what Chat says:
Q: are community notes a popularity contest
A: Not exactly. Community Notes (formerly known as Birdwatch) on X/Twitter aim to be more than a popularity contest by focusing on credibility and consensus across diverse perspectives. Here’s how it works:
Diverse Agreement is Key: Notes are considered “helpful” only if users from different viewpoints (based on prior rating patterns) agree that the note is useful. This avoids one-sided dominance or echo chambers.
Not Driven by Simple Votes: A high number of votes doesn’t automatically make a note successful. It needs to reach consensus among people with varied opinions.
Algorithmic Filtering: The system uses algorithms to promote notes that meet transparency and neutrality criteria. Notes that appear biased or incomplete are less likely to be shown.
So while the process involves community participation, the focus on diversity and algorithmic checks helps prevent it from becoming a simple popularity contest. However, some critics argue it could still be gamed or influenced by active participation biases.
The obvious way to support the assertion of [merely] a popularity contest would be evidence-based: cite examples where the facts/evidence was overrun with something else.
Popularity concerns aside, I like how the original tweet is preserved when Community Notes are added. Anyone can look at the original, scrutinize the Notes, ask their favorite AI, research on their own, and come to their own conclusions. The presentation has a very “Just the facts, ma’am” approach. Joe Friday would approve. 
The alternative is the old Twitter approach of censoring discussion entirely: destroying the tweet from the fire hose. Even worse is the FB (and old-Twitter) practice of shadow-banning messages. In the old system, any possibility of learning anything is deleted at the instant the tweet is deleted.
Agreed. It takes time to ensure that a fact-check is based in evidence. The slowness of fact-checking mechanisms was true long before we ever had computers.
The better question: what’s the alternative? What is superior to Community Notes – what guidelines should Zuckerberg use when implementing his new transparent solution? Do we all agree that the older systems were a spectacular failure? Did anyone here listen to Mark Zuckerberg’s entire conversation on the Joe Rogan podcast?
@big_d suggests something like Bellingcat. I hadn’t heard of them. At first glance, one might question their funding sources. And I’m certain they would be far slower than the open community on Twitter/X to issue their clarifications. I think FB’s adoption of something close to Community Notes is a good idea.
I’m skeptical of any pseudoskeptical dismissal (i.e., junk science dismissal) of Community Notes. To risk going a bit meta, I need to see evidence for the assertion that they are [merely] a popularity contest. ChatGPT respectfully disagrees with this assessment. If you wrote a hypothetical Community Note convincingly dismissing Community Notes, what exactly would it say?
The FAQ you posted states that an opaque algorithm makes the decision as to what to show which doesn’t make me feel any better. In any event, I want to reiterate that I am not against community notes. I think that a better approach is to combine it with fact checking.
I don’t care either way since I don’t use X anymore. For me the experience has gotten considerably worse over the last few years based on problems that go far beyond fact checking.
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Not a FAQ. I was clear on that. It was a question I asked to ChatGPT.
It does not! There’s no mention of the algorithm’s opacity.
That hybrid idea sounds more opaque than what Twitter/X is doing right now. Since humans are involved, it would continue to have large latency problems that X’s current solution has. I don’t see evidence this would be an improvement.
How do you deal with things like October 14, 2020, where the government fact-source is spreading what we now know was complete disinformation? How would your proposal fix that? Would those Twitter fact-checkers stand up and remain skeptical in the face of extreme pressure from the government?
It’s not just a question of Twitter/X. Community Notes systems are spreading to other social media – as noted by Zuckerberg. And BTW, any system with human “fact checkers” would always be slow to correct actual disinformation in social media posts.
If people here think that Community Notes can degenerate into a “popularity contest”, it would be great to see tweets where that literally happened. What are there examples on Twitter/X where a “popularity contest” corrupted the factuality of a Community Note? I don’t think anyone here has any actual facts to back up that conjecture.
It would be, but you can’t prove a negative. The posts where bad things happened get removed or disabled because they lost the popularity contest.
Even worse
Sounds good. Please direct me to the source code that dictates what gets surfaced in Community Notes.
Worse than what??? I clearly said what asked ChatGPT:
“are community notes a popularity contest?”
and I published its reply. You presumed it was a FAQ, and I corrected you assumption. How could that be “even worse” than anything? 
If you want to see the FAQ on Community Notes, you can look them up.
You asserted:
Specifics, please. What is the origin of your conclusion? Can you cite anyone anywhere who is providing an example where Community Notes are a popularity contest (i.e., not fair)? I’ve seen nobody complaining about unfairness, and I’ve seen them work quite well in the Twitter/X stream (example earlier in this conversation).
Community Notes is a template that will used by other social media. If you think there is something inherently in the design, it would be good to hear your reasoning.
No. You’ve got that backwards. You told us:
If your idea were based on something real, you could show where Community Notes had degenerated into a “popularity contest”. That would be a smoking gun that Community Notes were not behaving the way documented in the FAQ.
If you’re certain they don’t behave as documented, you could show us.
If the only evidence is that they behave as documented, then your “popularity contest” conjecture is incorrect.
The actual unfalsifiable conjecture is that every single Community Note is fair. That cannot be proven. What we can say is that nobody has publicly demonstrated that Community Notes are categorically unfair.
There will be biasing in any system. That was a big part of the problem with OG Twitter: their contractors had disproportionate power to summarily delete and shadow-ban tweets. Community Notes are a major improvement, because the Community Note adds context to the controversial tweet. Nothing is ever deleted. Those reading tweets learn nothing when a “fact-checker” deletes a tweet, but much can be learned when a Community Note is added to a controversial tweet. Look at the example I provided: I learned about sniping tokens from that Community Note.
This is why I’m excited that Community Notes are the template to be incorporated in other social media systems.
This might be the most fire-y thread I’ve seen on this forum so far. Talk about a divisive topic. I doubt Andy could’ve anticipated this.
I like the passion though. I worry a bit about hard feelings but hopefully it’ll be OK
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