Mar 13, 2023·edited Mar 13, 2023Liked by Thegnskald
1. "I thought the problem was that we had no common enemy to unite against since the fall of the Soviet Union. But no, even the unity we possessed then was illusory, enforced by widespread censorship of the media."
2. "upvotes and downvotes. These, of course, have their own flaws and exploits ..."
True. And Twitter's Community Notes (formerly "Birdwatch") has taken an interesting approach to mitigating at least some of the flaws with upvoting/downvoting – see the second paragraph and last sentence here, especially:
"Community Notes aims to identify notes that many people on Twitter 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 Twitter such as follows or Tweets). 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."
1. "I thought the problem was that we had no common enemy to unite against since the fall of the Soviet Union. But no, even the unity we possessed then was illusory, enforced by widespread censorship of the media."
I've speculated a bit about that, too. https://twitter.com/aronro/status/1547689913033768962
2. "upvotes and downvotes. These, of course, have their own flaws and exploits ..."
True. And Twitter's Community Notes (formerly "Birdwatch") has taken an interesting approach to mitigating at least some of the flaws with upvoting/downvoting – see the second paragraph and last sentence here, especially:
https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/contributing/diversity-of-perspectives.html
"Community Notes aims to identify notes that many people on Twitter 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 Twitter such as follows or Tweets). 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."