Yeh it's bizarre. I guess, inevitably, he is viewing everything through a crypto-centric mental model of the world. Round-peg-square-hole thinking. Community Notes are not truly permissionless, trustless, or decentralized. The algorithm is ~transparent but controlled by Twitter, and subject to its community policies and impulse changes. Community Notes are as decentralized as twitter itself. Not really "crypto", even by a long shot. It's moments like these I find it hard to not see crypto as an all-consuming knowledge cult. Every avenue of life and analysis becomes imbued with crypto thoughts. Quite scary.
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It's somewhat decentralized. It's at least a lot more trustless, decentralized and permissionless than what the media came up with, which they call "fact checking" but is basically just a bunch of self-anointed ex-hacks who hired each other into a bunch of deceptively named quasi-institutions, and who aren't checked or held accountable by anything at all.
Yes, the actual software runs at a single location. But apparently it's open enough that you could in principle run it in a distributed manner. As you can even cross-check the data and compute the same results deterministically, you could theoretically even do it as a blockchain, although it's unclear why you would. But you could, if there was value in P2Ping such a thing.
In that sense, Vitalik's point does land.
It has a central authority that can and has taken down community notes that were disagreeing with their narrative. Seems like the opposite of decentralization.
https://gizmodo.com/twitter-x-elon-musk-vaccine-bronny-james...
May be it’s the false sense of being decentralized that makes it like crypto?
That piece reports that the note in question was not taken down by a central authority in Twitter, and was instead voted down. You gotta read the correction at the bottom.
this is not what vitalik is saying. he is saying that the output of the algorithm has not been modified after the fact. he explicitly mentions the possibility of vote brigading and fake accounts, both of which are well within elon's capabilities.
Was it? Vitalik's essay studies a case where that was alleged, and it was found that Twitter hadn't intervened. The note appearing then disappearing was organic and driven by user interactions. If you or Gizmodo want to claim otherwise, this is the standard of proof now expected. That's the power of decentralized systems - you can audit them!
Looking at that specific note, it's obvious that the note was extremely open to dispute and that's why it was voted down. You don't need to invoke the spectre of The Terrible Elon to explain that. The medical establishment has by their own admission created an endless torrent of false claims about vaccine safety, so it's something where you just aren't going to get bipartisan consensus about anything at all.
> it was found that Twitter hadn't intervened
At least, that’s what the centralized authority says.
No one outside Twitter can verify that claim.
Well, the point of the article is that you can verify that claim because Twitter provide enough data to reproduce their calculations, so to claim otherwise you will have to assert that all the numbers and data being supplied are faked.