Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder and self-described free speech absolutist, recently wrote a 4,300-word blog about X’s Community Notes feature, a crowdsourcing tool for people to add context and rate the truthfulness of posts. Buterin calls it the closest thing to an instantiation of ‘crypto values’…in the mainstream world. Elon Musk, who retweeted the post, has yet to derail the feature like he’s derailed much of what made Twitter special.
Buterin sees Community Notes as a case study in decentralized governance. It’s a Wikipedia-like system that anyone can apply to join, written and voted on by anyone, and kept in check by an open-source algorithm. Buterin says the machine learning algorithm is able to straddle the deep ideological divisions online to surface non-partisan, impressively useful and credible information. He calls it surprisingly close to satisfying the ideal of credible neutrality, a term of art used to describe things like blockchains, built to avoid discrimination of all kinds.
Buterin notes that Community Notes is transparent and consensus-driven, but it’s not quite crypto. He acknowledges that there are many technical and social ways to game public votes, and that crypto hasn’t exactly found a solution to Sybil attacks, brigading or the problem of money in politics.
Buterin also addresses recent commentary suggesting Community Notes is not brave enough and doesn’t go far enough to address misinformation. He states that it should not be the goal for systems like these to catch every falsehood or lie, and that the goal is to remind people that multiple perspectives exist.
Buterin’s reflections on Community Notes are a reminder that some problems just cannot be solved. He sees it as a worthwhile experiment in spreading verifiable and credible information in an age of incredulity, but hardly the only solution.