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Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter

1 episode

Episodes

An inside look at Xโ€™s Community Notes | Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter

Feb 27, 20251h 47m

Guest: Keith Coleman - Product Lead for Community Notes, and Jay Baxter - Founding ML Engineer and Researcher for Community Notes. Keith Coleman has a background in product management at Twitter (now X) and has been instrumental in developing impactful products like Community Notes. Jay Baxter is a key engineer behind the algorithm that powers Community Notes, ensuring its effectiveness and neutrality. Key Takeaways: Community Notes allows users to propose and rate notes on potentially misleading posts, with notes becoming visible if found helpful by people who usually disagree, ensuring neutrality and accuracy. The project was developed with a small, focused team under a "Thermal" model, emphasizing autonomy, rapid iteration, and minimal bureaucracy. The algorithm's success lies in its ability to find consensus among polarized groups, proving that people can agree on factual context even in contentious situations. Transparency and openness are core principles, with the algorithm and data being open-source, allowing public scrutiny and trust. The product has remained impactful and relevant through multiple leadership changes at X due to its clear, proven value and adherence to its founding principles. Topics Covered: Community Notes functionality, algorithm development, team structure and management, transparency and trust in tech, handling misinformation, leadership changes at X, product impact and scale.

Notable Quotes

โ€œSociety often feels really polarized, you hear people talk about it all the time, no one can ever agree on anything, but actually Community Note shows you people really can agree on quite a lot.โ€

societal polarization

โ€œImagine if we could use the same kind of approaches we use with notes, but to find agreement on legislation, or policies, or things like that that people want the government or the world to do.โ€

potential for societal agreement

โ€œI think it's easy for people to feel pessimistic about the world, but I think this product is a good reason to be optimistic about the future.โ€

optimism about the future