Wisdom of the cloud? Drifting through Community Notes

Community Notes - if you haven’t heard of this algorithm yet, you’ll come across it in 2025. Originated by the team at then-Twitter and developed open source, this year Meta will be adopting it across all platforms (and spinning down all other content moderation—but that’s a separate topic). Let’s focus on what’s interesting about Community Notes: a fascinating blend of algorithm and design choices that puts platform users in the driver’s seat. In their own words, “Community Notes aims to create a better informed world, by empowering people on X to add helpful notes to posts that might be misleading.” Importantly, also, “X doesn’t write, rate or moderate notes (unless they break X's Rules.)” This hands-off approach is particularly noteworthy in an era when model guardrails and constraints are increasingly part of the public consciousness, and not in a good way. People are bumping their heads as they sail into the wall at the edge of their AI-managed world, like Truman discovering the limits of his manufactured reality.

For anyone building an agent or thinking about dialogue-as-interface—this is the talk for you. Let's drift through this data science success story, examining how careful algorithm design combined with thoughtful UX can create something remarkable: a system that finds truth not through central authority, but through bridging the multiplicities of human perspective. We'll dive deep into both the mathematical engine ranking these bridges of agreement, and the subtle design choices that make users want to cross them.