The Exchanges

Q And I can, you know, it's important. When does a post get triggered to even be considered for community note? Is there like a threshold or is it just, you can write a community out on anything and people decide what they want to vote on? How does that work?

A So every post is eligible for notes. Um, it's, and that was again, another really important principle. It's like, It, we shouldn't exempt, uh, Elon. We shouldn't exempt government figures. We should, like everyone, even advertisers can get notes. So any posts on the platform can get a note. And if you look in practice, um, you'll see notes appearing on world leaders, on Elon, on ads, on media organizations, and on obviously like just regular people using social media. But yeah, the idea is really that it's an even playing field. For a note to be proposed, the person proposing has to have earned the ability to write notes. So there is, there is that, that aspect where you have to, like, earn in to be able to do this. And the way you earn that ability is, is through your ratings by demonstrating the ability to help identify notes that are found helpful to a broad range of people. So basically, like, if you have an ability to, to sort of see and know, recognize what's helpful to a lot of people, then you have the ability to start proposing notes.

AI assessment note: “So every post is eligible for notes. Um, it's, and that was again, another really important principle.”

Q How big was the team early on, uh, that you set up? How many engineers?

A It started with just me, and then we, we, when we decided to build the thing, it, we, we figured we needed about five, um, and we wanted to be as small as we possibly could. It was clear we needed someone on ML doing scoring. It, it was clear we needed someone to do some client engineering work, someone to do backend engineering work. Um, there may have been like, you know, one or two other, oh, we needed a designer and, um, A researcher to help us understand the customer base and make sure we were, we were building the thing in a way that was actually going to resonate with people. And so I think that was, I think it was like back end, front end, um, ML design research. That was, that was the original team from what I remember.

AI assessment note: “It started with just me, and then we... figured we needed about five”

Q Just a few more questions. Uh, There was an audience question asked on Twitter. We all asked on Twitter. What do people want to know back in the notes? One was actually why you guys switched to anonymous contributors. What was the decision between behind that?

A Yeah, that was, you know, we had this pilot, um, where we were testing the, with a small number of contributors, like a few thousand contributors, and we learned a lot through that pilot. Probably the biggest thing we learned was related to anonymity or pseudonymity of contributors. We had originally assumed that it was important that people contribute under their, like, real handle or their real name or whatever it was. We actually, like, the first prototypes depicted that. We kind of thought that would be important for, like, people trusting the note. And actually it was totally wrong. We were like, it was the, the, the best option was actually opposite of what we first tried. Um, we found a few things. One, people were hesitant to write a note on a controversial topic because they didn't want to get like attacked or harassed online. And so some people were comfortable doing it, doing this, but others were not. And so it meant there was more potential good notes to be written, um, than were getting written. And this is very clear feedback from the pilot. Two, And this is super interesting. People are actually more willing to cross partisan boundaries when they are anonymous or pseudonymous than when they are under their real name. And it intuitively makes a lot of sense. Like if you publicly are using your name, you are, you, you feel are affiliated with one side versus the o…

AI assessment note: “One, people were hesitant to write a note on a controversial topic”

Q and career trajectory and influence and just like, forget all that. I'm going to go back to just building something awesome, small team. Is there any advice there that you could share from that experience that you think might be helpful for other leaders to share or to hear, to help them maybe do that same jump? Because that's really difficult in practice. Easy to talk about, hard to do.

A Yeah, I think it is a difficult jump. Um, I've, I've done it a bunch of times in my career and I've always been very happy with it where I started with a small team that it kind of grew into something bigger. And then I was like, you know, this is like, we're kind of dealing with a lot of big production stuff, teams really big. I want to go back to do something like crazy and new with a small team again. And so I've kind of done that like saw teeth leap, um, a bunch of times, but it can be hard because certainly the natural, like the classic career path It's sort of, I don't know, rewards, or, ah, you know, running a large organization, or being a manager, things like that. But I think at the end of the day, you got to work on stuff you love, you got to be having fun, and you, and I think people want to be having impact. And I think there's one myth that, that can get in people's ways, the idea that the, the more people you manage or something, or the larger your scope is, the more impact you have. I definitely do not think that is true. Um, if you just look at, I mean, look at community notes, for example, if I had stayed running a large consumer PM team, like, what would I have produced? Like, 16 more pages of OKRs? Like, I don't know, you know, a bunch of documents? And I think building community notes has had way bigger impact on the world. It's become the industry standard…

AI assessment note: “there's one myth that, that can get in people's ways, the idea that”

Q like how fun it is and how interesting it is. And it's interesting to hear that because I think a lot of people don't feel that externally. Is there anything else along the lines of just working for Elon within an org Elon runs? That might surprise people about just the way of working that's interesting or surprising or, or you think other companies might want to think about adopting.

A I've always liked lean teams, but this has made me, my experience at X has made me change the way I would, I would think about running a future or, you know, if I were to start a company and change the way I think about starting that company, it would be even leaner than I would have made it before. I've been amazed with just how much the team is able to accomplish, um, with a small group. And I think because of a small group, like, When, shortly after the acquisition, um, you know, we had this product called Spaces. Um, it was, it had been in the product before, but it was, it was pretty small scale. And Elon wanted to run these large spaces. I forget who the first people he was going to bring on were, but he was going to be there. You know, ultimately these things have gone on to host politicians and things like that. And he's like, guys, we got to scale this up. I forget the numbers. He's like, I, we need to be able to scale like a million people or something like that. I'm getting the numbers wrong. You'd be able to scale way up. This is the kind of thing at one point. Oh, that would have taken a year if it had ever happened. And the team did it in like two or three weeks. And, uh, it was really exciting and inspiring to see like we, I didn't work on that, but I watched it from the outside. I'm like, wow, with this tiny team motivated behind a big goal that was like, Hey gu…

AI assessment note: “I've been amazed with just how much the team is able to accomplish”

Q Oh man. Where's Community Nets going from here? What should people look? What's happening? Where's it going? What's, uh, what's the future?

A We're always working on basically more better notes faster. So we want, there's clearly opportunity to get more notes out there. Um, we want to, they want them to stay as good or better than they are. We want to get them there faster. So we're always working on like core product changes, um, to help deliver that. Like recently, for example, we, um, just released an update to what we call the community notes bat signal or the ability to request a community note. So we, anyone on X can say, hey, I think this post needs a community note, and now they can even add a source explaining why, so that when a prospective writer sees that, it's much easier for them to write a note. Um, so we're always working on, on core things like that, core algorithm improvements. Um, I think there are also new frontiers that show a lot of potential, um, AI and LLMs are one. It's easy to imagine a lot of ways that, um, AI could assist the people in this task they're doing of trying to get information out there quickly. Um, and maybe Jay should talk about the super notes work that, uh, we've done with some folks outside the company.

AI assessment note: “We're always working on basically more better notes faster.”