Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter: How bridging finds neutral truth

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

February 27, 2025

Duration

1h 47m

Channel

Lenny's Podcast

Watch on YouTube

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📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (founding ML engineer), the minds behind Community Notes, reveal how a small, scrappy team inside Twitter/X built the most trusted crowdsourced information system on the internet—one that’s changing the way we understand truth online. What you'll learn:

1. How Community Notes actually works—a deep dive into the groundbreaking algorithm that rewards “bridging agreement” instead of majority rule
2. The seemingly crazy yet brilliant way this idea survived multiple CEO changes—from Jack to Parag to Elon
3. How this project started with a dumpster fire GIF (literally)—the untold backstory of its early launch
4. The secret to running ultra-fast, high-impact product teams—no OKRs, no Jira; just one Google Doc
5. What Meta’s adoption of Community Notes means for the future of online (mis)information—why this open source system is becoming the industry standard

— Brought to you by:

• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny
• Productboard—Make products that matter: https://www.productboard.com/lenny
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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-x-built-the-best-fact-checking-system-on-the-internet Where to find Keith Coleman:

• X: https://x.com/kcoleman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-coleman-19b12b46/

Where to find Jay Baxter:

• X: https://x.com/_jaybaxter_
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaybaxter/
• Website: http://jaybaxter.net/

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Community Notes (06:56) How the “bridging-based” algorithm works (13:33) The impact and scale of Community Notes (17:24) Understanding the note publishing threshold (21:32) Challenges and philosophies (26:26) The effect of notes on re-sharing content (29:41) Origin story (35:46) Embracing small teams for big impact (40:23) The thermal project approach (47:47) Algorithm development and internal competitions (50:34) An inside look at how the team operates (58:56) Working with Elon (01:05:30) Launching Birdwatch (01:10:48) The core principles behind Community Notes (01:26:15) Anonymity and pseudonymity in contributions (01:32:17) Sustaining the project through leadership changes (01:37:57) Future directions for Community Notes (01:42:12) Final thoughts and optimism for the future Referenced:

• Community Notes on X: https://x.com/CommunityNotes
• Sign up to be a Community Notes contributor: https://communitynotes.x.com/guide/en/contributing/signing-up
• The Making of Community Notes: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-notes
• “Readers added a Community Note to this Tweet”: https://x.com/HelpfulNotes/status/1718103364792205704
• Note-ranking algorithm: https://communitynotes.x.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/ranking-notes#matrix-factorization
• Study: Community Notes on X could be key to curbing misinformation: https://giesbusiness.illinois.edu/news/2024/11/18/study--community-notes-on-x-could-be-key-to-curbing-misinformation
• Study Finds X’s (Formerly Twitter’s) Community Notes Provide Accurate, Credible Answers to Vaccine Misinformation: https://qi.ucsd.edu/study-finds-xs-formerly-twitters-community-notes-provide-accurate-credible-answers-to-vaccine-misinformation/
• Did the Roll-Out of Community Notes Reduce Engagement with Misinformation on X/Twitter?: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686967
• Kayvon Beykpour on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayvz/
• Jack Dorsey on X: https://x.com/jack
• “Birdwatch gives me the creeps” tweet: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589454464611540992
• Blake Scholl on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blakescholl/
• Creating Truthtelling Incentives with the Bayesian Truth Serum: https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs286r/courses/fall12/papers/DW08.pdf
• Asana: https://asana.com/
• Spaces: https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/spaces-is-here
• Amazon MTurk: https://www.mturk.com/
• Community notes on GitHub: https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes
• What do I think about Community Notes?: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html
• X’s community-led approach: tackling inaccurate and misleading information: https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2023/xs-community-led-approach-tackling-inaccurate-and-misleading-information
• Messi-Ronaldo rivalry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messi%E2%80%93Ronaldo_rivalry
• Supernotes paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06116v1

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Lenny Rachitsky

  host

• Keith Coleman

  guest

• Jay Baxter

  guest

• Narrator

  other

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, featuring Lenny Rachitsky and Keith Coleman, Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter: How bridging finds neutral truth explores inside X’s Community Notes: Crowdsourcing Neutral Truth At Internet Scale The episode explores how X’s Community Notes crowdsources context on potentially misleading posts and uses a novel "bridging" algorithm to surface notes agreed upon by people who usually disagree.

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