An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead)

Feb 27, 2025 1h 47m 19 insights Episode Page ↗
This episode features Keith Coleman (Product Lead) and Jay Baxter (Founding ML Engineer) of X's Community Notes. They discuss the product's origin, its unique bridging-based algorithm for combating misinformation, and the principles and lean team structure that enabled its significant global impact.
Actionable Insights

1. Cultivate Low-Ego Leadership

As a product leader, focus solely on delivering the most helpful outcome for the world, rather than personal power or recognition, which fosters adaptability and trust within the team and project.

2. Empower User-Driven Content

For platforms relying on user-generated content for context or moderation, design systems where the ‘voice of the people’ is paramount, with no company override button, forcing systemic improvements if issues arise.

3. Structure Projects as Thermal Teams

Establish ’thermal teams’ for high-impact projects, featuring a single clear driver/founder, one senior external decision-maker, 100% team focus, and autonomy to define their own process and dynamic goals.

4. Encourage Team Self-Selection

For new projects, allow team members to self-select and opt-in, ensuring they are fully bought into the mission and working style, which significantly boosts success and motivation.

5. Prove Concepts Incrementally with Data

When introducing disruptive ideas or changes within an organization, prove the concept’s viability incrementally with data at each stage, making it harder for others to deem the next step unwise and building internal buy-in.

6. Build Inherently Valuable Products

To ensure a project’s longevity through leadership changes, build a product with inherent, undeniable value that appeals across different viewpoints, set ambitious goals, execute consistently, and always back progress with compelling data and results.

7. Re-evaluate Source of Impact

Don’t equate impact with the number of people managed or the size of your scope; true impact often comes from focused, hands-on building and solving real problems, regardless of traditional career metrics.

8. Build Leaner Companies/Teams

When starting a company or building a team, aim for an even leaner structure than you might initially consider, as small groups can accomplish a surprising amount and thrive due to increased pace of launches and experimentation.

9. Start with Small, Cross-Functional Teams

When initiating a new project, aim for a very small team (e.g., around five people) covering core functions like ML, client engineering, back-end engineering, design, and research to maximize agility and focus.

10. Prioritize Deleting Unnecessary Code

Regularly audit your codebase and prioritize deleting code where the maintenance cost outweighs the incremental gains, especially in lean teams, to prevent long-term maintenance burdens and keep systems efficient.

11. Use Lightweight Project Management

Avoid heavyweight task management tools; instead, use a simple shared document (like a Google Doc) to coordinate, keep the team on the same page, and dynamically manage goals, allowing irrelevant items to naturally fall off.

12. Ensure Full Transparency for Trust

To build trust in a system, especially one dealing with sensitive information, make the underlying code, data, and decision-making processes fully open and auditable, allowing external parties to replicate and verify its operation.

13. Use Pseudonymity for Honest Feedback

When seeking honest feedback or contributions on controversial topics, allow for anonymity or pseudonymity, as people are often more willing to cross partisan boundaries and provide unbiased input without fear of public association.

14. Cultivate Healthy Skepticism

Develop a habit of healthy skepticism towards information encountered online, especially on social media, by recognizing patterns of misinformation and thoughtfully questioning claims to seek a better understanding of reality.

15. Find Optimism in Common Ground

Counter feelings of societal polarization by recognizing that people can agree on a lot, even on controversial topics, and seek approaches that identify and leverage this common ground for progress and collective happiness.

16. Leverage AI for Content Validation

When using AI for content generation (e.g., notes), don’t rely on LLMs to write from scratch; instead, use them to generate variants from existing inputs and then simulate human validation processes to predict helpfulness and ensure quality.

17. Contribute to Community Notes

Sign up to be a Community Notes contributor on X, regardless of your views, as diverse participation helps identify truly helpful and neutral notes, allowing you to have a significant impact on information quality.

18. Propose Notes on Misleading Posts

If you encounter a post on X that you believe is misleading, propose a Community Note to add informative context, as this is the fundamental way the system works to combat misinformation.

19. Set Low Expectations for Launches

When launching a new product or feature, especially one with an unproven concept, be disciplined about setting low expectations and letting the product prove itself incrementally with data, rather than over-promising or expecting immediate perfection.