Note-writing limits

Ensuring our contributors are writing high-impact notes, and that raters are able to find them among less helpful ones, is one of the most important parts of Community Notes.

Community Notes is also not a comment section or a forum, so it's important to keep the sense that note-writing is a scarce resource. “Graduated access”, or earning priviledges based on one's track record, has always been at the core of our strategy. Our system has many of these rules in place already, but we had none to prevent people from writing hundreds of notes a day.

After brainstorming ideas and running some numbers, we came up with a daily limit rule that is based on contributor's Writing Impact score and allows top-performing contributors to write a reasonable amount of notes, while giving everyone elsean incentives to up their game.

As a designer doing more and more code this year, this project was a healthy step up in challenge compared to what I'd done before. I worked closely with one my colleagues who created a new field, can_write_notes in the backend. Then I had to register and call that new field in the frontend, and use it to determine whether to show the blocking modal or not.

We're looking forward to seeing how this change will impact our metrics.

Other projects in Community Notes