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It's $8/month. And the answer is yes, that's pocket change for @marietherealtor - she regularly spends 10x that on things like donuts + paper fliers + balloons for an open house. It's quite cheap if you put it into the category of marketing/reputation spend.
Assuming the average person reading replies scrolls down a full screen, you need between 3 and 7 people who replied to ElonMusk/ye/etc to be verified and spam is pushed down.
But hey, probably you have a better grasp on stopping scams than Elon Musk (early Paypal) and David Sacks (early Paypal). At least one person in this conversation is also experienced in stopping organized crime from doing scams online (albeit not at the same scale) - is that person you?
Here's an example of how 8/mo verified accounts won't stop spam replies to people like Musk: https://twitter.com/ArmisteadMaupin/status/1589022522175111170 this is currently the top reply to a 6h old elon musk tweet. It's a sexy girl spam link (link to archive, nsfw), and is posted by a hacked verified account. Note that this is an account that was verified before musk's takeover (can they just pay someone to watch elon and vitalik's tweets?). Verified accounts currently appear to sell for $1.5k on some website I didn't look too hard at. So ... in that sense, $8 is clearly a win for spammers! (the scammer probably pays less than the $1.5k upfront per account, if they even do at all vs hacking, so who knows how hard it is to actually get an account ofc).
If you think there's some silver bullet to 100% stop scams, and Musk's failure to find it means the effort is worthless, then you simply don't understand the problem.
You also didn't even read what Musk wrote about $8/verified account, namely that the verification process still happens. It's not simply "send $8 worth of shitcoins for a bluecheck".
So let me illustrate how you've clearly not thought this through. Here's a simple way Musk can use the $8 payment process to verify the account in a manner that is hard for hackers to exploit directly, and also incentivizes them to bother someone else: no CC, you pay via bank transfer authorized by Plaid.
Now in order to get a verified twitter, a scammer also needs to either a) hack plaid b) hack BofA/Chase/etc. In both cases, if successful, there are far more lucrative things the hacker can do with the hack than get a checkmark - transfer money directly from the victim, buy an XBox using Afterpay/Klarna/Affirm (set up auto repayment via bank transfer with plaid) then sell it on eBay, that kind of thing.
I highly, highly doubt that. Musk and twitter seem to be approaching this as a generic way to make money, slapped on top of Twitter Blue, and any friction there will significantly hurt revenue. I'll follow it, and if he does, that'd be my mistake. But I'm pretty sure you'll be able to pay for blue with a credit card.
Even then though, a cracked bank account (via cracking.com) seems to be around $100, which is still much cheaper than $1500, so ... it's not helping! (note: prices seem to vary a lot - some sell verification for $60/$150, others sell for $800-$1500, maybe the former is scamming i dunno)
These aren't cracked. They are empty accounts opened up in the identity of nonexistent or defunct people, typically with negligible history. (If you want an account with a few transactions, that's more expensive.) Best case, you're now verified for spamming as Herman Lopez, a 90 year old guy in Florida currently in assisted living.
(Folks in assisted living are generally the best fake identities; not on a "he's dead" list but also unlikely to notice.)
Anyway, you don't seem to disagree that the cost of spamming has gone up.
I'm sorry but this just reads like you're just trusting musk or something? I don't have anything for or against musk, but these arguments don't really make sense.
True, my typo
That is fine, it's just as good as the currently stolen verified accounts - journos, authors, random musicians, none of whose names are distinguishable from 90yo floridians. If we look at the above example of using verified accounts to spam - they just want the blue checkmark next to a random name. I'm not entirely sure why, honestly, who clicks a 'i will trade nudes with you. i am a hot 18 year old' posts because they're posted by a author bluecheck named 'Armistead Maupin'? If you click the post, the spam shows up as a top reply despite having fewer likes, comments than the replies beneath it. Maybe it's the verified that's boosting it - which would be incredibly ironic given this entire argument - but even then there are verified posts 10 replies down with more likes, comments. This is how people are using verified accounts to spam. (Also, you're assuming they'd disable 8/mo blue check accounts' ability to rename. I'm not sure they would do that - maybe they do not currently, see the recent examples of famous people changing name and pfp to 'elon musk' (many now [are]https://twitter.com/zoo_bear/status/1588834121308307456) apparently suspended, but that happens to spam accounts anyway so lol), but that is orthogonal to the utility of paying 8/mo for them. Almost all of the security improvements you're positing will either not actually happen, or come from changes that could be easily made without adding paid bluechecks!)
I disagree that the appreciable cost of spamming will be increased in by the blue checkmark change. Non-verified account spamming, which is afaict the dominant kind, won't be affected at all. (unless they implement your 'blue checkmark replies get massive priority boosts over non bluecheck replies' theory - which would only hurt it a bit - a 20% or 50% boost or something would not make a difference here, - they probably will not do that, even if they did it would seriously harm the twitter product experience) Spamming with verified accounts would become, probably, easier, or maybe stay the same.
edit: just saw here they will be removing bluechecks on name changes. Also says "will suspend accounts that impersonate without clearly specifying parody", which i assume refers to all accounts? That kinda sucks tbh, and is not very free speech.
I'm not "trusting" musk. I'm saying that from my perspective as a professional in the field, the things he has said he plans to do - when given as executive direction to a competent security team - can result in a bunch of very clear changes that have clear mechanisms that might reduce or at least bury spam.
As in, if I were evaluating projects for my team to do from the perspective of "can they work", these would get onto the roadmap.
Yes, I'm evaluating the projects he's proposing from the perspective that details which don't fit into a tweet will be thought through by competent teams of professionals, rather than from the perspective of an Elon hater who assumes it won't work. (Just like electric cars, rocket ships, and sending payments on the internet without getting destroyed by fraudsters won't work.)
Feel free to specify a mechanism for verifying people at scale without charging.
...
Lol, the first statement very much seems plausible.
https://twitter.com/HeheWaitWhut/status/1590489781502611458 https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/09/verified-accounts-ben-shapiro/
I mean, it's incredibly funny and dramapilled, but it doesn't really accomplish the 'reduced spam' and 'reducing misinformation' goals i think
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Okay, just saw this on twitter https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721
"A huge problem with spam and bots and trolls"
"Verified users will pretty much always be at the top of comments and search ... You’ll have to scroll really far to see unverified users"
that would really suck! Compare that to the 4chan or rdrama ethos, right? Baby, bathwater
full 1hr conversation - https://youtube.com/watch?v=WgQBTo0EUxA
the early part is about tesla and is a great read (although not a great listen, really hate the talk/podcast format vs reading)
Other transcript excerpts (heavily edited for brevity, a solid 1/2 to 2/3 of words removed per excerpt, the voice format just sucks)
That might work
On the verified change -
Can't tell if 'hateful conduct' was just thrown in there to sound good (the guy he was talking to asked about antisemitism) because there aren't "100k hate speech bots" but if not, the 8/mo thing reducing 'hateful conduct' is not great
I think this is a sign that content rules won't loosen too much, not sure though.
the comment about x.com vision clashing with the twitter vision?
when asked why invest in tesla vs much cheaper p/e car companies making EVs: "many times I've recommended people don't invest in Tesla and I've said our stock is too high but when people just ignore me and keep buying the stock some reason [...] at a very high level I'd say that autonomy is an insanely fundamental breakthrough and and no one is even close to Tesla for solving generalized autonomy or generalized self-driving Vehicles"
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Alright in that case - sorry for the accusation!
I don't mean identity verification, I mean - for replies to tweets from people like musk or vitalik, specifically, or other tweets that are 'high risk of spamming', heavily downweight replies that 'might be spam' using heuristics that you allow to have a much higher false positive spam-detection rate than your normal anti-spam heuristics to decrease the false negative rate. The problem with weighting comments by verification (aside from people buying verified accounts), to crowd out the spam, is that - if, as you say, you put verified comments at the top to crowd out the spam, that's like (for those top comments) using a spam-filter with a false positive rate of 95% (from my browing, the ratio of good replies by bluechecks : good replies by non bluechecks). You're going to filter out almost all of the good / funny comments in favor of whatever bluechecks like. But if you just 'crank up your spam filter' for specifically that sorting, or use more effective but also error-prone metrics, I think that'd be better at filtering out that specific kind of spam, and with a 'false positive' rate plausibly lower than 30% - also, with much less effort than reworking twitter blue.
I'm actually a big fan of technical competence and leadership, and musk is great at that, I just like the technical details of whether things will work or not as much!
I would guess that it looks like musk mishandled some things, most confidently the whole 'rushing the team to release twitter blue quickly, and as a result the twitter UI offering people the ability to purchase blue checkmarks, and telling existing blue subscribers they have checkmarks, without actually displaying the checkmarks' thing seems like a clear error, and some of the other publicized actions seem like mistakes too, but idk.
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My bad, I meant $100/year.
She certainly can afford it, but that's different from finding it valuable enough to purchase.
If it's implemented as you describe, where verified posts crowd out nonverified no matter what, wouldn't that that'd severely degrade the twitter experience, because unverified people often post better replies than verified people? not sure what you mean precisely
They've spent a lot of time as VC/executives, and even smart people who are experts can make mistakes. I know someone who works in a related area IRL who agrees, and the people I follow on twitter who work at twitter seem to agree too.
I mentioned a realtor because the general sentiment I'm seeing on retwitter and fintwit is a mix of "wtf why so cheap" and a few "I want to verify but stay anon". For example @realestatetrent, an anon account wants to be verified as "a PE guy who buys strip malls" so people take him seriously when he talks about never buying a place where a dry cleaner ever was.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587500060853424129
How does it degrade the experience? Musk has explicitly described bluechecks getting to the top of replies, search and mentions. Assuming the typical screen holds 6 replies, and the typical @kanyewest tweet gets >1000 replies, you need 0.6% of people who reply to be verified to push spammers and cheapskates 1-2 screens down where most people will never see. Eyeballing a few other celebs - @kingjames, @kyliejenner - suggests 1000 is a reasonable number. For your 20% number to make sense, are you aware of many crypto scams in the replies of minor celebs who get only 30 replies/tweet?
0.6% is a lot less than the 20% you were talking about, making me think you didn't do any back of the envelope math on the mechanics proposed.
I have no direct experience with replies, but my experience with search and browse is that > 2 screens might as well not exist. Do you have different info? What do you think is the 95'th/99'th percentile of scroll in twitter replies?
Color me shocked that people angry about a hostile takeover don't like anything about the new guy.
Yeah, and that means the top replies will be 'by people who paid' and not 'the funniest tweets as selected by likes'. It degrades the experience by destroying the 'like' mechanism sorting good tweets to the top! It's better to have the top reply be <funny joke that got 500 likes> as opposed to <tweet from verified user @JoeRealtor saying "Wow, great job!".
I'm specifically referring to the bluecheck thing here.
I also can't tell if the checkmark will involve identity verification? As it stands I don't think it will, it'll just be a nice checkmark that's part of blue?
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