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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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