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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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I'm saying that from my perspective as a professional in the field

Alright in that case - sorry for the accusation!

Feel free to specify a mechanism for verifying people at scale without charging.

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 don't have anything for or against musk, > ...

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.