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Notes -
Elon is still making changes to twitter
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1637198368714772486
"1000X harder to game by bot & troll armies" Really? It seems like scammers have no trouble getting verified accounts: https://www.theverge.com/23379133/twitter-instagram-verified-account-for-sale-scam-criminal
Also, not to mention that verified accounts tended to be the ones who are woke and the most critical of his management, so why would Elon want to give them priority? It's already bad enough that there are more ads on twitter. Now giving more priority to blue accounts will make it worse.
This seems like a bad idea
You don't use twitter, I believe.
The old school verified accounts/blueticks definitely tended to align with Wokeness.
These days it's far more of a mishmash of whoever's willing to pay.
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While I'm willing to believe this statement (I think Grey has mentioned not using it before), I'd like to see evidence countering what you quoted.
Journalists used to be one of the foremost classes of Blueticks (back before it was a pay-to-play feature) and tend to lean pretty left.
Current demographics are a lot harder to track since it's gone to a subscription service.
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It doesn't strike me as a terrible idea from a moderation perspective, but it might damage the product from an end-user perspective. I haven't been impressed with his management of Twitter at all. He didn't even unban all accounts like he said he would, nor has he stepped down as CEO like he said he would. He wants so desperately to be cool in a certain way, and that only makes him all the more lame.
He unbanned Kanye and Nick Fuentes, but then promptly re-banned them. Not unbanning Alex Jones was weak though.
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From the article you linked:
This doesn't seem like anything new, let alone related to the new Twitter Blue system. "Impersonation of official communication" is an age-old "social engineering" attack. Hell, the article predates Twitter Blue, and has more to do with the prior crypto-craze that's even led to things like the hacking of Discord bots.
I assume Elon's bet is that $8/month is too high a price for normal spammers and scammers to bother with. Phishers will always be a problem, yes, but again, we've had literal decades of trying to warn regular people to be vigilant against cyberattacks. Maybe it'll be worse when there's more bluechecks, but that's the other thing: the value of the bluecheck is not as high in the eye of the beholder, or, rather, the signal changes with the ubiquity of the check. Pre-Elon, the Blue Check was generally taken as a warning sign that the holder was a sanctimonious opinion-holder who leaned left. Post-Elon, "you paid $8 for a checkmark" has become the new lazy insult on Twitter. If the worst-case scenario you imply were to come to pass, why would the response not be "most users scroll past the checkmarked tweets"?
From that small excerpt, all I can say is that Pearl is an idiot. How many of these kinds of emails does everyone get everyday? I've had urgent messages about my account with such-and-such being compromised, and they look legit - but since I never went near such-and-such and have no account, I know it's a fake.
Anyone above the age of reason who clicks on a mystery link in an email, in this day, is an idiot. Sorry Pearl but it's your fault, not Musk's fault.
It is shocking to me, as someone whose job is basically helping small business owners deal with technology, how resistant people are to learning basic internet safety habits. There are often two or three clear signs that these emails are fake and a very simple way to verify without clicking any links in the email. Fortunately, I've trained several of my clients to forward suspicious emails to me, so I can confirm their suspicions, but it really isn't very hard and we've had 20+ years of life-training on this by now, haven't we?
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I keep hearing whispers that Twitter is doing away with legacy bluechecks. Did anything ever come of that?
I can’t believe Elon is still trying to get people to pay $8/month. He still doesn’t get it. Power Tweeters (i.e. the people who might care about bluechecks) aren’t Twitter’s customers. They are Twitter’s primary product. Their purpose in the Twitter ecosystem is to attract eyeballs (ordinary users). These eyeballs are the secondary product which is sold to advertisers for $$$. Trying to extract money from the primary product directly is both inefficient (there are far less power Tweeters than ordinary users) and counterproductive (you run the risk of driving your most valuable assets away).
Yeah. Charging them for Twitter is like charging the Attractive women for Tinder and not the males.
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The reason why Elon went with $8/mo is that is the amount twitter makes of a user in ads. By switching making revenue to the user instead of to advertisers, he's hoping Twitter will become less beholding to advertisers controlling what can and cannot be said on twitter and making it a more open platform.
Whether this will work is something to be seen as Elon went from Reddit's messianic hero good boy to super-evil megavillan in the blink of an eye, but I understand where he's going with this.
I remember someone writing a post/substack about how valuable the blue-checkmark is and that it should be 10k+ to maintain one for products, corporations, and/or power users. Maybe they'll create a higher tier for super users as well? Who knows.
I haven't used twitter in years so I'm just speculating. I just don't find that it's worth it to use.
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You are confusing two blue checks here. The one you are talking about is the historical blue check. The new one is about the ordinary guy getting some features.
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Yes. They were mostly converted to yellow piss marks.
$8 is nothing. Lots of Americans have bought it for the convenience.
As to the $8 blue checks, I believe you're going to join the august company of people who thought they knew better than Elon Musk and didn't have basic physics on their side.
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Does anyone have a good model for Elon's thought process here? I do not see him deriving any satisfaction from his current role at Twitter.
Investing effort as the CEO of a Social media product seems like a big step down from being known as a Tech Entrepreneur in the Electric vehicle or commericial Space aviation space.
Getting into fist fights on Twitter trying to squeeze non advertising revenue from a social media product seems like the least interesting and the most self-defeating thing to do. The general population is now accustomed to getting Social media for "free". It's a losing battle to make them pay for it with the glut of other "free" options.
Epistemic status- Confident: I think he originally bought Twitter because he thought it was a morally good thing to do, that he would bring back free speech, even though it'll be at a small cost to him because the return on investment would be lower than if he just kept his 55 billion in Tesla stock. But when he bought Twitter, it caused advertisers to flee, because they don't want the bad PR of being associated with free speech Twitter. Elon realized he massively over paid for Twitter, and has since been scrambling to make Twitter remotely profitable, and not go the way of Tumblr after Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion and sold it for 3 million.
Epistemic status- I think this is true but I'm far from sure: I also think he gets caught up in internet arguments and drama the same way lots of normal people do. Lots of people share memes and get into pointless arguments on the internet. Elon is the same, but just has far from eyes on him than anyone else. He's probably relatively unbothered by the abuse that gets most celebrities to stop getting into constant culture wars. Also, he knows that his tweets going viral from people hating him still gets Twitter views and in the news cycle, so him saying something dumb often earns him more money than him saying something smart, at least in the short term.
Also, I don't think trying to turn Twitter into a subscription model is a bad idea. Ads, even when your site isn't blacklisted by a lot of advertising companies, pay very very little. If he can get even a very small fraction of users to subscribe, it can easily out earn advertising. For example, Tumblr introduced their own parody checkmarks(you get 2 for $8!) after Twitter start selling them, and the Tumblr app gained $263,000 in consumer spending since the paid verification scheme was launched, which amounts to a 125 percent boost in iOS in-app revenue(https://mashable.com/article/tumblr-twitter-blue-tick-revenue). Which is a pretty massive amount for a joke.
And my guess is Twitter will make a lot more than 263k per month on check marks.
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It's a two-tiered system, which adds to the confusion. Old, legacy verified users are grandfathered in: no fee. New verified users who are notable do not need to pay the fee. Everyone else does.
And a lot of people, including me, use a browser extension that reveals if the checkmark is legacy or paid. There's another toggle on the extension to hide paid checkmarks completely, which is very funny to me. You can also opt to show them in comic sans font.
I actually think the For You option (versus just showing your followed accounts) is where I find a ton of interesting tweets and new people to follow. I see people complain about "horrible politics" on their For You feed, but surely that's related to what they interact with?
The workaround for anyone who dislikes changes to Twitter is to use lists to follow only the people you find interesting and use the 8 Dollars extension. Then it's just like old Twitter.
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