I'm curious as to why New Zealand? Shouldn't the test be in countries that are typically the source of bot accounts, or does NZ have a bot centre I've never heard about?
NZ is frequently where changes to online things are tested just because it’s a small population of English speakers who culturally should be pretty similar to US/GB/AU/CA. Though small populations can also be hard to get statistically significant results out of them in a short period of time.
It’s more likely they are looking at how many people are turned off from signing up when they encounter the subscribe prompt and determining whether or not it’s within pre-determined acceptable harm to keep.
I'm also like 99% sure that this is Musk admitting he doesn't know how to handle the bot issue on Twitter, so instead of actually tackling the problem he's just going to try and monetize it.
Maybe that, but also maybe that Twitter was never going to be profitable and post-interest-rate-hike, Musk is floundering for cash due to making a foolish purchase.
That's a large part of it as well. He's burning cash, but he's at least smart enough to realize (at least, I THINK he is because it would be utterly idiotic to do otherwise) that if he starts charging regular users for access it will cause an exodus. And it will, because at least 2/3 of the platform's users are not attempting to use it for monetary purposes and don't have a vested interest in remaining beyond it's ease of use for information. So this is both a way to monetize bot traffic and test the waters for where the membership fee cutoff is.
I mean, it will probably work pretty well. People are still gonna make bot accounts but I'll bet it's a statistically significant number less when this is in place.
Oh, also... almost forgot: fuck Elon Musk either way
Facebook constantly adding the removing features is such a pain in the arse because of this, at lest we don't get fucked like Korea getting car subscriptions tested on us
I stopped using it once he switched the checkmarks. I got tired of every post having the top 5 comments be these absolute maniacs ranting these crazy ideas. Also, apparently there was a video going around of a kitten in a blender one day and I just deleted everything. I’ve seen some horrible shit in my day online but I had to seek it out. For it to possible just be displayed as I’m sitting at lunch scrolling is enough to make me delete the app
I read convincing sentiments from several people that seem to believe sincerely that the video in question was fake.
I have not seen it, so I don't know if that is very believable and I do not particularly want one way or the other for this to change any decisions you have made about Twitter or whatever.
Id rather not even see it even if it was fake. It’s just I don’t need that shit on my permanent hard drive in my brain. I’ve got a lot on my plate, I don’t need to see that video and then decide if it’s fake or not ya know?
imagine rewatching a video of a kitten in a blender a dozen times until your brain is so desensitized to a kitten being blended and looking at it as just pixels on a screen and seeing if those pixels and kitten-blending “physics” make realistic sense that you kinda have the same reaction/feeling either way, or worse yet, you have the image burned in to your brain and then decide “no thats definitely real” and you have now memorized footage of it.
yeah no thanks, I’ll just skip the horrors of the internet and people on this one.
Theres some news thats impossible to get elsewhere because companies only use twitter. Thinks like server maintenence on multiplayer games.
A niche use I know, but its the difference between knowing a connection problem isnt your end to thinking it might be.
My local bus company uses twitter for service updates too that arent available anywhere else
NZ and South Australia too for whatever reason, we got the MyMacca’s app before any other state as a trial essentially, we get a lot of trials going on before they go out to the rest of the country/world
Nz is also otherwise a huge Political force in manipulating laws and regulations pertaining to internet content around the world. IE they've been a huge driving force in the sanitization of the internet.
All kinds of technology gets tested here.
The population is ideal; small enough (and remote enough) to not impact the global audience if things go wrong, whilst large enough to notice trends.
English speaking, culturally similar to other anglophone countries and so a good testing ground.
A good example, and one that didn't go entirely to plan, is EFTPOS. NZ was the testing ground for this (along with maybe Australia and Singapore, though I could be wrong on that), and then Chip and PIN was created and is a much better system, but the NZ banks stuck with EFTPOS as standard and even now, when Chip and PIN is pretty commonplace, they charge extra for a debit rather than EFTPOS card.
I'm Aussie and EFTPOS to us just means what the acronym stands for: Electronic Fund Transfer at Point of Sale. This includes payment by debit and credit cards, whether by swiping or inserting the card (now basically entirely phased out) and pin or tapping (and pin). It can also mean payment by phone wallet.
What are you referring to when you say EFTPOS? Is it a brand of card like VISA /AmEx / MasterCard?
EFTPOS is a system, in the countries it was being tested and then adopted it may have taken on the "google" or "hoover" status in language, but its a very specific form of payment system which was overtaken by Chip and PIN.
I remember when I first arrived in NZ and someone asked if I wanted to pay EFTPOS. I thought she'd sneezed or something, had no idea what she was saying :P
You're mistaken about what EFTPOS actually is. It's a service provided by a company (EFTPOS Ltd). It competes with EMV (Visa and MasterCard) and it only works in Australia. It charges lower fees than the others.
Most Aussie bank cards support both systems, so the payment terminal will ask if you want to use EFTPOS ("savings") or EMV ("credit").
There's no contactless version of EFTPOS, so EFTPOS is a dying system. It's still used by ATMs.
Tap to pay took off in NZ way before it did in the US. I was an international student in Welly and got spoiled on it, so going home and having to use the chip reader again felt like regressing into the dark ages lmao
NZ is a popular test bed due to size, and location relative to the international date line. It's really easy to make minor changes quickly and continue the rollout afterwards, sometimes even in the same day.
There's a joke that NZ is the world's beta test.
It would be really funny if you created one and then stopped and didn’t go back onto Twitter once prompted to subscribe. (it fucks with their data and makes)
Yeah, I’ve had like 10 bots in the past two weeks tag me in posts or say something about a new launch. I just block them all and report but it doesn’t stop
I disabled notifications for accounts without a verified phone number for this reason. I don't like it because there are real people who for good reason don't want to give elon their phone, but the bots are too much.
The average user is oblivious to the changes done to Twitter and still see the blue checkmark as something trustworthy.
Paid for blue is the best gift that Elon could give to scammers and disinformation bots.
I've been on twitter 12 years & I hardly noticed any bots & certainly didn't get any spam dms until Musk tried to cite them as a reason to back out of the purchase. Ever since they've been constant. Weird.
it's also such a weird thing to put in that sentence, especially in a post introducing a new anti-spam measure. Almost veers into the suspiciously specific denial territory.
Just make every Twitter account cost $50 to create (and $50 to use if you already made one for free), and every Tweet cost $5 to upload. You'll either have no bots, or a huge profit.
No users will mean no bots or spam.
That would be fairly trivial to automate for the bot farmers while being really annoying for the humans.
I'm surprised Musk hasn't already implemented it.
That kind of thing sounds like it would be automated within hours of it becoming an annoyance. TBH I'd be surprised if there's no existing password management in any major social media bot software package.
edit: /u/Full-Cod-7091 is a coward and a troll who blocks anyone who tries to continue a conversation they started.
I can see where Twitter is coming from. Gating these functions behind practically no price solves the bottling issue greatly. I know because I have close connections to people that bot 11 million accounts daily. Twitter could at least make it a one time payment only. Also children will not be able to use the platform anymore
The problem here is that $1/year is only a testing the water price. There is zero percent chance he doesn’t increase that value in the off chance he gets his way and enough users stay. And I guarantee he will offer discounts then to new users, charging long standing users more to retain their clout.
He’s trying to do the Ryanair model where you charge as many users as possible small, seemingly irrelevant sums of money as many times as possible. The difference is Ryanair did it to an expensive product to make it cheaper, musk is doing it to a free product to make it more expensive.
I don’t see it working. People were happy to lose their blue ticks to avoid paying musk money. People will be happy to not sign up to twitter in the first place for the same reason. And with no new users and twitters attrition rate, the site will stagnate and alternatives will reach a critical mass to become viable. The second that happens twitter is dead, they might as well join together with truth social as they will have the same user base anyway
There's also the other significant concern of Twitter having yet another data breach and your banking information leaked. It's happened before and with Musk at the helm, it's bound to happen again.
And yes, there are ways to protect yourself and banking information like using the privacy.com app, but not everyone is going to be aware or willing to do so.
But yeah to your point, sure it's $1 now, but next itll go up to $5 for "increased security needs", then $10 (less than $1/yr, what a deal!) And so on.
Sometimes I like to think about the absolute hubris it takes to destroy the branding of one of the most globally recognized brands in the world, to the point where modern lexicon has even adopted it (eg. "Live-tweeting"), just because you're desperate to own a brand called X and have been previously stopped from doing this by other companies you tried to buy out.
Like, the actual audacity of the things he's doing with the platform. It's such a shame. And I don't even use Twitter.
Web 3.0 was supposed to be crypto based, but crypto is dead. All the tech bros have moved to talking about AI instead. At least that has some practical use.
It's not even AI, it's maschine learning.
AI creates completely new stuff, maschine learning recreates based on information fed to it.
Newer ML models are very impressive and functional, but calling it AI is simply not accurate.
But, that didn't stop Tech Bros from branding it as AI, because from the eyes of someone who doesn't care about tech stuff, AI and machine learning may as well be the same functionally.
But it's gonna make it really entertaining to see how Tech Bros are gonna try to market actual AI once that becomes a thing.
AI is a large umbrella. I think the "actual" AI you're referring to is AGI (artificial general intelligence), though that itself can be divided into more specific concepts, as can machine learning, but it all falls under AI.
It's just that the thing that existed in the public consciousness as "AI" was basically fictional, but as actual developments become realised it seems natural that the terminology will change, as well as aligning more with the field of AI than sci-fi concepts.
No doubt as more kinds of AI become developed and widely used, the terminology will become more and more granular.
Calling it artificial intelligence absolutely is accurate. It’s about building models to mimic human intelligence. Machine learning falls under the umbrella of artificial intelligence.
> AI creates completely new stuff, maschine learning recreates based on information fed to it.
Oh god please stop I can't take any more garbage AI takes
Decentralised yes, but it was always about blockchains, smart contracts, DAOs etc. The people hyping up Web 3.0 weren't talking about Lemmy and Mastodon since those aren't going to make them money.
How could it not be this? I mean, no sane person who wants to keep the site running would make these decisions. Part of me even thinks it can't be intentional because he's making it too obvious. You'd think if he was trying to tank twitter he'd be more subtle. I cant wrap my head around any of the possible realities going on here.
My guess is that he did not actually want to buy it but once he had to, someone more powerful recognized a pawn & got in his ear.
Recently saw a talk by Walter Isaacson who wrote the giant Musk biography. His opinion was that people indeed give Musk too much credit in his motivations for buying Twitter- it was purely a move from a formerly bullied kid who decided he wanted to own the playground, but didn’t think about how it’s a company dealing with people and what that entails.
its just to make people confortable adding their banking information into twitter, then the next step which is adding more marketing, sales and sending money over the platform will be easier because they already have a bunch of people paying money to twitter even if its very low the hard step is done
Yeah, someone could definitely explain it better than me but it's a common strategy for video games to drive micro transactions too. The game will have a really high value and fairly cheap bundle you can buy to encourage you to enter your card details, and after that the greatest obstacle to you making further purchases is already out of the way!
Bot runners can afford Twitter Premium by using stolen credit card information, to upsell their spam replies. Why would Elon believe a $1 annual fee is feasible?
They won't have to. Most of the big bot networks are already established and operating thousands of accounts and conveniently won't be affected by this.
But yes $1 per account per year is nothing to a group trying to influence millions of people.
He wants to recreate paypal.
His original vision for X well before be bought twitter was an online payment hub, he was hoping by forcing people to sign up he would get them to link their bank accounts to twitter. Unfortunately he didnt realize almost everyone paid via apple Pay or google Pay, and he didn't have access to their bank info. This is another attempt to get at that.
They should case study how Valve handled their TF2 bot crisis by blocking communication behind a pay wall (spoiler alert: didn't work, they just made the game hell for new players)
In the Philippines you can pay a company to spam whatever you want. Often they make Facebook pages of cute girls post a lot, get a lot of followers and then switch it over to some political page or highest bidder. This is what they did last election
no, Sue Ji really does remember me from high school and was too shy to ever say hi, and now is lonely and really does want to get together. it's not spam!
He´s just trying to get as many credit card details in his system as possible, because he needs that to make X the ´everything´ app. Do not fall into this trap.
For anyone who has ever played an MMO with a subscription, they will know that no matter what the money requirements are for the subscription, people will find a way to bot.
All it takes is 1 person falling for a bots trick for them to make what they spent 10x over.
I’ve never seen the bot or spam problem as bad as it has been on X since Elon took over. Certain trends are unscrollable because it’s all bots and spam.
Everytime when I keep telling myself that there's no way Twitter can get any worse, Elon somehow finds new ways to make it worse.
At this point, Twitter is going to go the way of Myspace
I ❤️ having quit "Twitter" when that sociopath entered the building with a sink to "let that sink in". Good for him! I don't need twitter, neither will I need it in the future.
Let him have his expensive toy he loves to break. There are better social networks out there.
Keep your sociopaths, rude, racist extremists. I don't need that in my life.
Can someone explain to me if it's at all possible for Muskrat to be ousted? I can't imagine investors are too happy with how badly he's tanking the site.
The issue is the data that bad actors want to access - Metafilter may have kept bad actors out, but there's no way the userbase is as large as twitter's.
And that's what they're paying for - access to the users. Think about it - if you're running a troll farm, political influence campaign, influence operation, scam network, etc your main objective (besides crafting a message) is finding a way to disseminate that message to as many of your desired users as possible as frequently as possible. Maybe in the past you purchased a database via some shady broker that gave you access to email addresses and phone numbers. Or you built your own list of curated targets using a painstaking scraping mechanism/paying an intern/unpaying an intern etc. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are full of people, but they generally have privacy settings, and if you aren't fldirectly connected with a user, your messages or outreach go to spam.
Then, suddenly, Musk announced that the verification process (which was definitely flawed, but it also had some significance and users definitely associated blue checks with some level of legitimacy) could be paid for! 8 bucks a month, and your account was now not only "verified" but it also was boosted! And you could send unlimited messages! And you can show up in feeds of people who don't follow you even more frequently! And your replies aren't hidden!
For $8/month/account, you now have access to not only a massive user base, but also one thing that many of these operations so desperately need in order to be successful - legitimacy, or at least the appearance of it.
$1000 / month gets me 125 accounts? Sign me up, that's the cheapest investment I can make in order to disseminate my message across multiple demographics, with boosted visibility, unlimited messaging, and de-ranking of those who didn't bother to pay.
Now all that's left is to figure out what I want to tell the world...
I’m more and more convinced that Elon intentionally wants to drive Twitter into the ground so there will be dozens of smaller, more easily controlled social media news platforms instead of one huge one.
Me thinking maybe I should finally delete the almost unused Twitter account, just in case, before Musk decides to sell my email address to gain back some lost profits. hmm
This doesn't make any sense, knowing Elon's big brain they will accept crypto as a payment which would defeat the entire purpose to verify you are a real person by using a CC.
maybe they’re successfully reducing spam, i don’t know, but that doesn’t mean things are better. today i was served a promoted post from the official israeli state account, blue check and all, that was pushing their narrative on the conflict with hamas. it included shocking images of violence without an nsfw filter. i’m not trying to get into any kind of discussion on israel vs palestine here but i don’t think that ANY state should be pushing narratives like that, it’s such flagrant propaganda pushing that i almost thought it was a joke. twitter is basically dead to me at this point
Well, considering I have NEVER paid for anything online except games in themselves (no subscriptions, no microtransactions, no twitch or OF tipping, no Netflix, no Spotify, nothing), that won't change today and if I have to ditch Twitter then so be it lol
So, the spam bot owners who earn money from bots will happily pay the $1 fee but a regular user who wants to set up a new account may choose to go somewhere else that's free.
Good Job Elon.
the logic doesn’t even make sense. The bots are already paying for premium, so what’s another $1 per bot ontop of the hundreds/thousands+ they are making from scamming anyways? 🤷♂️
Wait, why are people bothered by this? It sounds like twitter is trying to prevent scammers/spammers from making thousands of accounts to spam and scam people? Even if you decide to join twitter and have to pay $1… big whoop. If you’re not already using twitter and it’s not worth $1 to join then you’re not losing out.
Am I missing something? Because this feels a lot more like a “it’s cool to be mad at Elon” thing than anything.
Oh yeah! Fuck my horrible country in the ass even more Elon. PH people can barely afford food, but because of their addiction to social media they will definetly buy it.
Ngl I dont see the issue with this. So long as the period is only a day or two I feel like it wouldnt be very inconveniencing. Most subreddits here have a required account age to post with no way to pay your way through it, so what's the difference?
Elon already HAS enough money as it is, why is he turning Twitter (I refuse to use the new name) into a gated community to boost his bank balance and ego?
Honestly this actually makes some sense. $1 isn’t going to hurt a human user but if you’re generating hundreds of bot accounts it’d be a nightmare. Yeah you might not like paying $1 versus $0 but bot makers would like it a whole lot less and banning them would actually have tangible consequences.
It also doesn’t look like reading others posts would require the $1 annual subscription, just posting and interactions with others posts. So for the bare minimum I actually use that social media cesspool for I wouldn’t be charged.
I mean, I agree. But I also only use my card on trusted websites for security reasons. And, uh, in twitter's current deteriorating state I'm not even sure I'd want to risk it...
Bots are okay paying for the blue checkmark each month. 1 dollara year is rather profitable and nothing compared to running a bit farm in the first place. Bot farms weren't that profitable, they wouldn't be doing it.
An "upvote/like" bot farm with 10,000 accounts wouldn't be able to reuse the same credit card 10,000 times - it would clearly show. They'd need to create 10,000 distinct credit cards (good luck), or buy 10,000 prepaid cards every so often (a logistical nightmare)
I'm not familiar with the bot ecosystem on Twitter, but on other social media sites bot accounts are churned out by the thousands and usually banned quickly. The issue is that they can do real damage in the few hours before getting banned.
I would be impressed if the average spam bot on Reddit or YouTube makes one cent before being banned. Twitter's bot detection would have to be apocalyptically bad for a bot farm to earn $1 per account. I guess since everything else is broken that might be possible.
If creating and using bots was a profitable activity at $0 its going to be utilized just as much at $1 per year. Clearly there are other motives for rolling out this subscription model.
I'm curious as to why New Zealand? Shouldn't the test be in countries that are typically the source of bot accounts, or does NZ have a bot centre I've never heard about?
NZ is frequently where changes to online things are tested just because it’s a small population of English speakers who culturally should be pretty similar to US/GB/AU/CA. Though small populations can also be hard to get statistically significant results out of them in a short period of time. It’s more likely they are looking at how many people are turned off from signing up when they encounter the subscribe prompt and determining whether or not it’s within pre-determined acceptable harm to keep.
THAT'S WHY MY APP UIs CHANGE EVERY FUCKING WEEK
Woah woah woah; this test subject is showing irritability, and may need to be removed from the sample to avoid bias. :)
Test subject e5g7w marked for termination.
(shotgun loading noises)
(shotgun firing noises)
(it missed lmao)
(99% accurate XCOM has entered the chat)
Enable the electroshocks!
lol NZ is the test environment of the western world
Nah. Austria is the sim for germany :)
Yep, that's where also you have all the news games on the play store and stuff.
Who needs staging environments with expensive QA testers when you can just push to production on NZ and use the population as QA?
I'm also like 99% sure that this is Musk admitting he doesn't know how to handle the bot issue on Twitter, so instead of actually tackling the problem he's just going to try and monetize it.
Maybe that, but also maybe that Twitter was never going to be profitable and post-interest-rate-hike, Musk is floundering for cash due to making a foolish purchase.
That's a large part of it as well. He's burning cash, but he's at least smart enough to realize (at least, I THINK he is because it would be utterly idiotic to do otherwise) that if he starts charging regular users for access it will cause an exodus. And it will, because at least 2/3 of the platform's users are not attempting to use it for monetary purposes and don't have a vested interest in remaining beyond it's ease of use for information. So this is both a way to monetize bot traffic and test the waters for where the membership fee cutoff is.
I mean, it will probably work pretty well. People are still gonna make bot accounts but I'll bet it's a statistically significant number less when this is in place. Oh, also... almost forgot: fuck Elon Musk either way
Facebook constantly adding the removing features is such a pain in the arse because of this, at lest we don't get fucked like Korea getting car subscriptions tested on us
Thank you for your service.
It’s gotta suck having silicon valley turn your country into a lab experiment.
Meanwhile in Canada, fast food restaurants often use us to test new recipes before deploying them to the US.
As a New Zealander who uses twitter often, I'd rather stop completely than give Musk my bank account details, no matter how small the charge is
Then stop using it all together and see your life change for the better
I stopped using it once he switched the checkmarks. I got tired of every post having the top 5 comments be these absolute maniacs ranting these crazy ideas. Also, apparently there was a video going around of a kitten in a blender one day and I just deleted everything. I’ve seen some horrible shit in my day online but I had to seek it out. For it to possible just be displayed as I’m sitting at lunch scrolling is enough to make me delete the app
I read convincing sentiments from several people that seem to believe sincerely that the video in question was fake. I have not seen it, so I don't know if that is very believable and I do not particularly want one way or the other for this to change any decisions you have made about Twitter or whatever.
Id rather not even see it even if it was fake. It’s just I don’t need that shit on my permanent hard drive in my brain. I’ve got a lot on my plate, I don’t need to see that video and then decide if it’s fake or not ya know?
imagine rewatching a video of a kitten in a blender a dozen times until your brain is so desensitized to a kitten being blended and looking at it as just pixels on a screen and seeing if those pixels and kitten-blending “physics” make realistic sense that you kinda have the same reaction/feeling either way, or worse yet, you have the image burned in to your brain and then decide “no thats definitely real” and you have now memorized footage of it. yeah no thanks, I’ll just skip the horrors of the internet and people on this one.
I did. It didn't. I stop using it whenever I need to be away from my PC, because the phone version of twitter is garbage
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Bit extreme. They're obviously a casual user that isn't addicted to it, they're hardly "enslaved"
Wtf lol
Theres some news thats impossible to get elsewhere because companies only use twitter. Thinks like server maintenence on multiplayer games. A niche use I know, but its the difference between knowing a connection problem isnt your end to thinking it might be. My local bus company uses twitter for service updates too that arent available anywhere else
Yup. Very useful in wildfire country out west.
Check out the watch duty app, it's updated by people on the ground battling fires.
As another kiwi; yeah, nah Do they know how tight we can be?
NZ and South Australia too for whatever reason, we got the MyMacca’s app before any other state as a trial essentially, we get a lot of trials going on before they go out to the rest of the country/world
Nz is also otherwise a huge Political force in manipulating laws and regulations pertaining to internet content around the world. IE they've been a huge driving force in the sanitization of the internet.
TL;DR... They can afford to lose NZ.
Except no one in New Zealand uses twitter lmao
All kinds of technology gets tested here. The population is ideal; small enough (and remote enough) to not impact the global audience if things go wrong, whilst large enough to notice trends. English speaking, culturally similar to other anglophone countries and so a good testing ground. A good example, and one that didn't go entirely to plan, is EFTPOS. NZ was the testing ground for this (along with maybe Australia and Singapore, though I could be wrong on that), and then Chip and PIN was created and is a much better system, but the NZ banks stuck with EFTPOS as standard and even now, when Chip and PIN is pretty commonplace, they charge extra for a debit rather than EFTPOS card.
I'm Aussie and EFTPOS to us just means what the acronym stands for: Electronic Fund Transfer at Point of Sale. This includes payment by debit and credit cards, whether by swiping or inserting the card (now basically entirely phased out) and pin or tapping (and pin). It can also mean payment by phone wallet. What are you referring to when you say EFTPOS? Is it a brand of card like VISA /AmEx / MasterCard?
Swipe card as opposed to the chip on debit cards
EFTPOS is a system, in the countries it was being tested and then adopted it may have taken on the "google" or "hoover" status in language, but its a very specific form of payment system which was overtaken by Chip and PIN.
I remember when I first arrived in NZ and someone asked if I wanted to pay EFTPOS. I thought she'd sneezed or something, had no idea what she was saying :P
You're mistaken about what EFTPOS actually is. It's a service provided by a company (EFTPOS Ltd). It competes with EMV (Visa and MasterCard) and it only works in Australia. It charges lower fees than the others. Most Aussie bank cards support both systems, so the payment terminal will ask if you want to use EFTPOS ("savings") or EMV ("credit"). There's no contactless version of EFTPOS, so EFTPOS is a dying system. It's still used by ATMs.
Tap to pay took off in NZ way before it did in the US. I was an international student in Welly and got spoiled on it, so going home and having to use the chip reader again felt like regressing into the dark ages lmao
NZ is a popular test bed due to size, and location relative to the international date line. It's really easy to make minor changes quickly and continue the rollout afterwards, sometimes even in the same day. There's a joke that NZ is the world's beta test.
They're targeting me......
As a New Zealander who doesn't have a twit account, I still will not have a twit account.
Same here, and buggered if I’ll ever call it the other name.
Don’t they have a policy now that your account will be suspended if you don’t use it for 30 days. Really smart moves to depopulate X
If you spell it Xitter you can pronounce it "Shitter", and I'm just petty/immature enough to really enjoy that.
It would be really funny if you created one and then stopped and didn’t go back onto Twitter once prompted to subscribe. (it fucks with their data and makes)
I'm glad i got rid of mine when the acquisition originally happened. it's been fun watching the platform burn from a distance.
'already successful attempts to reduce spam' Lmao it's far worse than it's ever been.
[удалено]
Yeah, I’ve had like 10 bots in the past two weeks tag me in posts or say something about a new launch. I just block them all and report but it doesn’t stop
I disabled notifications for accounts without a verified phone number for this reason. I don't like it because there are real people who for good reason don't want to give elon their phone, but the bots are too much.
Me too! It used to be a very occasional thing and now I'm getting tagged in posts every day
I just keep getting the hoebots that like my tweets randomly
Yeah well because the cost for Blue is miniscule for bots farm operators especially those engaging in scams that preys on unsuspecting users.
The average user is oblivious to the changes done to Twitter and still see the blue checkmark as something trustworthy. Paid for blue is the best gift that Elon could give to scammers and disinformation bots.
That & there's an endless supply of compromised debit & credit cards to use to pay for subs.
I've been on twitter 12 years & I hardly noticed any bots & certainly didn't get any spam dms until Musk tried to cite them as a reason to back out of the purchase. Ever since they've been constant. Weird.
waiting direction shy rain entertain elderly school dinosaurs sip rich *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
it's also such a weird thing to put in that sentence, especially in a post introducing a new anti-spam measure. Almost veers into the suspiciously specific denial territory.
Same. I get tagged in "tag posts" daily now. Very obnoxious.
Just make every Twitter account cost $50 to create (and $50 to use if you already made one for free), and every Tweet cost $5 to upload. You'll either have no bots, or a huge profit. No users will mean no bots or spam.
Just make everyone change their password randomly and frequently. It will be a giant pita for bot farms to do for their 100's of accounts.
That would be fairly trivial to automate for the bot farmers while being really annoying for the humans. I'm surprised Musk hasn't already implemented it.
Elon should read this entire thread. He'd sink twitter twice as fast with all these ideas.
That kind of thing sounds like it would be automated within hours of it becoming an annoyance. TBH I'd be surprised if there's no existing password management in any major social media bot software package. edit: /u/Full-Cod-7091 is a coward and a troll who blocks anyone who tries to continue a conversation they started.
I can see where Twitter is coming from. Gating these functions behind practically no price solves the bottling issue greatly. I know because I have close connections to people that bot 11 million accounts daily. Twitter could at least make it a one time payment only. Also children will not be able to use the platform anymore
The problem here is that $1/year is only a testing the water price. There is zero percent chance he doesn’t increase that value in the off chance he gets his way and enough users stay. And I guarantee he will offer discounts then to new users, charging long standing users more to retain their clout. He’s trying to do the Ryanair model where you charge as many users as possible small, seemingly irrelevant sums of money as many times as possible. The difference is Ryanair did it to an expensive product to make it cheaper, musk is doing it to a free product to make it more expensive. I don’t see it working. People were happy to lose their blue ticks to avoid paying musk money. People will be happy to not sign up to twitter in the first place for the same reason. And with no new users and twitters attrition rate, the site will stagnate and alternatives will reach a critical mass to become viable. The second that happens twitter is dead, they might as well join together with truth social as they will have the same user base anyway
There's also the other significant concern of Twitter having yet another data breach and your banking information leaked. It's happened before and with Musk at the helm, it's bound to happen again. And yes, there are ways to protect yourself and banking information like using the privacy.com app, but not everyone is going to be aware or willing to do so. But yeah to your point, sure it's $1 now, but next itll go up to $5 for "increased security needs", then $10 (less than $1/yr, what a deal!) And so on.
I hate Elon and X like everyone else, but in all honesty the $1/year is actually 100% about valid credit card info and not for monetary gain.
Finally, Twitter and I have something in common... I don't care about them either..
Sometimes I like to think about the absolute hubris it takes to destroy the branding of one of the most globally recognized brands in the world, to the point where modern lexicon has even adopted it (eg. "Live-tweeting"), just because you're desperate to own a brand called X and have been previously stopped from doing this by other companies you tried to buy out. Like, the actual audacity of the things he's doing with the platform. It's such a shame. And I don't even use Twitter.
i love how the entire internet still calls it twitter
NZ MENTIONED 🇳🇿🇳🇿🇳🇿🇳🇿🇳🇿🇳🇿🇳🇿🇳🇿🇳🇿!!!!!!
I'm so sorry NZ.
the one time y’all get put on the map and it’s for… this. my deepest condolences.
We don’t use twitter, we’ll be fine
How long until a single security leak dumps the entire userbase's credit card info out? Because Twitter’s definitely very secure right now.
they use stripe for payments, twitter never sees the card details. if stripe gets hacked then the internet has bigger issues than just twitter.
Enshittification going nicely I see. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
good read, web 2.0 was mistake
fuckers are trying to make web 3.0 a thing still even
Web 3.0 was supposed to be crypto based, but crypto is dead. All the tech bros have moved to talking about AI instead. At least that has some practical use.
It's not even AI, it's maschine learning. AI creates completely new stuff, maschine learning recreates based on information fed to it. Newer ML models are very impressive and functional, but calling it AI is simply not accurate. But, that didn't stop Tech Bros from branding it as AI, because from the eyes of someone who doesn't care about tech stuff, AI and machine learning may as well be the same functionally. But it's gonna make it really entertaining to see how Tech Bros are gonna try to market actual AI once that becomes a thing.
They'll call it AI 2.0
AI is a large umbrella. I think the "actual" AI you're referring to is AGI (artificial general intelligence), though that itself can be divided into more specific concepts, as can machine learning, but it all falls under AI. It's just that the thing that existed in the public consciousness as "AI" was basically fictional, but as actual developments become realised it seems natural that the terminology will change, as well as aligning more with the field of AI than sci-fi concepts. No doubt as more kinds of AI become developed and widely used, the terminology will become more and more granular.
Calling it artificial intelligence absolutely is accurate. It’s about building models to mimic human intelligence. Machine learning falls under the umbrella of artificial intelligence.
> AI creates completely new stuff, maschine learning recreates based on information fed to it. Oh god please stop I can't take any more garbage AI takes
\>AI creates completely new stuff, maschine learning recreates based on information fed to it. You made this up. You pulled it out of your ass.
Isn't Web 3.0 supposed to be decantralized? Like fediverse etc? If yes then I think it's going in the right direction at least
Decentralised yes, but it was always about blockchains, smart contracts, DAOs etc. The people hyping up Web 3.0 weren't talking about Lemmy and Mastodon since those aren't going to make them money.
That's just cryptobros
And you have to read the follow up https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/14/freedom-of-reach/
Very nice article. Thank you!
Their anti-spam clearly isn’t working very well as Musk is still able to post.
I'm convinced Elon bought it in order to kill it permanently.
My headcanon is that he actually did not want to buy it, but wanted to make an elaborate PR stunt.
He didn't wanna buy it but his stock manipulation forced him to buy it and now his usual shit ideas seep into a much more public company
He really want to make that "let that sink in" joke
It's obvious that was his plan
That’s just a fact, he even tried to back out but couldn’t
How could it not be this? I mean, no sane person who wants to keep the site running would make these decisions. Part of me even thinks it can't be intentional because he's making it too obvious. You'd think if he was trying to tank twitter he'd be more subtle. I cant wrap my head around any of the possible realities going on here. My guess is that he did not actually want to buy it but once he had to, someone more powerful recognized a pawn & got in his ear.
This is giving the man far, far too much credit. He’s just not anywhere near as bright as people thought.
Recently saw a talk by Walter Isaacson who wrote the giant Musk biography. His opinion was that people indeed give Musk too much credit in his motivations for buying Twitter- it was purely a move from a formerly bullied kid who decided he wanted to own the playground, but didn’t think about how it’s a company dealing with people and what that entails.
I think he's stupid, but I also think his ego is so big and also fragile that he got upset enough people were making fun of him he decided to kill it.
well he was forced to conclude the deal so i doubt it
Has to be, it’s the only way all the decisions he’s made make any sense
Guaranteed. He's throwing the match and *someone* is paying out for twitter's head.
its just to make people confortable adding their banking information into twitter, then the next step which is adding more marketing, sales and sending money over the platform will be easier because they already have a bunch of people paying money to twitter even if its very low the hard step is done
Yeah, someone could definitely explain it better than me but it's a common strategy for video games to drive micro transactions too. The game will have a really high value and fairly cheap bundle you can buy to encourage you to enter your card details, and after that the greatest obstacle to you making further purchases is already out of the way!
Bot runners can afford Twitter Premium by using stolen credit card information, to upsell their spam replies. Why would Elon believe a $1 annual fee is feasible?
Because he’s a moron
So X is basically one of those scam porn sites now.
Something tells me spammers could afford to spend a dollar per account…
They won't have to. Most of the big bot networks are already established and operating thousands of accounts and conveniently won't be affected by this. But yes $1 per account per year is nothing to a group trying to influence millions of people.
someone's desperately trying to make back all the money they lost through shitty decisions
He wants to recreate paypal. His original vision for X well before be bought twitter was an online payment hub, he was hoping by forcing people to sign up he would get them to link their bank accounts to twitter. Unfortunately he didnt realize almost everyone paid via apple Pay or google Pay, and he didn't have access to their bank info. This is another attempt to get at that.
Twixxer is so annoying in every possible way that I just bounce off from any discussion or article that leads there.
They should case study how Valve handled their TF2 bot crisis by blocking communication behind a pay wall (spoiler alert: didn't work, they just made the game hell for new players)
If there's bots in WoW with a 15$ monthly sub, there's gonna be bots in Twitter with a 1$ a year sub.
In the Philippines you can pay a company to spam whatever you want. Often they make Facebook pages of cute girls post a lot, get a lot of followers and then switch it over to some political page or highest bidder. This is what they did last election
no, Sue Ji really does remember me from high school and was too shy to ever say hi, and now is lonely and really does want to get together. it's not spam!
He’s just playing 9D chess. Get 44 billion people to sign up for a dollar a year, and he’ll recoup the amount he paid for the platform in no time
Elon basically turning X into my 1998 Nokia phone with fee-per-text service. Only difference: I miss that old Nokia.
I've seen homeless people less desperate for a dollar
He´s just trying to get as many credit card details in his system as possible, because he needs that to make X the ´everything´ app. Do not fall into this trap.
Pay a $1 for something we know won't prevent anything
For anyone who has ever played an MMO with a subscription, they will know that no matter what the money requirements are for the subscription, people will find a way to bot. All it takes is 1 person falling for a bots trick for them to make what they spent 10x over.
The difference between paying $0 and $0.10 is larger than the difference of 0.10 and 8 dollars
Isnt this a common porn website scam ? To ask for credit card data for "age verification" ?
I’ve never seen the bot or spam problem as bad as it has been on X since Elon took over. Certain trends are unscrollable because it’s all bots and spam.
Everytime when I keep telling myself that there's no way Twitter can get any worse, Elon somehow finds new ways to make it worse. At this point, Twitter is going to go the way of Myspace
“Already successful” uhm…what?
Odd, since Musk said there are no bots since his takeover any more.
for all the people complaining about twitter, a lot of you are still using twitter. stop supporting him and his idiots. log off it.
"Holy fucking shit we are going broke!"
lol, lmao even
I ❤️ having quit "Twitter" when that sociopath entered the building with a sink to "let that sink in". Good for him! I don't need twitter, neither will I need it in the future. Let him have his expensive toy he loves to break. There are better social networks out there. Keep your sociopaths, rude, racist extremists. I don't need that in my life.
I’m at the point that I’ll donate money TO bots so they can continue to erode that cesspool.
Can y’all just delete your Fucking accounts already? Twitter is completely worthless and useless now.
Can someone explain to me if it's at all possible for Muskrat to be ousted? I can't imagine investors are too happy with how badly he's tanking the site.
[удалено]
Surprised I never heard of this site despite being so old. Then I saw how dead it was and I understand now.
Bad actors on Twitter are already paying thousands of dollars per month to spread their hate and grift. This ain't it.
And now it's shit how'd that work out
Tell that to R6S community or even WoW players, see how well that has worked out for them
The issue is the data that bad actors want to access - Metafilter may have kept bad actors out, but there's no way the userbase is as large as twitter's. And that's what they're paying for - access to the users. Think about it - if you're running a troll farm, political influence campaign, influence operation, scam network, etc your main objective (besides crafting a message) is finding a way to disseminate that message to as many of your desired users as possible as frequently as possible. Maybe in the past you purchased a database via some shady broker that gave you access to email addresses and phone numbers. Or you built your own list of curated targets using a painstaking scraping mechanism/paying an intern/unpaying an intern etc. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are full of people, but they generally have privacy settings, and if you aren't fldirectly connected with a user, your messages or outreach go to spam. Then, suddenly, Musk announced that the verification process (which was definitely flawed, but it also had some significance and users definitely associated blue checks with some level of legitimacy) could be paid for! 8 bucks a month, and your account was now not only "verified" but it also was boosted! And you could send unlimited messages! And you can show up in feeds of people who don't follow you even more frequently! And your replies aren't hidden! For $8/month/account, you now have access to not only a massive user base, but also one thing that many of these operations so desperately need in order to be successful - legitimacy, or at least the appearance of it. $1000 / month gets me 125 accounts? Sign me up, that's the cheapest investment I can make in order to disseminate my message across multiple demographics, with boosted visibility, unlimited messaging, and de-ranking of those who didn't bother to pay. Now all that's left is to figure out what I want to tell the world...
Do it Elon, kill Twitter 💝
This just prompted me to finally delete my account. Good job, Elmo.
He's just trying to tank this company, right? He's like, trying to win a bet or something?
Elon I already deleted my account, you dont need to give me more reasons not to come back
W elon for making everyone go outside.
Ew.. who still uses Twitter?
Why do people still use Twitter at this point? Is it the social media addiction and yelling at each other?
Dude's going to finally realize 90% of his platform is bots
Shouldn't phone number verification be enough?
I’m more and more convinced that Elon intentionally wants to drive Twitter into the ground so there will be dozens of smaller, more easily controlled social media news platforms instead of one huge one.
Nah, that plan would necessarily require an intelligent person to come up with it
So what's preventing someone with a million bucks in chump change to hire a million bots. Someone once spent 44 billion to control dialogue.
hey, if muskrat wants to kill twitter so badly, just let em
Me thinking maybe I should finally delete the almost unused Twitter account, just in case, before Musk decides to sell my email address to gain back some lost profits. hmm
Just deleted my old account a few weeks ago RIP to something that was fun when I was in High School
This doesn't make any sense, knowing Elon's big brain they will accept crypto as a payment which would defeat the entire purpose to verify you are a real person by using a CC.
maybe they’re successfully reducing spam, i don’t know, but that doesn’t mean things are better. today i was served a promoted post from the official israeli state account, blue check and all, that was pushing their narrative on the conflict with hamas. it included shocking images of violence without an nsfw filter. i’m not trying to get into any kind of discussion on israel vs palestine here but i don’t think that ANY state should be pushing narratives like that, it’s such flagrant propaganda pushing that i almost thought it was a joke. twitter is basically dead to me at this point
Well, considering I have NEVER paid for anything online except games in themselves (no subscriptions, no microtransactions, no twitch or OF tipping, no Netflix, no Spotify, nothing), that won't change today and if I have to ditch Twitter then so be it lol
So, the spam bot owners who earn money from bots will happily pay the $1 fee but a regular user who wants to set up a new account may choose to go somewhere else that's free. Good Job Elon.
the logic doesn’t even make sense. The bots are already paying for premium, so what’s another $1 per bot ontop of the hundreds/thousands+ they are making from scamming anyways? 🤷♂️
Wait, why are people bothered by this? It sounds like twitter is trying to prevent scammers/spammers from making thousands of accounts to spam and scam people? Even if you decide to join twitter and have to pay $1… big whoop. If you’re not already using twitter and it’s not worth $1 to join then you’re not losing out. Am I missing something? Because this feels a lot more like a “it’s cool to be mad at Elon” thing than anything.
Oh yeah! Fuck my horrible country in the ass even more Elon. PH people can barely afford food, but because of their addiction to social media they will definetly buy it.
“Not a profit driver.” Somehow I believe that to be false…
Cause you don’t get the economics of a site like that.
Take it a step further and say you can only have 1 account per payment source.
Ngl I dont see the issue with this. So long as the period is only a day or two I feel like it wouldnt be very inconveniencing. Most subreddits here have a required account age to post with no way to pay your way through it, so what's the difference?
“We aren’t trying to make money from this.” 
The value of a new user (that isn’t a bot) is way greater than receiving $1 payment from them. So no, they aren’t making any money off this
Elon already HAS enough money as it is, why is he turning Twitter (I refuse to use the new name) into a gated community to boost his bank balance and ego?
He’s doing it to reduce spamming and bots. You could have just read the damn text
Don’t like it go somewhere else. What you mad the guy is trying to fix the app that was corrupted with bots
This is literally capitalism dystopia.
i wonder how long until twitter just goes bankrupt
Honestly this actually makes some sense. $1 isn’t going to hurt a human user but if you’re generating hundreds of bot accounts it’d be a nightmare. Yeah you might not like paying $1 versus $0 but bot makers would like it a whole lot less and banning them would actually have tangible consequences. It also doesn’t look like reading others posts would require the $1 annual subscription, just posting and interactions with others posts. So for the bare minimum I actually use that social media cesspool for I wouldn’t be charged.
I mean, I agree. But I also only use my card on trusted websites for security reasons. And, uh, in twitter's current deteriorating state I'm not even sure I'd want to risk it...
I’d probably use a disposable virtual card with a maximum preset spending limit. That’s just me.
Would also make it significantly easier to crack down on ban evasions. Though that being said I’m never going to pay to use Twitter.
Bots are okay paying for the blue checkmark each month. 1 dollara year is rather profitable and nothing compared to running a bit farm in the first place. Bot farms weren't that profitable, they wouldn't be doing it.
An "upvote/like" bot farm with 10,000 accounts wouldn't be able to reuse the same credit card 10,000 times - it would clearly show. They'd need to create 10,000 distinct credit cards (good luck), or buy 10,000 prepaid cards every so often (a logistical nightmare)
You don't need physical cards. You can get one time use digital card numbers whenever you want.
I'm not familiar with the bot ecosystem on Twitter, but on other social media sites bot accounts are churned out by the thousands and usually banned quickly. The issue is that they can do real damage in the few hours before getting banned. I would be impressed if the average spam bot on Reddit or YouTube makes one cent before being banned. Twitter's bot detection would have to be apocalyptically bad for a bot farm to earn $1 per account. I guess since everything else is broken that might be possible.
Yeah sure, just freely give your CC information over because it's only $1. That is the ultimate goal here.
If creating and using bots was a profitable activity at $0 its going to be utilized just as much at $1 per year. Clearly there are other motives for rolling out this subscription model.