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Maybe time for a twitter-musk containment thread?
Elon Musk plans to democratize the Twitter verification badge
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587523701452464131
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23435092/elon-musk-twitter-blue-verification-cost-ads-search
In contrast to the belief that this is bad for scammers and spammers, I think it's the opposite. Scammers, especially crypto scammers, make so much money that $8 is a steal if it means having their tweets be more visible, hence more victims. The July 2020 twitter hack stole $130k of bitcoin using verified accounts, so $8 is nothing. NFT and 'rug pull' scams not uncommonly make hundreds of thousands of dollars too. Verification is expensive and time consuming, which is how you thwart spammers, by making the costs of spam high. Verified accounts sell for $1k or more on the secondary/dark markets, way more than $8. Or you have to send in a a lot of documents proving you are authentic real person, which is time consuming with a low rate of success (some companies will help you get your Twitter account verified , but for a large fee).
'The left' , which includes a lot of journalists, celebrities, and activists, oppose this for obvious reasons. The blue checkmark is a implicit signifier of having politically approved views and being an important person.
Part of the value of verification is that it's hard to obtain. But it does dilute the value of the blue checkmark though, so this means that there will likely be two tiers of verification, with a 'super verification' for important people.
You may be right in that it may not fully stop spammers, but I would argue it would definitely reduce how many there are. There's different types of twitter scams, but the most annoying and most prominent one is when a bad actor spams either replies of tweets of prominent people/tags pre selected accounts in their own tweets. This type of spam requires thousands of accounts per round because twitter actually locks such accounts pretty quickly if you abuse it, so they usually make a dozen tweets per account and then move to the next account. So if someone were to pay $8 per account for such campaign, that would be $8000 per 1000 accounts. Even though it could be profitable to pay this much, that's a much more expensive start up cost for these spammers. Currently, one new twitter account can be bought for around $0.25 and software to spam costs anywhere from a few hundred for shitty ones and thousand for good ones. So that raises startup costs from a few hundred bucks to thousands. And if scammers were to actually pay this much, this is a win for twitter because they would be getting a lot of money from these spammers.
Why can normal accounts suddenly not spam people? That'd require better spam prevention for non-verified accounts, which you can implement without this change. Doesn't seem related.
Elon said that paid accounts will get priority in replies. So, these spam messages will still be there, just at the bottom of the thread, which lowers engagement. Currently, if you check replies under tweets of some prominent figures, in the first few mins after the tweet all replies are bots
... right ... because they are bots, and can post a reply 2 seconds after the tweet is posted. Nobody else has replied in the first few minutes. And then the bot replies get overtaken by interesting replies that get likes. How would boosting verified accounts change this? The verified accounts still won't reply immediately because they aren't bots.
A lot of spam is just bots using the search api (probably) for crypto terms and replying to people with scams. This won't help with that either.
Also, significantly boosting verified accounts over nonverified accounts to stop the kind of spam that gets lots of likes on highly replied tweets (non-highly replied tweets don't have enough replies for it to matter) would degrade the user experience, right, because instead of seeing the best tweets you just see tweets from people who pay money?
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The thing about fraud/scams is that the supply curve slopes downwards. When you put in hoops to jump through you raise the cost of doing fraud as well as the cost of being a real person just trying to do their thing. The name of the game is to raise the cost for scammers by a lot, but for real people by only a little.
Right now, the cost of doing fraud/scams is mostly being good at selenium scripting through a botnet (cheap). An $8 charge passing through the ordinary financial system is a lot harder to do. Certainly far from impossible, but the set of people who can both do selenium scripting through a botnet and pass fake charges through the financial system is much smaller - the net result is we get less of it.
Here's a short list of people who I can say with 100% certainty know and have deeply internalized this fact: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, all of whom got very rich by doing a good job putting this principle into practice.
You didn't answer the question. How does making blue checkmarks cost money raise the cost of scams? You can still run scams with nonverified accounts exactly like you do now. Some people, but a small fraction, run scams with stolen verified accounts - those people will just switch to fresh paid verified accounts. But most scams weren't run with verified accounts before this change, and still won't be run with verified accounts after this change. If there's some separate change that makes scamming-without-checkmark much harder, that's fine, but you can do that without $8/mo verification, and $8/mo verification doesn't make that any easier or harder
I believe the theory is that once bluechecks are common, anyone without them will be more suspicious. Musk also mentions that bluechecks get priority in ranking, meaning unverified EloonMuskCryptoGiveaway is buried way down in the replies.
That really does not make sense. I use twitter a lot, and most of the people I follow do not have checkmarks, and none of them are going to buy it because they are just people who use twitter for fun or on breaks from work or w/e. Random repliers in comments sections still aren't gonna buy the checkmark. And there are already parts of twitter where most people are verified and have a lot of followers ... and they still get piled with scams replying to their comments.
Can you draw out a specific scenario here - what part of twitter, in reply to what accounts, where the scammers are currently using unverified accounts successfully but won't be able to anymore because most users will have bluechecks, as they are more common, so the scammers will stand out? I can't think of a single section of twitter where that will happen. Either all the big people already have checkmarks and their followers do not (and that will either not change or nobody will have checkmarks because people won't pay 100/year for it), or none of the posters or repliers have checkmarks, and that will not change.
Like, "8/mo bluecheck prevents spam" doesn't make sense, at all. Do people just believe it because musk says it will? Do they assume he figured it out?
I didn't say I think it will necessarily work, I was just laying out my best guess as to theory. The specific theory:
General use case:
Verification is easy to get, so people get used to seeing bluechecks next to @joespizzastamfordct, @marietoplessnerd, etc.
!!@! Elon Musk Cr1pt0 Giveaway !!@! doesn't have a bluecheck.
People more likely to spot the scam due to lack of a bluecheck.
This is a plausible use case and hardly unprecedented. Companies with real money on the line (read: financial institutions who take losses for scams their customers fall for) put significant effort into educating customers to distinguish between real calls and scams.
In the replies use case:
Elon Musk tweets "journalists often lie".
5,000 people reply including Jason Calcanis, Kanye West, Taylor Lorenz, Aella and the real Mike's Computer Repair of Talahassee are at the top since they are verified.
Regular guy decides to read the replies and actively scrolldown to even see the crypto scammer.
I have no idea if this will work, but there are clear mechanisms by which it can work.
Of course, I also think it's plausible that Musk is doing it merely to inflate away the value of journalist's favorite status symbol. Now Taylor Lorenz is no more special than Mike's Computer Repair of Talahassee.
Yeah, but the median twitter user, even the median twitter user with 50k followers, aren't gonna spend $8/month for the checkmark (although if they did, twitter would get a new massive revenue stream), so it won't have that effect
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