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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.
this would be true if it was $8 to create any twitter account. Even a tiny nominal fee of $.1 to register a twitter account would probably reduce the spam overall considerably. But $8 to give an ordinary account into one that has special privileges is a good deal.
That makes no sense. If it's not a good deal to get a basic account at $1, let alone $8, then how is it a good deal to spend $8 just to get some minor privileges?
they are not minor though. were talking verification-level privileges. ppl pay $1k or more for this. I think though it will not have all the privileges. But just having your comments rank high and not be put in the spam filter is a major benefit. Worth more than $8 if you have a small business and just need the extra visibility (way cheaper than advertising, which can easily cost $1 per click).
You said (I haven't read myself because Twitter delenda est) that the benefits are:
Priority in replies
Priority in mentions
Priority in search
Those are pretty minor benefits. I sincerely doubt that a scammer will get more than 8x as much value from those as from a normal account (which is what it would mean for them to be willing to pay $8 for verification but unwilling to pay $1 for a normal account). There is also no mention of being immune to spam filters in what you listed there, so unless you forgot to mention it in your OP I'm not sure where that is coming from.
And perhaps people did pay $1000 or more for verified accounts before. Honestly I would never have believed people were that retarded, but I'll take your word for it. But you seem to be assuming that it's because being verified had some great practical benefit. That doesn't seem right to me. Having a verified account (until now at least) was a status symbol. People will pay absurd amount of money for all kinds of status symbols, that doesn't therefore mean they derive material benefit from them. It means people are vain and will do stupid shit to seek status.
It's not uncommon for crypto scammers impersonating Musk or some other famous person to make thousands of dollars with a crypto scam using a verified account, hence why they pay $1k for it. A tweet by Musk not uncommonly gets 40k+ comment replies, only 200 at a time can shown, and replies by verified accounts have priority over the non-verified ones and are not buried. For someone promoting a scam that can net thousands of dollars easily, this is worth it.
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