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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
Regular people don't have to spend $8/month for either of my mechanisms work.
The closest thing to "regular people" who get a bluecheck in my example is @joespizzastamfordct. Those sorts of people absolutely do pay for similar things on other social media: WhatsApp business accounts, linkedin pro, google map's "not the closest or best but they paid us so they get to the top" search results, yelp for business.
Is someone really going to impersonate @joespizzastamfordct? Is that enough for joe to pay 100/month? And a lot of accounts with 10k+ followers are people like crypto or music 'influencers', or just guys who like shitposting. There's no way >20% of twitter accounts with 10k+ followers will buy the blue checkmark - which means that it'll not be effective in reducing spam.
It's $8/month. And the answer is yes, that's pocket change for @marietherealtor - she regularly spends 10x that on things like donuts + paper fliers + balloons for an open house. It's quite cheap if you put it into the category of marketing/reputation spend.
Assuming the average person reading replies scrolls down a full screen, you need between 3 and 7 people who replied to ElonMusk/ye/etc to be verified and spam is pushed down.
But hey, probably you have a better grasp on stopping scams than Elon Musk (early Paypal) and David Sacks (early Paypal). At least one person in this conversation is also experienced in stopping organized crime from doing scams online (albeit not at the same scale) - is that person you?
Here's an example of how 8/mo verified accounts won't stop spam replies to people like Musk: https://twitter.com/ArmisteadMaupin/status/1589022522175111170 this is currently the top reply to a 6h old elon musk tweet. It's a sexy girl spam link (link to archive, nsfw), and is posted by a hacked verified account. Note that this is an account that was verified before musk's takeover (can they just pay someone to watch elon and vitalik's tweets?). Verified accounts currently appear to sell for $1.5k on some website I didn't look too hard at. So ... in that sense, $8 is clearly a win for spammers! (the scammer probably pays less than the $1.5k upfront per account, if they even do at all vs hacking, so who knows how hard it is to actually get an account ofc).
If you think there's some silver bullet to 100% stop scams, and Musk's failure to find it means the effort is worthless, then you simply don't understand the problem.
You also didn't even read what Musk wrote about $8/verified account, namely that the verification process still happens. It's not simply "send $8 worth of shitcoins for a bluecheck".
So let me illustrate how you've clearly not thought this through. Here's a simple way Musk can use the $8 payment process to verify the account in a manner that is hard for hackers to exploit directly, and also incentivizes them to bother someone else: no CC, you pay via bank transfer authorized by Plaid.
Now in order to get a verified twitter, a scammer also needs to either a) hack plaid b) hack BofA/Chase/etc. In both cases, if successful, there are far more lucrative things the hacker can do with the hack than get a checkmark - transfer money directly from the victim, buy an XBox using Afterpay/Klarna/Affirm (set up auto repayment via bank transfer with plaid) then sell it on eBay, that kind of thing.
I highly, highly doubt that. Musk and twitter seem to be approaching this as a generic way to make money, slapped on top of Twitter Blue, and any friction there will significantly hurt revenue. I'll follow it, and if he does, that'd be my mistake. But I'm pretty sure you'll be able to pay for blue with a credit card.
Even then though, a cracked bank account (via cracking.com) seems to be around $100, which is still much cheaper than $1500, so ... it's not helping! (note: prices seem to vary a lot - some sell verification for $60/$150, others sell for $800-$1500, maybe the former is scamming i dunno)
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My bad, I meant $100/year.
She certainly can afford it, but that's different from finding it valuable enough to purchase.
If it's implemented as you describe, where verified posts crowd out nonverified no matter what, wouldn't that that'd severely degrade the twitter experience, because unverified people often post better replies than verified people? not sure what you mean precisely
They've spent a lot of time as VC/executives, and even smart people who are experts can make mistakes. I know someone who works in a related area IRL who agrees, and the people I follow on twitter who work at twitter seem to agree too.
I mentioned a realtor because the general sentiment I'm seeing on retwitter and fintwit is a mix of "wtf why so cheap" and a few "I want to verify but stay anon". For example @realestatetrent, an anon account wants to be verified as "a PE guy who buys strip malls" so people take him seriously when he talks about never buying a place where a dry cleaner ever was.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587500060853424129
How does it degrade the experience? Musk has explicitly described bluechecks getting to the top of replies, search and mentions. Assuming the typical screen holds 6 replies, and the typical @kanyewest tweet gets >1000 replies, you need 0.6% of people who reply to be verified to push spammers and cheapskates 1-2 screens down where most people will never see. Eyeballing a few other celebs - @kingjames, @kyliejenner - suggests 1000 is a reasonable number. For your 20% number to make sense, are you aware of many crypto scams in the replies of minor celebs who get only 30 replies/tweet?
0.6% is a lot less than the 20% you were talking about, making me think you didn't do any back of the envelope math on the mechanics proposed.
I have no direct experience with replies, but my experience with search and browse is that > 2 screens might as well not exist. Do you have different info? What do you think is the 95'th/99'th percentile of scroll in twitter replies?
Color me shocked that people angry about a hostile takeover don't like anything about the new guy.
Yeah, and that means the top replies will be 'by people who paid' and not 'the funniest tweets as selected by likes'. It degrades the experience by destroying the 'like' mechanism sorting good tweets to the top! It's better to have the top reply be <funny joke that got 500 likes> as opposed to <tweet from verified user @JoeRealtor saying "Wow, great job!".
I'm specifically referring to the bluecheck thing here.
I also can't tell if the checkmark will involve identity verification? As it stands I don't think it will, it'll just be a nice checkmark that's part of blue?
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