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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.
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
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.
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