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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Elon is still making changes to twitter

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1637198368714772486

In the coming weeks, Twitter will prioritize replies by:

  1. People you follow
  1. Verified accounts
  1. Unverified accounts

Verified accounts are 1000X harder to game by bot & troll armies.

There is great wisdom to the old saying: “You get what you pay for.”

"1000X harder to game by bot & troll armies" Really? It seems like scammers have no trouble getting verified accounts: https://www.theverge.com/23379133/twitter-instagram-verified-account-for-sale-scam-criminal

Also, not to mention that verified accounts tended to be the ones who are woke and the most critical of his management, so why would Elon want to give them priority? It's already bad enough that there are more ads on twitter. Now giving more priority to blue accounts will make it worse.

This seems like a bad idea

I keep hearing whispers that Twitter is doing away with legacy bluechecks. Did anything ever come of that?

I can’t believe Elon is still trying to get people to pay $8/month. He still doesn’t get it. Power Tweeters (i.e. the people who might care about bluechecks) aren’t Twitter’s customers. They are Twitter’s primary product. Their purpose in the Twitter ecosystem is to attract eyeballs (ordinary users). These eyeballs are the secondary product which is sold to advertisers for $$$. Trying to extract money from the primary product directly is both inefficient (there are far less power Tweeters than ordinary users) and counterproductive (you run the risk of driving your most valuable assets away).

Yeah. Charging them for Twitter is like charging the Attractive women for Tinder and not the males.