Exactly. Especially when secondary goal is likely to drown out bots by making all real people blue-checked and making sure everyone has a “see blue-checked tweets/replies only” option.
antlers
1772
I think your incentive is pretty clearly to verify the identity before granting the check if the check is meaningless people won’t pay for it.
I’m not following the leap from I can get the check by paying even if I’m not Paul Krugman to the check is meaningless, sorry.
JonRowe
1774
This is a bad take.
Nobody can get verified as Brian Jay Jones but Brian Jay Jones.
If someone else is using their AV and profile information, their account will be banned. Twitter will have their personal information, and if the Real Brian Jay Jones wants to lawyer up, guess where he can get started.
The entire reason the verification exists is to stop people from impersonating accounts. If you want to stay verified, you gotta pay up. Nobody is going to be verified as you but you, with the system working as it is now.
This stuff already happens, LITERALLY ALL THE TIME, already. Just because people can now pay 20$ to put their information in doesn’t mean it is going to happen at a higher rate than before.
You can do the thing he is proposing now, for free! Just get the login info from another verified account and voila. Or, if the person you are impersonating doesn’t have a Twitter or isn’t verified yet, you can just fake credentials and create a new account!
I don’t understand why people thinking that opening verification to all users will somehow increase the amount of fraud already happening with the system. People already can (and do) defraud the system.
Are you serious? The #1, and I mean #1 with a bullet feature that most verified Twitter users use is the limit notifications and replies to verified accounts only. This is a serious tool that allows users of the, as Elon put it, “Lords” level to only focus on communication with the other important people.
It is 100% a fucking clout thing as well as a personal business thing.
Additionally, this isn’t Elon’s original idea anyway (surprise surprise) but Twitter has been talking about opening up verification for all users for almost 5 years.
Under current system, the verification process is a decent cost (let’s say 2-5hours of an employee’s time to be extremely generous) so it’s a drain with no real financial benefit for twitter.
Under an “everyone can buy that verification process” Twitter is incentivized to open it up since now it’s a revenue generator.
The thinking I see here is that I, as a random east european, will be able buy a checkmark for a random american actor don’t have a checkmark already? Ask yourself if you’re making that assumption in good faith.
PS: Looked up a few older actors who I figured didn’t have accounts. Joe Pesci’s twitter is open for the taking. Is your argument that I will be able to make a verified account under that name?
I don’t know why you should have any confidence in the rules of the status quo ante.
JonRowe
1777
Look, I have been using Twitter since 2007, I have seen a load of shit on the site, and despite what people think, there are a lot of very smart and good people working there. Just because some technocratic buffon has stepped into the big chair doesn’t mean those people and the work they have done is gone. (They may all be fired soon, but I am not going to try to predict the future).
It is impossible to predict the future, but in the 15 years on the site, the type of fraud that is supposedly going to go rampant when verification opens up to all, is just something we haven’t seen on the site so far. I don’t think that particular claim holds up well.
Isn’t the plan to boot a lot of those people?
I don’t know what’s going to happen, but if I say you can’t really rely on how things worked before, responding with well they always worked great before isn’t going to do much to change my mind.
Charging people for verification is stupid, because it is the verified people who make Twitter valuable in the first place.
JonRowe
1779
Look man, don’t make me defend Elon Musk.
Like, he is a loudmouth idiot who used his generational wealth to get lucky with a couple business decisions. But I would say that both Tesla and SpaceX are very successful engineering firms. He runs both of those. Those firms also hire and retain a lot of really smart people in their engineering sectors. They are considered “first-choice” destinations for a lot of engineering students.
I hate him, but you cannot deny the success and (in particular SpaceX) incredible technological developments made there, under his leadership.
Maybe Twitter will be the same, and the “mass layoffs” will not effect the people doing the important work. I don’t know, but so far Elon has had a track record of letting the smart people do the work.
I need to rinse my mouth out with soap now.
That’s fine, I’ll do it.
There’s lots of people Elon’s age who had generational wealth orders of magnitude greater, and none of them are nowhere near as succesfull. I get not agreeing with his politics, but if you think he’s somehow stupid, you’re just plain wrong. Same goes for Jeff Bezos, Gates, Buffet, and many others on top richest people list. They are just smart.
JonRowe
1781
No he is stupid, or at the very least normally intelligent.
The only thing I am defending is that he hasn’t fucked up yet so far.
So what, he has superhuman luck? Is he hacking reality and only rolling 20s on everything he does, while having 10 (baseline) in every atribute?
Oh I understand. And I also understand that artists and creators have been around for thousands of years, when Twitter didn’t exist, and yet many of them somehow found followers and admirers and did just fine. And some didn’t. But the internet is NOT q requirement to be an artist, and Twitter absolutely is not. Put up a webpage, for goodness sake. Run a blog or a podcast. There ARE other avenues.
JonRowe
1784
There are billions of people in the world, and a handful of billionaires in the world.
A handful of people rolling 20’s on everything they do.
There are hundreds of thousands of insanely smart people who aren’t billionaires too.
I’ll just repeat this:
Someone is going to win all those coin flips. Someone has to.
If you toss a coin a hundred times, you’ll get a result, and no matter how unlikely that result seems to you, it’s still random.
Oh, I agree. But I’m saying Elon (and others) are just as smart, but lucky, while you’re saying he’s dumb but lucky.
JonRowe
1787
Worthington’s Law in action.
The best trick capitalism ever pulled was convincing people that wealth was somehow and indication of merit.
I’d argue that the idea predates capitalism as power/wealth were the hallmarks of aristocrats even in ancient times. But I agree with your point that it’s a sickness in our modern society.
ShivaX
1790
The meritocracy lie is a strong one.
