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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

The good news is that this should definitely reduce the volume of bot / troll accounts, by making it prohibitively expensive to run. That will mean a reduction of disinformation on aggregate - as what other purpose would there be to run a bot network?

The bad news is that it recreates the lords vs servants dynamic that Musk is claiming to want to get rid of. $8 is not much for everyone reading on HN, but guess what, we are very much the in the globally privileged 1%. He later adds something about purchasing power equivalent, but localised pricing suddenly makes this into a much bigger technical challenge

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$8 won’t necessarily price out spam accounts. As a counter example, on Tinder there are many fake/spam accounts with premium membership.

not all of them, no, but as any cost increases the friction of doing it, so less will be done.

But with spending money, you can theoretically have more information on the buyer which you can use to help identify and fight spammers/bots & their networks. For example, you can limit one twitter account per credit card or registered user (identified via payment method). If they are found to be spammers, you just kill the account and ban the payment account(s). They can still obviously work around this, but the cost and difficulty for the spammer increases.

I don't know how the financial transactions & stuff work in the background, but the point is that you have more information and more options.

You couldn't previously buy a checkmark, now you can. This opens new methods of attacking the network.

This move perhaps limits spam as practiced today, but the attacks that will happen once the network changes will be different in ways that are difficult to predict.

I think high value spam (ie scams that involve impersonating a high profile user) will find the lowest price country and get verified there. Lower value spam will continue to operate as they have been, and the replies to most tweets will still be dominated by non-Blue users. And unless Twitter manages to get a large number of people to pay for Blue quickly, that means the spam still at or very close to the top.

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