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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

It's super funny that identity verification of authors of things published was basically more than half of the value twitter provided to its users, both readers and writers and the first thing Elon did was to destroy it.

Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing.

It kind of reminds me how a while back somebody posted proposed redesign of stackoverflow to make it more nice from UX perspective. However this person wasn't a user of stackoverflow and didn't understand how much value which features provide and suggested changes that would make very valuable features removed or made less easily accessible while bringing to the front features that are not very useful.

I think it just helps to be a user of the product and have a deep understanding for it before you make any changes. Elon used twitter a lot, but in pretty unusual fashion (because he's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted.

It's really a bit surprising that noone told him that his tweets are worth anything only because people reading them can know they come from Elon not some guy who paid 8$ to call himself Elon on Twitter.

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> I think it just helps to be a user of the product and have a deep understanding for it before you make any changes. Elon used twitter a lot, but in pretty unusual fashion (because he's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted.

And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively. For instance, in this case they should have at least added ID verification (of the kind Facebook sometimes forces people to do), and only allowed people to verify their real names for $8.

It seems like Musk also got too used to people cutting him slack for his crap at Tesla and SpaceX, but those companies have mission narratives that people can "believe in." That's not the case for Twitter, and it's looking like Musk is going to slam into the ground without that net to catch him.

It also doesn't help that there's a Twitter replacement (Mastodon) waiting in the wings. IIRC, Bad decisions like Musk's killed Digg, because Reddit was there to take the exodus.

The biggest difference between Twitter and every one of Musk's successful companies is that his typical ventures absolutely depend on US federal largesse to survive. Unless Twitter can start selling carbon credits or secure some bloated federal contracts, there is no chance in hell that Twitter is going to be in the black any time soon.

Charge the US government to censor posts like they are currently doing for free?

Could be like Palantir and provide a bunch of citizen tracking analytics to govt.

If you don't already know Elon's govt scheming, read about Mike Griffin and Elons missile defense contracts with the US DoD.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career

This is just completely untrue for Tesla. Carbon credits make up less than 10 percent of Tesla's profit. They had 250 million in carbon credits last quarter and 3.3 billion profit.

Government incentives helped them get to their current level of profitability. Not just in the US either: in Norway, for instance, there's a huge environmental tax on gas-burning cars, but EVs are exempt since they don't burn fossil fuel, so Teslas end up being quite cheap by comparison and are therefore very popular there.

You're being disingenuous by claiming carbon credits are the only form of government largesse or incentive.

Sure they helped the company, but it's not like they handed them 10 billion dollars. And at this point they make up so little of the cost. Every car company had this same opportunity but they passed it up.

Don't fault Tesla for that as if the government is propping them up. At this point very little of Tesla's money comes from.

You using Norway is disingenuous they have just over half the population of New Jersey. They are incredibly small. Meanwhile Tesla is #1 in all of Europe.

The Federal government, and state governments, and various EU governments have given tax credits to buyers of Tesla cars since almost the beginning of Tesla.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/what-you-need-know-about-federal-...

https://www.tesla.com/support/incentives

Tesla claims they pay up to 7500 for every Tesla (depending on the time bought), up to 30% + 400$ for every powerwall for example.

They give them to all car companies that produce Electric cars.

> And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively

This is what gets me. He's basically speedrunning a world-class demonstration of the lesson of Chesterton's fence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

What we have here is a failure to communicate - Musk suffers from Tony Stark Syndrome which is caused by excessive exposure to Ayn Rand novels, Marvel Comics and Twinkie's.

https://watchfuleye.online/whisky70/2017/8/1/the-one-great-m...

If twitter is bleeding money so fast, slow changes of direction are not the first choice

A substantial portion (more than half?) of its bleeding is a direct result of Musk's purchase of twitter. The debt he introduced is the bulk of it, but it is compounded by a reduction in advertising revenue.

edit: to make this observation into an actual point: I'm not sure that a situation is a good justification when you're the reason for the situation.

Great quote for this. And a lot of other situations software people find themselves in.

> It also doesn't help that there's a Twitter replacement (Mastodon) waiting in the wings

As much as I want to see Mastodon succeed, I don't see it ever happening. Its biggest feature (multiple instances) is also the biggest reason most users are never going to use it. It's just too confusing for the end user. Also it's bizarre that the one instance that actually has the potential to gain mainstream interest (mastodon.social) is not accepting new invites.

I'd put my money on something new taking Twitter's place way before Mastodon.

Everything about mastadon seems pretty bad in that way. You basically just need to clone how twitter works an go from there

These days that’s a Put tweet lambda and Get tweet lambda that autoscale with traffic, and copy pasting a copy cat UI from GitHub.

The last decade has been spent making something like Twitter today a simple shell script.

Companies would be better off improving internal customer service for existing users than astroturfing for new users. You know actually build a business rather than rely on hype for simple things the world used to find complex.

>I'd put my money on something new taking Twitter's place way before Mastodon.

Something new, like what? When there's a big user exodus from some kind of service or platform, there has to be something for them to flock to right then. When Digg imploded, Reddit was there to absorb the exodus. Right now, Mastodon is there, even if it has significant downsides. Users aren't just going to wait around for something ideal to be built for them.

>> he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted.

This is particularly surprising to me also, for a different reason. Since Musk was a key player at PayPal, he should have learned that although the vast majority of users are well-intentioned and harmless, there are a small group of scammers and criminal who MUST be dealt with or they will rapidly bankrupt you.

On Twitter, we must add to the list of scammers & criminals the additional bots, trolls, and pranksters, all of whom can rapidly destroy trust in a community (online or off).

Why he didn't carry that lesson forward to this platform is baffling (unless he's in a contest with Kanye and the FTX crypto guy to see who can create the largest and most rapid-burning money bonfire).

> Since Musk was a key player at PayPal

That's mostly a legend. In actuality he took some part in some company that got bought by another company which eventually became PayPal.

Although, especially since he still made significant fortune from it, it still seems sufficient exposure to at least understand the concept of a minority of scammers & criminals who must be identified & shut off in real time (maybe even more exposure if he came up through two precursor companies).

Heck, it is something that is already obvious to everyone here, and most of us were never employed in banking or payments operations...

Elon increasingly looks like a child in the fog whose actions are driven mostly by emotions.

> Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing.

1. Create a new Apple account

2. Buy a $10 iTunes gift card

3. Use that to pay for Twitter Blue

Would I pay $10 and twenty minutes of my time to knock $20bn off of an insulin profiteer's stock price? Absolutely. Put me down for a recurring subscription.

You can block gift cards in most payment gateways, I imagine you could do similar with Apple's system.

There also is mixed evidence that Eli Lilly's stock actually went down from the tweet, given it reacted hours after the tweet and never recovered (usually fake news items effecting price will immediately correct back to the previous trading level.)

Several articles I read about it bury this deep in the article, basically alluding to "we'll never actually know why the stock went down." I would imagine their new Alzheimer's drug looming had more to do with it, but idk. It also becomes slightly questionable about if a quant, etc fund would not know the difference between accounts, when you really think about it...it sounds improbable.

If you're accepting payments for in-app purchases through iOS, all the billing for that happens through Apple. The app developer has no control (or knowledge) of how those payments were funded.

> You can block gift cards in most payment gateways, I imagine you could do similar with Apple's system.

What GP means is to go to a grocery store and lay out 10 American Dollars for an Apple-branded services gift card (what used to be called an iTunes Gift Card). One of these: https://www.apple.com/shop/gift-cards

You apply it to the brand new Apple ID you've made and use those virtual funds to make the in-app purchase in the Twitter app that, at the time, was the method of paying for Twitter Blue. (The purchase page even said/says, "You can only subscribe on the Twitter iOS app (for now).")

No blocking of prepaid or gift cards here; you're doing exactly what Apple wants and it's not Apple's problem that Twitter takes IAPs for a "verified" service.

Are we now sure that's really what happened?

I'd be too worried about getting charged with wire fraud or something personally.

And if you shorted Lilly at the same time, you'll probably soon be getting a visit from men in dark suits.

How would they connect you to the anonymous estonian vpn gift card purchased verified blue check account

The SEC definitely targets sudden, surprising stock moves, and looks for people who profited off them. (This is why one of Matt Levine's tongue-in-cheek 'rules for insider trading- this is not legal advice!' is never do it in short dated, out-of-the-money options!) I'm sure there are relatively sophisticated ways to exploit the market that the SEC probably won't catch (that are also more sophisticated than I understand), but now you need to have a sophisticated understanding of the market, and of cybersecurity fraud (to beat Twitters payments verification), and naturally maintain flawless opsec on both throughout. Harder and harder to do.

The FTC would look at people who recently bought short term call options against Eli Lily stock and ask them questions. Pretty much the same playbook anytime bad news causes a stock price to go down. Matt Levine notes this as a common way people get caught doing insider trading each time it comes up.

It's normally combined with recorded IM conversations along the lines of "bro, I bought some short term chickens for Lli Eily. Let's make them CLUCK with this tweet." You call them chickens, or something similar, to try and fool the FTC. This is also a surprisingly common occurrence during insider trading investigations.

"Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Apple doesn’t give away subscriber details to the service. So you don’t even need the gift card.

Unverified accounts provide most of the good content on Twitter, so I think you're wrong there. What should have happened is you do have an $8 (I think $8 is too much, but alas) verification, but you simply make the badge different. Some people say that defeats the purpose, but it doesn't. You then know you are talking to someone with a vested interest, and since credit cards are now linked to the account you can do more high value advertising to those customers. You also get the ability to edit, have slightly less ads, etc. It's such a simple solution. I don't know why Elon is being stubborn about it being the exact same, or why people are totally against the idea of new verification methods.

Getting verified previously with a small account was cumbersome and took ages.

Blue tick was something that was seen as authority and was coveted, Musk wouldn't have got one tenth of people to subscribe for golden tick.

The blue check isn't coveted by most, there's even a meme about it being a mark of shame. I really think people that don't use Twitter often overestimate the importance of blue check accounts. If anything, they are the butt of a lot of jokes/content vs creating it. I am interested in the new Twitter Blue, but actually don't want the checkmark, but think it needs more features.

That being said, a normal user shouldn't have the same mark as an official Microsoft or government account. A secondary mark make sense, especially imo if only other paid and verified accounts can see the mark (I would just make it a hollow verified icon vs it being a different color.) Then it creates a network "in crowd" effect (similar to the green v blue text bubbles.) You also need to pair that with better tools and features.

> Unverified accounts provide most of the good content on Twitter,

I don't think good content is the core value of twitter. In my perception value of twitter is who said what. Good or bad.

I don't use twitter and have contact with twitter only when it's cited elsewhere and bulk of most popular citations are mostly not "here's interesting thought someone had on twitter" but rather "this celebrity/politician/office tweeted that".

In general I'm a fan of Elon, not his crazy political stuff, but just the cool businesses he does.

But this twitter thing beginning to end has mostly been a disaster. I think he's mostly unfairly hated, in that almost any CEO is as bad or worse but he's his own worst enemy with twitter.

He's alienated a lot of people and then alienates them more by saying people should boycott thier products.

> It kind of reminds me how a while back somebody posted proposed redesign of stackoverflow to make it more nice from UX perspective. However this person wasn't a user of stackoverflow and didn't understand how much value which features provide and suggested changes that would make very valuable features removed or made less easily accessible while bringing to the front features that are not very useful.

To be completely fair, this is my feeling about the web Twitter and especially Reddit UI.

> Which apparently is worth less than nothing.

It’s much worse than that. Selling the verification check mark to anyone with $8 poisoned the platform instantaneously.

It’s a bit like the DMV suddenly starting to sell driver licenses without any proof that you are who you say you are. Immediate erasure of the trustworthiness of any driver’s license, forever.

I cannot imagine that Musk was not aware or made aware of this consequence. He did it anyway.

Possibly after firing the people who warned him.

The only thing they had to do was have someone's nephew draw a different symbol for the $8 tier and use that instead of the very well known Verified badge.

That's it. This whole debacle would've been instantly avoided.

True, but who wants the dollar-store version if the verification mark? Twitter is/was selling the prestige of the badge and what it represents to some, specifically "I am a notable individual". Any other symbol would only mean "I paid $8 for this", and my guess is that isn't quite as compelling.

Then take the old blue mark and make it ... green like the money you paid for it? :)

If you asked Elon (atleast before he stepped into Twitter HQ) I'm sure he'd disagree with you, and he'd claim good ideas can come from anywhere and it shouldn't matter who they are or if they are important.

It remains to be seen if learning has occurred.

It's classic "If I don't understand it, then it must be easy" syndrome.

Oh, Twitter is full of bots! So when I'm in charge I'm going to press the "no more bots" button and save Twitter! Also, the company only needs half this much staff, so we're going to spend a few days firing half of them and then the company will be better off!

Elon's not gonna learn because that would tarnish his image of someone who has any idea what the heck he's doing.

And the company is doing too many RPC calls. And we will take down overbloated "microservices" (where the apostrophes kinda give suggest he is not at home with the concept).

One of those appears to be the SMS verification one.

RPC calls is like ATM machine. Musk’s tweet says RPC’s. The person quoted everywhere arguing with Musk over it’s tweet says RPC calls. Does that count as apostrophe misuse suggesting not being at home with the concept as well?

As the classic Twitter meme says: "I would simply…"

You can have a fake ID. I would calculate that "payment verified" is way cheaper than full identity verification. But it's easier to create several iClouds with the same cc, so you still need to check IDs, but you can compare newly created accounts (or ones that changed their name) with existing accounts and check for similarities and flag those accounts. The thing is that you can automate that and you need to do that only for a small percent of subscribed users. Instead of fully checking everyone's identity you check only flagged accounts.

> It's really a bit surprising that noone told him that his tweets are worth anything only because people reading them can know they come from Elon not some guy who paid 8$ to call himself Elon on Twitter.

I'm aware of no less than 3 formerly verified individuals who did tell him[1] before the feature launched, and he responded by banning them for impersonating him and instituting a "no lying about who you are" rule that empirically works on an honor system, or upon pain of forfeiting $8.

1. "Showed him" would be more accurate, but he shockingly failed to grasp the point they were making.

Musk didn’t institute that rule, the rule was already in place. Musk’s change was to ban without first giving a warning.

Except for obvious parodies. And Mario giving the finger is an obvious parody.

Given a list of all twitter bans, there would surely be many that we would both agree are obvious parodies. So, obvious is relative, or, a grey area/high weasel potential area to do what you want. So it’s not obvious that anything has changed there either. That’s besides the point though that, while widely reported and repeated, Musk, as far as I’m aware, did not institute the rule about impersonation.

If you seriously think that Nintendo would tweet a picture of Mario "flipping the bird", you don't come across as a neutral arbiter, you come across as someone ridiculous.

Rather confusing thing to try and pin on me. Could you elaborate on how I’ve caused you to think that?

Well you seemed to do everything but acknowledge that the Nintendoofus context was obvious parody, so what else are we to think?

So let me get this straight: what I think about whether a picture of Mario being rude is a joke or not determines if Elon Musk instituted a rule about impersonation? That makes no sense. You also throw ideas around like me pretending to be an arbiter around, makes no sense either. Why do you need it to be about me? “What else are ‘we’ to think?” That’s arbiter talk buddy. Seems to me like you’re trying to drag me personally into a bickering match, I won’t hazard a guess as why. First thing you replied to (reworded for clarity) I think Mario being rude is a joke, I think other times things that are obvious jokes have also been banned. And that’s what this Mario thing is right: joke gets twitter account banned? It’s faulty reasoning for you to assume I know much of anything about Nintendoofus internet drama but I don’t think I need to as long as it boils down to banned for joke. But I also think, and this is most important of all: that what I think has nothing to do with whether Musk instituted a rule or not. That should not be shocking.

Here’s a story anyone at home can confirm or not, before I posted the first comment, I tried to look it up to see if it was true: ‘did Elon musk institute a rule about impersonation’ had to reword a few times and scroll through many pages of news articles from all around the world repeating what I would call the same outrage clickbait from seemingly the same script, before I found a snopes article that actually answered the question and no he did not institute such a rule. That’s interesting and worth pointing out imo for the readers here that are interested in getting full stories, because as I’ve already said, that he instituted such a rule is widely reported and repeated, and is (afaik) incorrect.

>"So let me get this straight: what I think about whether a picture of Mario being rude is a joke or not determines if Elon Musk instituted a rule about impersonation? "

No, what you think about the Nintendoofus context reflects upon your judgment. Which I pointed out was incredibly questionable seeing as how you are somehow incapable of putting the words together to acknowledge it is obvious parody.

That your next step is to write this whole ridiculous long response based upon a premise that isn't even in question is... telling.

Ok. I think going further would bring no benefit and would run against site guidelines. Posting this so you don’t wait for a reply that isn’t coming. Thank you and have a good day.

I don't think the previous rule required one to have to have the word "parody" on the display name, not just the bio.

Elon lowered the bar for triggering the rule , and made the punishment harsher: insta-ban, from someone who was against perma-bans less than 20 days ago - that change to an old rule is so large,it might as well be a new rule.

They should have done actual verification like many financial accounts do (you upload your ID and answer questions on your past). Musk is ex-payments professional and should have known that gaming payments to adversely attack verification was bound to happen. His assertion that lords and peasant system needs to be dismantled is absolutely correct, however. Twitter has largely turned into message distribution system for 1% and that's limiting its growth. Blue checkmarks bestowed by some opaque priesthood at Twitter is not 21st century.

"Twitter has largely turned into message distribution system for 1% and that's limiting its growth. Blue checkmarks bestowed by some opaque priesthood at Twitter is not 21st century."

But at least the blue check system was mostly correct. Imagine how much a blue check would cost if it was opened to the public and the level of verification pre-elon was used .

Right now the $8 was just a code change and let's just call it 100% profit. With actual verification you'd need a bunch more people and one of those identity verification services and now that $8 isn't pure profit

They need an extra 1 billion per year. 1,000,000,000.00/($8X12 months) = 10.5 million verifications of pictures and IDs. Work force slashed in half. Questionable management decision making. Seems like the head winds are pretty strong for not being really successful or getting true verification implemented.

> His assertion that lords and peasant system needs to be dismantled is absolutely correct, however.

Not such a great system when a bunch of peasants convince themselves to believe in lies. "Everyone gets a voice to say damaging things" is the road to ruin.

> His assertion that lords and peasant system needs to be dismantled is absolutely correct, however.

But what if the entire business model was/is actually a lord and peasant system. Whereby lords can, while verified and identified as lords, communicate with the masses of pesants without any other gatekeepers.

The peasants having their chit chat on the side isnt the point, that is the noise and the lords are the signal.

The damaging stuff isn't idle chitchat. Much of it is orchestrated by people who want to manipulate the gullible to their political advantage.

If all the pesants are saying it, nobody gives a shit.

If all the blue checkmarks are saying it, people give a shit.

You cant tell the difference anymore.

I think that's what they used to say when the United States was founded.

It’s not Twitter’s fault when stock market bots go wild.

> Twitter has largely turned into message distribution system for 1%

The Twitter user base is massively non-Western. Within the West it skews non-White.

Your assertions are meaningless garbage and betray a complete lack of how Twitter works and who uses it, comprising merely the braying of the far-right greivance industry.

He's turned a useful service into an opportunity to pay real money for a little blue gif. Like NFTs, except you don't even get a unique monkey pic.

Extremely Fungible Tokens.

> Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing. I keep seeing this everywhere, that the switch from being verified to "payment verified" made that possible. It was possible to do this attack before the change. It just made it easier but also traceable with the payment info.

No, it literally had not happened before.

Is anyone really fooled by fake profiles? I thought twitter verification is a way to get boosted by the algo? I see many influencers with less than 10k followers that are verified. Who is going to impersonate them? No one.

Twitter itself pre-Musk started killing the meaning of bluechecks back in 2017, where they officially changed their rules from "this person is who he says he is" to "this person is who he says he is, and is politically correct". It was a controversy at the time: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/twitt...

I'm amazed that people have already forgotten this.

> a while back somebody posted proposed redesign of stackoverflow to make it more nice from UX perspective

Interested in reading more about this, do you have any links?

> suggested changes that would make very valuable features removed or made less easily accessible while bringing to the front features that are not very useful

I see this a lot in redesigns, and it's always "oh people aren't using this thing that I think they should, it must be because they don't know about it" and not "it must not be what they want".

It's like that thing that people do when they come into the room and say "oh why are you sitting in the dark" and switch on the lights, without stopping to check why you're sitting in the dark. I know how to switch on a light, it's just that right now I'm loading a camera.

How was that not obvious? The current situation Twitter is in is the most naive prediction. If Mr. Musk needed someone to point this out to him and ask why it wouldn't go down this way, I'm not sure what to say. Hell, a bunch of comedians actually pointed this out by changing their names and avatars to Elon Musk and impersonating him. Elon banned them. It really should have clicked at this point.

Given how obvious it is, a more logical premise might be to assume someone did and Elon chose to believe otherwise.

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