Twitter to incorporate mutes and blocks from paying users as downvotes | Hacker News Reader

Twitter to incorporate mutes and blocks from paying users as downvotes

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So in other words, if you're willing to pay enough for enough accounts, or organise groups, you'll be able to heavily suppress your political opponents or competitors tweets.

It’s an interesting exercise: how many accounts would, say, China need to suppress a critical story and what fraction of their intelligence budget would that constitute? This seems like a very cheap way to shape the public narrative since you’re only talking $8/month for many, many votes.

If it’s like HN or Reddit then speed of burying is more important than volume. A few downvotes early on can easily bury dissenting comments / posts or change the narrative significantly.

I wonder if an account will be allowed to unmute/unblock an account, in order to downvote (block) it again in later posts. Otherwise you're looking at using a lot of blue checks to silence articles from say, NYT.

Millions of accounts on “private” at $8/mo each

The question of thresholds is interesting: if it required a large number of votes it wouldn’t be very effective. If it doesn’t, it’s too easy to game — and even a million accounts doesn’t seem like a high bar since it could easily be rented for many votes. A large ad agency or PR firm could do that - promising all of their clients the ability to bury bad news (thinking of how much Johnny Depp alone paid) – and it’d be really easy to imagine, say, the Catholic or Mormon churches, Scientology, etc. recruiting members or even funding their Twitter Blue memberships.

That is only true for a message with high initial momentum (impact, importance,...). If you act as a decelerator/gatekeeper - in contrast to Russia's agents acting as accelerators -, then you can control a lot of things.

If you look at reddit, it seems like the combination of maybe 50 people with 10 sock-puppets each is enough to shape conversations on specfic topic, especially if there is also some organic support for an issue. There are some really obvious examples for this, like the defense of Monsanto's practices (until they were bought out by Bayer) or the extreme condemnation of Julian Assange and wikileaks (since they fucked over the Democrats in 2016).

Monetizing downvotes is a stroke of inspired genius on Elon's part. To target the most unhappy, permanently-online conflict addicts, and turn them into whales. Twitter has always been an addictive Skinner box for many people; now that addiction can be converted into money pretty directly.

I predict this will become the new norm for social media. Before this, monetization attempts focused on positive endorsements: "promote" a post, "sponsor" a submission, super-upvote with "Reddit Gold". Positive, like the advertising industry they imitated. But these were rooted in outdated ideas of what social media is or how it works. Misery is the most powerful force. If you're a FAANG, you have to monetize on the negative engagement to profit on a grand scale.

edit: If it wasn't clear in my tone, I don't approve of this antisocial trend at all. But I do think it's profitable and I do think it will therefore continue, in this direction.

>Before this, monetization attempts focused on positive endorsements: "promote" a post, "sponsor" a submission, super-upvote with "Reddit Gold". Positive, like the advertising industry. But these were rooted in outdated ideas of what social media is or how it works. Misery is the most powerful force. If you're a FAANG, you have to monetize on the negative engagement to profit on a grand scale.

I don't have anything real to add, I just want to point out that the movie Monsters, Inc had a redemption arc for the monsters, and it was the opposite of this.

it will create a pro elon echo chamber (no one is paying for twitter blue except for freaks) and it will make the service die. a reddit you have to pay for? and ruled by paying users? no thanks

Based on Twitter's history, the feature will be silently disabled and dropped from support after the first few months. No matter what features Twitter deploys for crowd control, people always find a way around it. And Twitter's decisions are so CEO driven that they only survive as long as it's on the CEO's radar.

It's undoubtedly the worst way to run a major application that turns into pretty much a vital public service.

The easiest way to counteract this move is to just run a bunch of automated accounts the parrot the exact same message. Trends are literally hijacked every day and brute forced onto everyone's view regularly because there is no way for Twitter to honestly control timelines to suit their profit...

The way things are run are beyond dumb, and corruption has been present in operations as far as I can remember. It is utter torture on honest users, and eventually those honest users leave and never come back, and that's exactly when the investment will never be able to make a comeback in value.

Social sites are successful when they appreciate users, but they always end up trying to convert a free service into a paid service, and that's when they die fast. Twitter already had disgruntled users, asking them to now pay is not going to go well at all.

Nothing genius about it. Musk simply deconstructs the product and checks every element for its costs, replaceability, or marketability, then, if a profitable path was found, he just walks it.

Nothing screams free speech like using money to silence dissenting voices.

The folks on this side of the argument believe that money is speech. Therefore using money to suppress opponent’s speech is itself an expression of free speech. I don’t agree; this is a steelman argument

When you put it that way, he’s got a lot of experience at that now.

Appears that Musk is making it up as he goes, and the remaining skeleton crew is just tuning things that were mostly already built and he's selling it as major platform changes. Bankruptcy seems inevitable to me.

I'm not an active user of twitter, but so far it seems like almost no one left the platform. There's no direct equivalent of it, and the main user base is quite addicted. I took a bet a couple of days ago that twitter will lose 50% of active users by the end of 23, but I'm not super confident about it, and I think it is contingent on major security flaws being widely publicised.

Yeah people are addicted, I don't think people are going to abandon the platform at that rate. They don't care about Mudge's revelations, people don't care about security issues until it directly affects them. The issue is just that Musk has massive debt obligations forged at the top of the market and ad revenue is supposedly shrinking due to him torching the brand during a recession. I don't see Twitter Blue making up the difference or growing revenue at a large enough rate to avoid bankruptcy but I don't have intimate knowledge of their finances.

You are spot on. I’ve been wanting to leave the platform since he took over, and am simply unable to... There are some high profile accounts that have left for Mastodon, but for an average user, it is a lot tougher to start anew. For me my Mastodon usage has just become an additional time spent on more social media, not a replacement, despite the fact that I really really want it to be a replacement.

Next can be some paid actions: permanently suspend some account globally for a price like $1k + follower count * 0.1.

For example you wanna permanently delete Tesla from twitter:

pay 1k + 18mln * 0.1 = 1.801 mln dollars and you've deleted Tesla from twitter

Don't give him any ideas.

No, give him ideas. The sooner he would go down the happier everyone would be.

So he only needs to find 24,000 people willing to pay 1.8M USD* to ban a Tesla-sized account to break even on his purchase … while keeping Twitter interesting enough absent those 24,000 Tesla sized accounts to keep 15M users paying the $8/month necessary for his engineering payroll/budget to break even.

* Unfortunately, there're only 2,500 billionaires and some of them aren't on Twitter.

You don't get. One dude pay once 1.8 mln and Tesla on twitter is permanently banned or deleted for everyone.

I even got idea for additional micro service. If you got banned by this payed action you can unban for payment 2xbanned amount. So Tesla company pay 1.8 mln to person that banned it and 1.8 mln to twitter and it will get unbanned/undeleted.

You're onto something: micro-transactions for tres commas club.

Pay $1.8M USD and there's a chance it gets banned. If you pay $1M a month the chances are doubled on Tuesdays, but only if you compliment Elon on the latest #elongate once daily. Successfully ban one account a week, and at the end of the season you get a Dogecoin-backed NFT tied to your username, freely tradable on #elonchain but 90% of sale proceeds go to the Trust and Safety budget covering the ChatGPT API calls checking if Twits should be banned. If you collect 50 DogeNFTs, you can buy Twitter from Elon.

Ah, pay to win twitter.

I’m _astonished_ they’re going with this. Given the calibre of people who appear to have the paid checkmarks, this seems likely to transform it into Truth Social, only without the main attraction, pretty quickly.

So Elon just made Twitter a pay-to-win game :(

Based on the last few years or so of his actions I suspect that mirrors his views on life/society in general.

That thread is full of people who can apparently react to a new tweet within minutes. Yet most of them proclaim the death of Twitter.

I wonder if these people notice that their attention is the product being sold and that they have just proven that Twitter+Elon still own their attention...

Wow. This is dumb and genius at the same time. I mean, it's dumb, but I will at some point participate in a campaign where I will pay the 8 dollars just to downvote Tesla posts then block it. To see if this works. So genius as it will cost me 8 dollars.

the echo chamber this will create will kill the service

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