Facebook Announces Meta Verified
facebook.com
facebook.com
Reason is simple: AI
1.You can now trivially create an avatar photo, of any level of attractiveness, of any race, of any age. You can even reproduce the same character reliably in different environments/costumes via stable diffusion + LORA. 2. You can now easily create a comment history on that account, thanks to ChatGPT. 3. You can even produce voices reliably with just a few samples.
There's no real defense against AI impersonation at scale, except for charging-for-verification. The money drastically increases the cost for impersonators and scammers/catfishers, and provides resources on the other end to moderate impersonation.
Impersonation-at-scale depends on scale, not verification of individual accounts as authentic people with authentic notability and opinions, and impersonation not at scale sometimes feels more motivated to pay the $8 than the person or position being impersonated.
If everyone on twitter were paying for verification, I think twitter would be much more interested in defending the sanctity of said system.
As it stands, they are currently just trying to get the feature out there and get people to pay. Getting it deployed trumps making it perfect.
I don't see them making the now that we've got a bunch of people paying for it, lets reduce our revenue by suddenly becoming strict on it again decision. Or people taking the badge more seriously now it just means someone subscribed to Twitter Blue
Also, I'd note the gp didn't bad-mouth Elon or Verisign so your comment is a kind of riding a trolly false accusation.
The CA system, on the other hand, has more or less abandoned the expensive, manual "extended verification" process in favor of the zero marginal cost "domain verification" process. This switchover drove the cost of a new cert to $0 for almost all users.
So I'm really not following your analogy, since Twitter gave up the workflow and started charging (aka, a cash grab), whereas CAs gave up charging and adopted a more efficient workflow (aka the expected behavior of efficient markets).
“Paid account with extra features” is just far easier to parse than “someone at Twitter thinks this person/company is both authentic and important.”
The Meta implementation therefore seems smarter (depends on gov ID).
People were doing verified accounts for my ISP support twitter that day, lol
I don't need that information to pass via Bob Woodward for a hard-hitting journalistic enquiry into the truth of the claim.
someone created an account named USEmbassy_SaoTome and that had twitter verification = that was indeed the official account of the US Embassy there.
consider after Twitter Blue
someone creates an account named USEmbassy_Kiribati and has the twitter blue mark. You dont really know this is an official account. anyone can pay for this
PS: this is just hypothetical I dont really know if those embassies exists.
They muddied that water, I just don't bother with the site much anymore. I never gave a shit about the gen pop on there and it's just amplified a bunch of strangers and nobodies - I'm sure their friends and families love them, but I didn't come on the internet to see them and since twitter blue all kinds of stupid shit from nobodies with blue checks magically makes it into my feed. It's just a garbage website now.
That's not what it meant. It was an award for being notable. $8 is a fee that you pay to get verified.
Using an arbitrary and biased determinant of who is notable.
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2021/06/28/twitter-verifica...
Very useful.
> “this is a person who speaks with authority of some sort, listen to them”
Rather, "this is a person that people at Twitter have blessed with authority. It's astounding that you care what we think."
> “someone pays eightbux”
To have their identity verified. This is where I pretend to be shocked that a certain class of people prefer arbitrary credential grants by unelected authorities, and that they look at a simple identity verification service that accepts anyone who is willing to show their papers and pay with absolute contempt.
$8 cheapens their pageant award.
No, they think arbitrary credential grants by unelected authorities that attempted to verify people were who they said they were represented a more useful verification service than one which initially made anyone who was willing to pay $8 a "verified" account in the name of a famous person and still doesn't actually check identity.
This is where I pretend to be shocked that a certain class of people will insist a clusterfuck of such epic proportions they had to suspend it for a month after launch was actually a genius move.
did you care about the so-called "pageant award"?
It'd probably work a bit on LinkedIn because of the nature of the user base and lots of people already expensing Premium accounts, but funnily enough I'm not sure LinkedIn actually has that much of a fake account problem...
Oh it does for sure, unfortunately many people are more than happy to connect with anyone who wants to connect with them because “LinkedIn doesn’t have a fake account problem”. And many people post resumes, entire employment history, all professional social connections, etc. and so all you need to do is pretend to be a student of your targets alma mater and now you have all of that personal info with the click of a Connect button. I’ve noticed trends where someone would try to connect with me and they’d be connected with some acquaintances of mine, but not once have I ever heard of that person. Those types of accounts exist, are fake, and steal information.
If you haven’t 1-1 met someone before in person or via actual business relationship you should definitely not connect with them on LinkedIn.
"Culture war artifact" is not a real term. I've never had what looks like a reasonable combination of three words come up with zero hits in a search engine.
What happened is that Musk decided to charge for identity verification instead of granting it to favored media people, and other people already involved in a culture war where Musk plays the villain added that to their long list of incomprehensible grievances.
Is this really your barometer for discussion, that all grammatical phrases must first exist in Google search results for them to be considered valid self-expression? If so that's pretty out there.
There's a wonderful irony here in that this a discussion about a Megacorp validating people's identity and here you are telling someone that their words are not valid because they haven't been validated by some other Megacorp.
The phrase "culture war" itself wasn't in use in English before it was used in the title of a book in the early 90s [1]. There were no search engines then.
Those verifications are 100% useless for non public figures.
Actually the fact that it's paid makes it even more useless, because the vast majority of users will NOT be verified. I would never, ever, pay for this verification for example.
Therefore a non-verified user will not look less trustable than a verified one.
(Also, you are talking about "Facebook verifying users". They can't even verify who is paying them for political ads, and they certainly don't seem to care very much.)
That seems plausible? Already achievable with some interns mind you. But still
The idea these bots are doing that for a reason doesn't seem so crazy to me.
You get a ton of scammers and you can't tell with some of them (until they try the actual scam, by which point you've wasted time messaging them, packaging the item, etc.)
Consider popular novels which are fictional social commentaries. Or culturally influential Hollywood movies.
Amazing what they can get us to do!
This is the reason musk bought twitter too, of course.
Bad actors are going to be happy to pay $10/20/30/40 a month to scam people, its their job and livelihood.
Either they truly verify (which is probably hard) and I can pay to be verified, or they don't, and it's completely useless because nobody should trust the verification...
> and the normal ongoing monitoring of behavior Now I get another question: say you have millions of paid, verified users (that's the goal, right?). If you can monitor millions of account successfully, then it's most likely automated, isn't it? And then it should scale to all the users, maybe? In which case again, "verified" feels meaningless (because they just improved the bot situation overall).
> And that makes a lot of bad behavior unprofitable
I wonder if the bad behavior that can be reasonably well detected is the unprofitable one. Say I can leverage the "verified" badge to scam people more efficiently -> probably I can pay 8$ for an account that will scam a few people, right? So really paying 8$ would be a deterrent for bots that purposely do disinformation, but there it's hard to know if it's a bot, isn't it? I mean many people do disinformation just out of a lack of knowledge, and that's not a reason to qualify them as bots, right?
If you're charging $8/mo/account, you can justify a lot more verification than if it's just an effort to keep the user base free of scammers for nebulous brand value reasons, and there are likely to be far fewer scams to moderate anyway, since it makes it a lot more expensive/risky to ramp up 10,000 accounts, which might all get banned at once if they identify commonalities between them.
If people learn to trust verified accounts, it becomes a risk (they shouldn't, since it is not completely reliable / it was completely bad for Twitter), right? And if they don't learn to trust verified accounts, then scammers have no reason to pay for them.
They usually hijack someone else's account.
What's to stop a generative AI from generating a state issued drivers license or similar to go along with that avatar photo though? Also how different is that really though from all the existing non-AI generated fake accounts?
Note that a "Class A misdeamenor" in Texas is punishable by a $4,000 fine and/or 1 year in jail.
Is that going to happen because you used it to pick up a food order? Probably not, but stranger things have happened...
Just like the act of defacing your currency is illegal, even if you don't pay with that money.
For me, the safest verification is what I had to do for my first email address in Germany, which is that the postman comes to your house and verifies that you are who you claim to be. Alternatively, and pretty much equally secure, our passports include the option of digitally verifying your identity at home. However, I'm not willing to do either that for Facebook, the last option is probably not possible with US passports, and the first option would be rather expensive.
Eeeehhhhhh, I don't think so.
There is: have the state take care of that as you are a citizen that pay taxes (you already are paying for this "verification") – an ID card that contains a proof of you being... you.
https://developers.realme.govt.nz
But the U.S. has a phobia of any form of national ID card, so I doubt that the USDS will be able to build anything soon. It's such a shame. At least having it as an option could allow society's to start experimenting with it as a solution to these problems.
Most people use social media to keep track of people they already know.
And most people who drive for Uber are just doing so to make a few bucks in their daily life. And most people on AirBnb are renting their spare room or couch.
/s
Most people follow a handful of a famous people or companies, and some friends. Especially on twitter, which was very "one to many" following relationships. Thats why verification was so impactful, it gave the "one" in "one to many" something special, and a way to establish authenticity.
Defamation liability. I'm not sure the laws have worked out yet, but I suggest that these companies may be in for some lawsuits if thing go awry, and they have not shown to be actively working against it.
I'm looking forward to that one.
Verification could be provided for free with ID cards or something like this.
It was actually quite good back then. Now it's unusable and I left it long ago.
¹) Yes, yes, Facebook/Meta hassome access and security issues might exist etc., but way different from public-by-default Facebook
There's still, you know, real life. I recommend it.
It would be quite a challenge to re-create what FB circa 2006-2010 or so was like. Before influencers and engagement farming. Before it became "social media" and was just a "social utility"
The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.
Group chat apps somewhat fill this product void, but not completely. There was something magical about a social network being somewhat open & organic that group chats can't capture
We need the Craigslist of friends and family social networks. A company that is just aggressively disinterested in bloat or hyper engagement.
Something where "re-sharing" doesn't exist and links are deemphasized in the UX, so it's more focused on your content (hopefully you talking about your own life, thoughts, etc.). Especially text content, with photos/videos present, but a bit deemphasized.
Absolutely no business or "influencer" pages, of course.
This doesn't make sense to me: the Facebook from back then didn't support "engagement optimizers" as it didn't have a pervasive programmatic newsfeed trying to show you posts from random people you might like: it showed you posts from your friends, and if none of your friends were "influencers" you simply couldn't see any influencer content even if every other user on the site who wasn't your friend was an influencer.
It would seem that we'd need multiple group chats to make it work reasonably. Is that what you do?
If we wanted it done with only one group chat it would seem it would have to include the union of all the friend groups of people who are in the chat, which would result in there being for most people in the chat a bunch of people they don't know also in the chat.
We'd probably then want some kind of filtering. I'd probably only want to see posts that are from my friends, and maybe posts that my friends have reacted or replied to.
...and then we are essentially back to a Facebook-like or Twitter-like thing except maybe with better filtering.
Group chats are intimate by design and don’t seem like a good fit for “broadcast” style updates like “I bought a house”, “moved to CA”, etc. That’s the value in the Facebook feed of old. Something like that also helps you stay connected with more distant friends/acquaintances, people you might not talk to daily but you would still be happy to see how they are doing in life.
Where's the problem here? Too many options and too much control? Nothing's stopping you from blasting every group chat you're in other than that you'll annoy the people in chats that don't want to hear about your problems. Maybe just send to your family and close friends.
> now some people get the same update twice - are they supposed to react in both?
This is a non-problem. Do people have to react to everything you say every place where you've said it? Is it difficult to decide how to deal with getting news over the phone and having that person announce the same news at the book club meeting? How will you know where to answer?
You could say “if you don’t think people care, only tell your close family and friends”. But broadcast announcements can cause more spontaneous reactions from people, and I often find myself reconnecting, even if only in a short conversation, with people I don’t generally talk to otherwise. It’s a better way for staying connected with old friends, who you might not have reason to talk to frequently (e.g. via group chat), but would happily spend a day catching up with if you were in the same city.
My intimate friends are almost all in group chats. Many of them are not technical at all.
People would announce things like that to each group individually, and often chose to not mention it in some groups because they're not intimate enough. We used to just be okay hearing and discussing the same announcement multiple times ("some of you already know this, but..."), most likely with different parts of the story told in different settings and triggering different conversation because the groups are different.
For the more distant acquaintances, people wrote Christmas cards (or equivalent) for the occasional updates. These can still be handled very nicely with an email list, and really don't call for the kind of instant-update sharing that Facebook et al encourage.
Is it less efficient to write and read the same updates multiple times? Sure. But is efficiency really what we should be striving for in human relations?
The value that Facebook brought is now people can _choose_ to respond to you, and you can also silently see what others are up to without needing to explicitly catch up. It’s kind of like bumping into someone you know in public, and the resulting interaction (e.g. comment or DM from seeing the update post) feels much more organic as well.
WhatsApp, at least, makes it easy to post the same update to multiple groups.
It's imperfect, but it works well enough
So you just don't do any of those things you mentioned, people rarely broadcast using group chats. You are trading quantity and breadth for quality and depth by choosing just a small group of people to keep in contact with meaningfully.
Social media does really help people stay connected no doubt, but it breeds shallow connection habits, and I wager it makes less meaningful connections out of people who could have been very close had they not been given that feeling of connection through shallow means. Like eating a fast food burger instead of a nutritious meal, you are satisfied so you don't seek more, but you robbed yourself of a better opportunity.
now we just have baby boomers pretending to be told something by someone that doesn't care about them, making conversation with you as if they were part of a social circle they’re telling you about
yes
> It would seem that we'd need multiple group chats to make it work reasonably. Is that what you do?
It's not that complicated. If you really need to you create multiple groups. Generall it's not necessary. Groups are usually topic-related, not just based on friendship. Most of my friends come from various interests, so I just participate in the right topic groups and I see them there.
The volume is also not a problem. I quickscroll through it once a day or so and if I miss something important I'll get reminded by someone.
The thing is that social media have really screwed themselves up by screwing with our feeds, adding suggested crap and removing stuff we want to see.
I, too, am sick of all the existing social media companies trying their damnest to cater to the entertainment use case no one ever asked for.
No ads between posts, no "you might like" between posts, no "smart feeds" that ruin the order of posts. Works pretty well overall.
But then there’s the right section of Snapchat — “Discover” and “Spotlight”. We DON’T GO to the right half of Snapchat, because it’s just complete and utter garbage.
In this scenario, government ID is like a taxpayer-funded "Layer 1" network that does all the heavy lifting, so that a "Layer 2" network can extract rent for storing a single bit that never changes between initial verification and kill switch/glitch invocation.
Should governments impose a tax or monetization limits on corporate citation of government ID?
Should governments compete with corporate ID verification services?
In blockchain context, https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1626299802156769280.html
Centralizing power always has predictable outcomes
Corporate x2
1. Rent-seeking (aka they will capture some of the networks effects $$$$)
2. Less innovation (they will block competitors)
Political x1
1. Power. Raw unlimited power. The person in control of those databases is a GodOne, Facebook is obviously providing you with a service. Two, your solution to not liking the price of something is to tax it? What?
Last I checked, the DMV doesn't have a social media arm.
You're thinking of identity verification as product. That's obviously not what Facebook is selling.
Your $12/month also covers access to a support service. I guess that's what you're actually paying for.
The rent extraction argument sounds preposterous. Should a bouncer have to pay compensation to the government if he uses a driving license to make sure his clientele are of age?
Is the bouncer selling $12/month Bouncer-Verified ID that can be read by a computer instead of the bouncer?
Should every online and offline establishment sell "Verified ID" subscription/membership services?
https://twitter.com/cryptolawrev/status/1627399591313264641
Step 1: charge for govID (premiumfi it)
Step 2: make govID freemium
Step 3: drop the pretense & de facto req govID
Bonus Step: blame the govID req on Ey Ay
> The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) is a US government initiative announced in April 2011 to improve the privacy, security and convenience of sensitive online transactions through collaborative efforts with the private sector, advocacy groups, government agencies, and other organizations. The strategy imagined an online environment where individuals and organizations can trust each other because they identify and authenticate their digital identities and the digital identities of organizations and devices.
With programmable money (CBDC) proposed by multiple countries and draft EU/UK/US regulations to impose criminal liability and mandatory audits on developers of "critical software" like operating systems, there aren't many hurdles remaining for dystopian unification of offline and online identity, e.g. after a hypothetical "cyber" crisis.
Websites tracking their users and shoving ads in their faces isn't really the "alternative" to paid services. It's something paid services often do in addition to charging money, because they're unwilling to leave any money on the table in any situation, and you can always get more money by charging your users and harvesting their data.
This is the other thing that pops up, in the rare instances where services like this are offered, they're often pretty inflated. It's notable that Youtube Premium comes with a music service and it's impossible to de-bundle them. I honestly think that part of the reason for this is to make people think that ad-free services aren't economically feasible.
I'm supposed to believe that the cost to Twitter to deliver ad-free and tracking-free text streams is higher than the cost for Netflix/Google to stream unlimited HD video to all of my devices on demand.
> The question is, how many premium ad-free subscriptions can one person get? YouTube? Tumblr? Twitter? Facebook? Insta? It could easily be $100 per month.
The thing is, what we're seeing is a push to monetize more services through subscriptions anyway. Like, this is a better argument if Twitter and Facebook aren't both pushing people to give them roughly $10 a month anyway.
I think that the advertising industry and traditional media companies have sold people on this idea that ads are somehow magically keeping the Internet free and and it would collapse otherwise, but if the trend continues and they all start charging anyway, then...
The price is not based on the cost to provide the service, it’s based on the current or potential revenue they can bring in via ads. A company won’t switch revenue models if it means a 50% reduction in revenue.
Eh, technically it's based on what the market will bear, but your comment also kind of demonstrates my point.
You can extrapolate out from what you've said to explain why the ads are not going away. Because if you can make $X with a paid service, and $X + $Y from ads, a company will do that. My point is, it's a mistake to think about "what would the Internet cost without ads." The sites will do whatever they can to make the most money possible, they are not going to leave ads and user tracking off of the table just because you gave them money. That would be throwing away revenue.
The framing of "this keeps the Internet free" is incorrect, the Internet will cost as much as is it can get away with costing, and the ads will just be another part of that equation. If the users tolerate the ads, then they'll get ads, regardless of what else the service is doing.
A monthly charge for support may make sense, but what value is there for the rest of the people who would want to prove it’s themselves but not need support?
They can't charge all users because they might lose too many people to other social media like Tiktok. But with such tactics they can provide additional perks like fewer ads, preferred support, etc..
the utility has value for a little while
for consumer protection purposes it is totally broken for an account to move out of verified status, but thinking further, this is actually better than whats currently happening, where perpetually verified accounts are hacked
The only thing that’s going to stop every random company you have an account with from trying to extort a fee just to make sure an account is actually you is going to be regulation.
Anyone who sets up a Facebook account has chosen to do so because they find value in it. If they ever stop finding value in it they can delete it.
I don’t see a problem with them offering an option for people who want it to validate themselves for a fee. Seems like a direct copy of Elon Musk’s idea for Twitter which I also don’t see an issue with.
For example, I’ve always seen something like this in my credit agreements:
> You agree that we will give information about the Account to credit reporting agencies. We will tell a credit reporting agency if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. This may have a negative impact on your credit report.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-repor...
After that though you can't even really rent an apartment without a credit check so I'm not sure what you would do (I guess if you have a partner that handles it for you).
There are plenty of places that rent without credit checks. Where do you think all the people with no credit (or no SSN!) live? It might not be on the nice side of the tracks, though.
Have you ever had a bank account? Gotten a credit card? A mortgage? Missed a student loan payment?
When I got my very first credit report, which I was entitled to by law, the reporting agencies asked me to very information they already had about my life and financial history dating back to my early teenage years.
Especially important if sharing properties as a student.
>When I got my very first credit report, which I was entitled to by law, the reporting agencies asked me to very information they already had about my life and financial history dating back to my early teenage years
Thats because they dont know if the data supplied to them is genuine or not. Postal addresses were also a problem, I know of programmers who would boast about how quickly they could clean millions of records a second in the 90's (in memory rather than disk), but the credit reference companies main issue is getting clean data. A bank might have one address for you, and another bank or loan company might have a different address for you, both work in that the post office deliver the mail but the addresses are different.
example House Name House No, Street Town/City Postcode(zip code)
House No, Street Town/City Postcode(zip code)
House Name Street Town/City Postcode(zip code)
Post office should deliver to all 3 addresses, but a computer program see's differences, ergo cleaning data and recognising these differences were one and the same involved a lot of time.
Other examples is the name of someone. A.N. Surname Arthur N Surname A. Name Surname
All the same person, 3 different but legal ways to do a name on paperwork.
>The credit reporting agencies keep track of you without your consent by providing services to other companies and agencies.
The contracts signed with banks and lenders of sort have blanket clauses where they can share their data with whoever they like. You have no control over this. So they do have consent and they sometimes use this for "fraud detection", so either dont deal with them, go cash and/or crypto.
Actually I can’t delete my Facebook account. I forgot the password years ago, and I get the recovery questions incorrect (I have to recognise people in photos from extended social graph and I don’t know them!). I’m not sure I even have the email account any more. I can’t delete the account.
Remember the backlash when Eric Schmidt was pushing for identity verification for Google+. This is the flip side of that coin; we can't have it both ways.
Tying real world identities to online accounts is bad, and Google+ did a lot to create the problem. Before that, it was unrealistic to believe that the name of an account was particularly meaningful
No, that was a separate problem: Google+, and later YouTube, both pushed for having to always use a verified identity *without* the option to be anonymous, pseudonymous, or to otherwise assume a fictional identity - especially in venues where people would have many legitimate reasons to not use their real-identity that aren't nefarious, criminal or misleading at all: anything from teenagers with abusive parents, forums like Erowid; Google has enough furries and otaku in their own ranks who'd be opposed to this policy anyway - and there is genuine democratic value in being able to speak anonymously - I'm surprised it isn't an enumerated constitutional right in more places, really.
With Facebook/Instagram/Twitter's Verified-identity-costs-money feature the problem is that it seems the onus is on the individual to stump-up to avoid having their identity hijacked or misrepresented by someone else.
What the Internet clearly needs is the good-parts-of-both: no-one should be forced to use their single real-life identity on the Internet, but also that no-one should be allowed to hijack another real-life identity - and that, ideally, no-one should have to pay to have to protect their own real-life identity from hijacking or misrepresentation either. These are not mutually-exclusive or otherwise incompatible goals - and paying for identity verification is not unethical in itself either.
Yeah, I would be absolutely devastated if I were required to link a "real life" identity, especially since I do not identify with that. Species dysphoria makes me uncomfortable. I need spaces to express myself. Not the body I happen to be trapped in.
(Basically agreeing with you and confirming that these people totally exist.)
I was being sincere, yeah.
(I... usually forget to put emotion into my text here. I'm always self-conscious about my comments getting reported somehow if I act too playful or anything. I try to be more serious and informative.)
I'm pretty sure thinking you're not "supposed to be" human is a mental illness and you should be seeking treatment for it, not leaning into it.
That's not what I meant by "dysphoria". I use "dysphoria" to mean that I feel a mismatch between my inner identity and outer body. It doesn't mean that I think the body is somehow wrong or incorrect, but rather that I'd prefer to be inside a different one and I am uncomfortable with this one.
I never think "I was supposed to be born as something else", because that isn't true. I was born exactly how I was supposed to be. Autism and ADHD are merely genetic differences. But one can grow to dislike their own existence and desire a different one, and that's not necessarily a mental illness in itself. I don't have delusions of transformation or rebirth or religion. I just feel like I identify as something else.
It's similar to how some people feel gender dysphoria or gender euphoria. HRT and SRS exist for gender/sex transitions, but unfortunately transhumanism or "species transition" isn't really possible. So I have to tough it out and try to make myself as comfortable as possible despite that.
This includes expressing myself online the way I want to instead of a way mandated by the laws of "reality". Having to identify online using the body would indeed be very dysphoria-inducing because I don't identify that way and I don't want to be seen that way online.
Going through ADHD treatment is helping me significantly (and with other mental illnesses too), because some of my discomfort probably stems from executive dysfunction (i.e. the body not listening to me when I tell it to do certain things), but I will never not be otherkin; take that as you will.
What’s ridiculous is the types who want to force this play on others, especially the aggressive trans types, who claim any misgendering is basically violence, or want biological males in female changing rooms, because that’s the game they want to play. It’s extremely damaging narcissistic behaviour and wanting to control others.
It could be the opposite. I was given a computer with internet access around age 5 and allowed to experiment all I wanted. I was a faceless entity at first, but after around a decade, I started exploring animal roleplay and eventually animal identities as I saw others doing those things.
Found a form that I felt like I identified with... and now that's my honest identity.
> as long as you are doing this with similar people and in a community, who cares, be happy.
I am <3 species euphoria is great, when I can express myself~
> What’s ridiculous is ...
Please don't.
Most identity experimentation games happen from age 2-3, and much of it depends on parent and environment feedback. Sitting at your computer "experimenting" is highly unlikely to be what our psychology and evolution needs for us to become fully mature adults. It's much more about direct feedback and interaction with parents, siblings and others.
Except when your coping mechanism has negative implications for other people. As soon as you are forcing others or damaging them (note: easy to see how that works with alcohol for example), then it's not ok. Find a way to cope, fine. Just don't expect me to play along with it (we have interventions for alcoholics for a reason).
What are you implying? Does not wanting to link my accounts to a real-life body have negative implications somehow?
Where are the good things at? Where did we die?
Funnily enough I was saying the same thing tonight. Here in the UK I think it became all out screw people over when Margret Thatcher and the City of London had their 1980's yuppie boom.
I under stand why the older generation in the former Soviet Union harp back to the good old days of the soviet union, life was simpler and more stable for many people.
Now we have to navigate recessions about about 7-10years, have so many financial products in order to not get screwed over because the state is no longer up to the job. Life has become a bit of a free for all, and the extent and deviousness of some people to get money or manipulate people is off the scale imo.
I also understand why we had to come off the gold standard, if we were every really on it, because it was/is arguably holding back the economy and innovation, so with fiat its easier to print money and keep the plates spinning, but in a global world, 3rd world country's have the cost advantage which is why so much is offshored to 3rd world countrys. When looking at central bank digital currency, the fact that digital money can be expired unless its spent, I think is a poor attempt to reduce the risk of boom and bust, good times and recessions. It also shows how money is being used by govt's and central banks to manipulate people like holding a carrot out in front of a donkey.
Its a legal insult in some ways.
The one constant in all of it is the dehumanizing and scapegoating of the hated "others". It's not a new thing either, it's been pretty well documented from our earliest history. I would have thought The United Kingdom has a long tradition of doing just that, stretching way back before 1980, before the industrial revolution, even before feudalism.
Religions are not by nature inherently sexist, see veneration toward the Mother Mary or toward Mahadevi. But there are countless examples.
All religions (a.k.a governments) that have lasted the test of time put men and women in a complementary position, as opposed to the modern state-mandated one, which actually is incredibly sexist, and seeks to scapegoat and demonize men in a frantic and irrational way.
Or is Satan a representation of the health of the individual and knowledge obtained by crypto haters? For example, the missionary's have a position which is highly recommended to increase histidine and histamine. That can put people especially teenage boys in awkward situations.
Or we could look at the garden of eden and the apple, knowing the effect the ursolic acid found in fruit peel (Victorian Xmas Pudding) like apple skin and some herbs can have on the body. We know about health effects of old style apples, not necessarily the new breeds found in food malls and stores, because of old proverbs like the Pembrokeshire Proverb.
>Religions are not by nature inherently sexist
Who are you trying to kid? Just look at their hierarchical structure and history of employment and storytelling. I'll tell you know the Roman Catholic church is massively sexist, because AFAIK there has never been a female pope! Ergo Catholics are sexist if not overtly, certainly subconsciously with their beliefs. Same goes for a lot of other religions.
> see veneration toward the Mother Mary
Ah yes, the immaculate conception, so putting aside how the immaculate conception was inspected, I think the Japanese have a word pertaining to this form of unusual insemination, its called bukkakeru.
> opposed to the modern state-mandated one, which actually is incredibly sexist, and seeks to scapegoat and demonize men in a frantic and irrational way.
I think the modern state-mandated one are trying to address the sexism in society, which is a great form of psychological warfare against males, which the military will love because they are always looking to undermine insurgents and terrorists, whilst not recognising their own actions are radicalising individuals in society.
What goes around, comes around, aka Karma.
1) it doesn’t take very long to understand the motivations of Satan: see “Dante’s Inferno”.
2) No
3) wtf?
4) that’s not very bhuddist of you
I'd argue we've always been dead in that way, as a species. The internet just makes it seem more apparent.
Capitalism just happens to be the least shitty system we have that's been proven at scale thus far.
> the failure to distribute covid vaccines
The fact that we even have COVID vaccines in such a short time is an amazing accomplishment.
> mass hunger
Capitalism has proven way more capable at avoiding famine than planned economics
> mass homeless
Homelessness in wealthy countries in an issue of drug addiction and mental health, not inability to build housing.
As for Poland, it is thoroughly a capitalist country. All of the largest coal mining companies and energy companies there are publicly traded (although some, including PGE is majority [58%] owned by the state). It is safe to say that Poland’s continuing carbon emissions are more then happy to continue under a capitalist rule.
What do you base this on? Greenhouse effect was scientifically established in the 1800s and evidence of CO2 induced global warming in the mid 1900s. The IPCC was set up in 1988. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
> and engage in a mass disinformation campaign to keep increasing pollution at the cost of our climate. I’m sure they would have, but they’re government collapsed before they were able,
USSR may have have believed they would be a strategic winner in warming temperatures. At best they would not have been particularly inclined to sacrifice their energy and industrial development when their rivals were not.
> so, so far the climate crisis is a uniquely capitalist problem.
No it's not, even if you strangely ignore USSR's massive past contribution to atmospheric CO2. China emits more CO2 than all western countries combined, and plans to continue increasing output. You'll say China is capitalist to some degree, but its heavy industry, electricity generation, and fossil fuel industries (and more) are all under absolute control of the communist dictatorship.
The climate crisis is your average every day human problem, formally documented in feudal England (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) but certainly the same condition existed pre-history.
The IPCC published their first report on climate change in 1990, the Rio conference took place in 1992, and the first real UN climate deceleration wasn’t until 1997 with the Kyoto protocol (I say real because this is the one where government promised to limit their greenhouse emissions; and then proceeded to fail). So I say that even thought the climate crises starts with the industrial revolution, 1997 is the year we start seeing the climate failure that will doom us all.
Just to state the obvious, if governments would have acted in 1997 like they promised to, then climate change probably wouldn’t have reached this catastrophic proportions which we are observing today. We had recently saved the ozone layer using similar measure, so there is no reason the Kyoto protocol failed other then the profit motive of fossil fuel companies which successfully lobbied against following through with the promises. The efforts of ignoring the Kyoto protocol were led by the USA which failed to ratify it. I believe there was significant lobbying involved from fossil fuel companies that influenced the senate’s decision to not even vote on it.
Bringing capitalism into it is just silly. "Capitalism" is not to blame, removing capitalism does not fix it, and people don't need to give up capitalism to improve global warming. It seems to be bringing an unrelated personal bias against capitalism in and tying it to global warming, which is really anti-scientific misinformation.
My statements was about fossil fuel companies internal scientists discovering the link, which resulted in them thinking only about their shareholders’ profits when it came time to react. You have no proof a similar situation ever happened inside the soviet union.
Off course there were scientists within the soviet union which knew about the link, and even some that realized the scale of the human impact before the political collapse. But stating how the soviet leadership would have acted in the wake of the Kyoto protocol is pure fiction that has nothing to do with the world we live in.
Communists certainly contributed to the climate disaster, and continue to do so today, but by the time push came to shove, and we were set up to enact the essential international agreements to prevent it becoming a disaster, it were capitalist countries, and capitalist countries alone, that resisted.
> Communists certainly contributed to the climate disaster, and continue to do so today, but by the time push came to shove, and we were set up to enact the essential international agreements to prevent it becoming a disaster, it were capitalist countries, and capitalist countries alone, that resisted.
Also incorrect. China is a strong resister. Of course they like treaties that puts restrictions on the west and allows them to continue increasing emissions, which is what they push for.
Western nations are responsible for the majority of historic emissions, and have gotten rich at the cost of everyone else’s future. They have the financial capacity to build out the required infrastructure with the money they have already made off of their pollution. This is the logic behind the exceptions to the Kyoto protocol. The US (or rather the oil lobby) touted this as unfair (which it isn’t) and instead continued to pollute at an accelerated rate. It was also always understood that the Kyoto protocol was a start which would get stronger in a later agreement, so China was never going to be exempt forever, and they knew that.
When the US killed the Kyoto protocol they killed every future prospects with it as well. The disagreement was always about this issue you point out, but COP after COP, non-western nations (including China) proposed a reduction (e.g. in COP 2009 China promised a 40-45% reduction from 2005 by 2020; this puts China in the same category as Europe with governments that promise action but fail to deliver) but COP after COP it was always the USA that brought up this as a disagreement and we continued to not make an agreement (COP-15 resulted in a non-binding agreement and China missed this target).
But this is all irrelevant when discussing capitalism as the only culprit of the climate disaster because most (all?) of China’s pollution companies are publicly traded either in Hong Kong Stock Exchange, or in the New York Stock Exchange, or both, with the Chinese state as its majority owner, for over a decade now. These companies operate for the profits of their share holders, not for the benefits of their workers like a communist entity would. These are firmly capitalist entities, one might call them state capitalist.
Sorry, I'm just not going to buy it. It just looks like you have a hatred of capitalism and trying to pin things to it. Better tighten up your argument a whole lot before you try it out on somebody else.
I’d argue homelessness is heavily tied to an inability to build housing, but that’s a regulatory failure (zoning and building codes) not a market one.
For two centuries, we have had exponentially increasing consumption, exponentially increasing production, and exponentially increasing waste.
Unbounded exponential growth is impossible in a finite planet. But capitalism requires unlimited exponential growth to function - "return on investment" is literally exponentiation.
Unfortunately, there is a multi decade lag between the causes and the effects.
Already, disaster is baked into the amount of carbon dioxide we have pumped into the atmosphere, and we aren't turning around. There are trillions of dollars of commitments for fossil fuel generation plants that will be still operating in 30 years and more.
The idea that people today will give up their standard of living so that their grand children will not experience catastrophe turns out to be completely unreasonable. No one will ever give up their standard of living. Technology will continue to advance, and this will continue to accelerate the growth of resource consumption and waste production.
> authoritarianism, monarchy, or feudalism.
I too find those systems enraging and unfair, but future historians will say, "They did not decimate the biosphere - only capitalism did that."
We've another comment replying to this one that bemoans Maggie Thatcher when I'd be willing to bet they weren't alive in the 80s and display a complete ignorance of, well, basically all recorded history prior to that. I'd say you couldn't make it up but it's actually very easy to parody and predict.
I'll leave you with Ray Davies singing a rendition of how his record company, manager, and agent ripped him off - sorry, exploited him as a worker, comrade - in the 1960's. Yes, grift and centralising of power to prey on the weak and ignorant are new inventions, if you were born yesterday!
In answer to your question, I think we died as a race when we gave up the nomadic life. We stopped moving around, got comfortable and started accumulating property.
Yeah, I'd like these companies to fuck off too.
Edit: Looks like they also publish guides on how to do it yourself, that's actually kind of helpful. I guess the high price is to have someone continually checking and submitting removal requests on your behalf.
If you don't renew your account, they just delete your data.
>Company offers you means to pay.
>^^
Which is it?
(Though the truth has always been that you’re part customer, part product, of course.)
https://www.experian.com/consumer-products/identity-theft-an...
Granted, I know there’s a free plan that covers everything you mentioned. I just thought it was funny that it’s over double the price you mentioned.
If you have a real account and pay for verification, and someone else has a fake one, it's easy to see that one is "verified" and one isn't.
If you don't have an account and the only ones on the site are fake ones claiming to you... seems you're screwed?
In the extra-crazy future you will be able to pay to not have an account but still have them take down fakes, maybe?
Was talking to a lawyer recently (making a will; I'm old), and he saw my email address was firstname@lastname.net (my lastname is almost globally unique), and he asked if I had bought up "the rest" i.e. lastname.com, .org, .com.au, .org.au, .net.au, .id. I told him my paranoia had met it's match in my laziness, and he looked at me like I was an idiot about to have his identity stolen.
I briefly looked into trademarking my personal name (legal to do in Australia) but its cost prohibitive (vs verifying for multiple online platforms).
I even thought briefly about legally changing my name to include a new middle-name that was my PGP short key id. But Australia does not permit the use of numeric symbols in names. (Though I guess you could shift the hex string by 10 so 0-F maps to A-P. That wouldn't break the rules.)
By now it’s become pretty clear that it’s not possible to preemptively defend against this. There are a bazillion gTLDs and on large social media sites display names are not unique.
If you die without a will, the state ends up determining what happens with your possessions. That usually means that they'll go down a list of relatives and ask them "hey, this person died, do you want to inherit their belongings". If they find absolutely nobody (this happens a lot with people that die with a lot of debt, since you also inherit the debt), the will instead falls to the state.
The order makes some sense (first is spouse, then kids, then siblings, then direct family and finally extended family), but it's of course something left up to the present state of the law and depending on how that might change, something could occur you're not happy with.
One specific example of this (albeit not for your case) is in the event you're gay; gay people often had to prepare their will specifically because the state wouldn't acknowledge them as the spouse (this was even with the "civil arrangements"), so the state would just skip over their spouse for inheritance and relinquish stuff to their family instead.
This doesn't apply of course if you're not married, but it's one simple example in how that default order might have some asterisks that are easily avoidable if you just have a will.
Basically it's useful to have one to avoid a lot of complications in the event of an untimely death (which can happen for all sorts of reasons).
Thanks for your detailed answer. You haven't convinced me it is important either way, but I at least know now that I havent missed something important.
Regardless, if you like the standard list of inheritors, it's still worth writing it down. That means that the executor of your will knows that that is the order you prefer. Laws can be changed at any point and it could say, be changed in order to prioritize your parents over your siblings; if you don't care at all about what happens with your belongings after your death, yeah fair, there's nothing I could do to convince you, but for anyone else that's worth taking into account. Having it explicitly spelled out in your will ensures that that doesn't change, even if the law does.
Gay people was just an example of what might seem sensible on paper could still have a strange asterisk attached to it.
I paid zero of that debt when she died. Just ignored it. It was all in her name. I might have also been fully ptsd’d.
But my credit is fine, the probate period is LONG (10+ years) gone, etc…
Sure my evidence is anecdotal but no - debt is not “transferred” to your name like you inherit it.
Note that all this stuff can get very complex in a hurry especially when taxes are involved (and they usually are) so you should definitely hire the help of a professional when dealing with this for anything exceeding a few thousand.
If you're married then pretty much everything goes to the spouse by default. Kids, likewise, are usually a default inheritor as well. Can get messy if you have a bunch of kids, but the default is usually an even split.
But what happens if you don't have a spouse or kids? Do you want that cash to go to a charity? To your shitty relative who you don't like? You gotta make it explicit.
For me personally, I am not attached to the concept of cash/assets enough to really care what happens with excess assets after I am gone. It is something entirely different if you have offspring, and want to pass accumulated assets to them, I get that. However, given how much money was printed recently, all the cash I leave behind might as well be burnt, I really dont care either way. If I have friends in need, I might as well pass some of it on to them before I go.
I won't call you an idiot, but I will say you're significantly increasing the risk of social engineering. I had a vanity domain email and someone use another TLD and tried to switch my bank accounts using it. The bank customer service agents are very willing to believe in the equality and authenticity @lastname.com and @lastname.net. If you go to a HN post on vanity email, there are countless stories about customer service agents not understanding how email addresses work.
I do own (or have a family member buy) most of the common lastname.tld's that exist. I'm just hoping that the confusion of uncommon tld's are a good defense. Eg. I hope CS agent won't easily believe login@vineyardmike.com should be login@vineyardmike.club or .wiki
I do like your idea of trying to trademark the name (and I considered it too) but my name is common enough (and a word in a European language) that others have tried already, and its already in use with a handful of businesses across the world.
Social media should be considered one giant deepfake.
There is also the 'unhook' extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
You’re fine if you say no. If you say you don’t have social media and they find you do, of course that’s fraud. But I know several couples off social who were asked, explained, and then showed photos off their camera roll and were fine.
As long as there is price transparency, people will vote with their feet.
Now - the 'sleight of hand' thing where you buy one thing and the later they change their structure, that's a hustle for sure - but otherwise, for 'new customers', I view this as just part of the pricing structure. And BTW I think they will mostly drop it because people won't like it and won't see a lot of value in it.
This is for the Lady Gaga's and Elon Musks of facebook. Followers want to be able to know if they are following the real deal, and the real deal wants to be certain that they can be differentiated from the fakes.
Musk and Meta are trying to reinvent this, but they have it backwards - if your platform depends on people to post "content" you should be rewarding the people that draw the masses to your platform not raising pointlessly small amounts directly from them.
But in line with facebooks strategy book, if a competitor is doing it, we better implement it too.
Often actual people either lose their FB accounts because they forgot their password, lost the email associated or the 2FA etc... or they closed the account down.
Then real people open another account and re-connect to their old friend groups.
Spammers mimic this behaviour by replicating peoples accounts and then sending out new friends requests that appear to be from someone you know.
Once you accept the spammers friend request they begin to send you malware phishing links and so on.
I'm sure there are other scams around this I havent heard of! :-)
You can validly infer "if we're not the product we must be paying", but more realistically you'll be both paying and the product (i.e. paying a subscription and receiving ads, a la cable tv).
I think that at the end of the day, the natural order is that every entity is trying to maximize the goodness it can get, be that businesses, people, governments, churches, or any other. This is exacerbated with the fact that often it's a competition. If you don't do the level of shady shit that others are doing, you get less goodness, or even fade into irrelevance. Which is why good regulation, and culture matters a lot. Entities are powerless against systemic issues like this, the only way is to change the playing field itself.
If this removed ads, added more controls on what you see and what is shared/sold to 3rd party, I'd actually consider it!
But ads are not mentioned and ads are probably worth more than 12$/user/mo and.. this would probably help them track you "better".
And then there's the problem that the users most likely to pay are more valuable than average to advertise to.
[1] Worldwide quarterly ARPU x4: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
If those users go away, the average $/user from ads goes down, because the only people seeing ads are those who are too poor to avoid it.
To an advertiser, poor people who direct their attention towards whatever is put in front of them are worth a lot less than rich people who carefully curate what their attention is directed towards. It's grody, but that's the advertising industry for you.
It probably scales all the way up until $10k/month, which is near the upper limit of what super-luxury brands, that would buy ads online, can earn per customer.
So the curious implication is that such services could be 'free' or $20k/month.
But with a changing advertising market and lower budgets, FB might view the alignment of incentives more beneficial.
Interesting, firefox on my iphone mobile[0] does not allow this...
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios
In a similar vein, the world does not lack ICE cars because a minority of them are electric.
In other words, a lot of people who use ad blockers are good ad targets, but the converse is not true.
There's a reason their products are so engaging and sticky—they're enjoyable to use!
And they'd be significantly more enjoyable if you didn't have the Eye of Sauron watching you and trying to manipulate you at all times.
I'd pay considerably for that.
There should be opt-in OS-level identity verification based on zero knowledge proofs and tied to your government-issued digital ID. This also solves issues like preventing minors from accessing adult sites, etc.
I should not have to verify with 1000 third parties and hand over my personal data and then hope it's handled properly and doesn't get leaked. We have zero knowledge proofs and we can get OS makers to make this seamless for us.
The OP can verify with proper ID and be safe. The gov just needs to regulate that rather than keep copies of all the originals. They just have something like a checkbox, where you're either verified or not and a human / smart system is involved and no record is permanently kept of the docs.
Anyway, I don't anticipate this feature working out for meta.
Does it cost money? It’s a problem
Is it only available in certain neighborhoods? It’s a problem.
Are you unable to get it on vote day? It’s a problem.
Other countries have solved this by doubling down on making voting easy to do.
The problem with many attempts at voter ID in the USA is that they’re thinly veiled attempts at disenfranchisment because they purposefully don’t address the above issues.
This will be the end of a lot of things, to include the internet we grew up with in the 90s. It's holding on by a hair, but you can still visit personally-owned and hosted websites, and not run any non-free code.
And there is no OS in this case, it's a product feature for Facebook that allows users of Facebook to be told that Facebook verified the account's government ID.
Fuck that.
Problems with this approach:
1. Participation in the internet should not be contingent on being documented by a government.
2. There are ~200 countries, so this adaptation will require worldwide collaboration by a lot of parties. Governments and borders change or are disputed all the time. Are all 200 countries trustworthy as identity issuers on this network? Who decides who is trustworthy?
3. This will increase the leverage a government has over it's citizens, by giving them an avenue to cut their communication lines with the rest of the world.
4. Governments are notoriously slow for adapting new technologies. Governments are notorious for wanting backdoors in technologies. Can we trust them to keep this up to date, secure, and to migrate to any new advancements that are to come?
You verify your identity with one or more level 0 identity services. Level 0 services would be the most secure, but as is often the case that heightened security would likely come with a cost. It would likely take some effort to establish your identity with a level 0 provider. It might also might take some effort to use a level 0 provider to prove you identity to someone.
Level 1 services would be built on top of level 0. You make an account at a level 1 service using a level 0 service to prove your identity. Level 1 is likely not as secure as level 0, but it is easier to work with and to use when providing identity to someone else.
Similarly, level 2 builds on level 1, and so on. Some of the services at these levels might function both as identity verifiers and as providers of end user services.
Level 0 would best be handled by long lived entities that have actual offices that you can visit. Banks would be a good candidate for providing level 0. To set up an identity account at level 0 you'd have to show up in person and with whatever proof of identity is generally required in your jurisdiction to prove identity.
Some good entities that might provide level 1 service are domain registrars and email hosting companies. The key things they would have to do to be a level 1 service is (1) let you associate your account with an identity proof from a level 0 service, and (2) set a flag on your account that says anyone claiming to be you trying to recover from a lost password or lost 2FA token or something must verify against the level 0 service to prove they are really you before recovery is allowed.
Lets say I'm using my domain registrar for level 1.
For me then level 2 might be my email host. An email host acting at level 2 for someone with their own domain would be similar to an email host acting at level 1, except you associate the account with the domain and anyone trying to take the account has to prove ownership of the domain.
Below that I'd then use my email as my identity at places like Facebook, my ISP, Amazon, and anyplace else I need to create an account. Account recovery would require being able to respond to emails sent to me.
Then maybe below that I might use login by Facebook or login by Apple at a few places. (I normally just go for traditional email/password if I can, but sometimes a site or service makes that so painful I give up. For example the McDonalds mobile app. But that's a rant for another time...).
Level 0 providers would also provide something like certificates of identity. That would be a way to get a certificate from them that says that at the time the certificate was issued the person with real identity X, which they have verified in person, is also the person with email address Y (or telephone number Z or whatever), and they have verified this.
So if I need to prove to say Facebook who I really am, I can get such a certificate from my level 0 provider and give Facebook a copy.
With this we can continue to use the fairly simply way we identify ourselves to most sites (email), but if we have to we have a good way to prove real identity, and we have a reliable way to recover if our account at a site gets compromised by anyone short of a major state actor.
If end sites get compromised, email recover works. If email gets compromised, that can be recovered based on domain ownership, and then once email is recovered end sites that were compromised via the compromised email can be recovered. If my domain gets compromised that can be recoved by going to my level 0 and using that for domain recovery, then I can recover email, and then end sites.
And again, it would be opt in, just like verifying with Facebook / Twitter etc is opt in. And for people who are concerned about government surveillance, they can already do that if you verify your social media account via your credit card, that's kind of the point there, that the credit card ties a social media account to a real world person.
[0] - https://www.id.me/
The adult content case is possible, as you're just asserting age.
In what world does anyone care about meta impersonation anymore ? Does anyone make public announcement on meta beside meta employees ?
It’s just copying for copying sake.
If Musk had made an impassioned case about why, and engaged peoples concerns in a grown-up way it might have gone better.
Musk is a fool. But Zuck is the fool that follow him.
My 84 yr old mother does. It really annoys her when someone steals her profile picture, makes an account in her name and starts sending friend requests to her friends. I told her Facebook could fix this easily but they don't want to.
Now I can tell her they want to charge her to fix it.
The announcement mentions "impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you" but I'm skeptical how advanced that's going to be. It can't stop name reuse (because real people have the same name). And preventing someone creating a second account with the same image would be perfectly possible today, with no verification system, so I doubt that's it either.
Once established it’s a great network effect. But networks with effects are hard to start.
“You are already friends with someone by this name” warnings would be a lot more helpful.
Some just panicked and closed their accounts making the fake one the only one with their name left on FB...
I can't imagine any of them wanting to pay to be verified to avoid this though.
And anything pushing internet identity forward is also good. With the rise of chatgpt verification of “human” is going to be important.
Facebook… apparently.
Edit: 625 out of 1000 top companies advertising in sept weren't advertising in first weeks of Jan.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-d...
Threatening your customers[0] in the process is probably also not a winning formula.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-name-shame-adverti...
Twitter's debt management alone is a billion dollars per month.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertis...
On the other hand, they are reporting a study that they may have even paid for and don’t actually share the details of the study. So I certainly see your point.
On the other other hand, I think the “soft” signals like Elon asking people to hit the like button for ads, or the various reports of orgs pulling their ad campaigns suggests that there is general distress. Which is what’s on my mind when I think it’s more than a “narrative,” which I tend to interpret as hand wavy “media bias” used to explain away anything that doesn’t support one’s own narrative.
> Overall, advertising spending by the top 30 companies fell by 42% to an estimated $53.8 million for November and December combined, according to Pathmatics, despite an increase in spending by six of them.
Is that inaccurate and if so, why?
> Pathmatics said the previously unreported figures on Twitter advertising are estimates. The firm bases its estimates on technologies that track ads on desktop browsers and the Twitter app as well as those that mimic user experience.
> But the company said those estimates do not account for deals advertisers may receive from Twitter, or promoted trends and accounts. “It is possible the spending data could be higher for some brands” if Twitter is offering incentives, Pathmatics said in an email.
It's all speculation across the board - people want musk to finally fail, and that possibility produces some delicious schadenfreude. I am in this industry, and don't trust for a second the estimates "Pathmatics" cites. Everytime I've seen these types estimates on properties where I know the real numbers, they are off significantly, in both directions.
The numbers come from comps, and some sampling of Desktop ad impressions and a twitter client. That's so far away from what the real numbers are that it's just a fuzzy guess.
1 - https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/01/19/twitter-musk-consum....
They've made a massive gamble on pivoting to VR to save them from irrelevance but that seemingly has already flopped.
$120B in revenue, $20B in profit last year
Unless they pivot soon, they're in deep trouble, with a declining user base (particularly young people) and a consistent loss in ad revenues. One big problem Meta has is they went "all in" on a VR bet, that isn't working.
In 'deep trouble' with 2 billion daily active users on each platform: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, resulting in the stock doubling in less than 3 months of screaming about the chorus of the end of times for Meta.
I guess betting against HN is somewhat a profitable move when everyone was scared to buy the stock at $88.
user base is growing 1.75% YoY
In the last earnings call it was reported that Facebook had just broke 2 billion MAU. The user base is inclining. Meta's family of apps' MAU increased by 4% year over year.
Stock price has little to do with company financial health.
Now that they are coming back a closer to normal, providing normal services start to make a bit more sense for companies.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/08/27/facebook-no-l...
Still kind of upset that that immediately obvious lie back in back in 2009 paid off.
I was there in the background noise in that first reddit post, saying the obvious.
It would not surprise me one bit if it turned out that the reddit founders manipulated that one post to make it go the right way.
1. https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
> Preface
“Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.
The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put “Don’t be evil” into practice. ...
So really, you're implying the article claims something more extreme than it _actually_ claims... which is a little like starting your _own_ clickbait urban legend - how meta!
Google’s unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase “don’t be evil.” But that’s over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.
Unless you feel the content at the end of documents doesn't count, because no one would ever actually read it...? Bit of a trap there!
That was too low hanging to leave and I know I'm being a total asshole there, which I'll try to stop -- but come on, having to read to the end isn't at all like the article is straight up lying.
The status of "unofficial motto" was conferred by the preferential position the concept was given in the doc, a symbolic gesture of corporate culture, and that entire block was removed for a much lesser reference at the end. It is made motto no more, because that specific phrase which started the doc was removed, as was reported.
Now, I grant you: a lot of people have the wrong impression of what precisely happened here, and I agree, the article is just here for the clicks. It could start off by clarifying that the idea isn't totally erased, and that might have served the precise truth better.
But the world is complex and nuanced! The thing called Google changed into a thing called Alphabet, and at that time, Alphabet dropped the phrase completely, while Alphabet's new child company (now called Google) seriously demoted the phrase+idea. Some web journalists then editorially simplified their titles about it all to get more clicks, while providing the full facts inside.
In spirit, at that time, Google kicked the ethos into a hole, and that's what people broadly understand. It's not at all like Google and its entire code of conduct are just what they ever were, and it's similarly disingenuous to claim the whole idea here is some crazy urban legend as it would be to claim that Google and friends have e.g. purged any and all references to good moral conduct from official documents -- neither is true.
But in the long view, Google stopped caring about this idea, and that popular understanding is roughly correct. That's the story, and it is not an urban legend.
Don't Be Evil was relegated to a weird basement desk and had its stapler taken off it back in 2018.
(I don't care, and don't think "don't be evil" really ever meant much, but urban legends drive me a little batty.)
Elon canceled WFH for a multitude of reasons. Mainly to encourage willing employees to leave and those that remained to work harder.
They spend time commuting. They suffer constant distractions. They deal with physically relocating in the office multiple times per day. They experience physical discomfort in an environment they cannot control.
What in office employees don’t do is deliver more value per minute to the company because they waste energy just trying to exist in an office.
> What in office employees don’t do is deliver more value per minute
Isn’t this contextual?
> They spend time commuting
Also this. Commute can be productive especially in cities where people can safely cycle to the office.
> They suffer constant distractions.
Lots of the folks I meet in the office currently, have more distractions at home.
> They experience physical discomfort in an environment they cannot control.
“home” is not the opposite for many people.
WFH is productive only if you are single. Or have single like benefits. Like kids who are off to school and a spouse who doesn't talk to your for hours.
Other wise you are better off working at office. At home you get peppered by spouse/kids/chores tasks during your working hours.
Also, think about those on an H-1B. Their options are limited.
For older more mature people who have families it’s an amazing gift to be able to work from home, for some it absolutely isn’t. The point is that you can decide how to run things in your company and try to be flexible.
I've worked for a company who had to go full remote due to covid and productivity increase a lot because people were not being bothered by senseless interruptions and calls.
When asked why move back to the office in a meeting where people could ask "anything", the CEO just said he doesn't believe in working from home and he does not want that for the company but provided zero reasons for his beliefs. :/
Also commuting is such a pain that it makes me feel depressed. I took about 2h each leg and sometimes it was even worse. I usually get so much earlier in the office to avoid not being late and I had to simply not do anything as I could never leaver earlier too :(
Don't be a reactionary. Think about things more and you'll be right more often than you are now.
This has been my experience as well. Also, not every company is the same. When COVID hit, I started working remote, and the company was very poorly equipped to deal with work from home. Communication disappeared and culture died out. I stopped being interested in my work and left the team, and later, the company.
Fast forward to my new company. It’s remote-first. More than half the workforce is remote and it saves the company what I’d imagine to be a pretty sum in office supplies, rent, etc. I’m hybrid now, but 90% of the time is remote. I’m much happier now than in my old remote experience. I don’t have to commute and I haven’t missed out on any of the perks of an office because of the company structure and techniques, and a few other decisions by myself.
The things I think are game changers:
- Slack, or similar. My old company used Teams. It was slow and buggy and I disliked it. Having channels is a game changer for remote work! Being able to have channels with many people creates a place for banter and common, shared experiences. That makes a remote team feel much more personal.
- Having a good home office. My first stint with remote work, I was ill prepared. I had no desk and was working at the dining room table. I had no good peripherals, no good chair, etc. Not a good environment. Now I have a standing desk, a mouse and keyboard I enjoy, nice monitors, a good chair, a separate area of the house dedicated to work. This has made a huge difference in my mindset. I’m “at work” by being in an area of my home I reserved exclusively for work, and I’m comfortable in it. I dread going into the office where the water doesn’t taste as good, the air is stale, there’s little natural light, I have limited control over my environment. I’m now much more productive at home. As a bonus, I get back an hour (or more, depending on traffic) of my day, and save myself all the accompanying stress of commuting.
1. the leadership and most important employees meet at the office 3 to 4 days a week.
2. less important employees are allowed to work from home
The workers in group 2 are in direct competition with outsourcing firms in India, Vietnam, Brazil, etc. If you are just an average frontend programmer, and allowed to work from home, there is a good chance that your work can be sent overseas. So workers in this group are seeing more downward pressure on their wages, and have a more precarious position.
This is absolutely unhealthy behavior, but my WFH problems have never been because I'm slacking off since I'm at home.
People with integrity will work. People without integrity will find ways of avoiding work. Location doesn't matter. Hire or work with the former; avoid the latter.
- Apple: https://www.fastcompany.com/90781330/apple-return-to-office-...
- Amazon: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/17/amazon-employees-asked-to-be...
- Microsoft: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/microsoft-rto....
Why should your anecdote be stronger than this?
Building stronger ties with teammates is part of work. Progressive companies encourage this, and this is why some progressive companies have pushed people to return to the office.
To be clear, I'm showing up to be seen and available.
Imagine being able to rename your company to exempt yourself from the terms you wrote, because your new name isn’t in the terms.
It's signal they'll stop bothering the anonymous Facebook accounts my friends have. Why not let those few people wanting Facebook verification have it?
Why don't these companies have a responsibility to prevent fraudulent signups in the first place - especially Facebook which has, from day #1, prevented non-real-person signups in their Ts-and-Cs.
“We can see hackers are in your account, enter your credit card and upgrade now so we can boot them for you.”
"Nothing sinister to see here, move along!"
Sometime ago it was "if it's free, you are the product". Let's change that to "you are always the product".
I guess it'd be helpful for people like them to have dedicated support lines.
https://www.indy100.com/viral/only-fans-sex-facebook-employe...
(I think it's if you run a page with over a certain number of followers or something)
These moves are driven by ignorant (outright) class-ism, and social media is quickly becoming a system of fraud that supports the wealthy while disabling people who don't pay. It's going to corrupt every aspect of life from news to entertainment if it hasn't already.... Trending topics used to be somewhat accurate because they were based on everyone's posts rather than just the posts of people who could afford to pay for verification. Because platforms got greedy and couldn't make platforms work with corporate sponsoring advertiser funding alone, they turn on users, the very people already working for free... This is not sustainable business. These platforms create schemes like crypto and NFT scams, info harvesting, unfair moderation, user account lockout extortion schemes, fake followers, payola promotion, ban extortion, industry plants, and many other criminal things to extort their user base. It's the modern day large-scale criminal enterprise to run a social media site.... The reason it's not obvious is because no one sees the code at work, they just see the end result of content creators.
This is really short-sighted (stupid actually) tech leadership based on profit desperation. I hope people begin to defund these large social media entities, as they are no good for anyone's progress, except for the company CEOs and Investors perhaps... Ugh.
I'd probably be more fine with a one-time fixed-cost verification service, considering it probably requires a human to manually verify and approve each request. But a monthly subscription? That feels like a rent-seeking cash grab. Do you suddenly forget about someone's verification status as soon as they stop paying?
If anyone reading this comment is considering paying for this service I'd love to hear what makes this service worthwhile for you.
In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought, that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship, and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
All positive developments for the industry IMO.
I hated the moderations/censorship on these platforms and I dislike the adtech/tracking business model so he has my support on both of those angles.
Meta also appear to be bundling in customer support which is probably my third objection to big tech. So I’ll thank Elon for that one too.
He still has yet to demonstrate any other outcomes than making twitter vastly less profitable.
No, it doesn't let you be a prick with someone elses resources. They have no obligation to listen or amplify you.
Perhaps people's expectations of free speech are a little greedy?
Thanks for confirming my point, glad you agree.
Is free speech in your mind something someone automatically has obligation to share? Thats forced, not free.
Yes, I can write what I want in my personal word editor but quite obviously that's not the topic at hand in a discussion on social networks.
Personally, I'd rather try something and have it not work out and learn the lessons than sit around saying "what if" for the rest of my life.
Why would you say that though? The people who've hung on this long probably want to be there.
There are a lot that don't want to be there. A lot returned out of necessity. Mostly from h1b visa stuff and avoiding being deported. Or getting a new job isn't as easy right now as some think it is. Teams are tiny so people are over worked and elon is making demands that require people to over work and do things immediately.
Reports from inside the company suggest a rather grim attitude. Musk has fired several engineers, even those directly aligned with his vision for the site, often over fairly minor errors and mistakes. There's no sense of loyalty to either the company, the product, the boss or even the vision, Musk has basically eroded all of that.
Musk has been treating the employees as completely expendable. He fired one of his last two principal engineers for daring to suggest that the reason he had less views was just because people weren't into his antics anymore. Then he forced 80 employees off of their current tasks just after the Superbowl to artificially boost his own priority in the algorithm over the weekend because Joe Biden got more views on his Superbowl tweet than Musk did.
People want to find doom and gloom, but the reality is that if Musk wants priorities changed, he is the boss and should be able to do so. 'Forced' is a pretty strong word given that he's paying their salaries and people should be able to switch tasks if the boss wants it.
Well sure. Musk risked a lot more than that and almost lost Tesla on the Model3 ramp. He risked a lot more than that on reusable rockets, he's risking a lot more than that on Starlink & Starship.
If you want to do something extremely impactful, you've gotta take big risks.
Playing the safe game is pretty mundane and boring, and to be honest it's not a very exciting way to live, and not a very fast way to improve something.
He may have done far worse things as well but that depends on your opinion of his product/feature changes. But the additional debt he has saddled them with and the revenue he deprived Twitter of aren't really arguable, and his attempts to cut costs by short term slash and burns don't make anywhere near the dent needed to offset them.
I don't like Musk but is this a mercy killing?
I'm not sure selling sausages made out of sawdust is a big win or even that interesting of a business solution. It's a short-cut that most companies could take if they were to chuck their ethics out of the window (and possibly be willing to break the law).
But if it makes money a large swath of the tech industry will hail it as an innovation and follow suit. Which is kind of sad. And also, at the end of the day, why we need laws against selling sausages made out of sawdust.
By removing the very politically-biased censorship he already did a very healthy move for the whole world.
About that…¹²³
¹ https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/25/23571103/elon-musk-twitte...
² https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/16/tech/musk-censors-press/index...
³ https://theintercept.com/2022/11/22/elon-musk-twitter-censor...
Unfortunately it isn't possible to have an unmoderated forum. Choosing not to moderate is still a moderation choice.
I'm not sure that anyone should be looking at Twitter and thinking, "this is a good strategy for making things more profitable." Is Twitter making more money? They were already losing money before, and my understanding is that post-transition a bad situation has turned into a crisis.
What are the odds that Twitter ends up being seen as something to emulate in business and not as a cautionary tale? I mean, never say never, but the impression I've gotten about Twitter's financial prospects is not optimistic.
Companies were afraid to be first but Elon plus the new malaise economy gives them the right condition to follow suit and start it.
I wish FB would have a free verification service so everyone can be verified...so when I look through comments I can filter by such.
You are wishful thinking the best case scenario for Musk decisions. It is just as likely, in my opinion, that in a year or two the worst scenario will be the outcome of Musk tenure.
The worst case scenario, in my view, is something like the revenue never recovering to pre-acquisition levels (which weren’t great already), the product not having any significantly valuable new feature, and suffering from long outages and ended up being sold for ~$10bi.
It's extremely difficult to find the right balance, almost impossible when the company is sky rocketing, like Twitter was.
Trying to analyze it from a business man perspective, I see that Elon's trying to find that balance and I see that as positive. He can be wrong, things can go wrong, but sometimes you must make this kind of decision, take the consequences, and adjust to fix what you broke.
I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
> I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
If you're leaving all prediction and forecasting to other people, why complain when they do it?
He's definitely made a bunch of contrarian decisions but it's too early to speculate that they could be 'impact'.
Buying a company and immediately forcing it to operate on a fraction of its prior resources is not new, btw. It's the private equity formula.
A bunch of 3rd-party devs jumped ship, and it's tempting to say "they'll remember that" if Twitter tries to lure them back,but we don't know yet if that's true or not. A bunch of advertisers jumped ship, but they could come back. The cost is that users look at these decisions and trust the platform less.
But we don't know the cost of that cost, if that makes any sense. We don't know if this ends up sparking a death spiral or if everyone complains about the decisions and then forgets about it by the end of 2023.
The headline says 180,000, but it’s close to 300,000 worldwide — which you can read before the hard paywall cuts you off.
There has been light to no coverage from mainstream press as it doesn't advance the left's current agenda.
>In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought
Fact: The site has repeatedly had significant technical issues since he took over, with repeated down time, massive waves of complaints from top users about flakey behaviour.
Fiction:
> that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship
Fact: His first move at Twitter resulted in a collapse in ad revenue and massive stock market shocks for companies as impersonators announced new policies on the platform. Since then he has taken far more overarching, far more capricious, moderation decisions than the previous management.
Fiction:
>and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
Fact: Twitter revenue is in freefall. The revenue from Twitter Blue is entirely inconsequential and the loss of ad revenue has completely eclipsed it. It is an open secret Musk is fundraising to cover his enormous losses.
I think this tells us one very clear thing that we've known about the industry for a while. It operates on vibes not facts. Does everyone love the idea of a subscription based model rather than Ads? Sure! People were talking about that for years before Musk turned up. Does that mean Musk has succeeded? Fuck no! He's made an absolute mess of it. Welcome to Twitter Blue, perks include everyone on twitter thinking you're a mug for paying Elon Musk $8 for your brand new blue badge.
A lot of people thought Twitter would collapse immediately due to all the cuts. Granted, as you wrote, it isn't as good as it was, so he probably cut too much.
The notifications feature on Android App is already broken and hasn't been fixed since like eternity now. Messenger notifications don't show up either. It takes hours, at times even days for the notifications to show up. There are times when the messages are not properly ordered. They just removed 2FA. Messaging was a nice way to talk to people of common interests, and that's barely working these days.
The app/website are randomly down and you often have to scream on Twitter to get it up and running.
Nothing is really working in Twitter at this point in time, It could get fixed eventually but the strategy has clearly backfired.
Perhaps people underestimate what sort of effort it takes to run operations of that magnitude. If you have a $50 billion site. It is not really a bad idea to pay a few people to keep something like notifications and messenger running. The sheer amount of losses in terms of user trust, experience and eventually money numbers themselves would far exceed expenses paid in salaries.
I must not be the target audience for this because I can't see how paying nearly as much as Amazon Prime is worth it so I can get comment priority and a little star next to my FB account, which is friends-only anyway. If they threw something useful in, like a music or video streaming service with a decent catalog or airline miles or a discount at Target, then maybe.
Just because someone writes in your name and your style online won't mean it's you when ChatGPT or the next version can clone your writing style in seconds.
Being verified online is going to be more important for businesses and people as the internet degrades into the quality level of recipe sites.
Now someone is thinking and making sense. But I don't think this current AI cycle is anything of a 'revolution'. It is more like a pure hype and mania driven reaction over a hallucinating AI generating sophistry.
There is no breakthrough in this other than 'train it on more data and watch it go off the rails' like what we have seen with Bing AI. This is just Tay 2.0.
If feels like people are expecting robocop, but owning an electric table saw, KitchenAid mixer and a electric golf cart - in the year 1800 - would still be revolutionary even if those are just stupid tools.
ChatGPT is a stupid tool, but what that tool, in unskilled human hands can do, will be more revolutionary than ChatGPT becoming some self-aware robot.
1. Is it only for FB or across all Meta services (FB, IG, WhatsApp, Oculus etc.) 2. Are ads going to be shown to verified/premium subscribers?
2nd point is particularly important. Especially if key value prop is about security and privacy. Looks like ARPU for Meta is $40 annually. So financially they can afford not to show ads to verified subscribers (annual sub of $100+). However, for verified subscribers it's only about "blue badge" I doubt there will be huge uptick unless it has other "sweetners" like "no ads" like youtube premium.
Overall - this is a great move by Meta. As it gives them ability to diversify revenue streams from ads where they are dependent on 3rd party platform privacy policies. YouTube premium has shown that social platforms can thrive with freemium model and they have roughly 80M subs ($1B+ revenue). Meta is trying to replicate same success with their brands.
Twitter Blue now allows for longer tweets, and there is (or at least was) cachet around having a checkmark, so there is some cultural heritage there.
Blue checks on Instagram have some clout, but I’ve never heard of someone eager for verification on Facebook. Protecting against impersonation is something these platforms should be doing for free.
If this removed ads across the platforms then maybe there’d be value in this, but I really just don’t understand who this is for or why anyone would pay $100+/year.
I worked at a company that had restaurant delivery app, very similar to Uber Eats / DoorDash (but not in the US). ~10% of top spenders there got priority support.
Anything that gives people some possibility of human contact in the event of a problem is a welcome baby step forward, but this isn't really good enough. If Meta screws up something with blocking/banning your account and you're not subscribed, are you still completely unable to get in touch with anybody, for any price? These are the people slipping through the gaps that I worry about.
Mobile (Google Play, Apple App Store) takes a cut from transactions made through them. Companies don't want to lose money. Companies have been doing this for as long they could. It is not anything new.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
As we see with paid Google customers, business and otherwise.
If my Gmail account is compromised, I'd be pretty fucked, despite doing my best to make backup arrangements - it's still the skeleton key to the rest of my digital life and my primary point of contact for everyone who interacts with me.
I'd happily pay some small fee to have an actual human help me resolve the issue. But right now, that's not even an option.
$0.99/mo for emojis. $1.99/ to show your support for various causes. $3.99/ for sports teams. $4.99/ for ID verification. $0.49/ of your red cross badge goes to earthquake survivors.
Like virtual hats, but for social media.
Right now it’s a property not advertised to network participants. But in the near future you might seem the following above unverified accounts posting about controversial topics
“Careful. This person could not be identified. They may be a bot or falsifying their identify to misrepresent opinion”
At which point, the value of verification goes up. Maybe.
It is valuable to Facebook to maintain a healthy pltform. But is it really worth $15 a month to you to broadcast this to others?
Unless the culture of the platform shifts to a point where non-verified accounts are considered second-class, the only reason to pay this is basically as a status symbol. In which case, I think the tiered approach makes more sense. And maybe "Facebook Gold" for people who want to pay even more for a badge....
Twitter had their checkmarks established as an artificially constrained status symbol you couldn't buy with money... and then, under Musk, they altered the terms of the deal by saying you have to pay, but you get tangible perks in terms of platform features, visibility of your content, etc. Unless Facebook wants to do that, I can't see people paying this much on their own...
But in principle, I think networks should charge their users and provide services, and identity is the most-in-need service the internet lacks.
Will users pay for identity? Probably not, but one can dream.
Twitter is different because I assume most people haven’t met their followers IRL.
Example:
My MIL is 'friends' with a prominent US based surgeon who is also a leading founder in a biotech company. He convinced her to buy stock in said biotech company, when its price was peaking. Of course it was a classic pump and dump and the value plummeted a few weeks later.
Would identity guard rails have saved her? Possibly not. But telling her "if you don't see a verified XYZ they are a scammer" might move the needle.
On Twitter, there's just so many face-less spam troll accounts that are verified, and all a blue check means is that the person likes Elon enough to give him $8. At least Facebook requires a government ID, and the verification confirms that the person is who they say they are.
(I do think if they really cared, especially in the face of looming AI advancements, this would be free. This only really works if most real people are verified, otherwise there's nothing suspicious about a non-verified account.)
But Facebook has already required this for years to run advertisements. So they're now charging for the thing that they were previously doing for everyone for free, making the site less safe and secure.
I photoshopped my dad's driver's license 25 years ago. I used it to successfully confirm to a website that I was over 18. I'm pretty sure that method is still viable today
They have customer support??? :D
But seriously. What's the value add here? Perhaps it's for influencers who post a lot? For me as a user who only follows there's no point then. I don't use FB anymore anyway, only insta.
I'd pay for social media IF AND ONLY IF they do the following:
- Not datamine me for tracking
- Don't show ads
- Don't use algorithms to control my feed - just let me follow who I want and show everything they post and add zero 'suggested' content
However this is not going to happen of course. They're still going to monetize. So there's no point.
FB without ads would be great, and might change Meta's incentives going forward.
On Facebook the network effect that made it cool in the beginning has now died and it will keep it from ever coming back for the same reasons it was great in the beginning. I'm very confident people I really care about will not start posting there, and they probably have the same thought process. It's just uncool.
I still have one.
And this model doesnt even scale up. FB makes ~$60 per user/year which is comparable. If people start verifying en masse, they dont have the capacity to really verify the users identity, that the users haven't sold their accounts etc etc. They are shooting their moneymaker here
What i like about these payment schemes is that they put a real value on the company, based on what customers are willing to pay for the service, not the nebulous advertising return. The results of these programs should also inform investors about the true value of the companies.
As a VC and someone who's invested in some companies involved in crypto, even though I keep a rather low profile, I constantly have to deal with impersonators on my Facebook and Instagram accounts, trying to scam people. I've tried repeatedly to (1) get Facebook support to shut down the impersonators, and (2) to secure a blue tick so this stops being effective. Meta has dropped the ball on both of these, so I have to deal with this constantly. I will happily pay to avoid this.
Second — the ads on Instagram have become overwhelmingly annoying and frequent. I would happily pay for a premium version of IG that gets rid of ads. Hopefully this is that.
Seriously, it seems there is no mention about this being ad-free tier.
Right now I can log in, but the interface is non-functional. I can’t even delete it at the moment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34859919 1 hour ago (22 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34858691 3 hours ago (77 comments)
Both point to Facebook post by Mark Zuckerberg:
> Meta Verified -- a subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support.
My tech-ignorant father-in-law who has 3 friends on Instagram had a fake profile created that was identical to his and matched his username except 1 minor character difference. I reported it to Facebook and the reply was "We get so many requests, we haven't had time to review yours, so we are closing it out. Sorry."
Funny that now you can pay $12/mo for them to... maybe not ignore reports of impersonators?
Although I do wonder if this is the opening salvo in sending "Facebook: it's free and always will be" the same way as Google's "don't be evil"...
Obviously, Meta is after that sweet sweet MRR. But the consumer should recognize that they're paying for a one-time or infrequent task as if it involves ongoing effort.
From the consumer standpoint, a one-time fee makes much more sense.
Maybe the logic with paying goes that, if you loose access to the account for any reason - you can just stop paying and it will no longer be verified.
I remember when Facebook was a private network until they saw Twitter was getting the numbers with public tweets. And they made posts public by default.
Now they are copying Twitter again! And btw. This isn't actually very meta at all!
But seriously... I know why they all need to do this now. And it has to with the coming botpocalypse. Soon your identity will be tied to your reputation. Which is fine and everything, except it will be on CENTRALIZED BIG TECH SITES. Enjoy your social credit score, plebs!
My initial thought is that this creates an incentive for the companies to have more permissive verification processes, since that would make sales easier and reduce costs.
Probably standard PR tactics than genius upon reflection!
If it targeted normal users like me (I pay for twitter blue, for example) then it would let me do things like:
- set chronological newsfeed
- see less or no ads
That’s it. That’s enough to get me to pay
Is it worth $20 / month to get no ads and a chronological feed?
Also, twitter got away with half as many ads or something like this. Personally I’d pay $10 a month, but I don’t know about others.
There can be an explosion in the first months, but most people will cancel the subscription when they realize how useless this thing is.
I believe it tends to normalize in a curve not so distant from what we have today.
Many sites are happy to have free accounts but only one to a person. They want to avoid sock puppets and abuses like spam. If you had to pay even a tiny bit it would drastically cut down on it, but most users won't.
If everyone had a pay for account somewhere that they could use elsewhere, others could piggyback off of it. (It might even be worth a small fee to Facebook, for a service they provide very cheaply.)
I'm guessing this is a way for Mark to sell a new premium tier of data to advertisers. He can charge advertisers for access to a "blue checkmark" tier of user data for an extra fee.
The idea that they are asking users to now pay FB for the privilege of giving them even more personal data is so twisted that I think only Zuckerberg could come up with it.
"It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?" — Lucille Bluth
Sorry Meta, I'm not giving you $576/year (family of 4) ongoing. Validate that I am who I say I am for a one-time fee of $99, or $19/person/year, and I'm in. I'll even pony up $29/person/year for a "no ads" plan.
If you consider that amount × 1000 for a very modest open source fediverse instance hosting circa one thousand users, that is more than enough to sustain admins, moderators and spare change for some development.
The economic model of social media never made any sense and its hard to see how it will sustain going forward.
$15/mo: you're the product + you have to turn in your government ID.
Money grab exposed, really.
Yeah, I know. That was very naieve.
We can already buy any fake press release...verification is just a visual cue online akin to a press release indicating that its value is now somewhat below zero.
useful maybe if u make money on FB/Insta - but even that is so fickle, they can change their terms at any moment.
I've had relatives loose two account into limbo, because of this and yes - even after being "verified" on one of them.
I guess the logic is that if someone took over your account, so you're no longer you.
Then I remember my account is blocked because I failed at the opportunity to do this for free.
I assume/hope this will be available to third party sites so we can verify users.
Oh, but not eliminate it? And you want how much?
Fu(k right off.
Now they're charging us for it?
Raises hand
How is this ok?
How much time should it take to implement a subscription payment?
With all the respect to Facebook scale, more than 1 month would be a failure.
I'm not saying that Facebook did it because Twitter did it, but the timing of it seems more than a coincidence and they are using the same justification for doing it as Twitter.
It's quite likely that Twitter doing it successfully overcame the risk aversion that large corporations are oversupplied with.
Twitter is an announcement platform. Facebook is a discussion platform. Comments, replies to comments, no content length limit, ability to upvote, etc.
Imagine paying for this...
I got a document for state pension in the mail; it had instructions for creating an online account with a default username and password. Bad idea, right? But to activate the account, I would have to sign a document saying "I have created an online account with <username>" and have it notarized.
Social media companies could use notaries to verify identity tomorrow.
3 problems I can see with notarizing documents: 1) Paper signatures / scanned documents. It costs money and time to verify uploaded scanned documents, and users could try to forge documents. Solution: some notaries can sign documents digitally with their publickey: https://www.notarypublicstamps.com/articles/online-notary-di.... I'm not sure how secure this is or how the certificate authority (which publickeys to trust?) works since I'm not a notary, but it seems promising. 2) Notary fraud: unscrupulous notaries could verify impersonators. But if caught, they would lose their license and also be charged with a felony. 99% of us aren't important enough for someone to take that risk. 3) Users losing control of their account at a later date. Just because someone associates their identity with their account doesn't mean that an imposter could take control of the account at a later point in time. But that's what 2fa is for, and you could still ask the website to take your account down, or go through notary again to fully reset your account. This problem is common to every system that doesn't have 24/7, social-engineering-proof customer support.
Anyway, I just think notaries are good way to verify identity. It's also more democratic -- almost anyone without a criminal record can become one with a few hours of training and a small fee. The government has a responsibility to make it accessible because it is required for many government and legal processes.
It's worth noting that this is for the US, and notary systems also vary by state. There are some 3rd party companies that seem to standardize the verification process a bit, which probably adds some added fee. Trusting the notary systems of all 50 states, or these 3rd-party companies, can add risk because impostors will use the weakest link. But I think the added volume would bring attention and scrutiny to these systems and hopefully pressure them to become more secure.
Lastly, public notaries usually don't make much money. Many people do it to feel civically engaged and help their neighbors, as well as making a few bucks on the side. I think an influx of millions of social media users would either overwhelm or bemuse them.
Would be interested to see comments from actual public notaries, what do y'all think?
Useless bullshit. I was hoping for a paid model where you can get rid of ads for good. Instagram has become unusable over the past year as they shove ads into more and more places. Its like reading a book and every time you turn the page, you have a random chance of getting smacked in the face.
I just opened Facebook and here's the top "suggested post". Of course it's a "news" story, which is itself just a repost of someone's Tiktok video. The Tiktok logo is prominently displayed in the tumbnail.
In between all that content, is Facebook Reels. Most promoted Reels are just reposts from Tiktok. There was literally a "Content Creator" named "It's gone viral on Tiktok!" that for a while was the most commonly promoted Facebook reel I would see.
Edit: here's a screenshot of Reels: https://imgur.com/a/OhVvbSf
12 dollars per month??? for a blue badge? Really?
that’s more than basic monthly netflix
So it begins....
How about not having my account locked for 7/14/30 days for sharing a meme that I find on Facebook? How about not locking my account for a racy image I posted 3 years ago?
How about Facebook do a better job of removing the obvious scam accounts like the ones claiming that they're giving away free meals & travel tickets? How about removing the "omg! shocking news video! click here" spam comments that are all over the place?
Nope. Sorry Facebook, if you had a product worth paying for, I might consider it. I'm out.