Twitter will charge users to be able to vote in polls | Hacker News Reader

Twitter will charge users to be able to vote in polls

twitter.com

35 pointspartiallypro16 comments

Leading with Twitter polls seems to understate the rest of his tweet:

"Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations.

The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle."

Will that really stop it!? Don’t think so, I remember I did some analysis years ago and bots don’t behave that way, there’s usually a “trusted” or verified account that propagates the bots and use them to spread their info, so you would still get those recommended tweets by “verified” accounts, and these tweets are bumped by bots for example.

Willing to put money to a prediction:

1. This decision will be reverted within 3 months after goes live, as they see engagement, therefore ad revenue will fall flat

2. Twitter is gone from lack of revenue / gets re-sold / becomes generic news site / etc.

The average twitterian won't effectively curate their own timeline, either can't or grew too depends of the algo, to make the Follow tab work sufficiently well.

> The average twitterian won't effectively curate their own timeline

Is it even possible to do that? I was under the impression that 'the timeline' (I assume you mean the "For You" feed) was an auto-generated feed that I have no control over.

I only figured their crappy new UI after a friend pointed out, turns out there is a "Following" tab-thing to the right side on the header, those are the chronological tweets of people you actually follow.

Oh yeah, I know about the two tabs — I wrote my own Chrome plugin to change the 'force for you' behaviour to 'force following'. I didn't realise that was what you meant by 'curate your timeline', though.

It still respects block lists and mutes, as far as I can tell.

Though that may change as some twitter folks have mentioned how much of a burden that block lists supposedly place on the site.

They just outsourced the algo now, which is interesting!

Sure block lists are maintained, except on search it doesn't seem to be the case

The only semi-serious use of Twitter polls I've ever seen is stuff like "which game should I stream next". It's very obviously not a representative sampling of anything except your most engaged followers.

I'm sure other services exist, but it's annoying to do this when Strawpoll just shut down last year.

Also I check out the For You tab from time to time, and the only "bots" I've ever seen are the ones which post cute animal pictures.

> The only semi-serious use of Twitter polls I've ever seen is stuff like "which game should I stream next". It's very obviously not a representative sampling of anything except your most engaged followers.

Unless you manage to achieve global representation, most polls work by taking a sample from a specific population. In this case, it usually involves a segment of your followers or, occasionally, a broader Twitter audience. However, it clearly does not include people who refrain from participating in random Twitter polls.

The polling conducted by your online newspaper represents a portion of their readers. When they perform on-the-ground reporting, the sample consists of people present at the actual physical location, and so on.

This is the reason we aggregate multiple polls to obtain global numbers because individual polls inevitably have a limited audience, one way or another.

Here in the UK, our news services literally report on Twitter polls as if they were incredibly meaningful. Now our news is going to be even more biased.

I guess he's still really, really mad about how all his own polls went.

Classic malignant narcissistic, the results must be manufactured against him, it can't just be the average response to his actions.

Burying the lede a bit. Musk is literally the only person in the world who cares about Twitter polls, but the algorithmic feed will also be tithe-payers only. I can only imagine how comically bad it will be.

I would expect that people just link to 3rd party polls.

Putin is pleased.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com