Verified accounts are now prioritized | Hacker News Reader

Verified accounts are now prioritized

twitter.com

32 pointsbifftastic56 comments

This is only going to make it easier people like crypto scammers to boost their activities. Just think about the people that are going to want to pay to have their voices prioritized, and have it be worth it.

Any influencer that wants to sell you ads, any organization that benefits from you buying into their product, any scammer that can trick you from parting with your money, all those people are going to want to pay for this and will be rewarded for doing so.

Meanwhile, I struggle to see why the people that generate actual good discourse (imo I guess), the scientists, the engineers, the writers, the thinkers, etc, would ever consider paying for this.

I'm sure there's a massive bot problem but couldn't that have been dealt in different ways? Getting people to pay to boost their tweets as a value add for the subscription really devalues the platform.

For the most part today I didn’t notice a big change in how replies were ordered because, as it turns out, I interact mostly with my friends and network, who have overwhelmingly rejected joining Twitter Blue, and thus don't (yet) see much competition between bluechecks and non-bluechecks.

But it’s definitely noticeable when I go into the replies of a general news thread, like yesterday's announcements of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon being fired. The algorithm is very coarse — after prioritizing the thread author's replies, then it's just a free-for-all of bluechecks. Not in chronological order, or by amount of engagement or size of account. Just seemingly random, which is just not enjoyable.

I can't even see my own replies to a big tweet — previously, your own replies to a tweet would show up at the top of all replies.

Here's how verfication works on Mastodon: https://joinmastodon.org/verification

The Twitter blue tick is actually much more visually distinguishable than Google's tiny "Ad" label in search results.

Is Twitter really still a thing? Amazing how long it takes for "established" internet services to die.

It’s a service worth $40 billion, with a community of tens of millions of daily users. Even if it’s in a downward spiral, I don’t think anything of its size will just quickly die.

It's a service that one person paid $40+billion for after being forced to follow through on the contract for purchase that he tried to back out of & discovered that he was legally committed to it.

Nobody believes that Twitter is worth $40billion today, not even its current owner.

Someone paid $44 billion for it, that's a clear marker of what it was actually worth — do you think there's some objective universal scale that defines worth?

In any case, Twitter was worth as much as $60 billion in early 2021 [0], so we can still say it's been a service valued in the tens of billions. What is the expected timeframe for a declining service in that market cap bracket to "die"? Which examples do you have in mind? Geocities? Myspace?

[0] https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/TWTR/summary/market-cap

It is not a clear marker for what its worth. The man didn't even want to buy it at that price and was forced to. The same man recently stated that the service is worth $20b.

The banks financed about $12b, which was probably an optimistic valuation on their part, and that was at the absolute peak

https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-puts-20-bln-val...

I’m not paying you in order to generate content for you, sorry. Good luck with your dwindling base of people who are willing to pay for an all round worse experience.

Do as @dril suggests and block verified users.

I think it’s funny Elon is gifting famous people the blue check. PG suggested Elon should allow any user to pay for another’s check.

I hope Elon does it so people can give the gift of shame.

“Make something people want” (hn doesn’t allow emoji but I wanted to put a sarcastic one here)

(Disclaimer: User since 2008, paying since 2023)

Please drop the "Verified" wording. Just call it pro for everyone who pays like every other Saas (reminder: Websites are also not verified, and verified SSL failed)

I assume that by "prioritized" he means "ranked higher in the feed".

If so, this actually makes sense and should improve quality on average. Yes, verification is quite cheap and pretty much anyone can get it so it's not a perfect spam filter, but it's a million times better than letting bots and sockpuppets rampage among people who actually have something to say.

I strongly believe that the only effective way to control spam and abuse is to control who gets a voice, rather than trying to control what they say. Content-based methods don't work, and neither does banning "bad" accounts, as long as people can just create 10 more sockpuppets afterwards. This is a small, but welcome, step in the right direction.

It is exactly the opposite. The “verification” verifies nothing other than having a credit card and 8 USD to spend. There already have been “verified” accounts with blue checkmarks impersonating the NY government, governor and other people. [1] All this will do is push these impersonating accounts higher in the feed than the actual legit accounts.

It’s an easy and cheap way for fake accounts to gain access to a larger audience.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/fake-accounts-pop-twitter-legac...

> The “verification” verifies nothing other than having a credit card and 8 USD to spend.

Indeed. That's why it's effective for reducing spam, since spammers who run thousands of bot accounts aren't going to verify each of them unless their spamming activity generates at least $8 per account. Most spamming activities generate far less revenue, so those become unprofitable, and the overall amount of spam goes down.

Future will show, but I believe you’re wrong about this. It’s still possible to create bots, but now, for a mere 8 USD, I can have it boosted to top, above legit human accounts. This may reduce the amount of cheap spam, but it’s a godsend for any actor that is for example trying to influence public opinion. For a mere 80000 USD I could have a verified bot army with 10000 accounts drowning out a lot of legitimate conversations. Or push advertising. Or I could go all the way and just use stolen credit cards.

> For a mere 80000 USD I could have a verified bot army with 10000 accounts drowning out a lot of legitimate conversations

That’s a different problem. The parent is referring to the cheap high-volume spam/scams that have proliferated every corner of the free internet. These only work because they’re extremely cheap. There’s a reason your email inbox receives 10,000x more spam than your physical mailbox.

If a scam can't even make $8 per account it's pretty much doomed to failure anyway. Think about it.

Paid spam accounts are removed as well, which you left out of your analysis.

Buying an account doesn't give you un-suspendable account.

All spam detection techniques are applied to paid accounts and they are removed as well.

This not only raises the cost but difficulty.

Just having money is not enough. Detecting 10+ payments from the same credit card is trivial.

There aren't infinite amounts of valid credit cards or Apple accounts to be used for verification.

Spam detection at Twitter is horrendous. Search results for many crypto and stock ticker symbols (or cashtags like $SOFI) are deluged with Discord links for shady trading groups endlessly trying to rope in paid subscribers. If you select "top" search results, you'll see much less spam but stale tweets. "Latest" yields tons of spam. They've been tweeting with the same phrases like "don't miss the next move in a few hours" and "top analyst price target" for years, presumably because it's never been a priority to get rid of them.

In a sense it’s legitimizing bots as long as they pay

Was spam ever that much of a problem on Twitter? Stupid humans were always a much bigger detriment in my experience and this move disproportionately boosts stupid humans.

They were if you were a billionaire named Elon Musk whose likeness was constantly being used to promote crypto scams to your gullible followers.

$8 won't stop the really bad actors, just the trolls.

And impersonating someone could easily make a lot more than $8 in a very short time.

Maybe the two things should be different? Blue checkmark for official accounts, but to get boosted you need to pay up?

Paying a tiny sum to get boosted is still a shortcut for grifters. Paying for the effort to do actual verification would be an option, but that’s not what’s happening here.

Anecdotically, accounts whose speech I find valuable have not paid, and accounts with negative-value speech have.

Rationally, it makes some sense, as people willing to pay $8 for being published consider their publication to be worth -$8.

I agree though that verification (which is not what is done here) would be valuable. Not sure why they didn't go for a KYC.

> people willing to pay $8 for being published consider their publication to be worth -$8.

I don't think this is right. I'm not willing to pay $8 for something just because I think it's worth -$8 to you. I don't care how much it's worth to you. Rationally, the value of something to you doesn't factor into my valuation. I pay $8 for something because it's worth at least +$8 to me.

When I give you a barrel of oil in exchange for $80, that oil is priced at $80, and that is often phrased as its value.

When oil prices went negative in 2020, people were giving both the oil and $30, and so the oil was priced at -$30. Sure, the oil was worth $30 to give away, but the oil was not valued at $30; it was valued at -$30.

Many people sell speech (eg. President Obama has given a speech in exchange for $400K). When you give both money and the speech, just like oil, that infers the price of that speech.

> Rationally, it makes some sense, as people willing to pay $8 for being published consider their publication to be worth -$8.

How does this follow? I might spend $8 if I think I have valuable things to say if it means prioritization over thoughts I consider less valuable. It's not like the reach of a publication is determined by its value.

The problem is that the blue check has become a culture war so all the blue checks are aligned with Elon (either politically or in temperament) so the top replies to popular tweets are dominated by that tribe. The old way (whatever it was) wasn’t great but at least you got a mix. Not good for the product imo, it would be nice if he offered a setting to choose your ranking algo for tweet replies.

Maybe things will settle down though and blue checks will become more evenly distributed (or engagement will tank and he’ll roll this back)

> The old way (whatever it was) wasn’t great but at least you got a mix.

I thought Twitter was a complete echo chamber where you only ever heard from people aligned with you, except more extreme.

I never notice bots on Twitter except for those shilling for crypto in Elon’s comment section.

What makes you think bots and sock puppets wont be verified?

The fact that if an entity uses thousands of bots, verification does become expensive. At the very minimum, it's an additional barrier. All else being equal, bots and sockpuppets are less likely to get verified than regular human users. I've seen communities where an individual user created dozens of sockpuppets to troll around. Such sockpuppets won't be verified for obvious reasons. Not to mention, if a credit card is used to verify lots of spam accounts, the card itself can be banned from being used to verify additional accounts, which hampers bad actors who have just a few credit cards lying around.

Bots and sockpuppets have an incentive to be verified -- they're hoping for a return on investment. What benefit is there for a regular person that can compare with that?

It's also not that there will be a single entity using thousands of bots but thousands of individuals all paying because of some real or perceived financial incentive.

What if the strategy of the bots is to signal boost a small handful of accounts? Verifying that small handful of accounts isn't expensive.

Why need thousands of bots? They get banned at a rate of a couple a day at most. That’s a pretty long time to scam.

"should improve quality on average"

Based on replies to that tweet I think this is hard to achieve.

> it's a million times better than letting bots and sockpuppets rampage among people who actually have something to say

You are replying this to the man who just destroyed the only way users had to verify legitimate sources of information on the platform, setting the floodgates of disinformation open.

Please, if you (not you specifically) rely on checkmarks that in some cases have been given as personal favor or to amplify specific voices despite their extremist views, to verify legitimate sources of information, that’s a general educational problem in understanding how to identify legitimate sources in the first place. This should actually be taught in school, because it’s really Fkin important, but isn’t.

The floodgates of disinformation on Twitter were already open and actively abused before the new system. The old checkmark system was beyond flawed and the new one is as well. Just that this version fills the pockets of the man who is desperately trying to destroy the platform he didn’t want to buy in the first place to minimize losses on his way out.

I don’t mind people wanting to support Twitter or Elon. And they should not be ridiculed for doing so.

But I think as a society the deciding factor if your valuable contribution is heard or seen should not be a monthly subscription. Twitter blue is inaccessible for a large part of the population of this planet. Poor people completely loose the ability to make valuable submissions on the platform and participate if they are drowned under people paying 8 bucks to better troll others or push their views that wouldn’t get traction without the checkmark.

The solution is not to change Twitter. It’s getting away from relying on this specific platform as its algorithm manipulates you into a worse, less critically thinking version of yourself.

What exactly stops the bots and sockpuppets from having blue and this getting ranked higher now?

If the value the bot operator gets from the account is less than the cost of buying Twitter Blue, then they'll make a loss.

Twitter started with good intent but alas is no different to any public net space. It suffers from the same 'gossip' and 'over the garden fence' mutterings as other comment forums. It's best value lies with users painstakingly sifting for actual worthwhile information from bona fide contributors - and then continuously resisting reading the inevitable junk responses. How it was and still is discussed with serious interest or concern by mature people is an example of the worst aspects of human web nature, and/or how fleece ignorant/uninformed/desperate public.

The flip side of the coin is that 95%+ of Twitter's user base (every unverified user) is now going to have a worse publishing experience due to less engagement, less visibility of their tweets. Time will tell if prioritizing the consuming experience over the publishing experience is a good business decision.

Elon can be quite the polarizing individual but the hate and pessimism is just too much and frankly down right embarrassing.

Were they not already?

Was it not already such that only blue checkmarked accounts would be recommended?

It's astounding the correlation between "has blue checkmark", ".eth" in display name, and "supports trump in bio".

The venn diagram of those three things is nearly a single circle.

I recall another day someone who had a PHD in astrophysics and was a professor of climate science at a university making a comment, with lots of people disagreeing with his opinion.

A fair few telling him "he was wrong" were blue ticks with crypto in their profile.

In my corner of Twitter there’s no correlation between any of those.

> It’s astounding the correlation

Can you post your research? How many millions of accounts did you analyse? What tools did you use?

Didn't he announce this like 6 months ago?

Since Twitter doesn’t seem to be able to find out who is human vs who is a bot, I guess a paid subscription was the next best thing. Plus they get paid.

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