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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

"because people who pay for Twitter have their replies shown first"

I don't really go to Twitter, so I don't know, but am curious: Is this an established fact? A quick search did not show anything official confirming this.

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https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue

> Prioritized rankings in conversations and search: Tweets that you interact with will receive a small boost in their ranking. Additionally, your replies will receive a boost that ranks them closer to the top. Twitter Blue subscribers will appear in the Verified tab within other users’ notifications tab which highlights replies, mentions, and engagement from Blue subscribers.

The rationale was that paying $8/month is the best way to filter out bots, but...

Oh, so it officially is "pay to win" now. Nice. Free speech to everyone, but if you actually want to be heard, you have to pay up.

At least it is somewhat honest and not, oh, we didn't meant to do this, in our effort to convince more people into paying.

It actually kind of has the opposite effect. Turns out the people that want to pay to have their opinions heard probably don't have great things to say, so it creates an easy demarcation in the replies. You can just ignore all the posts at the top with a blue check, and then go down to the higher quality organic posts at the bottom.

Thanks for the advice, but I think I will just continue to ignore Twitter.

Important things will still probably reach me in embedded shape or quote on other sites, but currently I cannot remember a single tweet at all, that not reading it, would have changed my life for the worse.

So no doubt good content is hidden underneath, but all this drama makes it not worth it for me.

I’ve been considering adding this bot to my account just for a chuckle: https://twitter.com/jules_su/status/1656005035631820804?s=46

But if this is what is happening to the prioritisation of replies it might actually be a useful change.

Does it only hide them for yourself? Because I can still see all those tweets that are meant to be hidden.

Ironically, this kept the overall bluecheck quality fairly stable. People used to be gifted bluechecks for knowing the right people or being some variety of celebrity or influencer, rather than because they were good or thoughtful writers.

Blocking blue ticks also works well for this

Actually Elon gifted thousands of blue ticks to any accounts that had over 1M followers and other notable accounts in order to obfuscate who paid for their tick and who did not.

Thousands? Thought it was hust three. Where did you find that out?

Most of the people I know of paying for it are paying for the other features like long posts.

Honestly, I don't know of a good solution to the coming LLM spam apocalypse other than something like this (paid verification of ID) or gov issued private keys.

Any ideas?

State-backed troll farms have million dollar budgets though, they could surely spend 8k/month on 1k accounts:

>A notorious Russian "troll factory" had a $1.25 million [monthly] budget in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to interfere in the US political system, according to charges filed by the Department of Justice.

https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-troll-farm-spent-mil...

Wait,doesn't twitter blue require ID verification?

I thought it famously doesn't, because Musk said it is too expensive?

And the official site also mostly just says, that mainly you have to pay and have a phone number. No sentence that they actually verify you are a living human being.

"Only accounts actively subscribed to Twitter Blue are eligible to receive the blue checkmark.

Our team uses an eligibility criteria on when the checkmark is given to ensure we maintain the integrity of the platform. Your account must meet the following criteria to receive or retain the blue checkmark:

    Complete: Your account must have a display name and profile photo

    Active use: Your account must be active in the past 30 days to subscribe to Twitter Blue

    Security: Your account must be older than 30 days upon subscription and have a confirmed phone number

    Non-Deceptive:

        Your account must have no recent changes to your profile photo, display name, or username (@handle)

        Your account must have no signs of being misleading or deceptive

        Your account must have no signs of engaging in platform manipulation and spam

https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...

So why do we still post Twitter conversations here? Shouldn't we be posting links to conversations on Mastodon instead? Or are we still somewhat addicted to Elon Musk's influence?

Out of all the questionable changes made it’s by far the worst. It has uniquely changed the tone of Twitter from a place where the discussion would be in some way shaped by the followers of the OP. I.e. You had some idea whether or not the replies would be interesting to you based on who was being replied to or maybe how controversial or informative the post was. It was complex but interesting dynamic. Now… it’s just a predictable hoard of of internet howler monkeys below any post that isn’t just some quiet odd corner of Twitter. It’s what is reducing my engagement and anecdotally that of anyone I know too. Even friends who decided to pay are tired of being “lumped in” with these people.

So who gets the megaphone, those who support the platform, or the ideological moderators behind the scenes?

It’s being passed around amongst the crypto spammers and each of the 10,000 or so “people” vying for the title of hottest 18 year old on OnlyFans.

I’m just saying it was better before, not perfect before.

It's so obvious when you use Twitter as to not really need confirmation.

It's not like a fuzzy statistical boost, it's literally just all Blue replies come above all non-Blue replies. The only exception is that a non-Blue reply can sometimes get boosted in order to be able to show a blue 2nd-level reply.

If you scroll through replies you'll often find a bunch of zero-like replies like "lol" and "me too" from Blue users, then below that a handful of insightful replies with dozens of likes, from non-Blue users. You can see why the latter are not gonna keep posting those replies much longer.

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