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Comment by blobbers | Hacker News Reader

This has to be the most moronic part of Elon's plan.

Firing everyone to improve operating margins, I understand that.

Iterating on features rapidly, even if they're not quite ready for prime time? That makes a lot of sense if you're trying to beat out the competition.

Rebranding your website and conference rooms? This sounds like a stupid waste of time and effort. If you wanted to create X the next twitter, just do a start up. Everyone would have signed up just because Elon Musk was using it. You didn't need to buy twitter for that.

Just stupid.

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He could have easily created a second app and done exactly what Meta did with Threads and had instant signups with a Twitter account, connecting the two. His plan is comically awful. Unfortunately, I loved Twitter, and felt it was the most valuable social network in terms of instant content, but it is now being ruined.

> but it is now being ruined.

I'm not a Twitter user, how has the user experience changed since Elon's taking over?

The new prioritization algorithm tends to shift the lowest quality posts to the top in comments and the algorithmic feed. They also broke old (good) Tweetdeck, and have announced that new (bad) Tweetdeck will cost money. The quality of ads on the service has also declined tremendously. They've begun restricting other functionality as well like rate-limiting tweet viewing and direct messages.

The sibling explains well, although it's missing key detail. If you pay Musk $8/month, your replies to tweets will appear above those who do not. Just imagine how that might work here at HN, and multiply it by the "way worse actors" factor to get an idea of the result.

Since 'verification' is now just a paid service, it's also much harder to separate bad actors from good actors. There are other minor changes that have degraded the service, but it's difficult to tell if they're permanent or just another live experiment.

>Since 'verification' is now just a paid service, it's also much harder to separate bad actors from good actors.

Doesn't the fact that a payment method has been setup _help_ and not _hinder_ the process of separating bad actors from good? I'm not a huge Twitter user by any means but I would think that verification step would cut down on automated spam.

I believe the old verification system actually checked that somebody was who they claimed to be — obviously this required human intervention. Verification now just checks that somebody can pay $8/month (or promise to as a once-off, then cancel, maybe?) So a bot pretending to be Joe Biden or Donald Trump would appear to be legitimate.

if twitter were very strongly moderated it might have helped, but as it stands now it's a $8 fee for scammers to push their scams to the top of any thread. Even if they get banned every so often it's a great value proposition. Can't tell you the number of verified 𝕏 crypto scams I've seen since the rebrand, most of which seem to still be up.

> You didn't need to buy twitter for that.

You do need to buy Twitter to avoid running afoul of the SEC.

You do need to buy (something) to dump lots of Tesla stock without cratering it.

> You do need to buy Twitter to avoid running afoul of the SEC.

Huh?

At some point in the process, there is a worry that Musks public statements about buying Twitter when he owned like 10% and then not making a real effort to do so may have been investigated as a pump and dump (especially if he followed through in his threat to sell his stock if he wasn't allowed to buy it).

Now, I would say that was maybe a month of a long process when that was true.

Oh I see. Yeah, unless the fines for that were going to be several billion, sounds like an insane reason to buy Twitter.

Musk's apparent thinking was that it would have been easier to wriggle his way out of the Twitter purchase than the fines (around 1bn, if I recall correctly)

turned out not to be the case!

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