Consumers complaining on X targeted by scammers after verification changes | Hacker News Reader

Consumers complaining on X targeted by scammers after verification changes

theguardian.com

61 pointsnickcotter52 comments

This seems like a problem caused because they retained the blue tick at all. Now that they're shedding the old branding, they should drop it completely and create a premium badge.

What was once the blue tick now seems to be the gold tick, and it doesn't just go to insiders, it goes to anybody with $1K a month to pay for it. You can do plenty of account verification for $1K/mo customers.

I use the eight dollar extension [1]. Basically it replaces the blue verified tick with a dollar sign for paid accounts. I started using it when there was a still a mix of old verified and new paid accounts, both of which were given the same verified sign by twitter, but I kept it even after because it feels more truthful to reality, as it just informs that one has paid to twitter. I think this should be the default.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/eightdollars/

Do you have a screenshot of what the feed looks like?

Initially thought X was a metasyntactic variable, then realised it is post-rebrand Twitter. Would be funny if everyone just keeps calling it Twitter :P

I've seen it called the company previously known as Twitter. Maybe with a nod to Prince.

Have recently started seeing “Xitter” as a reference to the site. Possibly because it can be pronounced like a crude slang for a restroom, or just to make sure everyone realizes “Twitter” isn’t going away.

I really don't like the rename. I was worried there for a second if something was going on in the X-Universe - read as in X.org, X11, xterm, ... and the sentence didn't parse at all. Then I realized it's about dang twitter.

Agreed. Twitter had achieved the novel recognition that so many companies kill for: universal verbification (I.e. I’m gonna tweet this).

Destroying that kind of brand equity over a personal obsession will go down as an all-time failure in tech marketing lore.

It's trivial to disregard company name changes.

I'm going to keep calling it Twitter until Elon stops dead-naming his kid.

just anecdote but even in twitter days we saw tons of impersonator accounts that named themselves similar to a bank's official handle.

they used to respond the fastest to customer complaints (better than the real customer service team), politely apologie on behalf of the bank, and ask for PII over dm or provide a link.

this was for banks in India, so twitter enforcement of shutting down impersonation and scams was not very prompt / effective

Even for other companies in India, see this for Paytm for example: https://twitter.com/search?q=%E1%B4%98%E1%B4%80%CA%8F%E1%B4%...

(It uses small caps Latin characters to avoid detection).

Or this long list of impersonated accounts for PhonePe: https://twitter.com/search?q=phonepe%20care&src=typed_query&...

At least back then a blue check was an account that had some sort of verification

Well, cross out another thing that Twitter used to be good for.

Complaints on Twitter used to actually get results. I did it, a couple of times, over the years.

I haven't figured out how. But apparently, there is a logic hole people can exploit to insert their own content into anyone's "Following" tab without "Sponsored" or "Ads" tag (and without anyone in your following to retweet or reply). Would like to know if anyone noticed the same and how the game was played.

That's the second time on HN where I thought some article was about the window-system :(

It's interesting in this day and age to see a platform degrade at the speed twitter did in quality, stability, user experience, etc. I suppose what's the most surprising is that it seems it was intentional. I wonder how much Musk has been sandboxed at Tesla and SpaceX? Perhaps he was encouraged to do the twitter deal to get him away from the other two companies. Like a shiny object to occupy him and his time.

It definitely wasn't intentional. If it had been you couldn't have done a better job of it but there is no evidence that it was intentional, and plenty that it was not.

I believe there were complaints that Musk made decisions that were incredibly unpopular and reckless. Laying off important staff, creating a sweatshop environment, policy changes, etc. All these decisions were intentional, I'm sure he was warned of the possible consequences but didn't care.

Yes, but the fact that individual decision were intentional doesn't add up to that the overall goal was to wreck it.

So you'd need some sort of legal document declaring intent to conclude that it was intentional?

Twitter was the center of the Arab Spring. There's plenty of powerful people in the world who would be happy if it went away. And the users migrating to Facebook, a platform far more friendly to censorship favoring existing power structures, is probably also desirable.

Nobody, not even Elon Musk burns that much money on a whim, besides, he tried everything he could to get out of the deal.

All these weird 'genius play' defenses really are hard to follow, people make mistakes, even Elon Musk and if he had been able to walk away from it he would have.

Perhaps the Saudi ownership component is larger than we've been led to believe?

Yes, Musk understood (perhaps too late) that he has Teslas to make and sell, and China is the second largest market for them, and CCP would be aware if he owns Twitter. Now he is between rock and hard place because his financial interests don't play well with his public image as "pro free speech". So maybe killing Twitter is even not too bad a deal.

Plus his idea of X as "everything app" means Twitter will not exist as such anyway, ie. at best it'll be killed by quickly transforming into something else. The rumors that it will require ID verification seems to support it. Instead of a single common space it will be balkanized between nations so that he can satisfy everyone by showing different content (ie. if you verify as Chinese you will see only pro-CCP propaganda, same with Arab countries etc).

He could have payed 2 billion and walked instead of losing 25 billion plus :))

Pride can be deadly....

I don’t believe that’s accurate. There was a 1 billion dollar penalty clause, but that wouldn’t cover him simply changing his mind. Twitter could have sued him for breach of contract and potentially taken many billions of dollars (all fuzzy memories at this point, I could be wrong).

In my opinion, the simplest explanation is that Musk isn’t very good at business. He thought he was, but he mistook the successes of the people around him as his own.

To be fair, Twitter was headed in a downward spiral towards the end of Dorsey's reign as well. The political scene was a dumpster-fire tier mess, the remaining communities were spread out everywhere and the whole thing struggled to turn a profit. It's no wonder the previous shareholders sold out when they got the chance; Twitter's failure was writing on the wall.

It's fun to dog on psudointelligent billionaires like Musk and Ellison every once in a while, but Twitter as a platform just doesn't seem to work. The funding isn't stable, the staffing is too expensive and the expectations from the community are too demanding.

Twitter wasn’t great, but it wasn’t a dumpster fire. I think the evidence is clear that the previous shareholders sold because Musk was (initially) prepared to massively overpay, not because they didn’t like the business. If they didn’t like the business they could have just sold their shares.

It seems that many people have already forgotten the history of the aquisition. Twitter's board initially took a poison pill defense to stop Musk, but then Musk threatened a tender offer to bypass the board. Of course this was all before he tried to back out of the deal. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/technology/twitter-board-...

Maybe the shit show and specter of Musk's ownership dragged down the stock price such that at the beginning they didn't find his offer attractive, but later they couldn't say no?

Maybe when you engage is random speculation you should at least try to check your facts?

The stock price was 45.08 when Musk made his offer for twitter and 51.70 when the twitter board accepted it.

Twitter was at 77.63 in March 2021. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/delisted/TWTR/twitter/sto...

How is that relevant? that's a year before Musk made his offer.

It's relevant because long-term investors may not have believed that $54 is the max value of the stock. If it was at $77 before, then why not again in the future?

So completely irrelevant to the claim that Musk's ownership bid "dragged down the price" which is clearly false.

Of course some investors believed it was possible to hit $77 again, but the probability and timeframe of doing that apparently seemed worse than other available investments given the economic conditions that lead to that price in the first place. This is why the general consensus is that Musk overpaid for Twitter given the market conditions when he bought it.

But that would defeat the purpose of random speculation?

Which defeats the purpose of constructive discussion. Please source your claims rather than being lazy.

Yes. The board of Twitter did not appear to want to be bought by Musk and refused his initial advances. But when it became clear he was serious and willing to commit legally to paying a premium for the company they could hardly say no. At first it seemed like maybe he was trolling.

It had been profitable in the relatively recent past and I assume that like the others, it could have gotten back on track with a standard round of layoffs. If it wasn't for the extra debt and advertiser exodus.

> I suppose what's the most surprising is that it seems it was intentional.

This is a surprising conclusion. There was no conspiracy to sink Twitter. Musk just failed, you know, like every mortal human being does from time to time. What's interesting is that if he had started with Twitter instead of other companies, maybe you wouldn't know his name today. Being lucky and having the right people around you have a lot more impact than people like to admit.

Twitter/X is still an extant and operating business (and perhaps more sustainable given its reduced spend vs. when he took it over) so it may be premature to say he failed.

As a fan of Twitter, as well as the things he was saying about online publishing at the time he took it over, I rather hope he can be successful. The loginwall reappearing and the ToSing of the elonsjet account or whatever are troubling, but I think it would be great to see Twitter make a (sustainable, profitable) comeback.

I think the login wall is the only big mistake; it will chase away institutions like governments, schools, etc. that used twitter as a newsfeed. The last thing he should be doing is chasing away wholesomeness.

Yes, expenses are going down but revenue is going down even faster as advertisers view Twitter as toxic.

But why did you ever have any reason to believe that Elon cared about “free speech” based on his previous behavior toward critics?

If you take the average reported Twitter salary from before the layoffs and multiply it by the estimate of number of people laid off, the annual savings is approximately equal to the annual interest repayment on the loan that Elon Musk used to pay for Twitter. Ultimately, he didn't save anything.

>he's intentionally sinking twitter

>he's incompetent and been deliberately distracted from Tesla and SpaceX

do you see how these points don't really follow from each other?

You are getting this impression only because of the HN/tech bubble. Twitter quality has gone up and so has usage.

I had to delete my account because the bots and feature degradation got so bad it wasn’t worth it. Plus the pay-to-win blue checks at the top of every tweet certainly earned their… negative reputation. They hurt content quality, to put it very nicely.

> Twitter quality has gone up and so has usage.

What statistics did you use to reach that conclusion?

Or is that just an impression gathered from some other "bubble?"

Official Twitter stats: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684978651857596429

*Official Twitter stats

*-Coming from Elon

Imagine believing that the quality and quantity of Twitter discourse has increased, and then having the gall to accuse other people of being in a bubble.

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