Scammers posing as customer service agents on X as companies leave platform

In business, you may find that the two are synonymous with each other when you want to make an attractive platform.

Why would they pay for users to send them DMs on Twitter when they can point people to their support site for free?

There's a massive difference between going from free to say a few hundred dollars a month to $42k a month. It's not even whether the org can afford $42k, it's the process. Say 300 USD a month is something a low level boss can easily fit in an existing budget. But $42K a month is something you need to change the budget for. You need to go up very high the chain for that and prove it is worth it. Hint: it is not for most. And even if it does, more than a few orgs will not do it abruptly unless it threatens their core business. Say, you are an airline and a war breaks out so now you need to fly less fuel efficient routes, of course you will find the money for more fuel. But for this, with less than a month notice?

I've had the displeasure of working with their "new" APIs - the documentation is all over the place, their playground and examples are non-functional, the dashboard looks and works like someone started it as a "your first react project" and didn't bother finishing, and the prices are astronomical.

Exactly what you would expect from an underfunded and understaffed team at a social media site that doesn't want to be a social media site anymore, I would be surprised if anyone was actually working on this beyond what they need internally. The developer sign-up has been broken for weeks by the way, it will show you a 500 error in the console without any feedback and you have to spam it to let you in, like most other things in their console.

Initially, yes. It later came to be available for notable accounts, or ones Twitter deemed of public interest. That isn't a mark of authenticity, per se.

Even then it wasn't a reliable mark of authenticity as Twitter would often remove verification from authentic accounts as a form of punishment.

The platform itself had a higher degree of quality, because the authenticity of a brand was verified and impersonation was less possible.

Rarity tends to evolve towards prestige. I've witnessed it with things as mundane as office chairs. All the chairs were the same model, a small subset were in company colors and developed very high demand. Often, departing employees would "will" their special chairs to colleagues

I assume you're speaking about the quality of the content, which would be subjective, but I think platform quality is relevant here. My personal use for twitter was following some bands and artists I like, I followed them there because I knew it was them or someone authorized to represent them. Once God Emperor Elon took over that went out the window and the quality of the platform, for me (and others), went to 0.

Or browse HN for 5 minutes and see the term appear over and over and over.

It was the companies' idea to make it so convoluted to reach a human that the default became public shaming

Yeah, I remember during one of Mojang's migrations I lost access to my Minecraft account. Nothing happened from my communications through support. The only reason I have a twitter account was to whine at a Mojang representative and it actually resulted in the problem being solved.

I hate it.

> You couldn't (and still can't) get customer support from Google and many other customer-hostile companies

Not to derail you but I have an anecdote. I had an issue with my Google Fi account. Support was a breeze. I completed a web form that said "call me" and within a minute or two I was on the phone with a very helpful human who actually fixed my problem.

It wasn't their idea, but it was their choice. They chose to support this, now they're choosing to stop supporting it. Surprise, that's causing even more issues.

I understand this was a business decision, I just think it was always a risky one.

> I got far better service from airlines via Twitter (RIP) than I did by phone

That's the problem, not the solution. Why the hell was this the case? I guess because it was public.

Either way it sucks. Obviously (good) CS should be via a private channel.

In a lot countries outside the US this kind of customer support happens on Whatsapp.

> It was pretty great actually, I got far better service from airlines via Twitter (RIP) than I did by phone.

Oh, I totally believe it, and that is exactly my point. X offering the best-in-class UX for customer service is great for users but (in my opinion) an egregious failure for the companies affected.

Companies are choosing to operate a critical portion of their business using somebody else's infrastructure with no contractual obligations! X is not responsible for architecting their platform to suit a service they do not offer and that nobody pays for.

> Not in my experience, they just moved to DMs.

I'm horrified but unsurprised that people are willing to share their personal info such as trip itineraries (hopefully not credit card info) with X. I am surprised (still horrified) companies choose this too.

To be clear, I am not a Musk apologist. I will never have an X account, and that's yet another issue with the current system. I can now expect to be treated as a second class citizen to airlines unless I opt to share my details with Musk.

> the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising

This cuts both ways. If you have a well-oiled customer service team working in public, great! But if something major goes wrong one day and you have 3 million people @ing you with no easy way to identify their account in your system and suddenly your hashtag starts trending... that's free advertising too.

I think nothing of the sort. I'm currently watching them shut down an avenue of support people use and like, and I think it's because they failed to assess the inherent risks that have always existed with using the service in this manner.

Twitter is the only viable support option with some places. During the pandemic lockdowns, anything somewhat complex involving the California DMV had to start with contacting them on Twitter. I guess cause that's a whole separate intake process that was more nimble than their site.

It's likely KLM probably didn't think integrating Twitter with its customer support platform is worth the $40000[1] per month Musk was asking for.

1. Off the top of my head. May have been $50000 or in that ballpark. He seemed to overestimate the value of Twitter to corporates and transport agencies, and that the flow of value was in both directions. It's insane to think a quasi-governmental agency would spend tens of thousands to tell Twitter users the train or bus will be late; then again he probably doesn't know how much a banana costs, to steal from the Arrested Development trope.

No, it's not. It's due to Musk's personal product decisions and erratic behavior.

Which is why you have the option of hiding the blue checkmark now.

There are a few extensions for your browser that will hide blue checked people:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blue-check-hider/j...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blue-blocker/

I've no idea how well these particular ones work, but there seem to be a lot of them going around. Caveat Emptor.

My local credit union sent me a damn email from a DIFFERENT EMAIL ADDRESS to my private email that said I had "an important message" on my account that I had to click a link to go to a THIRD UNAFFILIATED WEBSITE I had never heard of before to get it.

I emailed their support directly asking if I was being phished. They said I was not. I still didn't look at the "important message"

Really glad my accounts with them are unimportant.

So he just wanted to blow away 30 billion of his own money? He felt he had too much money but he did not want to give the money to the needy or anything woke like that he just wanted to waste it in an extravagant gesture?

I think the answer is different. He wanted it to succeed he was sure it would succeed, but like many people blinded by previous success and personality worship he thought it would be easy and a bunch of half baked simple solutions would be sufficient. Fire most of your employees and increase fees for most of your users. Seems very simple, right? Guess not.

What would he have wanted it for then? Just a toy to mess around with and annoy people as it fails? Or he's burning it down as part of some as-yet-unrevealed long term strategy?

I have to think Hanlon's razor applies.

That’s giving him way too much credit. Let’s not forget he tried his hardest to back out of the deal before the Delaware courts forced him to buy (based on the terms he agreed to, or pay $1B to get out). If he wanted to tank Twitter, he would have bought it happily.

No, he said some things online, then signed a legally binding document, then realized he was in over his head, then proceeded to perform exactly as well as an owner in over their head (actually worse, since the status quo was not nearly this bad).

Nothing! In fact that's exactly why KLM is leaving: X started charging for the use of their service.

>He was forced to due to ad revenue plummeting as a reaction to his own actions and policies.

That’s incorrect. The need to diversify away from ad revenue was a topic discussed with Jack prior to the acquisition. The rationale was that advertisers effective control content moderation policies due to the revenue which they provide.

This is true. Whether it’s bad on or not depends on your viewpoint and ideological position. What advertisers want for now, e.g. with regard to social policy, may be aligned with what you or I want now.

But there’s no guarantee that will be true in the future.

>I’d argue there’s a reasonable middle ground between “a bloated team” and “just the die-hards.

Layoffs are painful, and they were handled poorly. But there can be no doubt the prior company was massively overstaffed.

If you’re going to cut, generally you want to cut deep to prevent future rounds. Arguably not increasing the size of the first layoffs led to the second, and more people could have been preserved in total.

There’s very little virtue in “middle ground” in this context.

> Community notes existed before Musk, and their role is to dispute a claim or provide context. They don’t moderate content in any way.

It doesn’t moderate content in any way… except for placing large labels to “dispute a claim or provide context.”

Sure, if you very narrowly constraint content moderation to the Trust and Safety definition of removing content and administering bans it doesn’t.

Birdwatch existed, but the prominence of the feature and improved reliability of the feature weren’t launched until after acquisition.

It solved the main edge cases for content moderation by only displaying labels when moderators who disagreed sufficiently on other issues agreed on that particular label.

It has significantly impacted the disinformation at scale problem for the better.

Yeah, that’s the only bad argument.

I said “parts of the recommender system code.”

This is the kind of highly emotional reaction that’s not helpful.

Yes, I am quite familiar with building ML models, both training and building my own for which I’ve been paid large sums of money, and I’m here to tell you that you don’t know what you’re taking about.

There’s so much more information about an ML system than just the trained model that is important for understanding the effects of the system on a society, and its legal, ethical, and social ramifications.

Just seeing the type of RS being used, the ranking approach, and the information on SimClusters is enough for RAI folks to start to understand the ecosystem effects and how that can show up downstream in social effects.

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-sourc...

Isn't that his point? The normal channels (that the company directly controls) don't work, so everyone ended up using the twitter wall of shame out of desperation.