Elon Musk says new X users have to pay to tweet | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk says new X users have to pay to tweet

qz.com

20 pointspaulpauper21 comments

I get a lot of spam on Twitter. I feel like you could eliminate a lot of it with basic heuristics -no AI required. Most of the bots that follow me or like my post are either trying to sell crypto or are scantly clad women. The bot accounts usually end with a lot of digits. The handles, accompanied with the fact that I’m overweight and not attractive, makes it easy to identify bots.

They know. One of their teams (x ai?) announced something recently including a joke about the pussy-in-bio spam - that's how aware they are. Yet, they won't apply the most basic filter possible.

Elon Musk complained about bot spam while buying Twitter in hopes to drive it's value down.

Elon Musk does absolutely nothing about bot spam after buying Twitter in hopes of not driving it's value down.

Dont new Twitter accounts have autogenerated usernames? There is a demographic of people who who dont post at all.

Seems like fighting bots is harder than he thought.

it's not that hard. he fired probably a lot of the people whose job it was to do that , and lack of imagination on his part.

A Red Queen's race is very hard. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Red_Queen's_race

Does it really apply if you don't do the bare minimum? I wouldn't complain if they were fighting automated building of sophisticated account networks that guide you towards some hidden ad. But until they do a pattern match on the most popular spam words used every day, Red Queen is not an issue.

I have found that they are pretty reliably hidden behind the "unsafe replies" section much of the time, so that are clearly able to identify most of them but are unwilling to actually ban them.

yeah that is the purpose of "show more". It is designed to hide spam

bots pay for blue checkmarks, and they'll pay to tweet too. twitter needs the money to stay afloat, and elon doesn't really have a reason to say no

his initial concern over bots was twofold: 1) he desperately needed a way to get out of a deal he made on ~vibes~ instead of due-diligence 2) elon was a mega-famous account. The #1 thing that impacts QoL for mega-famous accounts is a 24/7 firehose of bot mentions and replies

ok then spammers will just sit on the accounts for a few months. aged accounts probably work better for spamming anyway. useless solution

he's slowly getting there, one predictable mistake at a time. The only way to suppress bots / trolls is to have tiered permissions. X should be read only freemium, pay to post premium

Once you force pay-to-post schemes, you are shutting down new adopters.

Once your inflow of new adopters trickles to a halt, your business is dead.

If by 'getting there' you mean 'putting the final nail in the coffin', sure, whatever.

Predictable Elon Musk dunking, but I'd like to see other people's ideas. Generative AI is an existential threat to social media. At least he's thinking about what to do about it.

> but I'd like to see other people's ideas

Naive Bayes. They're at the level where that would improve things. Start with basics before gen AI.

> Predictable Elon Musk dunking, but I'd like to see other people's ideas.

Not firing teams responsible for enforcing terms of service.

Not firing teams responsible for moderation.

Not destroying the purpose of user verification systems and turning them instead to a negligible revenue scheme.

Should I go on?

Here's an easy one: actually do the vetting for verified bluechecks that he said they would do.

>but I'd like to see other people's ideas

Rehire the content moderation personnel he fired after the acquisition?

I understand that cash is tight following the implantation of certain policy decisions so I’d probably undo those too.

I imagine large global brands pay more for ads than the gambling sites, crypto scams, and alibaba junk peddlers I get ads for nowadays.

Elon Musk, I walking example of how to trash a social media company with hubris.

Well done, Elon.

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