"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.
The only person making any kind of assumption is actually you, by imagining that something is not possible or plausible because you project your personal expectations based on a personal notion of morality onto everyone.
If you take a step back and look at the scenario, you'll understand that nothing binds any third party to comply with your personal expectations, or follow your particular argument based on morality. Therefore your expectations are completely unfounded.
If you take a look at reality you'll find plenty of examples where projects which were previously open were afterwards closed and monetized. This is nothing new. Just take a look at, say, Reddit. Or even Twitter. Countless examples.
The more people who are involved in the decision making apparatus of an organization, not just at the top but throughout the entire net, the less human you know it is. If the entire company consists of a single person, it is a person and not an organization. But if a company consists merely of one owner/operator with one employee below them that tells the other things and is told things, the product of those two becomes less than human and may make decisions that neither of the two humans would approve of if they had the complete picture of what was going on. The larger the organization grows, the worse this problem becomes.
This isn't only true of companies, but any group of people. Groups of people are not themselves people.
What does this mean. What does Keynes have to do with moral companies? Is it made up?
And both people and boards can change for the worse.
Well that's of course OK with me : Bluesky should make their users pay. 10 % of users paying 1€/month, 1 % paying 10 €/month, for instance. That's ok, we're paying a service.
But the API access and federation should remain free.
...no.
APIs are not free cost-wise: They require server compute to serve requests, at minimum.
IMO: Require API users to put down $2 to obtain access, and offer higher tiers for higher limits. I.E What Twitter's API already does.
Nevertheless, it is my strong opinion that offering paid service is the only way to a healthy ecosystem, healthy competition, products that actually benefit the user, and the market that works as the market is supposed to (and that Big Social innovating[0] the subversion of this model is a tradegy with net negative effects on society).
Not offering paid[1] service to customers means ultimately either 1) dying or 2) making someone else your paying customer (e.g., the advertisers being offered the users as the product).[2] That “someone else”, by being the source of revenue, will dictate how the service evolves, and their interests will not be aligned with the users’ except by sheer accident.
In case of services like Bluesky, I doubt API access can be excluded from the equation, since it costs money, and when inevitably abused a lot of it, sadly.
Federation overhead could in theory be subsidized by paying customers, or there could be smart controls such as letting certain servers federate for free if it benefits paying users while charging others an honest fee[3].
Finally, let’s not forget the good old “charge for the app”. Sure, being open means someone can build another, cheaper app, and someone will use it, but believe it or not—that’s normal competition; make your app better, respect your users, turn profit.
Bluesky’s accepting large investment is a signal of not going in this direction, and is therefore worrying.
[0] It could be said that some companies (e.g., Adobe and Microsoft) did something like that earlier, subverting the market via offering a product for free by not seriously chasing pirates. When someone’s choice is between two paid products—instead of free awesome product everyone pirates vs. some mediocre paid product—the competition works much better. However, their core offers were still paid, and crucially those were not social media services that prey on our attention and anxiety.
[1] Before someone mentions the disadvantaged: offering subsidized options to those who need it is not mutually exclusive with a straightforward commercial model.
[2] There’s also 3) becoming another Wikipedia, which happens every so often… Let’s be realistic.
[3] A lot of courage would be required, as I can already hear the “walled garden” outcries.
2. My approach is not “one more product will be the answer”, more like “fixing the incentives and making the market work will enable many products”.
2. How do you fix the incentives short of fixing capitalism to remove software VCs?
2. You don’t need to get rid of VCs, it’s orthogonal.
Just make interoperation/complete API coverage required by law to be available to any user if you have more users than certain amount. It would neuter the lock-in when anyone can make a third-party GUI that has no ads and interoperates with any other social platform (meaning no “all my friends are there” effect).
It was yet another self-own, along with things like getting promoted on the feed.
X could have made money by selling features (eg tweetdeck) and other useful things, but they didnt.
Of course, then politcally it became a "this person is a MAGA person" so Musk had to start handing out "free" blue ticks to big accounts to avoid that appearance. To the point that people were putting in their name "didn't pay for blue"
But they did. Nobody pays for X premium just to get a blue tick. Being verified I guess is part of it, but they're paying to get other things including less ads, Grok access, longer posts & videos, communities, media studio, monetization, and other things.
I'm trying it to check out Grok, which is impressive now that it can handle current events and return posts and web links.
On the negatives, they claim "download videos" as a feature of paid plans. This is false advertising. Many videos cannot be downloaded. The uploader must specifically set the video as downloadable, and many do not. X is deliberately misleading about this. It was a key reason I paid.
Screenshot of page comparing tiers and features:
Twitter launched a paid tier, Twitter Blue, before the Musk takeover. It was a sensible move, offering additional features such as edit functionality for power users, but not harming the experience for those who chose not to buy into it.
Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts. In fact, there was as far as I know no visual indication that someone was a Twitter Blue user.
When Musk took over, one of his first changes was to combine Twitter Blue and the verified programme, removing any actual verification in favour of a claim that anyone who had paid was 'verified'. The company also artificially boosts the posts of those who have bought this new premium tier, which disadvantages everyone else.
Buying a blue tick is seen, quite rightly now, as buying an artificial boosting via the algorithm and that's just pure vanity.
Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." They were handed out randomly to some celebrities. bigcorps, and friends of Twitter employees. As far as I know a bluecheck was never handed out to anyone who wasn't who they said they were (although you could get them under pseudonyms too), but the "wrong" celebrities or normal people could not get them. It was a mark of social cachet, not authenticity.
It was launched after the company was sued by a sports star who was impersonated. Until Musk took over it could always be relied on as proof of an account’s authenticity.
What you’re complaining about isn’t that it represented something else, but that as with any large scale verification process it doesn’t scale well and the process was opaque.
Twitter cycled through various approaches to solve the problem. At first they merely reached out to people, based on the popularity of accounts representing them, their level of fame, and their risk of impersonation (or evidence of prior impersonation) and as and when the team had capacity. Therefore celebrities, politicians, and journalists were prioritised. However, this was a flawed process that was too US-centric and too US West Coast-centric on top of that.
They later opened up public applications but closed it down when they were overwhelmed with requests and couldn’t process them all. They ran into all the usual verification challenges, including language differences and the difficulty of verifying across countries. So they reverted back to the previous model while working on a way to use external factors to allow for a scaled up verification process in the future. That process stopped when Musk bought them.
The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks. The company even verified Jason Kessler, though that stirred up a public controversy that forced it to pause the programme for a bit. [1]
It wasn’t a perfect programme of course, but it did what it said it would: If you saw that an account had a blue tick you could trust it meant it was an authentic account that Twitter had verified. That aspect of the system never failed.
[0] https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-verified-accounts-2 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/technology/jason-kessler-...
Bluecheck -> authentic. Authentic !> bluecheck.
There was no path for most people almost all of the time to get a bluecheck, and they could be removed for arbitrary reasons having nothing to do with your identity. The "process" consisted of someone at Twitter deciding you were worthy, based on arbitrary criteria including "you're my friend."
> The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks.
Having bad politics doesn't mean one doesn't have social cachet. You yourself say here "notable" - but again, just being notable was not enough, though it was a big help. And of course, if you had the right friends, you could be completely non-notable.
Your post begins with "that's false", but the rest of it agrees with what I said.
In many old Twitter circles, having a bluecheck made you an object of derision for precisely these reasons - it didn't signify authenticity, it was a social marker that frequently came with inane tweets and thin skin that was perceived to arise due to an idea they thought they were "elite."
That is clearly false. The blue check was an accurate signal of authenticity through verification by Twitter. What it was not was a universal verification mechanism that scaled to being able to verify everyone who used the platform. Those are two different things, and the lack of universality does not mean that the programme was not useful in valuable in providing a means to prove authenticity and avoid impersonation of the many people it did cover.
Moreover, the company was actively working on ways to scale it up into being able to reliably verify many more people before Musk bought it.
Now all that is gone, and a blue check means nothing to other users of the platform other than as a sign that the holder is paying for premium features. It's no longer a trustworthy verification mechanism.
The fact is nobody paid attention to the blue check except the people who had one. The outcry was because a set of people felt elite because of their blue checks and were upset that anyone could get one. Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump or Kanye West impersonators are not an issue on the platform.
The only reason it’s not worse is because of inertia and the fact that most public figures are still using the accounts they had when verification was in place. That won’t last. It’s also why public figures who are leaving for other platforms usually opt to keep their X accounts in place but dormant.
Kanye was in fact impersonated on Twitter in the past, it was one of the key reasons behind the introduction of Verified Accounts.[0]
I have also seen impersonators for all three of those you mentioned, especially in terms of crypto bots for Trump. However those are also three of the most heavily policed and watched profiles by the company’s understaffed moderating team, who proactively monitor for impersonations. That’s not true for lesser public figures: I just searched for a hand full of well-known journalists and found several impersonation profiles for them all.
What’s worse, their impersonation reporting function does not let you report the impersonation of someone who is not an active user. I know another public figure who doesn’t have an account there, doesn’t want one, but now hasn’t been able to get them to do anything about an impersonator who is using his name to scam others.
The current model is badly broken and decidedly worse than the verification system that existed before.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/facing-lawsuits-and-compla...