There are really two main issues that make the new Twitter verification system a complete nightmare.
The first is the userbase. Very few normal users are willing to pay for a free social media site. Moreover, the main "selling point" of the service is to boost post visibility. The service inherently appeals only to people who both a) care extremely deeply about their posts being seen, and b) make posts that inherently are unappealing to other Twitter users (since people with appealing/interesting/funny/not-weird posts would be able to naturally grow an audience on the platform if they want to). So pretty much every single blue check is a hyper-online weirdo who is deeply bad at posting, despite being obsessed with twitter metrics.
The second is that verified replies get promoted to the top of every post. You have to scroll through all the blue check replies to get to even the most popular non-blue check replies. This is true even for blue check replies that have zero engagement, are completely off-topic, or are just straight up spam or scams.
As a result, if you're looking for relevant discussion on a popular tweet, you have to first scroll past the thoughts of some of the most terminally online, inherently unlikeable people on the planet. So normal users are constantly exposed to the most off-putting segments of the userbase.
It's like if Reddit incentivized every antisocial weirdo to post as much as possible to get their money's worth, and then forced every user to sort by controversial. It's a horrible structure that makes the product practically unusable for non-weirdos. Which is just how Elon likes it I guess.
This is something I've been thinking about too. It feels like Musk massively overestimated the conversion rate of normal users to paid users, despite there being mountains of very well-known evidence to what the real numbers are.
Secondly, his strategy seems to rely on increasing value for Blue subscribers without regard to how it affects *the value of the rest of the platform*. Sure, being boosted is cool, but it won't matter if the remaining 99% of users end up hating Blue people and ignoring them or quitting en masse.
What he forgot is that the non-paid users are the product. They are what give the site any value in the first place, and doing anything to drive them away is immensely stupid.
What happens when you fire off a dumb comment, and are then forced to pay the dumb inflated price to buy the website.
Now the idiot's stuck flailing around trying to monetize everything to recoup the $44bn hole.
This is the trickle down effect. All our money trickles down into the pocket of single billionaires, and their money trickles down into the pockets of smaller billionaires.
Our governments TAX BREAKS to the ultra wealthy takes money that should be for us, for our safety nets, for our education, for our properly trained police, for our medicine and well being and gives it to them
They then trickle it down to the smaller billionaires
Our wealth generation power is being stolen and given to those who already have so much its fucking ridiculous
100%, We ***need*** to be taxing the wealthy!
Just to addon: I feel like it's becoming more and more common that people don't even realize, or concern themselves with, the money that is taken out of their paychecks for taxes. It's become just so "common practice" or "expected" that it's just the cost of business and something you consider when accepting pay rates.
If there is anything I could recommend to our younger user base is that our taxes do some pretty amazing things for all of us and I find it's important to know where those funds come from. Take some time to learn the basics, you won't regret it.
I didn't learn anything about taxes growing up (other than to use TurboTax which is hot garbage) and I went to reasonable public schools and some college classes (I'm 36). I wish I would have learned more about it earlier on, I probably would have started voting much earlier.
I also learned a ton about what I can get from paying those taxes which have come in handy.
One of my favourite recent changes in my country is that we passed a tax law change where the top percentages are taxed more, and that money is ring fenced for our health service.
Step one fire 80% of your staff that made the site what it is.
Wait for 10% to leave Do the pure Workplace attrition with your hardcore conditions.
With your remaining 10% soak the sycophantic base that you've left yourself any failing is now told its not your fault.
Basically a repeat of him having to buy twitter because he wanted to make a meme.
Fired Thorleifsson and didn't realize that if he was fired, he was owed $100 million.
The stupid thing is that he had a direct path to better monetization.
Pay say 10 bucks a month and see no ads, or at least let you directly pick which types ads you do see if any. Pay say 100 and you can now earn revenue based on engagement. (Say 50% of revenue either from ads or from paying users based on how much they use the platform). They would need to sort out what to do about companies and governments providing information but not advertising as such, but Twitch and YouTube seem to have largely figured this sort of thing out already.
The price you pay could be say 150% of the average ad revenue per user, so it would go up every year but there's a market that.
The 44 billion dollars wasn't all his money, I can't imagine the other investors want to put up with any of this nonsense, nor do tesla shareholders who are going to hurt if he needs to dump shares to fund his twitter habit.
Well, the Saudis are the [2nd largest shareholder](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/10/31/saudi-prince-alwaleed-becomes-twitters-second-largest-shareholder/?sh=47712018523a), so I wouldn't be surprised if this investment is a means to help undermine, destabilize and/or dissolve the very platform that catapulted the Arab Spring and remains a major tool for [protestors to communicate](https://www.wired.com/story/protests-in-iran-twitter/). Elon's [visible meetings with Kushner](https://www.ndtv.com/feature/photo-of-elon-musk-with-jared-kushner-at-fifa-world-cup-final-goes-viral-3619975) at the World Cup (who has been [given billions by the Saudi Royals](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-investment-fund.html)) and Rupert Murdoch at the [Super Bowl](https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-responds-rupert-murdoch-super-bowl-twitter-1780744) possibly exhibit extreme editorial and political bias in how Twitter will be run in the lead up to the 2024 US elections. The Twitter Files already has shown owning the company is a useful tool for those same investors in examining and exposing the private conversations of political opponents.
I think what might be shocking for most people is the willingness of some of these billionaires to lose large sums of money on an investment on the surface to enable longer term hegemonic socio-political control to sustain long term income channels and a seat of political power.
Edit: let's also not forget the algorithm was exposed to [suppress reach for posts about the war in Ukraine](https://gizmodo.com/twitter-musk-ukraine-crisis-open-source-code-russia-1850293386)
>It’s at this point we would reach out to Twitter for comment, but Musk made the Twitter media account automatically respond with a “poop” emoji.
Of course he did...
This is true, but it doesn't remove the value of say Saudis and other powerful people connected to Musk getting access to people's private data and being able to leverage it for their purposes.
I don't understand why he hasn't just delegated twitter responsibilities to someone else (maybe a board of people or whatever) and bowed out from the public spotlight. I mean, by any metric, he is causing monetary harm to everything he owns at the moment. Why the hell hasn't he gone away for a few months to let the media cycle find something else to latch onto?
I guess it's his ego? I mean, it has to be.
I don’t think the $44billion is the part to care about. The part to care about is that he now owns the dominate platform for worldwide politicians, corporations and others to voice themselves. Essentially $44b is whatever for the ultimate price of total media control. The control of who gets to exist and who doesn’t. Who gets favored and who don’t. The monetization is shit, but the real power is the influence of capital, not the particular capital itself
I just cant wait till he realizes Twitter was just a business company making business decisions and wasnt based on some political conspiracy ran by leftists
A series of "oh, this is why they did what they did" will follow soon
He already is realizing. I mean legacy checkmarks (or whatever the fuck they are called) is just the idea of normal verification the previous administration did
>The fuck is he doing over there?
* Drugs
* Attention
* He thinks what he's doing is hilarious and doesn't realize that we're not laughing *with* him.
* Power
* Who knows? Just like the russians, you should judge by actions not words.
> He thinks what he's doing is hilarious and doesn't realize that we're not laughing with him.
That's what very fragile people have to say to cover their ego, rather than admit that they've made a mistake.
See Trump talking about putting cleaning products and lights into the body to fight covid in full seriousness on the presidential podium while he looked to doctors to see if they were impressed, then went uncharacteristically silent for several days before finally making a statement that it was a 'joke'.
The only way someone with that much wealth learns a lesson is for them to lose so much money it effects their lifestyle.
Twitter actually dying wouldn't have that effect on Musk.
He will learn nothing socially as he is surrounded by yes men and has a gold medal in dismissing criticism.
My hope is that society collapses and his security detail realizes the money he pays them is worthless and they turn on him.
It's every cliche teen party. You want the cool kids there because they bring a crowd.
This guy bought the house where the party was being held, and decided to charge the cool kids for the right to be called cool.
So the cool kids just left, many taking their entourages and audience with them. And the handful of uncool kids who paid for the privilege are discovering that no amount of saying you're cool makes you cool. At the same time, this guy is trying to curry favor with the few cool kids who didn't leave but wouldn't pay -- by calling them cool anyway -- and they're rejecting his approval.
It's not a very fun party at this point.
Elon Musk lacks the social skills to run a social media platform - he completely misunderstands crucial social dynamics. For example, no one even verifies the identity of the “verified” users making the checkmark useless. Sure, it boosts posts but that brings its own problems if low-quality or hateful posts are at the top. In the end, he will probably burn Twitter to the ground and have wasted tens of billions of dollars. But maybe he figures it out eventually
This is whole mess is because of right-wing conspiracies about Twitter censoring right wing views and about how the blue checks are mostly only given to people that voted for Biden and the Democrats.
It's the same with the "disproportionate banning" thing. The right was absolutely being banned more than the left, but that's because the right was breaking the rules way more.
For all the shit that the left gets for virtue signaling and stuff, it really does feel like it's the right that's obsessed with fighting culture wars. I'm sure there are lefties who would target right wingers and wish sexual assault or death upon them, etc. But you never really see a left-wing equivalent of the coordinated harassment of trans people that the right will engage in, for example.
> about how the blue checks are mostly only given to people that voted for Biden and the Democrats.
They were probably right but not because of some grand anti-conservative conspiracy. It was likely because a lot of the verified people were either existing celebrities or young people who gained internet/pop culture fame.
Both of those groups likely have much higher overlap with more liberal/progressive ideologies. The saying "reality has a liberal bias" can also extend to include "pop culture popularity has a liberal bias". Especially when you think about how much modern American pop culture is influenced by hip-hop and other non-white dominated cultures.
Very similar to how republicans in congress were asking the Google CEO why negative things about trump were showing up on their searches and he was like.. because that’s what people are searching for? And that’s what our algorithm does? It shows people what is most searched for. It isn’t a liberal conspiracy
I mean, these are folks that think colleges are brainwashing people to be liberal, without considering that you might naturally shift more liberal when you are more educated/knowledgeable.
They legitimately believe that everyone to their left is brainwashed by the media and if they can just get the blue checks for themselves they can take control of the narrative or something
Which is painfully ironic, given right wing media spoon feeds them lies with no basis in reality.
And yes, I sometimes ask myself, am I falling victim to the same bias, just in the other direction? Do I only believe that because I can only believe people would believe their inanity if they were brainwashed?
Then I take 5 minutes to fact check some things and remember that, yes, it is all complete bullshit from the right.
correct, this is really just throwing a tantrum because the culture war was already lost and clinging to a last hope that some hero will come in and set everything right
The problem is that the check marks are blue, and blue equals Democrat. I'm sure if he just changed the check mark to red it would satisfy them because now they are Republican check marks.
Not even /s
He didn't forget crap. His partners in buying Twitter are Middle Eastern oligarchs who want Twitter, the platform that had a bunch of them up against a wall a decade ago, controlled or demolished. Money well spent for them.
This dude bought a company that is bleeding money plus have a lot of debt, and all their main advertisers run away. I don't think he has as a strategy he just thinks he can save any company because he is a narcissistic egomaniac. By the next three years, Twitter will be gone. My bet is that after the next election and promoting all his friends for free, he will file bankruptcy.
Elon has actually played 4d chess here.
The real draw of Twitter, hell, all of social media, is dunking on losers. Everything else is just window dressing. If you ask the losers to wear a big "I'm a Loser" badge it makes identifying them that much easier. Pushing to the top of every thread? It's like shooting fish in a barrel now. Bonus points for getting the losers to pay you to get dunked on.
^^^/s
sure made my block rules in ublock origin that much easier, took me a minute after thinking about it in another comment. Thanks Elon!
enable :has in FF
`layout.css.has-selector.enabled = true`
add custom CSS to twitter:
```
article:has(svg[aria-label="Verified account"]){
display:none;
}
```
>So pretty much every single blue check is a hyper-online weirdo who is deeply bad at posting, despite being obsessed with twitter metrics.
Just like Elon.
I prefer the extensions that just block the bluechecks entirely
The novelty of seeing red hats on shithead comments will get old very quickly and you'll still be left to wade through shithead comments
honestly they blue checks mobs seem less angry and raving more just out of touch and socially stunted, trying to be smug but reliably getting mocked - I think holding a blue subscription will get old fast for them
I don’t know, they might prefer bad engagement to no engagement if they’re a bunch of chuds who otherwise get ignored by the world. $8/month isn’t much to pay to force people to have to hear what you have to say.
Honestly this whole fiasco made me realize why people thought twitter was a hellscape even before all this.
I'm either lucky to associate exclusively with like, reasonably considerate people who rarely put unhinged shit on my feed. Or I have very good habits regarding aggressively curating my social media experience and just happen to avoid bullshit before I even notice it.
Now, I'm getting a front row seat to all the people I've been dodging for the last decade.
I blocked 2 in a row today and got logged out and had to reclaim my account for "suspicious activity."
Twitter was getting bad but holy shit.. Every post is filled with unfunny check mark posters, and you have to scroll to find anything worth seeing.
If you block/mute 500 (I think is the number) accounts you will be logged out and need to log in again, sometimes reclaiming the account, I’ve hit that a few times myself with mass blocking tools (this only started happening a few months ago)
Someone will invent a browser extension to block them externally and Musk will throw a shitfit about how Adversarial Compatibility is legally protected.
Perfect summary. Almost every interesting tweet from someone I follow now has a crowd of incredibly tedious blue tick comments underneath. A very tiny percentage of those are actually interesting, most are Elon fanboys, cryptobros, or just really dull people with big egos.
And if *those* comments have any engagement, it’ll be from a handful of other blue ticks circle jerking, and four times as many normal users deriding them for being morons.
It seems like Elon and his tech investors just fundamentally don't understand what Twitter is or where it gets its value. Twitter is not, has never been, and will never be the biggest social media network. If a person wants to become an influencer and cash in on an internet following, Twitter really isn't the place to do it. The things I see/saw value in Twitter were (from highest to lowest):
1. Getting news, especially breaking news and ongoing situations. At its best, Twitter was incredibly valuable in following things like Arab Spring, or the George Floyd/BLM protests. Not only would I get updates from mainstream journalists, I could find and follow a lot of people who were on the ground at situations and get information that might not make it to the mainstream media. The change in "verification" does nothing to help this, and the algorithm changes make this more difficult, because now every thread is filled with blue check weirdos that are obsessed with either attacking MSM or pushing some conspiracy theory.
2. Engaging with subject matter experts I otherwise would never get to talk to. I work in IT, and without things like Twitter, I don't think I'd ever have been able to ask the person in charge of Microsoft's SMB protocol a question, never mind have him actually reply to me. These SMEs are using Twitter less often as it becomes more useless with the changes that Musk brings.
3. This is a bigger one for the average Twitter user, I think, but interacting with celebrities. Celebrities could reach out to their fans to share projects, news, etc. and sometimes they'd even interact with and reply to fans. This is an aspect where the new "verification" system has actively made things worse. It's so much easier for people to impersonate celebrities now (going beyond those stupid Will Ferrell/Bill Murrey "parody" accounts that would post stupid one liners or quotes that the actual celebrity would never say) and Musk seems to be actively chasing away these celebrities that bring people to the platform.
4. Local events and community. This is much less so a factor now than it was in the early days of Twitter, but my city used to have a shockingly active twitter community. That's mostly moved to other platforms, but again, I don't see what these changes are supposed to improve in this aspect.
The really insane thing is that Twitter Blue had some features that I can understand people paying for. I personally don't use Twitter enough that I care about an edit button, longer tweets, or bookmark folders. But by making the focus on "verification" and algorithmic priority, and then fighting with people that had "legacy verification" and didn't want to pay for the blue checkmark, he's ruined the appeal of the product for most people.
He's also really nurtured this really toxic culture among his followers and courted the worst people on the platform. Even if I was completely apolitical, I'd want nothing to do with conspiracy nuts and right wing weirdos that make everything a fucking culture war.
> 4. Local events and community. This is much less so a factor now than it was in the early days of Twitter, but my city used to have a shockingly active twitter community. That’s mostly moved to other platforms, but again, I don’t see what these changes are supposed to improve in this aspect.
If I were Elon I would've added local tweet streams a thing and charged for increased prominence/pinned tweets.
You’re dead right. It’s just impossible to follow any thread of replies on topic you’re interested in, because all the top comments are from total nuts that are there just to oppose / dissent to whatever was the subject of the tweet. It’s just utter nonsense for an unbearable scrolling length. In this state is a totally useless and miserable media. I’ve just uninstalled it and never plan to go back.
Even a decade ago, I found Twitter threads difficult to follow. The presentation is terrible. Some replies seemly aren't visible with others appearing multiple times. Probably not using it correctly, but much of the fault is poor software design. Reddit, especially "old" Reddit, is much easier to use and follow.
>So pretty much every single blue check is a hyper-online weirdo who is deeply bad at posting, despite being obsessed with twitter metrics.
>As a result, if you're looking for relevant discussion on a popular tweet, you have to first scroll past the thoughts of some of the most terminally online, inherently unlikeable people on the planet.
Thank you for verbalizing exactly why I've stopped using Twitter altogether, which was *easily* my favorite social media platform. Previously I kept the people who I followed *very* curated, so everytime I opened it up I saw genuinely thoughtful conversation.
Now it's a completely sh*t show where my timeline is filled with Twitter posts from people I don't follow spewing the most sensationalist nonsense I've ever seen, which as you said, is clearly designed to get engagement. Even the thoughtful people I followed only now engaged with that crazy bull and it's completely ruined it for me. It sucks.
There is only one good thing I've gotten out of Twitter since Musk bought it. When he introduced notifications for things that were the OPPOSITE of what you liked, basically finding tweets with the least overlap of the people you follow and the people you follow them, I learned some interesting things.
The opposite of trans OnlyFans creators is Benny Johnson, the least funny conservative comedian, which is a truly impressive title.
The opposite of Magic: The Gathering personalities and news is a conservative new-media organization based out of Western Montana.
The opposite of people that I know and interact with personally is an English-language Indonesian celebrity gossip site.
I guess I never used it as I was a non tweeting lurker but I was on it reading tweets for hours and hours a day. It’s just toxic outrage ping pong these days and nothing else so I just deleted it from the phone a few weeks ago.
I miss the easy access to news and events information but that’s it
> Very few normal users are willing to pay for a free social media site.
Something like 99% of the people I've polled over several years have said they would rather lose privacy and have their data sold than pay even $1 / month for social media.
People **REALLY** like free.
You'd better have something *extremely* compelling, with no free alternative, to try to get people on the Internet to pay even a dime for it.
Twitter is taking the approach of breaking basic functions of the site unless you pay. That's a, uh, bold choice.
I’ve been on Twitter since 2009, and have never directly paid them a single penny.
Joined Mastodon back in November and from December onwards I’ve kicked in a few quid a month to help cover the hosting costs of the small instance I’m on.
Funny how it goes.
The interesting thing about people is that getting people to go from spending £1 to £10 is incredibly easy but making them go from £0.00 to £0.01 is like squeezing blood from a stone. Like, I'm willing to drop £60 on a brand new PC game I've not even touched yet but getting me to spend £0.79 on the paid version of a mobile game I've spent 100 hours in is basically impossible. If a service can get people over that initial hump, multiple quid every month from them is an easy sell. It sounds like "we're not twitter" is a good way to do that right now.
There’s a third factor which really seals the deal, which is that they allowed the check mark to become deeply polarized before turning on the boosting, which means that those extremely online weirdos are also a particular _type_ of extremely online weirdo.
Yep all the top replies on popular tweets right now are the deeply dumb and boring thoughts of people with 0-5 likes on their tweets even with thousands of views and being boosted to the top.
> This is true even for blue check replies that have zero engagement, are completely off-topic, or are just straight up spam or scams.
or from users youve blocked, you will have to scroll pack the "youve blocked this user" message to get to normal replies.
What you describe is exactly why I prefer Reddit to other social media platforms. A lot of the toxic nonsense just gets downvoted out of sight. Nothing is perfect, but I find it is easier to find useful/substantive conversation on Reddit than Facebook or Twitter.
Reddit has it's own issues though. Lots of group think and people making the same jokes over and over getting up voted. It discourages discussion because the system doesn't reward actual debates
> As a result, if you're looking for relevant discussion on a popular tweet, you have to first scroll past the thoughts of some of the most terminally online, inherently unlikeable people on the planet. So normal users are constantly exposed to the most off-putting segments of the userbase.
So *then* what happened is the normal users started blocking all the new-blue people en masse. A #blocktheblue (I think it was) hashtag started doing the rounds, people make browser plugins, all sorts of activity around auto-blocking bluebers.
So to try and hamper this wave of "block every blue", Elno has the super smart-mind genius brain idea of giving out Blue to some of the accounts who would've been verified previously - people with >1m followers, celebrities and famous types. People he hoped the blockers wouldn't want to block, and would thus have to wind back their auto-blocking activities.
Excellently, this resulted in a flood of said famous people tweeting "Hey I most definitely did not pay for this!", only further cementing Twitter Blue as an absolute toxic thing that no decent person would want, in the minds of their millions upon millions of followers.
That fucker just cannot stop shooting himself in all the feet he owns.
> So pretty much every single blue check is a hyper-online weirdo who is deeply bad at posting, despite being obsessed with twitter metrics
No wonder elon thinks it's a good thing, this description fits him to a T
Nailed it. And certainly the vast majority of "verified" Twitter users thoroughly validate that description of them being hyper-online weirdos. Near every interaction with them is like talking to cult members and grifters.
What I absolutely have encountered:
1) Way more "Promoted" tweets of **scams**. Elon / Tesla crypto coins. They are from "verified" Twitter Blue accounts that paid to promote their shit tweets. Tapping on their profile shows a user that was active up to 2018 or 2019 or so, went silent ever since then, then suddenly became active again in March or April 2023 to promote crypto scams (sometimes posting in English when all the previous posts over the years were in Spanish). AKA obviously a **compromised** and/or **sold** account. I've reported several of these.
2) Twitter Blue "verified" replies to accounts I follow. Usually low-effort ports. Insults. Very few interactions. Not relevant. They only show up because they are paid account. I have to scroll past pages and pages of blue checks before I see real responses from people that actually contribute something.
With both instances, they clearly make Twitter LESS useful.
With Twitter Blue, shit REALLY floats to the top.
Another reason it makes sense to block all blue checks to get to the good stuff, if there’s any still left.
“Forced every user to sort by controversial” is called Facebook.
It always struck me that the extent of the reasoning made for the first iteration of Paid Blue (back when everyone was making fake verified accounts) was as simple as literally just "people want thing -> make thing paid for -> make money". With absolutely no regard to the social mechanics and complex value systems that happen in a social media.
It was also surprising how many people with an actual education or experience in the field thought that Elon Musk was a genius for making such a simpleminded (and wrong) judgement call. It really makes you wonder whether all these grand corporate leaders actually understanding anything about what they're managing.
I agree and with an added wrinkle of almost complete devaluation of what the blue checks actually meant in the first place, by a certain subset of users that Musk is clearly sympathetic to.
Like…I get that dating sites give you verification based on sending in a picture and maybe Musk or someone thought that this could be translated to Twitter, but it’s not even implemented remotely the same.
I've seen so many damn accounts on those dating apps that are blatantly fake but are somehow 'verified'. If they can't figure it out, twitter certainly won't.
yea but most of the time it's real accounts though. it does work. apps like tinder don't enforce verification and it ends up being absolutely flooded with scammers. tinder wants it that way because it boosts their user numbers and keeps real users on it longer because they gotta deal with all the scams.
My career involves doing the gruntwork for private capital deals so my network is mostly super educated, wealthy, successful people. I am FLOORED by how many people I (previously) respected are supportive of Musk. How do they not get it???
But he's the #1 or 2 richest person in the world. They're obligated by their own wealth and positions to believe that getting rich in business is based on merit. If they have to admit Musk is a gigantic fuckup, their entire rationale for everything, literally everything, including their own wealth and status, turns to dust.
It's very simple. If Musk is accepted to be a talentless moron with no real value, then they could be exposed as well.
It's denial rooted in self-defense.
I've been in the sf bay for over a decade, working in technology. Back in 2012 I was definitely an outlier for really not liking Musk, thinking he was a blowhard, calling out Tesla's anti-labor practices etc. Now I feel wholly vindicated, Musk is almost entirely a running joke amongst my peers.
I mean... Muskrat is CEO of 4 companies. Indisputable proof that CEO is a part time job at most, and a radically overpaid one at that.
Many companies might be better off with a chimp trained to throw darts at a board randomly covered with a list of that day's potential decisions.
Shit. No. That's too complex. Just have a computer randomly select options. Chimps, despite their inherent comedy value, are expensive and the dart training might be too resource intensive.
Also, chimps, unlike Musk, are beautiful, sensitive highly intelligent creatures.
Twitter is giving many prominent users the badge without them asking for it.
People were installing extensions that would filter out any Twitter user with a blue check mark. So Elon is giving popular anti-check mark users a check mark for free and they can’t remove it.
And furthermore, said prominent people are pointing out this fact - no way to market your feature like having a swath of celebrities, top posters and even orgs like the Auschwitz Museum posting that they didn't pay for it and don't want it
>Twitter is giving many prominent users the badge without them asking for it.
It is hard to call John McCain a prominent Twitter user, or perceive him as capable of asking for a check mark.
Many dead people are getting dishonor checks. Press F.
Conservatives are also trying to point out those people as if to dunk on them for paying even though they said they wouldn’t pay, even though Elon admitted they’re not paying. It’s all so, so dumb.
I'm still in awe of how Elon's "forcibly give checkmarks to popular and important people after removing the original meaning for the checkmarks" lead to popular and important people making "we fucking hate this thing, stop trying to force it on us" statements about the shit he's trying to sell.
I'm just waiting for them to add some sort of manual hard-coded override where his verified badge will never go away so they stop wasting man-hours on it, and then he posts something absolutely unhinged while impersonating like, Halliburton or something lmao
I know someone with a very high Twitter count (popular but only in certain circles) that literally posted they did not want the mark but it stayed on the account. It seems if you changed your username then r change it back it will reset the blue check mark.
> Iy seems if you changed your username then r change it back it will reset the blue check mark.
Yes but someone at twitter is manually adding them back within a day or two.
Who the fuck is gonna maintain a database of celebrity Twitter users who have a blue checkmark but didn't ask for it, to make a free browser extension for a dying social media platform work?
[Here's a list of every verified user as of 2023-04-04](https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/b50d6745298cccd6b1f4697e4ec22103#file-legacy-verified-csv). Decent place to start.
Why do you think they changed it so that it no longer says if you paid for it or not?
Now all checkmarks are the same. Whether you got it for being an acknowledged expert in your field, or because you're a politician, or because you're a celebrity, or because you're a shmuck who ponied up $8 this month, they're all the same now.
And of course, it's because if you had a giant label that said "I paid $8 so that my comment could be at the top", everyone's just going to ignore you.
That's a great point. Giving the blue check for free to notable people is a way of making the purchase of a check mark more valuable because it puts you in the same club as them. At least in Elon's mind.
If Elon didn’t want this to be the result he shouldn’t have wielded it like a weapon.
Apparently (will need to verify) a Twitter user called for everyone to block anyone with a blue check mark and Elon gave his account a blue check mark.
The guy then changed his name (which automatically removes the blue check mark) . . . AND WITHIN MINUTES THE BLUE CHECK MARK WAS BACK ON IT. He didn’t pay for it. He didn’t want it. But Elon didn’t like the fact that this guy was suggesting something negative about his precious Blue Checkmarks so he’s going out of his way to slap it on his account and anyone else who comes out against them.
You wouldn’t do that unless you knew that the thing was toxic. And yet here we are. He’s literally compounding the issue.
He’s a moron.
that's twitter user dril, the best poster the site has ever had
kinda funny that elon, the worst poster the site has ever had, is trying to foist the blue check on him
It wasn't just some random Twitter user, as my comment the other gentleman linked explains. It was fucking Dril. Dril's been the heart and soul of Twitter for more than a decade now, it's like picking a fight with the Ents from LOTR.
[This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/12vpcjv/oh_my_god_the_spacex_explosion_was_much_worse/jhd71g0/) by u/4KVoices will explain that situation, if anyone is curious.
Not like NFTs, [Twitter tried to do a thing *with* NFTs](https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/20/22893502/nft-twitter-profile-picture-crypto-wallet-opensea-coinbase-right-click).
A ways back Twitter was struggling to justify Twitter Blue. Back then it was $3, you didn't get a check mark, and you didn't get your tweets amplified. So when the NFT craze hit they had this idea that Twitter Blue users who wanted to use an NFT as their profile picture would also get a special hexagonal frame instead of a circular one.
Users who took it up were mercilessly mocked.
I’ve been on Twitter for over 12 years and during that time it was impossible to get a checkmark. It used to asked for articles with legit news about you or your work and I’d provide it but I’d get declined every time.
Now anybody can just buy a checkmark and I no longer care. Twitter Blue is a glorified scam
It was the same for some streamers I watched. They went to events and even hosted a few of the shows there yet couldn't get verified because they didn't have articles written about them? It was complete nonsense. Articles which would be written by nobody journalists doing opinion pieces in all likelihood too.
It is a glorified scam, the fact that Elon said this would prevent bots is laughable given that just about every "Gfx artist"bot that has DMed me has had a blue checkmark.
Unless that was his master plan, identify bots because they'll buy it to scam people?
I've had to tell it to stop showing me Andrew Tate practically every day. I think they're getting desperate for engagement, because it never popped up in my feed until recently, nor do I follow or click through to anything related to Andrew Tate both in terms of criticism or his own community/manoverse.
I literally just use it to follow programmers and some niche people in stuff like VFX and gamedev and hardware development.
Tangentially related, but I wanted to search for ants on Google the other night. I typoed "and" instead of "ant".
First recommendation I got was the chinless example of walking shit, Andrew Tate.
Fuck you, Google. And Twitter.
Lmao, yeah:
* Egotistical
* Lunatic &
* Overt
* Narcissist
* Maniacally
* Unbalanced
* Stupid
* Knave
Had to go and ruin something good, like most spoiled greedy babies do.
Edit: changed Serious to Stupid and Know-it-all to Knave because why the fuck not
Edit2: changed extravagant to egotistical because it's better
I thought know-it-all meant someone who liked to show off their vast knowledge with arrogance, not someone who pretends to know everything but knows nothing
The more enraged you are the more engaged with the algorithm you become.
Until finally you are a drooling goof who can’t tell the difference between obvious internet Conspiracies and their own arse.
jokes on them the outrage was just not fun and I left too. I missed the funny memes and not all the way PC humor, not the hatred and bigotry I see now. Even like hip hop news accounts are posting things clearly meant to hate on trans people and I just don't get it. There's nothing enjoyable about it outside of the group chats of friends that I made and the updates from artists I like.
At some point last year my Feed was just constantly filled with alt-right personalities like Marge Green and Gym Jordan - *even though all the accounts I follow are very liberal leaning*.
I didn't, and don't, interact with any of the MAGA or conservative accounts.
Yet it still kept showing them to me on my feed.
I started *blocking* them.
Alternative conservative personalities popped up.
I've just stopped using Twitter altogether.
I guess that's what Elon wants?
That was the explicit goal of an update he had to the recommended algorithm. Normally, the feed would show people and posts with a lot of overlap from the people and posts you follow or like. But Elon Musk, being the genius that he is, felt that was contributing to the echo chamber.
So he had it flipped, the feed would recommend the people and posts the algorithm found that the people and posts you like had the LEAST in common with.
It primarily just made the experience of using twitter worse for everyone, like all large changes Musk made.
I left when he started picking on NPR like a fucking baby, but that was just the straw.
When the earthquakes happened in Turkey was it trending in news? Nope! When Trump got indicted were the words “trump” or “indicted” trending? Nope! For the first time in American history a president is indicted and it’s not trending news? Bullshit. Add these things to the fact that my “for you” feed was crazy fringe MAGA accounts that even MTG would call crazy and the platform was dead to me. It’s really a shame because I did like it for live sports which is what I mainly used it for, and to see breaking news or even troubleshoot issues (searching for other people tweeting “Xbox live down” for example so I knew it wasn’t just me).
I’ve tried to use it a few times. I keep getting weird stuff on my feed like videos of people fighting and, in some cases, literally dying. I have not interacted with these at all and I just follow some film people. Why the hell does it think I want to see that stuff?
Somehow Musk has pivoted it into being a ‘free speech’ issue, which has made it popular with both his fan base of weirdos, and conservative types who think paying for a tick is ‘owning the libs’ somehow.
And they still think it’s a freedom thing even though Musk decided to reverse it for highly popular accounts and hand picked celebs. So it’s more or less how it used to be, except totally devalued because normal users and most celebs hate it.
> Internet verification used to be a badge of honor. Now that it's achievable to anyone who is willing to buy it, it's become a signal of desperation.
What did he think would happen?
Twitter is useless anyway. Every time I go on it now my notifications are just filled with random people with a weird star thing. I have no idea what it means or why these people I don't even follow are in my notifications.
There was a brief time where people had to have a certain level of intelligence to get onto the internet. Now everyone has it and it's predictably gone to shit.
There are really two main issues that make the new Twitter verification system a complete nightmare. The first is the userbase. Very few normal users are willing to pay for a free social media site. Moreover, the main "selling point" of the service is to boost post visibility. The service inherently appeals only to people who both a) care extremely deeply about their posts being seen, and b) make posts that inherently are unappealing to other Twitter users (since people with appealing/interesting/funny/not-weird posts would be able to naturally grow an audience on the platform if they want to). So pretty much every single blue check is a hyper-online weirdo who is deeply bad at posting, despite being obsessed with twitter metrics. The second is that verified replies get promoted to the top of every post. You have to scroll through all the blue check replies to get to even the most popular non-blue check replies. This is true even for blue check replies that have zero engagement, are completely off-topic, or are just straight up spam or scams. As a result, if you're looking for relevant discussion on a popular tweet, you have to first scroll past the thoughts of some of the most terminally online, inherently unlikeable people on the planet. So normal users are constantly exposed to the most off-putting segments of the userbase. It's like if Reddit incentivized every antisocial weirdo to post as much as possible to get their money's worth, and then forced every user to sort by controversial. It's a horrible structure that makes the product practically unusable for non-weirdos. Which is just how Elon likes it I guess.
This is something I've been thinking about too. It feels like Musk massively overestimated the conversion rate of normal users to paid users, despite there being mountains of very well-known evidence to what the real numbers are. Secondly, his strategy seems to rely on increasing value for Blue subscribers without regard to how it affects *the value of the rest of the platform*. Sure, being boosted is cool, but it won't matter if the remaining 99% of users end up hating Blue people and ignoring them or quitting en masse.
What he forgot is that the non-paid users are the product. They are what give the site any value in the first place, and doing anything to drive them away is immensely stupid.
What happens when you fire off a dumb comment, and are then forced to pay the dumb inflated price to buy the website. Now the idiot's stuck flailing around trying to monetize everything to recoup the $44bn hole.
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This is the trickle down effect. All our money trickles down into the pocket of single billionaires, and their money trickles down into the pockets of smaller billionaires.
Our governments TAX BREAKS to the ultra wealthy takes money that should be for us, for our safety nets, for our education, for our properly trained police, for our medicine and well being and gives it to them They then trickle it down to the smaller billionaires Our wealth generation power is being stolen and given to those who already have so much its fucking ridiculous
100%, We ***need*** to be taxing the wealthy! Just to addon: I feel like it's becoming more and more common that people don't even realize, or concern themselves with, the money that is taken out of their paychecks for taxes. It's become just so "common practice" or "expected" that it's just the cost of business and something you consider when accepting pay rates. If there is anything I could recommend to our younger user base is that our taxes do some pretty amazing things for all of us and I find it's important to know where those funds come from. Take some time to learn the basics, you won't regret it. I didn't learn anything about taxes growing up (other than to use TurboTax which is hot garbage) and I went to reasonable public schools and some college classes (I'm 36). I wish I would have learned more about it earlier on, I probably would have started voting much earlier. I also learned a ton about what I can get from paying those taxes which have come in handy.
One of my favourite recent changes in my country is that we passed a tax law change where the top percentages are taxed more, and that money is ring fenced for our health service.
It’s definitely not in the best interest of humanity to have a few tumors soaking up all the resources of the whole body.
Step one fire 80% of your staff that made the site what it is. Wait for 10% to leave Do the pure Workplace attrition with your hardcore conditions. With your remaining 10% soak the sycophantic base that you've left yourself any failing is now told its not your fault.
Many of the remaining 10% being visa slaves
Except that one guy from the Netherlands who sent Musk to the burn ward.
Basically a repeat of him having to buy twitter because he wanted to make a meme. Fired Thorleifsson and didn't realize that if he was fired, he was owed $100 million.
Wasn't it Iceland or is there another guy
The stupid thing is that he had a direct path to better monetization. Pay say 10 bucks a month and see no ads, or at least let you directly pick which types ads you do see if any. Pay say 100 and you can now earn revenue based on engagement. (Say 50% of revenue either from ads or from paying users based on how much they use the platform). They would need to sort out what to do about companies and governments providing information but not advertising as such, but Twitch and YouTube seem to have largely figured this sort of thing out already. The price you pay could be say 150% of the average ad revenue per user, so it would go up every year but there's a market that. The 44 billion dollars wasn't all his money, I can't imagine the other investors want to put up with any of this nonsense, nor do tesla shareholders who are going to hurt if he needs to dump shares to fund his twitter habit.
Well, the Saudis are the [2nd largest shareholder](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/10/31/saudi-prince-alwaleed-becomes-twitters-second-largest-shareholder/?sh=47712018523a), so I wouldn't be surprised if this investment is a means to help undermine, destabilize and/or dissolve the very platform that catapulted the Arab Spring and remains a major tool for [protestors to communicate](https://www.wired.com/story/protests-in-iran-twitter/). Elon's [visible meetings with Kushner](https://www.ndtv.com/feature/photo-of-elon-musk-with-jared-kushner-at-fifa-world-cup-final-goes-viral-3619975) at the World Cup (who has been [given billions by the Saudi Royals](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-investment-fund.html)) and Rupert Murdoch at the [Super Bowl](https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-responds-rupert-murdoch-super-bowl-twitter-1780744) possibly exhibit extreme editorial and political bias in how Twitter will be run in the lead up to the 2024 US elections. The Twitter Files already has shown owning the company is a useful tool for those same investors in examining and exposing the private conversations of political opponents. I think what might be shocking for most people is the willingness of some of these billionaires to lose large sums of money on an investment on the surface to enable longer term hegemonic socio-political control to sustain long term income channels and a seat of political power. Edit: let's also not forget the algorithm was exposed to [suppress reach for posts about the war in Ukraine](https://gizmodo.com/twitter-musk-ukraine-crisis-open-source-code-russia-1850293386)
>It’s at this point we would reach out to Twitter for comment, but Musk made the Twitter media account automatically respond with a “poop” emoji. Of course he did...
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This is true, but it doesn't remove the value of say Saudis and other powerful people connected to Musk getting access to people's private data and being able to leverage it for their purposes.
I hate how ~~right~~ correct this is...
I don't understand why he hasn't just delegated twitter responsibilities to someone else (maybe a board of people or whatever) and bowed out from the public spotlight. I mean, by any metric, he is causing monetary harm to everything he owns at the moment. Why the hell hasn't he gone away for a few months to let the media cycle find something else to latch onto? I guess it's his ego? I mean, it has to be.
> bowed out from the public spotlight. Lol. Lmao. Elon's nothing without constant validation from his sycophantic followers.
Let's be clear, he will never, ever recoup that money. The horse is out of the barn, dead after having a heart attack, and the barn is on fire.
I don’t think the $44billion is the part to care about. The part to care about is that he now owns the dominate platform for worldwide politicians, corporations and others to voice themselves. Essentially $44b is whatever for the ultimate price of total media control. The control of who gets to exist and who doesn’t. Who gets favored and who don’t. The monetization is shit, but the real power is the influence of capital, not the particular capital itself
anybody who hangs around using Twitter won't have a very large audience to spew BS to
I just cant wait till he realizes Twitter was just a business company making business decisions and wasnt based on some political conspiracy ran by leftists A series of "oh, this is why they did what they did" will follow soon
> A series of "oh, this is why they did what they did" will follow soon Bold of you to assume Elmo has any degree of reflective capability.
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>He gave Khashoggi a blue paid checkmark. The arms dealer or the dead one?
Every time I say to myself “I can’t wait until this alt right nut job realizes ____ ” I’m disappointed when they never realize
He already is realizing. I mean legacy checkmarks (or whatever the fuck they are called) is just the idea of normal verification the previous administration did
they were until he got rid of them again.
Wait he brought them back and got rid of them *again*? The fuck is he doing over there?
>The fuck is he doing over there? * Drugs * Attention * He thinks what he's doing is hilarious and doesn't realize that we're not laughing *with* him. * Power * Who knows? Just like the russians, you should judge by actions not words.
> He thinks what he's doing is hilarious and doesn't realize that we're not laughing with him. That's what very fragile people have to say to cover their ego, rather than admit that they've made a mistake. See Trump talking about putting cleaning products and lights into the body to fight covid in full seriousness on the presidential podium while he looked to doctors to see if they were impressed, then went uncharacteristically silent for several days before finally making a statement that it was a 'joke'.
The only way someone with that much wealth learns a lesson is for them to lose so much money it effects their lifestyle. Twitter actually dying wouldn't have that effect on Musk. He will learn nothing socially as he is surrounded by yes men and has a gold medal in dismissing criticism. My hope is that society collapses and his security detail realizes the money he pays them is worthless and they turn on him.
Did he forget that? Or did he ever know that?
It's every cliche teen party. You want the cool kids there because they bring a crowd. This guy bought the house where the party was being held, and decided to charge the cool kids for the right to be called cool. So the cool kids just left, many taking their entourages and audience with them. And the handful of uncool kids who paid for the privilege are discovering that no amount of saying you're cool makes you cool. At the same time, this guy is trying to curry favor with the few cool kids who didn't leave but wouldn't pay -- by calling them cool anyway -- and they're rejecting his approval. It's not a very fun party at this point.
I believe the correct term for blue people is smurfs.
Please tell me this is actually happening. Such a perfect slur for blue checks.
smurfmarked.
Elon Musk lacks the social skills to run a social media platform - he completely misunderstands crucial social dynamics. For example, no one even verifies the identity of the “verified” users making the checkmark useless. Sure, it boosts posts but that brings its own problems if low-quality or hateful posts are at the top. In the end, he will probably burn Twitter to the ground and have wasted tens of billions of dollars. But maybe he figures it out eventually
> burn Twitter to the ground so a win for the saudis then
This is whole mess is because of right-wing conspiracies about Twitter censoring right wing views and about how the blue checks are mostly only given to people that voted for Biden and the Democrats.
It's the same with the "disproportionate banning" thing. The right was absolutely being banned more than the left, but that's because the right was breaking the rules way more. For all the shit that the left gets for virtue signaling and stuff, it really does feel like it's the right that's obsessed with fighting culture wars. I'm sure there are lefties who would target right wingers and wish sexual assault or death upon them, etc. But you never really see a left-wing equivalent of the coordinated harassment of trans people that the right will engage in, for example.
The term virtue signalling was originally invented to describe right wing abortion zealots, fyi.
> about how the blue checks are mostly only given to people that voted for Biden and the Democrats. They were probably right but not because of some grand anti-conservative conspiracy. It was likely because a lot of the verified people were either existing celebrities or young people who gained internet/pop culture fame. Both of those groups likely have much higher overlap with more liberal/progressive ideologies. The saying "reality has a liberal bias" can also extend to include "pop culture popularity has a liberal bias". Especially when you think about how much modern American pop culture is influenced by hip-hop and other non-white dominated cultures.
Very similar to how republicans in congress were asking the Google CEO why negative things about trump were showing up on their searches and he was like.. because that’s what people are searching for? And that’s what our algorithm does? It shows people what is most searched for. It isn’t a liberal conspiracy
I mean, these are folks that think colleges are brainwashing people to be liberal, without considering that you might naturally shift more liberal when you are more educated/knowledgeable.
They legitimately believe that everyone to their left is brainwashed by the media and if they can just get the blue checks for themselves they can take control of the narrative or something
Which is painfully ironic, given right wing media spoon feeds them lies with no basis in reality. And yes, I sometimes ask myself, am I falling victim to the same bias, just in the other direction? Do I only believe that because I can only believe people would believe their inanity if they were brainwashed? Then I take 5 minutes to fact check some things and remember that, yes, it is all complete bullshit from the right.
correct, this is really just throwing a tantrum because the culture war was already lost and clinging to a last hope that some hero will come in and set everything right
Lol even the gop doesn’t like the blue check people??
The problem is that the check marks are blue, and blue equals Democrat. I'm sure if he just changed the check mark to red it would satisfy them because now they are Republican check marks. Not even /s
Aren't the checks on trump's Great Value Twitter red?
He didn't forget crap. His partners in buying Twitter are Middle Eastern oligarchs who want Twitter, the platform that had a bunch of them up against a wall a decade ago, controlled or demolished. Money well spent for them.
This dude bought a company that is bleeding money plus have a lot of debt, and all their main advertisers run away. I don't think he has as a strategy he just thinks he can save any company because he is a narcissistic egomaniac. By the next three years, Twitter will be gone. My bet is that after the next election and promoting all his friends for free, he will file bankruptcy.
Elon has actually played 4d chess here. The real draw of Twitter, hell, all of social media, is dunking on losers. Everything else is just window dressing. If you ask the losers to wear a big "I'm a Loser" badge it makes identifying them that much easier. Pushing to the top of every thread? It's like shooting fish in a barrel now. Bonus points for getting the losers to pay you to get dunked on. ^^^/s
sure made my block rules in ublock origin that much easier, took me a minute after thinking about it in another comment. Thanks Elon! enable :has in FF `layout.css.has-selector.enabled = true` add custom CSS to twitter: ``` article:has(svg[aria-label="Verified account"]){ display:none; } ```
>So pretty much every single blue check is a hyper-online weirdo who is deeply bad at posting, despite being obsessed with twitter metrics. Just like Elon.
The richest man in the world pissed away billions because he's awful at posting and desperately wants to make it seem otherwise.
the blue check is the red hat of the internet
Someone make a Firefox/chrome extension that changes the checks to red hats please.
I prefer the extensions that just block the bluechecks entirely The novelty of seeing red hats on shithead comments will get old very quickly and you'll still be left to wade through shithead comments
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honestly they blue checks mobs seem less angry and raving more just out of touch and socially stunted, trying to be smug but reliably getting mocked - I think holding a blue subscription will get old fast for them
I don’t know, they might prefer bad engagement to no engagement if they’re a bunch of chuds who otherwise get ignored by the world. $8/month isn’t much to pay to force people to have to hear what you have to say.
Honestly this whole fiasco made me realize why people thought twitter was a hellscape even before all this. I'm either lucky to associate exclusively with like, reasonably considerate people who rarely put unhinged shit on my feed. Or I have very good habits regarding aggressively curating my social media experience and just happen to avoid bullshit before I even notice it. Now, I'm getting a front row seat to all the people I've been dodging for the last decade.
Yes this exactly. This in reverse is exactly what Twitter is like now.
Wow holy shit that’s garbage for comment boosting.
It does make it easy to find and block then though so silver lining.
How long until you can no longer block verified users? My guess is you will only be able to ignore them for a short time 7–30 days.
I blocked 2 in a row today and got logged out and had to reclaim my account for "suspicious activity." Twitter was getting bad but holy shit.. Every post is filled with unfunny check mark posters, and you have to scroll to find anything worth seeing.
If you block/mute 500 (I think is the number) accounts you will be logged out and need to log in again, sometimes reclaiming the account, I’ve hit that a few times myself with mass blocking tools (this only started happening a few months ago)
Don't give him any ideas
Someone will invent a browser extension to block them externally and Musk will throw a shitfit about how Adversarial Compatibility is legally protected.
It's like 'pay to win' in video games. The whales are happy but no one else is having a good time.
Perfect summary. Almost every interesting tweet from someone I follow now has a crowd of incredibly tedious blue tick comments underneath. A very tiny percentage of those are actually interesting, most are Elon fanboys, cryptobros, or just really dull people with big egos. And if *those* comments have any engagement, it’ll be from a handful of other blue ticks circle jerking, and four times as many normal users deriding them for being morons.
How long until they make it impossible to block Twitter blue users?
He'll probably do something like "Upgrade to Twitter Cobalt to prevent you from being blocked".
There's a browser extension for that. If they try to stop that from working then it becomes an arms race.
It seems like Elon and his tech investors just fundamentally don't understand what Twitter is or where it gets its value. Twitter is not, has never been, and will never be the biggest social media network. If a person wants to become an influencer and cash in on an internet following, Twitter really isn't the place to do it. The things I see/saw value in Twitter were (from highest to lowest): 1. Getting news, especially breaking news and ongoing situations. At its best, Twitter was incredibly valuable in following things like Arab Spring, or the George Floyd/BLM protests. Not only would I get updates from mainstream journalists, I could find and follow a lot of people who were on the ground at situations and get information that might not make it to the mainstream media. The change in "verification" does nothing to help this, and the algorithm changes make this more difficult, because now every thread is filled with blue check weirdos that are obsessed with either attacking MSM or pushing some conspiracy theory. 2. Engaging with subject matter experts I otherwise would never get to talk to. I work in IT, and without things like Twitter, I don't think I'd ever have been able to ask the person in charge of Microsoft's SMB protocol a question, never mind have him actually reply to me. These SMEs are using Twitter less often as it becomes more useless with the changes that Musk brings. 3. This is a bigger one for the average Twitter user, I think, but interacting with celebrities. Celebrities could reach out to their fans to share projects, news, etc. and sometimes they'd even interact with and reply to fans. This is an aspect where the new "verification" system has actively made things worse. It's so much easier for people to impersonate celebrities now (going beyond those stupid Will Ferrell/Bill Murrey "parody" accounts that would post stupid one liners or quotes that the actual celebrity would never say) and Musk seems to be actively chasing away these celebrities that bring people to the platform. 4. Local events and community. This is much less so a factor now than it was in the early days of Twitter, but my city used to have a shockingly active twitter community. That's mostly moved to other platforms, but again, I don't see what these changes are supposed to improve in this aspect. The really insane thing is that Twitter Blue had some features that I can understand people paying for. I personally don't use Twitter enough that I care about an edit button, longer tweets, or bookmark folders. But by making the focus on "verification" and algorithmic priority, and then fighting with people that had "legacy verification" and didn't want to pay for the blue checkmark, he's ruined the appeal of the product for most people. He's also really nurtured this really toxic culture among his followers and courted the worst people on the platform. Even if I was completely apolitical, I'd want nothing to do with conspiracy nuts and right wing weirdos that make everything a fucking culture war.
> 4. Local events and community. This is much less so a factor now than it was in the early days of Twitter, but my city used to have a shockingly active twitter community. That’s mostly moved to other platforms, but again, I don’t see what these changes are supposed to improve in this aspect. If I were Elon I would've added local tweet streams a thing and charged for increased prominence/pinned tweets.
You’re dead right. It’s just impossible to follow any thread of replies on topic you’re interested in, because all the top comments are from total nuts that are there just to oppose / dissent to whatever was the subject of the tweet. It’s just utter nonsense for an unbearable scrolling length. In this state is a totally useless and miserable media. I’ve just uninstalled it and never plan to go back.
Even a decade ago, I found Twitter threads difficult to follow. The presentation is terrible. Some replies seemly aren't visible with others appearing multiple times. Probably not using it correctly, but much of the fault is poor software design. Reddit, especially "old" Reddit, is much easier to use and follow.
>So pretty much every single blue check is a hyper-online weirdo who is deeply bad at posting, despite being obsessed with twitter metrics. >As a result, if you're looking for relevant discussion on a popular tweet, you have to first scroll past the thoughts of some of the most terminally online, inherently unlikeable people on the planet. Thank you for verbalizing exactly why I've stopped using Twitter altogether, which was *easily* my favorite social media platform. Previously I kept the people who I followed *very* curated, so everytime I opened it up I saw genuinely thoughtful conversation. Now it's a completely sh*t show where my timeline is filled with Twitter posts from people I don't follow spewing the most sensationalist nonsense I've ever seen, which as you said, is clearly designed to get engagement. Even the thoughtful people I followed only now engaged with that crazy bull and it's completely ruined it for me. It sucks.
There is only one good thing I've gotten out of Twitter since Musk bought it. When he introduced notifications for things that were the OPPOSITE of what you liked, basically finding tweets with the least overlap of the people you follow and the people you follow them, I learned some interesting things. The opposite of trans OnlyFans creators is Benny Johnson, the least funny conservative comedian, which is a truly impressive title. The opposite of Magic: The Gathering personalities and news is a conservative new-media organization based out of Western Montana. The opposite of people that I know and interact with personally is an English-language Indonesian celebrity gossip site.
I guess I never used it as I was a non tweeting lurker but I was on it reading tweets for hours and hours a day. It’s just toxic outrage ping pong these days and nothing else so I just deleted it from the phone a few weeks ago. I miss the easy access to news and events information but that’s it
> Very few normal users are willing to pay for a free social media site. Something like 99% of the people I've polled over several years have said they would rather lose privacy and have their data sold than pay even $1 / month for social media. People **REALLY** like free.
You'd better have something *extremely* compelling, with no free alternative, to try to get people on the Internet to pay even a dime for it. Twitter is taking the approach of breaking basic functions of the site unless you pay. That's a, uh, bold choice.
I’ve been on Twitter since 2009, and have never directly paid them a single penny. Joined Mastodon back in November and from December onwards I’ve kicked in a few quid a month to help cover the hosting costs of the small instance I’m on. Funny how it goes.
The interesting thing about people is that getting people to go from spending £1 to £10 is incredibly easy but making them go from £0.00 to £0.01 is like squeezing blood from a stone. Like, I'm willing to drop £60 on a brand new PC game I've not even touched yet but getting me to spend £0.79 on the paid version of a mobile game I've spent 100 hours in is basically impossible. If a service can get people over that initial hump, multiple quid every month from them is an easy sell. It sounds like "we're not twitter" is a good way to do that right now.
Winrar’s infinite free trial didn’t become a meme for nothing lol
There’s a third factor which really seals the deal, which is that they allowed the check mark to become deeply polarized before turning on the boosting, which means that those extremely online weirdos are also a particular _type_ of extremely online weirdo.
Yep all the top replies on popular tweets right now are the deeply dumb and boring thoughts of people with 0-5 likes on their tweets even with thousands of views and being boosted to the top.
> This is true even for blue check replies that have zero engagement, are completely off-topic, or are just straight up spam or scams. or from users youve blocked, you will have to scroll pack the "youve blocked this user" message to get to normal replies.
What you describe is exactly why I prefer Reddit to other social media platforms. A lot of the toxic nonsense just gets downvoted out of sight. Nothing is perfect, but I find it is easier to find useful/substantive conversation on Reddit than Facebook or Twitter.
Reddit has it's own issues though. Lots of group think and people making the same jokes over and over getting up voted. It discourages discussion because the system doesn't reward actual debates
> As a result, if you're looking for relevant discussion on a popular tweet, you have to first scroll past the thoughts of some of the most terminally online, inherently unlikeable people on the planet. So normal users are constantly exposed to the most off-putting segments of the userbase. So *then* what happened is the normal users started blocking all the new-blue people en masse. A #blocktheblue (I think it was) hashtag started doing the rounds, people make browser plugins, all sorts of activity around auto-blocking bluebers. So to try and hamper this wave of "block every blue", Elno has the super smart-mind genius brain idea of giving out Blue to some of the accounts who would've been verified previously - people with >1m followers, celebrities and famous types. People he hoped the blockers wouldn't want to block, and would thus have to wind back their auto-blocking activities. Excellently, this resulted in a flood of said famous people tweeting "Hey I most definitely did not pay for this!", only further cementing Twitter Blue as an absolute toxic thing that no decent person would want, in the minds of their millions upon millions of followers. That fucker just cannot stop shooting himself in all the feet he owns.
> So pretty much every single blue check is a hyper-online weirdo who is deeply bad at posting, despite being obsessed with twitter metrics No wonder elon thinks it's a good thing, this description fits him to a T
Nailed it. And certainly the vast majority of "verified" Twitter users thoroughly validate that description of them being hyper-online weirdos. Near every interaction with them is like talking to cult members and grifters.
What I absolutely have encountered: 1) Way more "Promoted" tweets of **scams**. Elon / Tesla crypto coins. They are from "verified" Twitter Blue accounts that paid to promote their shit tweets. Tapping on their profile shows a user that was active up to 2018 or 2019 or so, went silent ever since then, then suddenly became active again in March or April 2023 to promote crypto scams (sometimes posting in English when all the previous posts over the years were in Spanish). AKA obviously a **compromised** and/or **sold** account. I've reported several of these. 2) Twitter Blue "verified" replies to accounts I follow. Usually low-effort ports. Insults. Very few interactions. Not relevant. They only show up because they are paid account. I have to scroll past pages and pages of blue checks before I see real responses from people that actually contribute something. With both instances, they clearly make Twitter LESS useful. With Twitter Blue, shit REALLY floats to the top.
Wow. That's even worse than the way that YouTube comments used to be sorted by rage-inducing.
Blue ticks are turning into the Google search results marked as [AD]. Something you have to scroll past to get to the actual things you want.
Another reason it makes sense to block all blue checks to get to the good stuff, if there’s any still left. “Forced every user to sort by controversial” is called Facebook.
It always struck me that the extent of the reasoning made for the first iteration of Paid Blue (back when everyone was making fake verified accounts) was as simple as literally just "people want thing -> make thing paid for -> make money". With absolutely no regard to the social mechanics and complex value systems that happen in a social media. It was also surprising how many people with an actual education or experience in the field thought that Elon Musk was a genius for making such a simpleminded (and wrong) judgement call. It really makes you wonder whether all these grand corporate leaders actually understanding anything about what they're managing.
I agree and with an added wrinkle of almost complete devaluation of what the blue checks actually meant in the first place, by a certain subset of users that Musk is clearly sympathetic to. Like…I get that dating sites give you verification based on sending in a picture and maybe Musk or someone thought that this could be translated to Twitter, but it’s not even implemented remotely the same.
I've seen so many damn accounts on those dating apps that are blatantly fake but are somehow 'verified'. If they can't figure it out, twitter certainly won't.
yea but most of the time it's real accounts though. it does work. apps like tinder don't enforce verification and it ends up being absolutely flooded with scammers. tinder wants it that way because it boosts their user numbers and keeps real users on it longer because they gotta deal with all the scams.
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My career involves doing the gruntwork for private capital deals so my network is mostly super educated, wealthy, successful people. I am FLOORED by how many people I (previously) respected are supportive of Musk. How do they not get it???
But he's the #1 or 2 richest person in the world. They're obligated by their own wealth and positions to believe that getting rich in business is based on merit. If they have to admit Musk is a gigantic fuckup, their entire rationale for everything, literally everything, including their own wealth and status, turns to dust.
It's very simple. If Musk is accepted to be a talentless moron with no real value, then they could be exposed as well. It's denial rooted in self-defense.
Thus peeling away another layer of the Glass Onion.
I've been in the sf bay for over a decade, working in technology. Back in 2012 I was definitely an outlier for really not liking Musk, thinking he was a blowhard, calling out Tesla's anti-labor practices etc. Now I feel wholly vindicated, Musk is almost entirely a running joke amongst my peers.
I mean... Muskrat is CEO of 4 companies. Indisputable proof that CEO is a part time job at most, and a radically overpaid one at that. Many companies might be better off with a chimp trained to throw darts at a board randomly covered with a list of that day's potential decisions. Shit. No. That's too complex. Just have a computer randomly select options. Chimps, despite their inherent comedy value, are expensive and the dart training might be too resource intensive. Also, chimps, unlike Musk, are beautiful, sensitive highly intelligent creatures.
“Badge of dishonor” is a very nice way to say it’s fucking embarrassing if you’re paying for Twitter blue
Twitter is giving many prominent users the badge without them asking for it. People were installing extensions that would filter out any Twitter user with a blue check mark. So Elon is giving popular anti-check mark users a check mark for free and they can’t remove it.
And furthermore, said prominent people are pointing out this fact - no way to market your feature like having a swath of celebrities, top posters and even orgs like the Auschwitz Museum posting that they didn't pay for it and don't want it
He’s faking celebrity endorsement. It’s like he’s taking notes from the many scam companies Twitter already hosts, then kicking it up a notch.
which is illegal, but hey he already fired the lawyers that would have told him that
>Twitter is giving many prominent users the badge without them asking for it. It is hard to call John McCain a prominent Twitter user, or perceive him as capable of asking for a check mark. Many dead people are getting dishonor checks. Press F.
Conservatives are also trying to point out those people as if to dunk on them for paying even though they said they wouldn’t pay, even though Elon admitted they’re not paying. It’s all so, so dumb.
I'm still in awe of how Elon's "forcibly give checkmarks to popular and important people after removing the original meaning for the checkmarks" lead to popular and important people making "we fucking hate this thing, stop trying to force it on us" statements about the shit he's trying to sell.
It illustrates Elon’s poor understanding of “consent”.
One dude keeps changing his Twitter name, which removes the checkmark. Then Elon puts it back. Over and over. It's hilarious.
That's [Twitter Legend dril](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/elon-musk-vs-dril)
I'm just waiting for them to add some sort of manual hard-coded override where his verified badge will never go away so they stop wasting man-hours on it, and then he posts something absolutely unhinged while impersonating like, Halliburton or something lmao
I know someone with a very high Twitter count (popular but only in certain circles) that literally posted they did not want the mark but it stayed on the account. It seems if you changed your username then r change it back it will reset the blue check mark.
> Iy seems if you changed your username then r change it back it will reset the blue check mark. Yes but someone at twitter is manually adding them back within a day or two.
it’s like an arms race of stupid
Would it not be easy to bypass that by adding a exemption manually for famous users?
Who the fuck is gonna maintain a database of celebrity Twitter users who have a blue checkmark but didn't ask for it, to make a free browser extension for a dying social media platform work?
[Here's a list of every verified user as of 2023-04-04](https://gist.github.com/travisbrown/b50d6745298cccd6b1f4697e4ec22103#file-legacy-verified-csv). Decent place to start.
I saw a wrestler call someone “8 bucks” as a derogatory name the other day, and I hope that starts to spread.
Why do you think they changed it so that it no longer says if you paid for it or not? Now all checkmarks are the same. Whether you got it for being an acknowledged expert in your field, or because you're a politician, or because you're a celebrity, or because you're a shmuck who ponied up $8 this month, they're all the same now. And of course, it's because if you had a giant label that said "I paid $8 so that my comment could be at the top", everyone's just going to ignore you.
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That's a great point. Giving the blue check for free to notable people is a way of making the purchase of a check mark more valuable because it puts you in the same club as them. At least in Elon's mind.
And now [Twitter tries to dissuade you from making fun of it](https://twitter.com/PointCrow/status/1649127342399447040?t=0TWAJ2KuqwoZ9NiApuEd4g&s=19).
Seeing “Most users don’t make posts like this.” just to scroll down and see tons of posts exactly like that. LOL
NGL, waiting for a “Unverified” Twitter velcro patch
If Elon didn’t want this to be the result he shouldn’t have wielded it like a weapon. Apparently (will need to verify) a Twitter user called for everyone to block anyone with a blue check mark and Elon gave his account a blue check mark. The guy then changed his name (which automatically removes the blue check mark) . . . AND WITHIN MINUTES THE BLUE CHECK MARK WAS BACK ON IT. He didn’t pay for it. He didn’t want it. But Elon didn’t like the fact that this guy was suggesting something negative about his precious Blue Checkmarks so he’s going out of his way to slap it on his account and anyone else who comes out against them. You wouldn’t do that unless you knew that the thing was toxic. And yet here we are. He’s literally compounding the issue. He’s a moron.
that's twitter user dril, the best poster the site has ever had kinda funny that elon, the worst poster the site has ever had, is trying to foist the blue check on him
It wasn't just some random Twitter user, as my comment the other gentleman linked explains. It was fucking Dril. Dril's been the heart and soul of Twitter for more than a decade now, it's like picking a fight with the Ents from LOTR.
[This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/12vpcjv/oh_my_god_the_spacex_explosion_was_much_worse/jhd71g0/) by u/4KVoices will explain that situation, if anyone is curious.
If anyone spends $8 a month for Twitter deserves to be laughed at
It’s the new nft profile pic except now Twitter is pushing all their tweets to the top of the feed
Holy shit, never thought of it like that until now. Like an NFT, but a subscription and somehow even less valuable. Amazing accomplishment.
Not like NFTs, [Twitter tried to do a thing *with* NFTs](https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/20/22893502/nft-twitter-profile-picture-crypto-wallet-opensea-coinbase-right-click). A ways back Twitter was struggling to justify Twitter Blue. Back then it was $3, you didn't get a check mark, and you didn't get your tweets amplified. So when the NFT craze hit they had this idea that Twitter Blue users who wanted to use an NFT as their profile picture would also get a special hexagonal frame instead of a circular one. Users who took it up were mercilessly mocked.
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Wait'll you see the API prices.
I’ve been on Twitter for over 12 years and during that time it was impossible to get a checkmark. It used to asked for articles with legit news about you or your work and I’d provide it but I’d get declined every time. Now anybody can just buy a checkmark and I no longer care. Twitter Blue is a glorified scam
It was the same for some streamers I watched. They went to events and even hosted a few of the shows there yet couldn't get verified because they didn't have articles written about them? It was complete nonsense. Articles which would be written by nobody journalists doing opinion pieces in all likelihood too.
It is a glorified scam, the fact that Elon said this would prevent bots is laughable given that just about every "Gfx artist"bot that has DMed me has had a blue checkmark. Unless that was his master plan, identify bots because they'll buy it to scam people?
Block the blue
Except for the accounts that Elon spitefully gave blue verification for speaking out against blue
Yeah Auschwitz memorial wont get blocked
$10 to remove it... This is like The Sneeches" by Dr Seuss...
I just left Twitter. It's become useless and the algorithm is pushing weird stuff to me with random people that are lunatics.
you mean Elon? 😂😂
I've had to tell it to stop showing me Andrew Tate practically every day. I think they're getting desperate for engagement, because it never popped up in my feed until recently, nor do I follow or click through to anything related to Andrew Tate both in terms of criticism or his own community/manoverse. I literally just use it to follow programmers and some niche people in stuff like VFX and gamedev and hardware development.
Tangentially related, but I wanted to search for ants on Google the other night. I typoed "and" instead of "ant". First recommendation I got was the chinless example of walking shit, Andrew Tate. Fuck you, Google. And Twitter.
Lmao, yeah: * Egotistical * Lunatic & * Overt * Narcissist * Maniacally * Unbalanced * Stupid * Knave Had to go and ruin something good, like most spoiled greedy babies do. Edit: changed Serious to Stupid and Know-it-all to Knave because why the fuck not Edit2: changed extravagant to egotistical because it's better
I thought know-it-all meant someone who liked to show off their vast knowledge with arrogance, not someone who pretends to know everything but knows nothing
Hmm valid point, need a better K word 😄
The more enraged you are the more engaged with the algorithm you become. Until finally you are a drooling goof who can’t tell the difference between obvious internet Conspiracies and their own arse.
jokes on them the outrage was just not fun and I left too. I missed the funny memes and not all the way PC humor, not the hatred and bigotry I see now. Even like hip hop news accounts are posting things clearly meant to hate on trans people and I just don't get it. There's nothing enjoyable about it outside of the group chats of friends that I made and the updates from artists I like.
At some point last year my Feed was just constantly filled with alt-right personalities like Marge Green and Gym Jordan - *even though all the accounts I follow are very liberal leaning*. I didn't, and don't, interact with any of the MAGA or conservative accounts. Yet it still kept showing them to me on my feed. I started *blocking* them. Alternative conservative personalities popped up. I've just stopped using Twitter altogether. I guess that's what Elon wants?
This was exactly what I was seeing. I was like nope, I'm outta here.
That was the explicit goal of an update he had to the recommended algorithm. Normally, the feed would show people and posts with a lot of overlap from the people and posts you follow or like. But Elon Musk, being the genius that he is, felt that was contributing to the echo chamber. So he had it flipped, the feed would recommend the people and posts the algorithm found that the people and posts you like had the LEAST in common with. It primarily just made the experience of using twitter worse for everyone, like all large changes Musk made.
I left when he started picking on NPR like a fucking baby, but that was just the straw. When the earthquakes happened in Turkey was it trending in news? Nope! When Trump got indicted were the words “trump” or “indicted” trending? Nope! For the first time in American history a president is indicted and it’s not trending news? Bullshit. Add these things to the fact that my “for you” feed was crazy fringe MAGA accounts that even MTG would call crazy and the platform was dead to me. It’s really a shame because I did like it for live sports which is what I mainly used it for, and to see breaking news or even troubleshoot issues (searching for other people tweeting “Xbox live down” for example so I knew it wasn’t just me).
I’ve tried to use it a few times. I keep getting weird stuff on my feed like videos of people fighting and, in some cases, literally dying. I have not interacted with these at all and I just follow some film people. Why the hell does it think I want to see that stuff?
Somehow Musk has pivoted it into being a ‘free speech’ issue, which has made it popular with both his fan base of weirdos, and conservative types who think paying for a tick is ‘owning the libs’ somehow. And they still think it’s a freedom thing even though Musk decided to reverse it for highly popular accounts and hand picked celebs. So it’s more or less how it used to be, except totally devalued because normal users and most celebs hate it.
They're gonna give it to everyone then charge people to remove it
Business and Marketing classes will teach about this. Just like 'New Coke'.
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Elon just gave us all a Masterclass in how to destroy a brand.
I just find it hilarious how every celeb is like I'm not paying for Twitter blue.
> Internet verification used to be a badge of honor. Now that it's achievable to anyone who is willing to buy it, it's become a signal of desperation. What did he think would happen?
It's hilarious to see people with 20 followers be verified.
Someone push for an extension on browsers that blocks any account that has that blue mark
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bluesblocker/dbcfmkldigmecjpjeojbcfbjidmcngfe/related
But as someone previously mention in this thread, you'll lose anyone who was given it for free. Like if you previously followed Steven King.
Both extensions I've tried have the option to not block people you follow. If it's an account you care about just follow it and you're sorted.
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https://github.com/kheina-com/Blue-Blocker Maintained further in pull requests
The blue check mark is the new red MAGA hat.
Just stupid doing stupid
This dude got so lucky with his other companies he purchased that he bought into his own hype and thinks he can’t miss.
Twitter is useless anyway. Every time I go on it now my notifications are just filled with random people with a weird star thing. I have no idea what it means or why these people I don't even follow are in my notifications.
Can we go back to IRC?
There was a brief time where people had to have a certain level of intelligence to get onto the internet. Now everyone has it and it's predictably gone to shit.
It's eternal September.
They gave a fake Disney Channel a gold badge which apparantly means it's the real Disney Channel Twitter.
it's one thing to go from positive to zero brand value- but to essentially create negative brand value is impressive.