7 ms·

He wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between ac

by dd36 4y ago

He wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between accounts.

malfist 4y ago
How does charging for a checkmark prevent bots? Forgive me if I'm wrong, I'm not a twitter user, but typically, aren't bots not verified?
- dd36 4y ago
  The idea is that you can filter out the unpaid.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    How many accounts are needed to meaningfully influence a Twitter story? How much can you charge for a checkmark that people will pay for? Because if a checkmark costs $1/month for example, then spending a couple grand to be able to turn any story you want into "trending" is chump change for corporations, governments, and any particularly motivated silicon-valley salary'd employee. There are already services which essentially sell you retweets - all this is is an adjustment to their business model to sell "verified retweets" and "aged verified retweets" (in case you want accounts with a posting history to do it). It's a cost model adjustment, that might not even cost that much - after all if "verified" accounts receive less scrutiny from anti-bot algorithms, then they'd be cheaper to run then the developers/workers who need to keep your sockpuppet farm ahead of the game.
    - mrtranscendence 4y ago
      What if it cost $2 a month plus a scanned copy of a government-issued ID?
      - sangnoir 4y ago
        Governments can generate IDs for thier sock-puppets for online influence campaigns. Non-government actors can get in on the action by procuring IDs in other ways ("Make money by scanning your late maw-maws ID"[1]), or large scale phishing campaigns (fake jobs or college admissions abroad with 100% applicant success rate, the only catch is scanned IDs and qualifications are required). Electronic forgeries are likely the best way to do it at scale; just the other day, therr was a top story ok faking as if your document was scanned. Do the fine people handling verifications at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like? 1. Or "Get $10,000 funeral assistance from this new Biden admin relief program"
        Jensson 4y ago
        Now you are committing extremely serious crimes instead of just spamming though, few would risk that. So this might not solve all spam, but it would probably solve 99.9% of it. > Do the people at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like? Yes, there are guides for checking ID cards, how do you think that they check ID cards in real life?
        sangnoir 4y ago
        > Now you are committing extremely serious crimes instead of just spamming though, few would risk that. Oh no, I've broken the ID forgery laws of Burkina Faso and am in big trouble now. Isn't it a rule of low-level scamming to always target jurisdictions away from your own? State-actors don't care about commiting crimes against themselves, only the mid-level, "semi-pro" threat actors care about avoiding major crimes.
      - nindalf 4y ago
        It’s possible to generate realistic looking IDs. It’s not that hard, any person reading this comment can do it. Get a face from a thispersondoesnotexist.com like generator. Get the format of the ID in a template, fill in random but realistic data. Like for example, 1000 names for each race-gender combo. Realistic zip codes and addresses from another source. It’s about a weeks work to get it working to production quality, but it can be easily done. For bonus credit, see if you can generate an image of the same person holding up this ID. Harder, but not impossible. What’s frustrating is, those of us who work or have worked in Integrity have already discussed all of this for years. We know the easy solutions, the low hanging fruit. It’s not that helpful when a bunch of people say “why don’t you just charge $2 a month”
  - wutbrodo 4y ago
    I still don't underatand why paying would help. Wouldn't simply filtering out the unverified work the same way?
    - dd36 4y ago
      Paying verifies.
      - wutbrodo 4y ago
        Obviously, but verification already exists. For your answer to make sense, one needs to assume that there's a non-trivial problem of verified bot accounts. Is that assumption correct? It seems incredibly wrong to me, but I may be misinformed.
        dd36 4y ago
        Verification only exists for a small group not the general public.
        wutbrodo 4y ago
        Ah OK, so you're saying that this will enable an expansion of verification, which will then serve as a solution to the bot issue.
- lrae 4y ago
  They aren't. There are sometimes hacked verified accounts being abused, and I guess charging for the checkmark would result in less verified accounts and thus less hacked accounts... but bit of a reach :) Those are also not really the problem.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  Send them a 2fa key token with their fee and call it a day
  - DrBoring 4y ago
    Once upon a time, I was on a dev team which had to share an RSA 2FA token for accessing a client's VPN. Rather than pass it around to whoever needed it, we just pointed a webcam at it.
itsoktocry 4y ago
>He wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between accounts. What makes you think users want any of this? Frankly, most of the suggestions I've seen coming out of the SV "thought leaders" about what to do with Twitter are terrible. The bot problem isn't easily solved, and adding a ton of friction and/or reducing anonymity isn't going to be some huge boon to the platform.
- shiftpgdn 4y ago
  Go follow all the big crypto/NFT accounts on a fresh twitter account. You'll be able to see all of the easily solved bot abuse.
- dd36 4y ago
  Elon said this. I don’t know what anyone else is saying. He must think it will work?
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  I've often thought that if they 1) allow anyone to verify their account and 2) let verified accounts choose to only (or mainly) interact with other verified accounts, it can make it more obvious which accounts are anonymous or bots. I think it should work unless/until the anonymous and bot accounts figure out how to break the KYC process.
  - dd36 4y ago
    Right. It’s like removing spam. Frankly, I think Reddit could do the same and give more weight to upvotes from those that prove they’re real. It could help with disinformation problems and with finding signal.
    - jimkleiber 4y ago
      I remember reading an article where the CEO of Myspace said one of the main reasons Facebook won was because of its real name policy. <edit>I found the quote [0], which I had quoted in my essay "Why Twitter Should Verify More Users: Towards a More Human Web" [1]: > Facebook’s killer feature was that it replicated the real world by forcing people to use their real names, whereas MySpace users used pseudonymous handles [0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-myspace-ceo-explains-why-101300285.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-myspace-ceo-explains-why-1... [1]: https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verify-more-users-towards-a-more-human-web-9b7975aac414 https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verif... </edit> I know one of the things I loved about Facebook was interacting with university-verified humans. Then it got flooded with more and more spam accounts. I hope either these platforms or the next generation of platforms realize there is a strong opportunity for real-name policy platforms. It won't be the whole market, but I'm personally really tired of anonymous accounts. I mostly come to HN because there aren't many real-name platforms that talk about these things. Maybe that's because lots of people don't want it. I guess I just don't buy that argument. I think there's a niche for sure.
XorNot 4y ago
Who is going to pay? There's at most a few tens of thousands of people who care about their identity being verified on Twitter (because they're journalists, company leaders, politicians). How much is Twitter worth to those people? Probably not $10,000 per year, so we're talking about a very limited additional revenue source. For a lot of other people on Twitter, the pseudo-anonymity is a feature not a bug.
- dd36 4y ago
  WhatsApp charged a few dollars a year and did fine. I’d pay if it allowed me to filter out garbage. It’s like paying for the removal of commercials. I don’t believe Musk intends to require people to be publicly identified. I don’t believe I follow anyone anonymous on Twitter.
  - qwytw 4y ago
    Twitter has over 7000 employees, for WhatsApp's business model to work they'd need to cut this by 10x or so and there is no way they justify the 45 billion valuation if they do that.
    - dd36 4y ago
      Huh? I’m not following. Why would this hurt revenue? Authenticated real people are more valuable to advertisers.
      - yywwbbn 4y ago
        Did WhatsApp have Ads? I thought all their income was from subscriptions? If it’s only for verification they, yeah, they might be fine as long as the verification fee is optional.
        dd36 4y ago
        I do not believe they are literally applying the WhatsApp model. The point was that small amounts of money are tolerable in a network effect.
misiti3780 4y ago
I find this to be a great idea personally. I will totally give Twitter a few bucks a month for less bot BS and a blue checkmark.
- neurobot123 4y ago
  Yep, as long as they restore Trump and BabylonBee i might give Twitter another try
- sangnoir 4y ago
  ...and your government ID?
  - misiti3780 4y ago
    huh?
  - dymk 4y ago
    You give the grocery store your government ID when you buy oreos?
    - pueblito 4y ago
      Well there are the cameras in the parking lot logging my license plate, facial recognition tracking my course through the store on the way to get the cookies and to pay for them, probably at a self-checkout terminal with a camera right in your face. Then you pay for it with your Visa and that Oreo (automatically capitalized by my iPhone) purchase data is sold by Visa. Then that data gets consolidated with the data secured from Verizon and their Custom Experience badged reading of your text messages. Then THAT gets sold to the Depts of Defense, Homeland Security, and whoever else wants. I feel it’s fair to say we do.
Starlevel001 4y ago
Damn, now it'll be even more of a good idea to immediately block every bluecheck.
fooqux 4y ago
1. Retailers have had issues curbing bots hoovering up video cards, PlayStations, etc. 2. Most of the Twitter bots people are worried about when they talk about bots are state-funded. If companies can't prevent a self-funded scalper, what makes you think Twitter will be able to prevent Russia? There are a lot of ways to obfuscate payments so they don't look to be coming from the same source. Even more ways when you control the banks.
- dannyw 4y ago
  Retailers didn't really care. A sale is a sale, and scalpers are less likely to return or ask for a refund.
  - mrtranscendence 4y ago
    They care a little, because establishing relationships with (and gathering data on) real customers is more valuable than having single entities hoovering up all the supply. Further, real people often buy more than one item. I'm sure you've noticed retailers putting limits on specific items before.
    - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
      > Further, real people often buy more than one item. But... scalpers do this, especially so. As far as a retailer is concerned, a scalper is every bit as 'real' as any other customer.
- dd36 4y ago
  I agree with dannyw. Also, Twitter influencing requires scale. You can fake some but patterns will emerge that make it harder and harder. Now, if it succeeds, that does create an incentive for corruption within Twitter. The enemies of democracy have huge incentives to keep up these divisive public influence campaigns that have worked this past decade.
- nicolas_t 4y ago
  1. Retailers have had issues curbing bots hoovering up video cards, PlayStations, etc. I work in this field and to be honest, the main reason retailers have issues curbing bots is that they don't really spend much resource on it. It's a game of cat and mouse, there's constant work that needs to be done but there's a lot of low hanging fruits that the vast majority of retailers don't do to block bots. And, no, just setting up perimeterx and calling it a day is not enough.

by dd36 4y ago

He wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between accounts.

malfist 4y ago

How does charging for a checkmark prevent bots? Forgive me if I'm wrong, I'm not a twitter user, but typically, aren't bots not verified?

dd36 4y ago
The idea is that you can filter out the unpaid.
- XorNot 4y ago
  How many accounts are needed to meaningfully influence a Twitter story? How much can you charge for a checkmark that people will pay for? Because if a checkmark costs $1/month for example, then spending a couple grand to be able to turn any story you want into "trending" is chump change for corporations, governments, and any particularly motivated silicon-valley salary'd employee. There are already services which essentially sell you retweets - all this is is an adjustment to their business model to sell "verified retweets" and "aged verified retweets" (in case you want accounts with a posting history to do it). It's a cost model adjustment, that might not even cost that much - after all if "verified" accounts receive less scrutiny from anti-bot algorithms, then they'd be cheaper to run then the developers/workers who need to keep your sockpuppet farm ahead of the game.
  - mrtranscendence 4y ago
    What if it cost $2 a month plus a scanned copy of a government-issued ID?
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      Governments can generate IDs for thier sock-puppets for online influence campaigns. Non-government actors can get in on the action by procuring IDs in other ways ("Make money by scanning your late maw-maws ID"[1]), or large scale phishing campaigns (fake jobs or college admissions abroad with 100% applicant success rate, the only catch is scanned IDs and qualifications are required). Electronic forgeries are likely the best way to do it at scale; just the other day, therr was a top story ok faking as if your document was scanned. Do the fine people handling verifications at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like? 1. Or "Get $10,000 funeral assistance from this new Biden admin relief program"
      - Jensson 4y ago
        Now you are committing extremely serious crimes instead of just spamming though, few would risk that. So this might not solve all spam, but it would probably solve 99.9% of it. > Do the people at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like? Yes, there are guides for checking ID cards, how do you think that they check ID cards in real life?
        sangnoir 4y ago
        > Now you are committing extremely serious crimes instead of just spamming though, few would risk that. Oh no, I've broken the ID forgery laws of Burkina Faso and am in big trouble now. Isn't it a rule of low-level scamming to always target jurisdictions away from your own? State-actors don't care about commiting crimes against themselves, only the mid-level, "semi-pro" threat actors care about avoiding major crimes.
    - nindalf 4y ago
      It’s possible to generate realistic looking IDs. It’s not that hard, any person reading this comment can do it. Get a face from a thispersondoesnotexist.com like generator. Get the format of the ID in a template, fill in random but realistic data. Like for example, 1000 names for each race-gender combo. Realistic zip codes and addresses from another source. It’s about a weeks work to get it working to production quality, but it can be easily done. For bonus credit, see if you can generate an image of the same person holding up this ID. Harder, but not impossible. What’s frustrating is, those of us who work or have worked in Integrity have already discussed all of this for years. We know the easy solutions, the low hanging fruit. It’s not that helpful when a bunch of people say “why don’t you just charge $2 a month”
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  I still don't underatand why paying would help. Wouldn't simply filtering out the unverified work the same way?
  - dd36 4y ago
    Paying verifies.
    - wutbrodo 4y ago
      Obviously, but verification already exists. For your answer to make sense, one needs to assume that there's a non-trivial problem of verified bot accounts. Is that assumption correct? It seems incredibly wrong to me, but I may be misinformed.
      - dd36 4y ago
        Verification only exists for a small group not the general public.
        wutbrodo 4y ago
        Ah OK, so you're saying that this will enable an expansion of verification, which will then serve as a solution to the bot issue.
lrae 4y ago
They aren't. There are sometimes hacked verified accounts being abused, and I guess charging for the checkmark would result in less verified accounts and thus less hacked accounts... but bit of a reach :) Those are also not really the problem.
rdtwo 4y ago
Send them a 2fa key token with their fee and call it a day
- DrBoring 4y ago
  Once upon a time, I was on a dev team which had to share an RSA 2FA token for accessing a client's VPN. Rather than pass it around to whoever needed it, we just pointed a webcam at it.

itsoktocry 4y ago

>He wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between accounts. What makes you think users want any of this? Frankly, most of the suggestions I've seen coming out of the SV "thought leaders" about what to do with Twitter are terrible. The bot problem isn't easily solved, and adding a ton of friction and/or reducing anonymity isn't going to be some huge boon to the platform.

shiftpgdn 4y ago
Go follow all the big crypto/NFT accounts on a fresh twitter account. You'll be able to see all of the easily solved bot abuse.
dd36 4y ago
Elon said this. I don’t know what anyone else is saying. He must think it will work?
jimkleiber 4y ago
I've often thought that if they 1) allow anyone to verify their account and 2) let verified accounts choose to only (or mainly) interact with other verified accounts, it can make it more obvious which accounts are anonymous or bots. I think it should work unless/until the anonymous and bot accounts figure out how to break the KYC process.
- dd36 4y ago
  Right. It’s like removing spam. Frankly, I think Reddit could do the same and give more weight to upvotes from those that prove they’re real. It could help with disinformation problems and with finding signal.
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    I remember reading an article where the CEO of Myspace said one of the main reasons Facebook won was because of its real name policy. <edit>I found the quote [0], which I had quoted in my essay "Why Twitter Should Verify More Users: Towards a More Human Web" [1]: > Facebook’s killer feature was that it replicated the real world by forcing people to use their real names, whereas MySpace users used pseudonymous handles [0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-myspace-ceo-explains-why-101300285.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-myspace-ceo-explains-why-1... [1]: https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verify-more-users-towards-a-more-human-web-9b7975aac414 https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verif... </edit> I know one of the things I loved about Facebook was interacting with university-verified humans. Then it got flooded with more and more spam accounts. I hope either these platforms or the next generation of platforms realize there is a strong opportunity for real-name policy platforms. It won't be the whole market, but I'm personally really tired of anonymous accounts. I mostly come to HN because there aren't many real-name platforms that talk about these things. Maybe that's because lots of people don't want it. I guess I just don't buy that argument. I think there's a niche for sure.

XorNot 4y ago

Who is going to pay? There's at most a few tens of thousands of people who care about their identity being verified on Twitter (because they're journalists, company leaders, politicians). How much is Twitter worth to those people? Probably not $10,000 per year, so we're talking about a very limited additional revenue source. For a lot of other people on Twitter, the pseudo-anonymity is a feature not a bug.

dd36 4y ago
WhatsApp charged a few dollars a year and did fine. I’d pay if it allowed me to filter out garbage. It’s like paying for the removal of commercials. I don’t believe Musk intends to require people to be publicly identified. I don’t believe I follow anyone anonymous on Twitter.
- qwytw 4y ago
  Twitter has over 7000 employees, for WhatsApp's business model to work they'd need to cut this by 10x or so and there is no way they justify the 45 billion valuation if they do that.
  - dd36 4y ago
    Huh? I’m not following. Why would this hurt revenue? Authenticated real people are more valuable to advertisers.
    - yywwbbn 4y ago
      Did WhatsApp have Ads? I thought all their income was from subscriptions? If it’s only for verification they, yeah, they might be fine as long as the verification fee is optional.
      - dd36 4y ago
        I do not believe they are literally applying the WhatsApp model. The point was that small amounts of money are tolerable in a network effect.

misiti3780 4y ago

I find this to be a great idea personally. I will totally give Twitter a few bucks a month for less bot BS and a blue checkmark.

neurobot123 4y ago
Yep, as long as they restore Trump and BabylonBee i might give Twitter another try
sangnoir 4y ago
...and your government ID?
- misiti3780 4y ago
  huh?
- dymk 4y ago
  You give the grocery store your government ID when you buy oreos?
  - pueblito 4y ago
    Well there are the cameras in the parking lot logging my license plate, facial recognition tracking my course through the store on the way to get the cookies and to pay for them, probably at a self-checkout terminal with a camera right in your face. Then you pay for it with your Visa and that Oreo (automatically capitalized by my iPhone) purchase data is sold by Visa. Then that data gets consolidated with the data secured from Verizon and their Custom Experience badged reading of your text messages. Then THAT gets sold to the Depts of Defense, Homeland Security, and whoever else wants. I feel it’s fair to say we do.

Starlevel001 4y ago

Damn, now it'll be even more of a good idea to immediately block every bluecheck.

fooqux 4y ago

1. Retailers have had issues curbing bots hoovering up video cards, PlayStations, etc. 2. Most of the Twitter bots people are worried about when they talk about bots are state-funded. If companies can't prevent a self-funded scalper, what makes you think Twitter will be able to prevent Russia? There are a lot of ways to obfuscate payments so they don't look to be coming from the same source. Even more ways when you control the banks.

dannyw 4y ago
Retailers didn't really care. A sale is a sale, and scalpers are less likely to return or ask for a refund.
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  They care a little, because establishing relationships with (and gathering data on) real customers is more valuable than having single entities hoovering up all the supply. Further, real people often buy more than one item. I'm sure you've noticed retailers putting limits on specific items before.
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    > Further, real people often buy more than one item. But... scalpers do this, especially so. As far as a retailer is concerned, a scalper is every bit as 'real' as any other customer.
dd36 4y ago
I agree with dannyw. Also, Twitter influencing requires scale. You can fake some but patterns will emerge that make it harder and harder. Now, if it succeeds, that does create an incentive for corruption within Twitter. The enemies of democracy have huge incentives to keep up these divisive public influence campaigns that have worked this past decade.
nicolas_t 4y ago
1. Retailers have had issues curbing bots hoovering up video cards, PlayStations, etc. I work in this field and to be honest, the main reason retailers have issues curbing bots is that they don't really spend much resource on it. It's a game of cat and mouse, there's constant work that needs to be done but there's a lot of low hanging fruits that the vast majority of retailers don't do to block bots. And, no, just setting up perimeterx and calling it a day is not enough.