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X plans to use payment, phone and ID verification to stop bots, $1/yr fee
- 1970-01-01 3y agoWhat caused the flagging here?
- dexwiz 3y ago$1 hardly sounds enough to stop bots, just tax them.
- ttt3ts 3y agoIt isn't about the money. It is about getting the payment method. Getting tons of payment methods that are not obviously linked is not easy. Payment companies will often give up addresses, phones, etc. A bunch of information that can be used to connect accounts/bots.
- theossuary 3y agoDon't know, this sounds like an excellent use of stolen credit cards. And considering it's just a dollar, I could see CC harvesters using Twitter as their testbed for CC #s (as apposed to charities, etc.). Then they can sell the accts as well as the CCs. May take time to spin up, but eventually being willing to pay a dollar for Twitter might mean the acct is more likely a bot than a human.
- userinanother 3y agoAs soon as they launch this it will immediately become a stolen card test bed until the cc company closes the loophole. It makes perfect sense but nobody can explain that to the musk because they will get sacked
- smith7018 3y agoAh, I see you still believe Musk's argument that all of these changes have been "to fight bots" despite there being far more bots after he took over. If he really wanted to fight bots, he wouldn't have fired the Safety and Election Integrity teams.
- rchaud 3y agoNobody's who isn't already dependent enough on Twitter to pay $8/mo is handing over their payment info now. Maybe they'll pay it with Apple Pay/Google Pay or Paypal but that doesn't help Twitter.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoThis is as much about bots as his attempt to get out of the acquisition last year was about bots.
- dnissley 3y agoWhat is this about then?
- JohnFen 3y agoMy guess is data collection.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoGradually normalizing a paywall for Twitter in a manner that still preserves the ads, data collection, inability to use third party clients, and the various other downgrades to the service from this year.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoTwitter seems incapable of even creating a basic keyword filter to stop bots.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- userinanother 3y agoI’ll donate 10$ to nitter to run 10 bots for me to scrape.
- yodsanklai 3y agoI'm curious to see how this pans out! I'll be very amused to see all the Musk haters gracefully proceed to payment because they're addicted to this utterly toxic social network.
- DSingularity 3y agoIt’s the least censored platform. That has immense value to many people.
- over_bridge 3y agoScammers and disinformation spreaders especially.
- ckbishop 3y agoI don't know how you can claim this. The unpoliced proliferation of absolute horseshit, buried under an insurmountable pile of "verification" checkmark replies, is a form of censorship in my opinion.
- viraptor 3y agoMastodon has that place though. You're able to have your own node and nobody can censor you as long as they don't take down your internet connection. There are also existing communities with very few restrictions, if any.
- fckgw 3y agoSame thing was said about Twitter Blue and it's been an abysmal failure.
- cramjabsyn 3y agoAh yes lets pay them to aggregate and mishandle our PII because bots.
- ge96 3y agoSarah McLachlan sings For just $1 per year...
- jsnell 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37922973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37922973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37925439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37925439
- ajhurliman 3y agoIt worked for SomethingAwful.com there’s no reason to believe it won’t work for X
- rchaud 3y agoIt's certainly inarguable that their founder is in a better place.
- ckbishop 3y agoIt worked for SomethingAwful.com before Reddit and 4Chan launched, and now SA is essentially dead. Why do you think that is?
- howenterprisey 3y agoSA's pretty good these days. I think it's working great.
- bananapub 3y ago? SA isn't trying to repay tens of billions of dollars of loans and hugely damaged the income stream it had with billions of dollars a year of advertising. making people pay for niche random internet corners is of course a fine business model, but it doesn't make billions of dollars a year or satisfy someone with the ego of elon musk.
- fckgw 3y agoSomethingAwful is a profitable business which is more that can be said for Twitter dot com
- happytiger 3y agoOk this is the thing I’ve been telling people X would do from early on. The idea here is to provide enough information to turn the majority of active users from social media users to payment platform users, thereby changing the platform valuation incredibly and creating one of the most valuable companies in the world basically overnight. Note that the “bot verification” is merely a thinly veiled KYC check, which together with AML will set X up as a payment system provider and eventually the rollout of an MTL. Very smart business move if it works. They don’t need that many active users to transition successfully either, as long as it’s got scale. Just look at the monthly active users and consider what a verified payment user like square or PayPal is worth to company valuation and you’ll see why 43B was worth it. It was the largest available userbase to roll this business model out onto.
- howenterprisey 3y agoOK, this is the best explanation I've seen yet of the purchase, but still... nobody signed up for Twitter for this purpose, they just wanted to tweet. This plan will kick off all the users who don't want to do the new verification things. In that sense it's totally disrespectful of what Twitter actually provided.
- happytiger 3y agoThat’s why he’s paying people for tweeting. In order to get the money you have to KYC.
- datadrivenangel 3y agoAML/ MTL? KYC = Know your customer.
- stvltvs 3y agoAnti Money Laundering
- happytiger 3y ago
- O1111OOO 3y agoI think this will eventually be about the subscription model to help lessen the reliance on advertisers. Lots of companies are moving toward this. Microsoft (Office products, maybe even their OS), Google recently with Youtube, Meta's IG/Facebook subscription plan and certainly Apple has mastered this. I believe that the data analysis guys have determined that there is a large enough pool of people that are willing to pay for services. I'm (subjectively) seeing a trend where more companies are relying on a segment of the population to help keep them afloat, profitable and in some cases... dominant. Twitter may be experimenting (while curtailing bots) with getting people used to the idea of paying for their service. One dollar... sure! A year later, it's $2.99/yr or $1/month... Still not a bad deal for those who are already comfortable with $1/yr. Saving user's payment information also makes it easier to segue into other ventures (stores, merch, donations, etal) because the wallets are now open. Objectively... It's not a bad move overall for a company that has been struggling. I wanted to see if X/Twitter's Premium service was a success and if so... it might have helped spur this move. Unable to find any info on that. Some other useful stats below: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
- sneak 3y agoRequiring ID verification for publishing is the best way to kill anything truly interesting on a publishing platform.
- teddyh 3y agoSee also: “Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy?”: <https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...>
- tolmasky 3y agoThe monetization scheme for Twitter seemed so obvious to me — just charge to edit tweets. Something like $1 for a “5 edit bundle”. I would have easily probably ended up spending more than $8/mo with that. Beyond being just plain bad ideas, each of these new fees they’ve introduced leaves no ability for users to spend a lot of money. They're all one-time payments. And edits in particular would work great because: 1. It’s not functionality people were already used to getting for free, so they wouldn't feel like something was being taken away. 2. It's something people have been, quite vocally, asking for for a very long time, so you know that they, well, actually want it. 3. It doesn't lend itself to complaints because typos feel like they're “your fault,” and so it feels more understandable to pay to "fix your mistake." 4. And it can be billed as a pure convenience: "you can always just delete the post and repost it". Even though this misses the point that you lose your retweets, it just adds to point (3) that it feels like a hack they're allowing you to do to fix your mistake. 5. It doesn't negatively affect any existing user dynamics. When you charge a subscription, it's natural to feel like you shouldn't see ads anymore. "What am I paying for if I still see ads?!" This feature is completely orthogonal to every other existing revenue stream. If they would have just done this at the beginning, I think people would have actually cheered it on, and it doesn't affect any existing user dynamics. No devaluing of blue checkmarks, no risking losing tons of users by making it a for-pay service, and again, there's no hard ceiling on how much revenue you can generate from a single user. And guess what... a year later, they can still also offer a subscription that gives you 20 edits a month, or 300 edits a year if you pay all year up front, or something like that. So you can still get your subscription payments. And critically, unlike previously, you know what you're paying for. The messaging is simple and you can spin it as a user-friendly move: "Oh wow, the new edits feature is so popular, we decided it made sense to give people a way to get edits cheaper. Our new subscription pricing saves you money!"
- AgentK20 3y agoOne thing that I feel is probably not being thoroughly considered is that, given that this will likely be a credit/debit card transaction, just how many fraudulent card charges will be rung through this system, and how this will likely result in Twitter/X being banned by Visa and the other payment processors. One of the many reasons that almost NO ONE accepts less than $2-3 on the internet for things is that if you receive a chargeback from the bank due to fraud, there is a $20-$100 FEE that is applied to your account (in addition to the transaction being reversed), and if you get too many of these (both by percentage of transaction count and dollar volume) you will be banned from the payment processor. With the proposed $1/yr fee, it would be trivial to pay a few hundred dollars on a shady website for stolen credit card numbers, ring up huge numbers of $1 charges, and induce tens of thousands of dollars of damage while harming X's relationship with their payment provider.
- Freedom2 3y agoI'm sure that Elon has thought of this and has contingencies in place - he's definitely not the kind of person to make rash, arbitrary decisions at all.
- joshstrange 3y agoWell I just barely managed to avoid spitting my water everywhere, well done, well done.
- bananapub 3y agowhy is anyone reporting this credulously like it's a serious attempt to solve a serious problem? bot activity is far far far far worse than it was before Elon bought Twitter and fired loads of people, and much of the spam and most of the abuse I see comes from people who already paid for Twitter Blue! whatever the reason for this dumb idea is, it isn't to actually reduce the amount of bot crap on the platform.
- underseacables 3y agoSomething interesting would be if past tweets were hidden for everyone but those who pay.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] Lots of discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37922973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37922973