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X has the problem of boosting blue checks. Which basically means people pay money to get their way to the top, which leads to a few problems - engagement farmi

X has the problem of boosting blue checks. Which basically means people pay money to get their way to the top, which leads to a few problems - engagement farming, spam/scams, and perhaps worst of all, a ring of grifters who all promote each other. I usually have to scroll way down, and often hidden behind 'may contain offensive content', to see much otherwise. It'll last a while, but I don't see it having much legs. Eventually the free users will get bored of typing into the void and go elsewhere. The boosted users will have nobody left to grift, and will go too. I don't dislike Musk or even X for that matter, I check it here and there. I just don't see it being a successful long term strategy.

rsynnott 2y ago
The weird thing is, it's a mechanic that everyone already knew didn't work; dating sites, who pioneered pay-for-attention a few decades ago, have learned that they generally have to ration it to avoid it clogging up the whole system with something that no-one wants to see (if you open Tinder, and every profile you see is of people who feel the need to pay to get attention, say, then you'll probably uninstall Tinder). I'm _kind_ of surprised Twitter didn't rip off one of the dating site rationing approaches ("You get 5 boosts a month with Twitter Premium" or similar). Just flat-out pushing every single reply by every single pay-for-attention user is obviously doomed to fail.