Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition (Part 1)

The BBQ Pit
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I can see verified accounts for people like bestselling authors, politicians, famous performers and prominent influencers, and a whole bunch of other people……I have a friend, someone whose name you probably wouldn’t recognize , who has a blue check account because her spouse was a victim in a high-profile tragedy.

But for your average Twitter user? Does Twitter really need to verify that the account called Sniff My Farts Bro really does belong to a 19 year old named Joe Smith that is studying automotive repair at Keisterfluck Community Vollege In Missouri and that he really is a pickleball super fan?
When it comes to the average Twitter user, it seems that verification would be both difficult and senseless.

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They have some that Glow in the Dark, I hear. Ask your Pharmacist for a box of those Special Elons.

He really is a Scumbag, isn’t he?

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It has been free since it was first implemented, and millions haven’t demanded it.

Who cares who you are if you are not someone with a certain amount of popularity? So you are the real Sam Stone, so what? Either I know you in real life, so I’ve verified your identity by knowing you, or I only know you from twitter, so I don’t really care who you really are.

An actual public figure has a reason that they would want people to know that they really are who they say they are. (Or at least an authorized publicist.)

And I really don’t get why anyone who isn’t a public figure would want to be verified. As much as people complain about doxxing, isn’t this paying $20 $8 a month to doxx yourself?

Explain how a blue check can put a roof over someone’s head, food on their table, clothes on their back, education for their children, or healthcare for their family.

Ah, pay to be heard. Now I get it. If you don’t pay the toll, your comments get buried with the spam and trolls.

Actually not a bad business plan, if you are certain you have a captive userbase. Little bit evil, a lot bit risky, but then, those will probably be the words on Musk’s tombstone.

Yeah, the users will follow the content creators, and the content creators are the ones that Musk is pissing off with this.

I wonder if Stephen King insults Musk enough, Musk will ban him to shut him up. Content creators will leave in droves then.

How long do you think it would take Alphabet to make a twitter clone?

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We’re just monkeys on a message board, but why are actual journalists treating Musk’s off the cuff twittering as genuine plans? The $8 thing was obviously him trying to “own” Stephen King and though he’s announced real plans on Twitter before he’s also posted absolute nonsense like “I’m taking Tesla private at $420 a share!”, which got him into major trouble with the SEC and a settlement that, among other things, removed him as Tesla’s chairman.

If it wasn’t an established pattern my diagnosis would be that he’s trying to be the new Trump for twitter. The account that everyone knows spouts bullshit, but have to follow to see what idiocy spews forth next, to the extent that it draws in new users.

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Because the monkeys on the messageboards eat it up. Journalism isn’t about what’s important anymore, it’s what people think is important.

But the $20 thing was an idea floated unprompted by any users.

If we want to know what his plans are with twitter, then even if he is an unreliable source for his plans, he’s still sadly the most reliable source for his plans.

Everything he says and does is attention seeking. That said, he has enough weight to throw around that we do need to pay attention to him.

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Actually, I suspect that the advertisers had more to do with this than the civil right groups:

Elon Musk pledged early Wednesday after a Zoom meeting with civil rights groups that Twitter will not reinstate banned accounts until it has a clear process for doing so — a vow that means suspended users including Donald Trump will not rejoin the site before the midterm elections.

Twitter will “continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies,” Musk tweeted hours after meeting with the groups.

The fanbois are outraged!

The news prompted immediate dismay from people who previously had hailed his takeover of the site.

“I was 100% wrong about @elonmusk changing Twitter,” the 900,000-follower meme account Catturd tweeted. Tim Pool, another right-wing influencer with 1 million Twitter followers used an epithet to describe the decision to postpone the reinstatement of suspended accounts. Musk “caved in less than a week,” Pool tweeted…

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The week after you bought the company isn’t the time to make huge swings in your plans.

Elon Musk has never run a social media company before, doesn’t know how to, clearly didn’t really want to in the end, and is firing or driving away all the major players there who have subject matter expertise. He’s already lost advertisers. There is a much, much better than even chance that he’ll lose a fortune on this deal, assuming he isn’t secretly shorting Twitter stock.

Arguments over whether the new blue check plan might be better than the old? It’s arguing over a small detail (though, for the record, I think it’s a dumb idea.) Really, all I need to know is that an arrogant jackass bought a company he doesn’t understand and isn’t humble or smart enough to let people who understand the industry run it. How often does THAT work out, guys? Let’s take a quiz!

A) Almost never
B) Never
C) Like, NEVER
D) All of these

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The problem with people who have had success in their lives is that they think that everything they touch turns to gold. The other problem is that other people believe it as well.

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I still don’t get how they would “verify” the real world account of the average user.

OK, let’s say I pay the 8 bucks, and they verify that I’m a real person named Ann Hedonia.

So far, so good.

I now have a verified account with a blue check mark.

On Monday, I can claim to be a high level employee of the DOJ, and post a bunch of false self-serving bullshit.

On Tuesday, I can claim to be a world renowned expert in cult psychology, and post a bunch of false self-serving bullshit.

On Wednesday, I can claim to be a NYT bestselling author, and post a bunch of false self-serving bullshit.

On Thursday, I can claim to be a survivor of a mass shooting, and post a bunch of false self-serving bullshit.

….all of this under my “verified” blue check account.

It doesn’t seem like a blue check account would hold a lot of meaning, because they haven’t really verified anything.

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This is the main problem here. Musk’s actual goal is to make Twitter more entertaining for Musk himself.

Musk loves adulation like any narcissist. He goes to Twitter to get his supply of approval and worship, but it’s adulterated by a steady stream of criticism and ridicule from (mostly) anonymous users. His ego defense mechanisms tell him that this criticism is not authentic. That if there were fewer bots, he’d be better loved. That if people couldn’t hide behind anonymous accounts, they wouldn’t roast him so hard. That if he unbanned the people that his cult is begging him to unban, he’d be more popular. That with enough money and tech, this problem is soluble. That most Twitter users want the exact same thing.

There is nothing to his Twitter purchase beyond these concerns. The only thing he wants to do is make the discourse more flattering to himself (or destroy it).

He’s since learned that Twitter’s already-weak advertising model would take an enormous hit if he implemented the changes he wants. He bought Twitter with zero plan other than “how hard could this be”, and that’s why he fought so hard to back out of the deal. That’s why he’s trying (and failing) to haggle Stephen King into paying more than $0 for his blue check. All the ideas you see floated about charging for this or that feature? It wasn’t conceived to make money. At most it would raise maybe 6 weeks operating expenses. It’s not seriously expected to raise profit, it’s an afterthought intended to offset the destruction of the advertising model. The advertising model is incompatible with Musk being a god-king, so it has to go. He has no alternate ideas.

The whole thing about “make the blue checks pay” is an idiotic sideshow. The idea only makes sense in the conservative mind-bubble that chafes at authentic high-profile criticism. If your main gripe is “the elites are mean to me”, then yes, you’re motivated to find a reason to make them pay. Nobody who’s actually running numbers on this thinks it will actually turn a profit. This is just Musk listening to the dumbest ideas of his grievance-poisoned cultists.

The actual product of Twitter is advertising eyeballs. That means readers. Readers are attracted by high-value content. That’s hard to regulate, but authenticity is a big part of it. Blue-check authors are the means of production. Businesses that make money charge their customers, not their suppliers. But then, Musk’s gambit here is nothing to do with profitability. It’s about controlling or destroying how Twitter talks about Musk. He’s closing in on the first goal, and soon he will achieve both goals.

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Precisely. Those like Sam Stone who argue that it is unfair that only the elite can get the blue checks, misunderstand their purpose. the primary beneficiary of the blue check system is not the people who get the check. The primary beneficiary is their followers who can now feel secure that it is the actual celebrity that they are following rather than some imposter. Rando’s on the internet don’t need them. It matters not at all if a post from some random person you don’t know actually came from a different random person you don’t know. But if they are sold at $8 a pop then it defeats their purpose.

Hey! This describes my favorite social media site.

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I agree with everything you’ve written here. You’ve very successfully articulated what I believe about this situation, but could never state so clearly.

Great Post.

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It’s worth checking out.

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Well, to be fair, the idea behind verification of accounts is that it purports to ensure that the person you’re reading or replying to really is the person you think it is. It never presumed to ensure that what that person says is true, or reasonable.

But I certainly agree that there’s no reason for the average schmo to get his account verified.

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That’s exactly her point.

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This isn’t about what blue checks actually mean or don’t mean. I mean there are some rubes that see it as a status symbol and resent that they can’t get. This is partly because they’re idiots, and partly because the verification system was broken in ways that lead idiots to make idiotic assumptions. The process was opaque, your request could be delayed indefinitely, denied, or revoked without reason or recourse. We know that VIPs tend to get approved faster, but a lot of people get there just by dumb luck.

So there’s some justified annoyance with the existing verification system. If you want to prove that you’re you, this should be possible with reasonable speed and transparency (like a month would be slow but reasonable).

And ironically, it actually does make sense to fix this with a surcharge. It’s a labor and expense problem. Such problems are customarily solved with money. I don’t know what it actually costs. But it would only have to be done once. Assume it takes a $25/hr employee 4 hours to Google your name and run your ID. So collect a one-time charge of $100 and be done with it.

Like most consumption charges, that’s regressive. I’m not interested in thinking about that right now. But the important point is that a one-time $100 fee is sensibly structured to offset the cost of verification. That’s smart business. But deciding that blue checks themselves are worth a subscription, just because the previously broken system created accidental scarcity that made idiots see it as a status good, for the ostensible purpose of generating revenue equal to about 6 weeks of Twitter’s operating costs, and pricing it at $8 because Stephen King balked at $20 and didn’t even counter… it’s the sign of a flailing dilettante who has absolutely no clue what he’s doing (apart from owning the libs… er… the blue checks… er… the customers, or our product… er… what am I doing again)

It would have made total sense to say “verifications are slow and broken. Pay us $100 to do it once, guaranteed, and keep it forever (if you’re authentic).” I’m sure tons of people would have welcomed that, even cheered it. But instead Musk has approached it by treating blue checks as unworthy free riders, shaking them down with all the acumen of a cranky pensioner accusing his garbage man of stealing his newspaper and asking $5 back in compensation.

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Sure there is: if the average schmo is actually verified that means he is a real live human being–not a bot–and bots are very prevalent on Twitter.

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I suspect the only thing that the blue check will verify is your ability to pony up $8 a month.

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How’d I guess that???

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Not to the random audience member reading the spew.

But it totally matters as to who will say what. Lots of current bad actors say things they would not say if they were 100% traceable by law enforcement and by the public at large. If everyone is pre-doxxed we don’t have propaganda-spewing vandals.

They say an armed society is a polite society. I don’t quite agree with that, but we have proven that an anonymous society is a shitty society. So let’s eliminate anonymity. If 100% of posts came back to the real live human trying to keep their job suddenly a lot of trollish behavior would simply evaporate. Certainly the bots that seed the content for “me-too” trolls to re-post approvingly would simply evaporate. As would most of the me-toos.