And claiming that lots of people illegally vote for you. That’s class too.
The right-wing word-vomit machine where you can be as moronic and self-contradictory as you want, and as long as you include some version of “the left is dumb and hates you” in every sentence, Republicans will line up to support you:
“left-wingers are deliberately importing immigrants to vote for them. The left-wing is too stupid to intentionally do this.”
You see this all the time on RW message boards. Thing is, many of the migrants are more religious and socially conservative than the average American. They are ripe for the GOP, if the GOP wanted them.
True, but they’d have to stop with the racism, like they decided in 2012’s autopsy. Instead, their voters chose Trump.
Pay-to-post, you say?
I wonder if anyone around here has any experience with what happens to a free site when you suddenly have to pay for access.
“Melon Husk”. What a great nickname for him.
This is old news.
Those Evil New Zealanders and their billion-bot hordes. Always causing trouble for decent folks worldwide. Thank goodness Lord Elmo is on the job 24/7/365 protecting us all.
Snerk.
Actually, a nominal fee is not necessarily that bad an idea. I am a member of another board that has such a thing, and the people there behave very well. There’s something about putting even a bit of skin in the game that seems to improve people’s behaviour.
Mind you, a very small percentage of Twitter users ever post a thing, so the large majorityh of lurkers won’t care. But even a nominal fee could cut into the users who do. As users here remember, it’s shocking how many people will refuse to pay any amount at all for a service they enjoy.
Twitter is doing fine in terms of users, though. I think they hit an all-time high not long ago. The problem there is monetization. The ads on Twitter are now low-rent drop-shippers for Alibaba goods, and the kind of ads you’d see on Fox for older people. I can’t remember when last I saw an ad from a major company. That can’t be good.
You said that nearly a year ago, AFAICT, on January 27, based on a Nov '22 article in The Verge that was based on a Twitter internal memo.
At that point you also said:
This Slate article from a couple of months ago appears to be challenging the “user growth” claims.
I never noticed any difference here during the pay-to-post era. If online venom or generally crap behavior declined it was only in proportion to the drop in population as board membership tanked. Any improvements in manners at the SDMB, to whatever degree you want to argue they have, seems to have been a post-pay and forced by stricter moderation.
Agree mostly with @Tamerlane.
I will suggest that during pay-to-post we got fewer drive-by trolls. Once the experiment ended the flux of drive-bys picked back up. So @Sam_Stone has a point in terms of results, albeit not exactly the one he probably meant to make.
But the baleful consequences for user headcount remained even after pay-to-post had gone.
Yes it is.
Charging a nominal fee is a bad idea for what Musk is trying to accomplish. It has a much bigger impact on individual users than it does on bots and spammers. Sure, it increases their costs, but they have more money to spend.
It’s also a bad idea while the perception is that the quality of Twitter has gone downhill. It adds a further barrier to entry to people who are already considering quitting. You want to charge when people think that your app is the next big thing, or when people are so addicted they will pay.
And it also seems dumb to target countries that tend to be poorer, making the nominal fee less nominal. If you’re going to do price discrimination, you usually charge more to the people who have more.
Even if there is some positive effect by giving people “skin in the game”, it seems far offset by the downsides.
I’d expect the Philippines/New Zealand thing to be a typical soft launch and not anything about targeting or price discrimination. It’s quite common when making substantial changes to an app to first launch those in a specific market that’s small enough to not have a huge impact on your entire ecosystem but still large enough to detect any issues before rolling things out to the whole world.
Agree with @Gorsnak that a bunch of why those two countries were picked was for technological reasons.
I’ll also suggest they were chosen as exemplars of English-speaking upper-middle income countries and non-English-speaking* lower-middle income countries to assess the business impact of the change on those two sorts of populations.
As to the $1 discouragement charge, I can see the logical value of it to curb bots and trolls.
But it would need to be $1 per post or maybe $0.10 per post-view, not $1 per account per month. As to live humans spending their personal money, a surprisingly small charge has a surprisingly big psychological discouraging effect. Even on folks where the amount is trivial compared to their budget. I could tell some stories about that from my own businesses.
But for bot/troll farms which are businesses, it needs to be a big enough charge to gut the profitability of what they’re doing. E.g. If it cost $1 to send each piece of spam email, there’s be substantially none of it since the average payoff per spam email is much less than $1.
That calculus would not directly affect the work of political, as opposed to business, bot/troll farms. But if the cost to achieve a given political effect on an enemy population went from $100 to $100K, that would sure alter how much mischief they could engage in for however many $millions they’re willing to spend vandalizing their enemy’s society.
Unrelated to the above …
A question I’ve not seen explored here is how the advertisements seen on X vary by country. It seems lots of US-directed adverts are political / scammy in nature now that the real corporate advertisers have mostly fled.
What’s going on or been going on with ads in e.g. the UK, NZ, Philippines, South Africa, etc.?
* Yes pedants, I know lots of English is spoken in the Philippines; but it’s not the primary language.
I see that in my own psychology, where I’ll drive an extra mile to buy gas that’s three cents a gallon cheaper than the nearer station, even when that only adds up to maybe a $0.31 discount for a tankful.
Does that discount include the cost of the gas it takes to get you there? I don’t know what your MPG is, but say it’s 30 mpg at $3.25 / gallon. That’s another 10ȼ, so 21ȼ savings in total (if you hadn’t already factored that in).
I will drive to get slightly lower gas price. It’s not so much the 30 cents I save, as it is my small attempt to drive the market. If everybody always went to the cheapest gas station, the others would have to lower their prices.
Exactly. But that’s my point - the savings are so minuscule as to hardly warrant the effort of comparison shopping. Nevertheless, I do. Rational, I ain’t.