There is some merit to having paid accounts that get some sort of goodies¹, as the bot farms won't want to pay $8/mo for thousands of bot accounts (not to mention going through the process of having all those credit cards set up), but the fatal mistake was selling it to everyone as "now you'll get that cool blue checkmark that verified accounts have". It just devalues the blue checkmark for the purpose it used to have ("hey everyone, this is an actual official/verified account of some agency or company or prominent figure").
¹: (although letting your advertisers know that people with a propensity for paying for services have been partially extracted from the pool of people watching ads is not a way to make your ad space sell better, or for more money, to your potential advertisers - that also seems like a blunder)
It’s almost as if musk didn’t know what it was for before… kinda like people on here claiming it was just for people “to be elitist” 🙄, which is a common trait of insecure anti-intellectuals and pseudo-intellectual whining…
I'm kind of ambivalent about Chief Twit. I am glad he kinda sorta invented Tesla and Space-X before he decided to re-invent Twitter.
Invented Tesla… nope.
Which he only started doing after HE was the one impersonated. And its a liufetime ban. Meanwhile, you can spread election lies, covid lies and racsim - and IF you get banned, its not lifetime.
Musk - the guy who once asked Chinese social media censors to block posts critical of his company.
“But but but you’re just jealous of successful rich man!!!!11!1! Waaaa!”
I wouldn’t count on Musk failing. Twitter will be the greatest social media platform on the planet. Give him a year. Advertisers will be crawling back soon.
MAYBE after thee rehired employees who actually knows something about managing a social networking site educate Musk (without triggering his spoiled rich boy ego) and brings him up to an at least minimally competent level of awareness…
Isn't this the social media equivalent of saying to the world,
"I paid for WinRar!"
What’s wrong with paying for WinRar?
Umm, you don't have to pay anything. The subscription is completely optional. You get a few perks for it, but it's no different than downloading a free app from the App Store and paying for an in-app purchase. You can do all the stuff you could before for free and don't lose a thing unless you were a blue check prior to this.
…AND we all lose the ability to know when accounts are legit or not BEFORE they do damage…
We can only hope all social media dies. It's been a cancer on society.
This is an absolutist/black & white attitude. This is not how the real world works. Social media has been very useful to many people. When it became 100% a tool for the advertising industry, and that ensured the worst possible choices being made by the management of the services, things got bad. You want to talk about “cancer on society”? That’s advertising.
I have always found Twitter to be a cesspool of negativity. Plus, I am indifferent to EM but I have found his public autocratic approach to the Twitter employees jobs/careers unpalatable. If it was feasible, I’d delete my account yet too much content on the web needs a Twitter account currently.
It's a cesspool for you because of what you like and reply to.
It’s my news feed, because I follow a number of tech blogs (macrumours, Ars, theverge, Macstories), personalities (John Gruber, Marco Arment), and a couple of politicians here and there. It’s also fun following all the reactions during Apple keynotes.
I browse it with Tweetbot, which strips out ads, presents the posts in a clean, chronological order and supports safari view controller. Since I don’t really interact with anyone online, it’s actually quite a pleasant reading experience overall.
It’s my newsfeed too. I find the next day’s news on mainstream media playing catch-up to what I read a day or two previously on Twitter.
sounds like a lot of work.
And a lost cause
those theories were started by corporate journalists and persist due to lack of transparency by sfpd
The source was not “corporate media”… at least not a mainstream media source.
so are the people crying over the potential loss of an echo chamber
So long as Twitter is made to serve advertising, it will continue to push users into echo-chambers.
The guy is making it up as he goes along. He clearly doesn't understand what the value of a verified account was to the average user: knowing that that person/organisation is who they say they were. Now, it's just a free for all. Just look at accounts purporting to be George W Bush and Nintendo have been tweeting. Sure Twitter is blocking them, but the damage is done.
As for alternatives to Twitter, there is a substantial number of people moving to Mastodon.
Mastodon, like most open source stuff, is overcomplicated and poorly designed on a user-experience level.
It's social media, calm down.
Ah yes, the old “I personally see no consequences in this thing, so it’s stupid for anyone else to take it seriously” reaction… 🙄
www.washingtonpost.com
