Elon Recreates The Lords & Peasants Bluecheck System He Hated, But Makes Sure It’s Even Dumber
from the sometimes-first-principles-is-not-the-way-to-go,-elon dept
There is something amazingly humorous in watching Elon Musk work his way ass-backwards and blindly to recreating (but much worse) the mostly-functional systems he destroyed blindly upon taking over Twitter.
As we’ve been pointing out since basically day one, Musk never understood the whole verification concept. Early on, before he’d even taken over the company, Elon had suggested that the way forward should be that all users on the platform should be “verified” and that this would magically stop spam and bots (it would not).
Then, when he took over the platform, he got so confused by verification as a tool to protect well-known users, combined with the fact that some people viewed those users as influential, that he assumed it was the bluecheck itself that had value. Thus, he took it away from all the actual well-known users and allowed his dumbest fans to pay him a monthly subscription to have the bluecheck… that no longer had any value.
Indeed, it started to accumulate negative value as it was widely abused by scammers. Then, making matters worse, Elon futzed with the algorithm to make it so that if a tweet got a lot of replies, those with bluechecks (i.e., gullible Musk fans who were paying) got their replies at the top of the list. In practice this meant two things: (1) the very spammers and scammers Musk insisted he was getting rid of quickly started using this to their advantage, increasing the flood of spam, and (2) reading replies on ExTwitter became almost entirely useless as they were filled with garbage, and it was impossible to find anything of value.
Anyway, about a week ago, Musk announced that anyone with over 2500 paying followers would be gifted “Premium features” for free. This basically means that any decently large account would be getting a blue check for free.
This is, effectively, an admission that most actual influential and widely followed accounts weren’t seeing any value on the platform and weren’t paying for “X Premium” or whatever it’s called these days.
But, it also seems like an acknowledgement that Elon got the value equation totally backwards here. He thought that the value came from the blue check. But that was wrong. The value came from the people who were well known, who lots of people wanted to follow. And Musk inverted that, by making it harder to hear from the people folks wanted to hear from, and instead, flooded the system with fucking fools.
So, now, the system is even dumber. Basically any site with a decently large following (somewhere between 80k and 120k or so…) seemed to end up with a bluecheck back on their account. Even as many of them don’t want it (which seems silly: if you don’t want it, just stop using the site).
Users who got it received a notice that they were getting it for being “an influential member of the community.”
Remember, being “an influential member of the community” was the original reason that old Twitter gave users for verifying them in the first place. And which Elon raged against as inherently unfair.
I’m curious what happened to this version of Elon:
That’s Elon saying:
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.
Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
So… now we’re right back to there being a “lords and peasants” solution. Peasants can pay (often more than $8/month) to get a bluecheck, but anyone even remotely noteworthy gets it for free by way of having enough dimwit gullible suckers who did pay follow them.
This still undermines the only actual purpose of a verification system: to make sure people aren’t impersonating well-known users. There is no actual verification for anyone in this system. You have a bad form of verification (“do you have access to a credit card?”) for gullible followers, and then an even worse form of verification (“are you followed by a bunch of gullible suckers with access to a credit card?”) for everyone else.
That’s not verification. It’s also not valuable. It’s just designed to hide Musk’s incompetence in managing the platform, while (once again) undermining the whole “pay me for this site I’m making worse day by day” business model that Musk keeps pushing.
Filed Under: bluecheck, elon musk, influential, lords and peasants, premium, twitter blue, verification
Companies: twitter, x
Comments on “Elon Recreates The Lords & Peasants Bluecheck System He Hated, But Makes Sure It’s Even Dumber”
I could make jokes about Elon and Twitter, but none of them would be funnier than the joke Elon has made of both himself and Twitter.
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Rekt
Just lol
Neo-Feudalist Creates Feudalism in Purported Fight Against Feudalism
This is what finally pushed me off of Twitter (besides him stonewalling logged out users and Twitter itself being a breeding ground for mental illness lol.) Even if you found a tweet that wasn’t porn or ragebait, the top replies would be filled with blue check shmucks polluting the atmosphere with their own horrendous, ignorant opinions.
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That’s what pushed me away from even lurking there. There was zero value ever just passively reading the site.
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This is the best thing Musk ever did. He made it pointless for external viewers to even bother to look at tweets. It killed the last utility of Twitter as a communication medium. He again misunderstood what the value of the service was.
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You forgot the scammers, crammers, grifters, hornswaglers, cattlerustlers, crypto bros, white supremacists, Nazi, Neo-Nazis, bigots, misogynists, and other scum and villainy.
Sometimes you get to even mix and match the adjectives together!
Thinking
That you can do better then Another in creating a site/forum/chat type design?
Without LOOKING HARD at what was done and why?
Asking for a Shot in the head the hard way.
redesign something thats Working, and Improving??
Musk is living techbro Groundhog Day where he repeatedly learns lessons well known to experts.
He stares into the mirror every single night going “ohhhh…that is why they did that!”
And then forgets that lesson by the time he wakes up in the morning.
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Phil: It’s the same thing your whole life: “Clean up your room. Stand up straight. Pick up your feet. Take it like a man. Be nice to your sister. Don’t mix beer and wine, ever.” Oh yeah: “Don’t drive on the railroad track.”
Gus: Well, Phil, that’s one I happen to agree with.
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Phil:… Oh yeah: “Don’t take over a business without first understanding the business model.”
Gus: Well, Phil, that’s one that I happen to agree with.
Elon continues the genius tech bro tradition of inventing something that already existed, but worse.
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Next month, he will certainly “invent” the expression enshitification for what is happening to Twitter for 18 months.
But I’m not worry, there is still some fanboys ready to offer their tongue as toilet paper, and Elon has much more of it to prevent anyone starving.
Did you forget a word?
There seems to be a missing word after the dash in “mostly-“.
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Like Twitter, the sentence is broken.
Musk never did away with lords and peasants in the first place. He just replaced one set of lords with another. Classic “revolutionary to dictator” stuff.
So, you’re saying that with an investment of $20,000 I can start selling instant premium services?
And if I have each of my accounts following each of the others, they will be self-sustaining!
Don’t actual “Executives” delegate?
I dimly recall that Musk hired someone to actually run Xitter. In my decades of experience working in business, one of the things I learned is that good managers know how to effectively delegate, and once responsibility and authority have been delegated, you step back and allow that manager to do the job as he or she sees fit.
So, who’s actually in charge of Xitter?
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I think it is beyond obvious she is exclusively there to cash a check until Musk pushes her off the glass cliff.
She knows it. He knows it. I just hope that she has a really good lawyer to help her fight for the bonus Musk has zero plans to pay out.
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She’s looking for a job either in the next Trump administration or as a right wing lobbist/think tank exec.
She might be hoping for a Fox News position, but doesn’t have the legs for it.
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that’s if trump gets elected
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Oh it’s always been Elon, his ego won’t allow anything less, the one he hired was/is just a stooge to act as mouthpiece and try to do damage control for whatever mess Elon made last.
Blue checkmarks: So worthless they can’t even give them away to the very people they want the most on the platform, with Twitter reduced to handing them out whether the user wants them or not.
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Blue checkmarks are the modern swastika symbol.
What, again? i shouldn’t be surprised or anything, but FFS.
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Use something else if you don’t like it, or build your own, rather than whine about something you don’t like.
Standard answer around here. I guess it is different when the shoe is on the other foot.
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It always amuses me when people think that’s a gotcha, as thought that dolt’s ownership of the Twitter does or should make him immune to mockery and/or criticism when he does something stupid.
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It always amazes me how you people can flip and flop between whining and criticizing. If you like it others are whining and can go elsewhere and if you don’t like it you are criticizing.
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It’s indescribably sad how some people can’t tell the difference between “this guy is doing things I disagree with” and “this guy should not be allowed to do things I disagree with”.
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It’s not sad, it just shows some people have below average intelligence.
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If you can’t stick to facts, pretend I said something I didn’t
Re: Re: Re:3
What facts? You were whining about something you made up in entirely in your head because you don’t understand context while conflating things.
Let me blow your tiny brain into bits: Did you know that you can simultaneously criticize something while deciding if you want to use it or not? The two actions can be done independent of each other, neat huh?
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Why are you trying to change topic?
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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wpath files
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Whoosh!
what if…
Has he failed though? His plan, imo, has always been to flood the ranks of the “influential” blue checks with right wing crazies who couldn’t otherwise get verified. This was all about making the right wing peasants the dominant voice on the platform, and now he’s boosting the non-paying crazies that the blue check mob follow. And while some accounts that meet the threshold for a free blue check will be legit non-crazies, celebs, journos, orgs, etc, I would bet that the majority of them are the like-minded crazies, their pink slime outlets and bots, and others that will further enhance their dominance.
Everything he does, however ham-fisted and biased in favor of his preferred viewpoints, is calculated to boost those idiots to the top of every conversation. Given that this is happening just as election season goes into high gear is probably not a coincidence, and could be part of a larger, coordinated strategy.
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If his plan was to improve Twitter and thus improve its financial situation after his takeover: Yes.
If his plan was to wreck Twitter one way or another: Not by a long shot.
it's simple
Blue check (unpaid) for verifiably influential real people.
Green check for losers and spammers who pay.
People can figure it out for themselves.
Then again, why are they still on Xitter?
Another blue-check recipient, Marcy Wheeler, independent journalist and liberal commentator (and my old high school classmate!) responded in a fashion that sounds typical for her: “Shit. I’ve been forcibly bluechecked. How do I opt out?” (Also reported in the Washington Post.)
There may not be a way for her to opt out. She doesn’t seem to have the “Premium” option that would allow her to “hide” the blue check on her account. And that sounds like a typically-Elon trick to pull.
Re: 'Nice following you got there, be a shame if people thought you supported me...'
If you have to pay to hide the blue checkmark of shame that seems like a pretty big red flag that Elon knows it’s anything but a mark of prestige these days and he’s using that fact to extort users out of their money.
As for getting rid of it mocking Elon and pointing out what a blithering moron he is might be worth a try, and if all else fails as the article notes they can always leave Twitter.
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According to the WaPo article, Marcy still uses exTwitter “mostly to monitor right-wing narratives and disinformation so she can push back on them.” I’m presuming she doesn’t want to leave, as that would disrupt this mission.
However, either Elon has relented or she found a way; her account is no longer sporting a blue check.
Someone should tell Elon Musk to just go back to Africa where he came from.
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And if he were black, doing that would be blatantly racist. It’s no less racist to do it just because he’s white. STFU, Klansman.
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Telling someone who is not from Africa to go “back” to Africa because they’re black is inherently racist. Telling someone to go back to a country or continent they actually immigrated from may or may not be racist. In this case it is not because the motivation is not based on Elon’s race, but on the things he does and says. It’s also because “go back to Africa” is the sort of thing a lot of his admirers would say, so it’s a bit of petard hoisting.
The kind of verification I like is the kind Mastodon (and probably other AP implementations as well) have.
Bidirectional links to a webpage that you control. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/profile/#verification
Twitter should just do that.
Also, doesn’t this article of yours in the suggested articles section contradict your point about how checkmarks are supposed to be about verification?
If you want to know that an account actually is who it says it is, doesn’t that go for everyone well-known, whether they’re savoury or not?
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Or maybe it doesn’t, because who cares if someone impersonates some Nazoid scum.
But then that means it’s a system of approval, not just of verification, making Elon’s comments about “lords and peasants” more justified.
Also, you also promote the posts of people who pay you by buying “Techdirt credits”, lol