>He wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between accounts.

What makes you think users want any of this?

Frankly, most of the suggestions I've seen coming out of the SV "thought leaders" about what to do with Twitter are terrible. The bot problem isn't easily solved, and adding a ton of friction and/or reducing anonymity isn't going to be some huge boon to the platform.

I've often thought that if they 1) allow anyone to verify their account and 2) let verified accounts choose to only (or mainly) interact with other verified accounts, it can make it more obvious which accounts are anonymous or bots. I think it should work unless/until the anonymous and bot accounts figure out how to break the KYC process.

> 2) let verified accounts choose to only (or mainly) interact with other verified accounts

That is already a thing if you are verified and one of the reasons why "blue checkmark for $2" (Elon's plan) won't work and will make many verified people unhappy. They don't want even more peasants and "cloud chasers" in their verified timeline.

Hence different color. I also don’t agree. I think most blue checkmarks equally hate the spam and anonymous hate. In a public square, we can tell you’re a robot or if you’re not and say vile things, you’re unlikely to stay anonymous.

Yes, I'm all for adding layers of social friction, or frankly, reducing the emotional distance. I remember reading a book, I think called On Killing, talking about the psychology of war and violence. In it, he mentioned how it gets easier to kill from a larger emotional distance. Or in other words, it can be harder and harder to harm someone the closer we feel to them. Being able to put on a digital mask and act as a persona can lead to this (it can also lead to opening up more, too), but I at least want to know if someone is wearing a mask or not.

I think the challenge is "verified" = celebrity, or verified fame, and really I want it to equal verified humanity. Maybe that means the verified humanity gets a different name, who knows. There could be two tiers, allowing the verified famous people to interact with each other and others to just know who went through the KYC process.

Yes. But the opacity on how to get verified is ridiculous. And Twitter has used revoking a blue check mark as a punishment. As if the person that was once verified is no longer verified. It’s ridiculous.

Yeah, it has confused me that it's easier to verify one's humanity on dating apps than it is on Twitter.

Right. It’s like removing spam.

Frankly, I think Reddit could do the same and give more weight to upvotes from those that prove they’re real.

It could help with disinformation problems and with finding signal.

I remember reading an article where the CEO of Myspace said one of the main reasons Facebook won was because of its real name policy.

<edit>I found the quote [0], which I had quoted in my essay "Why Twitter Should Verify More Users: Towards a More Human Web" [1]:

> Facebook’s killer feature was that it replicated the real world by forcing people to use their real names, whereas MySpace users used pseudonymous handles

[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-myspace-ceo-explains-why-1...

[1]: https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verif...

</edit>

I know one of the things I loved about Facebook was interacting with university-verified humans. Then it got flooded with more and more spam accounts.

I hope either these platforms or the next generation of platforms realize there is a strong opportunity for real-name policy platforms. It won't be the whole market, but I'm personally really tired of anonymous accounts. I mostly come to HN because there aren't many real-name platforms that talk about these things. Maybe that's because lots of people don't want it. I guess I just don't buy that argument. I think there's a niche for sure.

Interesting. Thanks!

Go follow all the big crypto/NFT accounts on a fresh twitter account. You'll be able to see all of the easily solved bot abuse.

Elon said this. I don’t know what anyone else is saying.

He must think it will work?

1. Retailers have had issues curbing bots hoovering up video cards, PlayStations, etc.

2. Most of the Twitter bots people are worried about when they talk about bots are state-funded.

If companies can't prevent a self-funded scalper, what makes you think Twitter will be able to prevent Russia? There are a lot of ways to obfuscate payments so they don't look to be coming from the same source. Even more ways when you control the banks.

Retailers didn't really care. A sale is a sale, and scalpers are less likely to return or ask for a refund.

They care a little, because establishing relationships with (and gathering data on) real customers is more valuable than having single entities hoovering up all the supply. Further, real people often buy more than one item. I'm sure you've noticed retailers putting limits on specific items before.

> Further, real people often buy more than one item.

But... scalpers do this, especially so. As far as a retailer is concerned, a scalper is every bit as 'real' as any other customer.

1. Retailers have had issues curbing bots hoovering up video cards, PlayStations, etc.

I work in this field and to be honest, the main reason retailers have issues curbing bots is that they don't really spend much resource on it. It's a game of cat and mouse, there's constant work that needs to be done but there's a lot of low hanging fruits that the vast majority of retailers don't do to block bots. And, no, just setting up perimeterx and calling it a day is not enough.

I agree with dannyw. Also, Twitter influencing requires scale. You can fake some but patterns will emerge that make it harder and harder.

Now, if it succeeds, that does create an incentive for corruption within Twitter. The enemies of democracy have huge incentives to keep up these divisive public influence campaigns that have worked this past decade.

I find this to be a great idea personally. I will totally give Twitter a few bucks a month for less bot BS and a blue checkmark.

...and your government ID?

You give the grocery store your government ID when you buy oreos?

Well there are the cameras in the parking lot logging my license plate, facial recognition tracking my course through the store on the way to get the cookies and to pay for them, probably at a self-checkout terminal with a camera right in your face. Then you pay for it with your Visa and that Oreo (automatically capitalized by my iPhone) purchase data is sold by Visa. Then that data gets consolidated with the data secured from Verizon and their Custom Experience badged reading of your text messages.

Then THAT gets sold to the Depts of Defense, Homeland Security, and whoever else wants.

I feel it’s fair to say we do.

huh?

Yep, as long as they restore Trump and BabylonBee i might give Twitter another try

How does charging for a checkmark prevent bots? Forgive me if I'm wrong, I'm not a twitter user, but typically, aren't bots not verified?

The idea is that you can filter out the unpaid.

How many accounts are needed to meaningfully influence a Twitter story? How much can you charge for a checkmark that people will pay for?

Because if a checkmark costs $1/month for example, then spending a couple grand to be able to turn any story you want into "trending" is chump change for corporations, governments, and any particularly motivated silicon-valley salary'd employee.

There are already services which essentially sell you retweets - all this is is an adjustment to their business model to sell "verified retweets" and "aged verified retweets" (in case you want accounts with a posting history to do it).

It's a cost model adjustment, that might not even cost that much - after all if "verified" accounts receive less scrutiny from anti-bot algorithms, then they'd be cheaper to run then the developers/workers who need to keep your sockpuppet farm ahead of the game.

What if it cost $2 a month plus a scanned copy of a government-issued ID?

It’s possible to generate realistic looking IDs. It’s not that hard, any person reading this comment can do it.

Get a face from a thispersondoesnotexist.com like generator. Get the format of the ID in a template, fill in random but realistic data. Like for example, 1000 names for each race-gender combo. Realistic zip codes and addresses from another source.

It’s about a weeks work to get it working to production quality, but it can be easily done.

For bonus credit, see if you can generate an image of the same person holding up this ID. Harder, but not impossible.

What’s frustrating is, those of us who work or have worked in Integrity have already discussed all of this for years. We know the easy solutions, the low hanging fruit. It’s not that helpful when a bunch of people say “why don’t you just charge $2 a month”

Governments can generate IDs for thier sock-puppets for online influence campaigns.

Non-government actors can get in on the action by procuring IDs in other ways ("Make money by scanning your late maw-maws ID"[1]), or large scale phishing campaigns (fake jobs or college admissions abroad with 100% applicant success rate, the only catch is scanned IDs and qualifications are required).

Electronic forgeries are likely the best way to do it at scale; just the other day, therr was a top story ok faking as if your document was scanned. Do the fine people handling verifications at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like?

1. Or "Get $10,000 funeral assistance from this new Biden admin relief program"

Now you are committing extremely serious crimes instead of just spamming though, few would risk that. So this might not solve all spam, but it would probably solve 99.9% of it.

> Do the people at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like?

Yes, there are guides for checking ID cards, how do you think that they check ID cards in real life?

> Now you are committing extremely serious crimes instead of just spamming though, few would risk that.

Oh no, I've broken the ID forgery laws of Burkina Faso and am in big trouble now. Isn't it a rule of low-level scamming to always target jurisdictions away from your own? State-actors don't care about commiting crimes against themselves, only the mid-level, "semi-pro" threat actors care about avoiding major crimes.

I still don't underatand why paying would help. Wouldn't simply filtering out the unverified work the same way?

Paying verifies.

Obviously, but verification already exists. For your answer to make sense, one needs to assume that there's a non-trivial problem of verified bot accounts.

Is that assumption correct? It seems incredibly wrong to me, but I may be misinformed.

Verification only exists for a small group not the general public.

Ah OK, so you're saying that this will enable an expansion of verification, which will then serve as a solution to the bot issue.

They aren't. There are sometimes hacked verified accounts being abused, and I guess charging for the checkmark would result in less verified accounts and thus less hacked accounts... but bit of a reach :)

Those are also not really the problem.

Send them a 2fa key token with their fee and call it a day

Once upon a time, I was on a dev team which had to share an RSA 2FA token for accessing a client's VPN. Rather than pass it around to whoever needed it, we just pointed a webcam at it.

Damn, now it'll be even more of a good idea to immediately block every bluecheck.

Who is going to pay? There's at most a few tens of thousands of people who care about their identity being verified on Twitter (because they're journalists, company leaders, politicians). How much is Twitter worth to those people? Probably not $10,000 per year, so we're talking about a very limited additional revenue source.

For a lot of other people on Twitter, the pseudo-anonymity is a feature not a bug.

WhatsApp charged a few dollars a year and did fine.

I’d pay if it allowed me to filter out garbage.

It’s like paying for the removal of commercials.

I don’t believe Musk intends to require people to be publicly identified.

I don’t believe I follow anyone anonymous on Twitter.

Twitter has over 7000 employees, for WhatsApp's business model to work they'd need to cut this by 10x or so and there is no way they justify the 45 billion valuation if they do that.

Huh? I’m not following. Why would this hurt revenue?

Authenticated real people are more valuable to advertisers.

Did WhatsApp have Ads? I thought all their income was from subscriptions?

If it’s only for verification they, yeah, they might be fine as long as the verification fee is optional.

I do not believe they are literally applying the WhatsApp model. The point was that small amounts of money are tolerable in a network effect.

Remember for a moment that we live in a world where people drop $20 for a virtual Sword of Wounding +4. Often more than monthly in a single game.

A few bucks a month is nothing these days for dedicated netizens who want their social drug of choice.