Inaccurate. Musk stated that people you follow will continue to show up. I only use the 'for you' feed when I'm bored and want stupid dopamine hits, I leave it on Following almost all the time. But that's on desktop, my understanding it that it keeps resetting itself for mobile users (of whom I am not one).

He only said that later; he seems to be working on a "say we'll do feature and then change it all after people yell at him for weeks" process.

Sounds like moving fast and adjusting to user feedback, usually something commendable in tech, right?

No. There's an implied willingness to listen to people in the first place when you're agile in response to feedback. You shouldn't have to bruise Elon's ego to get him to do not-stupid things.

This distinction you’re making relies entirely upon how you personally interpret the motives of the people involved. An interpretation that you’ve entirely invented for yourself.

Approximately every US news organization and Lebron James announced they weren't going to pay for checkmarks yesterday, so he announced a surprise twist where the top 10,000 famous people get free checkmarks.

…so he's now not charging people who can pay, while charging people less able to pay.

Though, the main problem is that Twitter is about as big in Japan as it is in the US, but Elon only thinks about US culture wars because his only friends are a few VCs and a retired postal worker crank named catturd2. So none of his new ideas are going to work there.

Criticizing somebody by speculating about their motives really only reflects badly upon you, especially if you’re going to accompany it with that much hyperbole. All you’re communicating is that you’ve replaced your ability to reason about a topic with some version of the fundamental attribution error.

> the main problem is that Twitter is about as big in Japan as it is in the US

It’s not even close. When you account for the value of ad impressions, the US market is worth about 3.5x its next biggest market (Japan), and it drops off very sharply after that. You can argue that Twitter’s policies should be less US-centric. But the reason they are that way in the first place is because the US market is their most valuable market by a long shot.

> Criticizing somebody by speculating about their motives really only reflects badly upon you, especially if you’re going to accompany it with that much hyperbole.

No, you can tell who he cares about because he replies to them, and because his emails were released in discovery from the earlier Twitter lawsuit and it turned out his friends put him up to it because they were mad the Babylon Bee got banned for a US culture war pronouns joke.

I certainly don't have to expect he'll make good decisions, since he has no experience with the business, is a completely atypical user, was forced to buy it in the first place, and has lost $20 billion so far by his own valuation. (May have lost a few millions more by firing that disabled Icelandic acquihire in violation of his contract and a few discrimination laws.)

The network effect is very very strong though. Even if someone makes a good competitor (Instagram is prototyping one apparently) I'd be surprised if bad decisions actually killed it.

> When you account for the value of ad impressions, the US market is worth about 3.5x its next biggest market (Japan), and it drops off very sharply after that.

I suggest reverse adjusting for how poor their ad targeting is. I've used it both places; the ads are actually good and relevant in Japan (…except for being for domestic apps, so not valid for tourists) but in the US they've always been nonsense. eg if you follow any doctors it will just assume you're also one and burn the budget of every medical ad it's got showing them to you.

More like rewarding someone for putting out a fire that they started. Not exactly a model of good governance.

Musk said from day one of his Twitter purchase that there will be mistakes. Move fast and break things as that other guy said. :)

I have had it reset a couple times on mobile a few months ago but at least recently I have not noticed it happening anymore.

Just pressing the home icon twice takes it back to For You.

Which is incredibly annoying, as it used to scroll you to the latest tweets, I have years of muscle memory for hitting the home button

I don’t see a way out of this with the GPT/AI able to create fake persona in an instant.

What does that matter? If people find the content engaging then it will be amplified. If not, it shouldn't be there in the first place. This whole "AI / Bot swarm" excuse is just smoke and mirrors for "I want more people to pay twitter".

If _accounts_ find the tweet engaging

If "bots indistinguisable from humans" find your "account that posts pro-russian propaganda" engaging it will be amplified onto your For You page.

If you don't care whether the content is generated then you don't need to use a social network at all. GPT can generate you an endless interesting feed no problem.

I believe LeBron James said recently he isn't going to waste his money on a blue checkmark, so it should be interesting to see what stays and what goes.

LeBron doesn’t get $84 of value from Twitter? Definitely not a political statement going on there.

Parent didn’t say it’s not “political”. It’s reasonable for a wealthy person to feel that a system that discriminates against the poor is not a system they want to participate in.

(Note that I use discriminate in the literal sense, as a simple statement of fact.)

But the example you give is an appeal to a universal moral good. Not partisan politics. So despite saying it’s not not political, your justification is that it’s not political.

Also, how did you get a blue check before being able to buy one?

Some people unfortunately view concern for the poor as political. However my point of mentioning politics is to say that “it’s political” is not any kind of gotcha when it was never denied as being political. Regardless of the actual justification being political or not, the “political” gotcha is nonsense.

That’s bullshit. Virtually everyone agrees poverty is a problem. Sure, the welfare state feeds the cycle of poverty, but it’s not like that was the goal.

Absolutely not bullshit. Some cynical people on the internet believe this, and that's what I thought the person I was replying to was saying. It is an extremely low bar to say "some people believe X", and I don't know why you care to question that. Even with your own reply you say "virtually all people agree" and your use of "virtually" acknowledges that not everyone agrees with you, therefore some people do believe what I say. This is anyway such a silly tangent and was not even my point.

The exception proves the rule though.

Are you sure about that? If I break out of the poverty cycle who am I going to vote for?

Republicans I guess, but the point is that doesn’t mean Democrats hate poor people. That’s just political framing.

lol you don't actually believe that's his reason do you?

LeBron started a school where poor kids can get free food and clothes. The man obviously cares.

yeah he gave some money and shows up for photo ops sometimes, sticking the taxpayers with the rest of the bill - swell guy

Twitter doesn’t get $84 of value from Lebron?

Like it or not but it's the twitter that gets value from celebrities. How many people are on social networks jusy so see what their fav celebrites are doing?

It obviously goes both ways. Social media is a megaphone and ego boost for celebs.

The problem for twitter is it isn't the only game in town when it comes to social media, not by a long shot. They're not even in the top ten. They're a megaphone in a large pile of megaphones, and those other megaphones don't bite the hand that picks them up.

Twitter needs the LeBrons of the world far more than they need Twitter.

As someone who was on Twitter long before Oprah, or Elon, or Obama, or most other celebrities and politicians: I strongly disagree.

(Speaking about Twitter the product, not necessarily Twitter the company.)

That was an entirely different era. If you yearn for it, come on over to Mastodon.

Twitter the multi-billion dollar advertising company needs the big whales. I think it was pretty clear the company was under discussion.

What their fav celebrites say -v- what 'the media' says?

He may well, but he may have also concluded that the indirect cost of having a blue tick outweighs the benefits.

Lebron famously uses the free version of Spotify. Maybe he just does not see the value of paying for the blue mark.

Depends on how they weight the is_user_china_mouthpiece variable

Most of the major news outlets are not doing so either. The Elon stans are crowing that this will be the long-overdue end of legacy media, but it strikes me that the new 'blue check twitter' might end up becoming even more of a social bubble than what it replaced. There are so many low quality accounts sporting a checkmark now that users who value substance will soon be incentivized to just block anyone they find annoying.

yeah, they, uh seem to have realized that's gonna be a problem.

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/twitter-business-month...

and of course all this means is that the organizations most likely to be able to afford it won't have to

Good find! It'll be funny to see if the incumbents respond with 'don't do me any favors.' Also to see whether Musk's frens sulk aboit him selling out to the elites or so - their gratitude has an extremely short half-life.

NY Times, WaPo, LA Times and other major accounts too https://www.thewrap.com/ny-times-la-times-not-pay-for-twitte...

Seems dumb of them. Cost is trivial and their competition that isn’t so politically motivated will have a much further reach.

The smart move would be silent on the policy change, pay, and support rival platforms as they can. Instead they will eventually pay and look like they lost.

We’re in a time where ideology trumps revenue for some companies. You know, “Get woke, go broke.”

Everyone says that about things that made tons of money though.

Oh, I don't disagree. I wasn't necessarily (always) agreeing with it. As with anything it's a matter of degrees.

The phrase is "Better Broke Than Woke", we'll see how it works out for folks

> Seems dumb of them. Cost is trivial and their competition that isn’t so politically motivated will have a much further reach.

It's wild hubris for twitter to try to invoice/penalize the very users and organizations that make twitter anything but insolvent. There should be money exchanged here, but it should be flowing generously and most importantly in the other direction.

maybe they can make their own twitter and give themselves a big blue check mark there

For the NYT to verify their official accounts plus those of their reporters (using the Twitter Blue Affiliations feature) would be $1m annually. This, for a budget line item that has heretofore been $0. In this economy, that's a reach.

I don't think the NYT is worried about "reach."

> I don't think the NYT is worried about "reach."

LOL they are desperate for reach. Incredibly so; have you not listen to any podcast by them? They are begging people to go to their site. They get a fraction of the organic traffic they used to and nearly everything is driven from other site like Twitter, Google News, Facebook, etc. The internet age has not been kind to classic news orgs.

The NYT has been doing great recently. They're probably the legacy news company that's doing the best online of anyone.

That's on the strength of having a lot of verticals like games, recipes and Wirecutter though.

have you seen @nyttypos and (to a lesser extent) @nyt_diff? NYT online editorial standards are hilariously abysmal.

https://twitter.com/nyttypos

https://twitter.com/nyt_diff

Yeah and it doesn't matter.

correctly writing words and punctuation on the page digitally printed by "the legacy news company that's doing the best online of anyone" doesn't matter at all? isn't that like the bare minimum of what their job consists of?

I was responding to a post saying they weren't getting online traffic by saying they are getting online traffic. Nothing about the quality of their content.

How do you get the 1 million figure?

An affiliated account to a verified org is $50 per month per seat, so NYT would have to authenticate 1,647 affiliated accounts to reach 1 million dollars per year

Exactly this. Use the published number of reporters at the NYT and multiply.

Are all of these 1647 reporters (they have that many??) and posting on Twitter? That’s a lot of traffic generators or not. Surely they could just do the bulk with 100 or so.

You're suggesting the NYT further tier its reporting ranks, along with all the internal difficulty that would entail. For ex: obviously the 100 have to include the most senior reporters, who are also older and therefore the least likely to create the viral content NYT wants affiliated with their account, so immediately they probably need to look at a much larger number. For another example: social media is different for each reader, or from the other side, each reporter has a constituency. In one season, the fashion reporters are driving views, while the following season it's the European war correspondents or the economics reporters (and all of these desks have subdivisions that wax and wane in popularity).

And all that discussion so that they can spend $72k annually with Twitter, a y/o/y increase of $72k from last year. With no guarantees of reach, because the whole paid-only verification thing is an experiment that began an hour ago. Let me just say that this whole pitch is going to be...difficult... at the point in the economic cycle where we find ourselves.

The NYT has revenues of 2.1 billion. I’m sure they have a marketing budget and probably already spending money on Twitter to get traffic. This isn’t something strange.

Facebook did they same thing btw, just more gradual. For years they changed the algorithm slowly to take away reach from Pages only to offer it back as long as you paid.

Seems like a fair cost to pump spam

> I don't think the NYT is worried about "reach."

Then why are they on Twitter?

Having a presence doesn't mean you can infer they are worried about not having a presence.

It's smart because Musk already blinked

The top 10,000 are getting exemptions and won't have to pay

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/twitter-business-month...

So you need a blue check mark to reach non followers and Lebron won’t get one? Sounds like it’s making Twitter better already.

I had to search who this person is, and I still could not care less.

it's a shame we can no longer short twitter stock

Followed users will still show

But i agree it is a bad idea. The worst actors have money to buy the blue marks of an army of accounts.

This is basically making it easier for authoritarian governments to abuse it

Like that wasn't already happening?

not with blue marks

I'm not in the US

It's actually non-US autharitarian governments that the biggest abusers, using social media against their own people

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-...