I get daily emails with the sender listed as 'X (formerly Twitter)'. You know it's going well when you're 6 months in to a name change and you're still reminding your users who you are.
I've played MMOs long enough to know that membership payments don't keep bots out. At worst, they just steal credit card info to use for the membership payments.
I actually saw a video talking about MMO bots, and the fees actually increased the number of bots since the botters have to run more bots to make the same amount of money.
"Weren't mission critical" depends entirely on what your mission is. The moderation teams absolutely were mission critical to the mission of Twitter before the acquisition. They were what gave advertisers the confidence that their ad would not be showing up next to hate speech or other things that would make them look bad. That increases the amount those advertisers are willing to pay for the same ad slot. The teams that worked to make sure verified checkmarks only went to the real accounts made Twitter a reliable method for those verified accounts to distribute information to the masses and the masses could be sure it was actually the person or group that claimed to be providing the information. That ensures user confidence, driving more user engagement, driving more ad revenue. Elon came in and completely changed the mission to include none of those things, so after those changes, yes, they were no longer mission critical.
@@antoniofernandesmarchetti1097 This is like buying a business that is both a restaurant and a bar sharing one building, then immediately shutting down the restaurant and firing all the non-bar staff, waiters, most of the kitchen, most of the cleaning staff, etc., and then going to the media and bragging that 80% of the employees were doing nothing before you bought the place. It's simply not how that works. If he hadn't stuck Twitter with a massive amount of debt in the process then running Twitter as a smaller company with 20% of the old income and 20% of the old expenses would be entirely viable, but that debt is sized to the old version of Twitter and the interest is accruing on that amount. It doesn't care if your business has shrunk, it still needs interest payments.
I agree that fee's reduce the number of bots, but also I think the blue check makes bots feel more prevalent to the average user because they post non stop and they're always fucking boosted by the check. For example the fucking shirt bots, its 8 bucks to get them set but then the rules around blue checks let them run wild so for a while they were on the top of every thread
Every popular account has a bunch of blue checks in the replies, either advertising their onlyfans, or posting random unrelated (usually old) memes in an attempt to get revenue from the views.
I think the biggest argument against the $1 fee getting rid of bots is to look at MMOs. Fucking WoW has a billion bots running constantly, each paying for the base game and expansions to get to the gold farming spots. They don't see the fees and costs as a deterrent, but a cost of doing business. It actually *increased* the amount of bots in WoW because now they need a higher number of bots to reach the same amount of profit. As long as they make more money than the fee costs, they'll gladly just flood the service with bots until it dies.
I have definitely seen A LOT of blue checkmark bots. Obviously I don't know how much of a percentage it makes of the total population, but with twt boosting visibility for users of blue, they are very noticeable. Paying $8 and launching a bot that sells some shitty cr*pto nonsense is clearly worth it for some ppl
Atrioc, Elon suggested 1$ a year, that's 7 cents a month. Typically hosting a bot on a server can cost More than that a month. Let's say you want to host 100 bots. You get a server for 10-20$, then you pay 7$ a month to have 100 bots. This change will do very little
Yeah and I think those who own the bot farms are companies or governments, so they can afford this minuscule payment. Only russia spends probably hundreds of millions on propaganda
Except that many bots likely get banned after a couple of days or even hours. Depending on what your bots do, having 100 bots simultaneously will require thousands of accounts per year
@@tobene I understand the point that for orgs that have thousands upon thousands of bot accounts that it'll truly disincentivize them, but the bot moderation is way worse now than it's almost ever been. I joined in 2015, and before Musk bought twitter I'd get maybe 1 or 2 bot follows and replies a month. Now I get at least 1 bot follow per day, and I don't even follow anything crypto/business or NSFW.
I've been hearing a lot about those massive debt payments. When will they actually hit? It seems like a looming thing but when is this do or die thing actually happening?
if you make a twitter bot to make you money, obviously you will pay the 1$, meanwhile if you're a new user and see that you have to pay a dollar to enter you'll just leave
fees will reduce the number of bots in the short term, but they don't remove bots from the equation. games with $10+/month sub costs are riddled with bots, a $1/year fee per account will not deter any seriously profitable botter, especially since they're probably already spending per month on server costs or even paying for the electricity themselves to run the bots on their own hardware. i can see it working out if the bots are being banned quickly and efficiently, but it's rare to see bots being banned more frequently than like once a month.
Making bots cost a dollar is just gonna make them more expensive to buy. But the companies running bot farms will just raise the price to offset it. Bots are a business, Elon is just adding alittle more overhead to the business. it could make bot farms more competitive and would increase bots.
One of my co-workers is a massive elon fan boy which is funny because dude is super conservative the only reason he likes elon is because in his own words "X has real freedom of speech and he smokes weed" so dude will ride elon and his choices over stuff like that which is shocking to me. Dudes also pretty stupid as a whole though so maybe not to surprising he legit was trying to get me in on andrew tats pyramid scheme and actually shills out the $50 a month. That's the type of people that support elon are dudes that just wanna get rich quick and people that make their entire personality about their political beliefs and weed
Bots would reduce if X has a monthly cost, but not as much as Big A thinks imo. Team Fortress 2 made voice chat exclusive to premium accounts, and there's still tons of bots, most of which have had money spent on them so they can spam in voice chat.
While making people pay for Twitter may reduce the number of bots, I don't think it will change the number of scam bots. 1$ a month won't change how profitable those are. And to be honest, I'm not sure how much it will change how profitable paid bot engagement is either, it might just make it slightly more expensive.
06:00 On the rebrand element of this, if there was a significant change and big new features that will become to his overall 'vision' then I think people would have understood the rebrand, but it was a rebrand for no real reason. Apart from being 'cool and edgy' , but everyone I speak to still mentions Twitter as Twitter and not as X.
It’s awkward or call it C and let’s face it X stopped being edgy a very long time ago. It shows Elons age that he still thinks it’s cool. Anyway I’m happy etching a billionaire lose money - I hope he keeps on making really poor decisions. I’ve notice that Twitter is far less quoted these days in mainstream media which I think should terrify Elon, but you can’t help stupid.
2:31 Don't forget all the SPIKES in downloads was Elon blocking the old API so all the non-Vanilla clients for mobile like Twidere and others just stopped working at once. I know I downloaded vanilla half a year later once my fucking phone was new enough (Android API Version restrictions to run a goddamn website)
Big A will probably never see this but no, cost will not decrease bots. Just take TF2 for an example, it costs 2-5 USD for them to use mic and they still exist in the thousands.
It is absolutely insane to think that a fee will slow, let alone stop bots. Most bot farms have millions to spend on small fees, because they make it all back in seconds each time someone stupid decides to click on whatever link they drop in their comments (or buy into their scams, or take bad finical advice, etc). Edit: Everything else I agree with though.
Yeah, a nationstate can easily spend 10 million a month for a propaganda bot farm and it will be a much larger share of a smaller pie. Companies too will have a field day. It already costs like £0.36 a month to run bots (less advanced bots are cheeper obv), with set up fees for older accounts (less likly to get banned, and new accounts can be restricted see reddit place events). i know account farms that run bots on reddit and sell them once they reach a year old for like £12 each. so its only doubling the price and more than doubling the effect.
Big A bots cost more money based on how easy it is to circumvent the anti bot systems. They need to be more and more complex to not get detected. If you can just pay a flat $1 to not get tracked it's just cheaper. And to musk a paying account is a paying account. But yes bots will go down because less users means less incentives to even pay for them.
I agree that with $1 twitter will reduce the number of bots, but certainly not as much as it will reduce the number of real users. If the ratio bots/users goes up on the end, what's the point? 🤷🏽♀️
@@tengilledid you also forget spacex sent 447 metric tons about 80% of all tonnage sent to space beating countries including USA’s and China’s government programs
idk i'm on threads and it's fine. it's not twitter in the glory days but it feels like it gets a little closer every week. they launched super early to capitalize on twitter's mess and it might have been a mistake because it wasn't really ready then and i'm not sure people will give it another shot.
I'm sorry atrioc but you are wrong about the blue checks. There are so many bots that ha e started following me that just joined the platform, have 0 posts, and have a blue check. It's a small number in comparison to overall users but it is substantial
The real issue is he rebranded it X, if you're gonna do something, do it correctly! Rebrand if XXX! We all knew it was a porn platform, but he basically made it official.
Sure Bots will go down, they will NOT be eliminated though, and you'd be stupid to believe that charging a dollar would eliminate them. But the reality is that charging for it, will also reduce the total users, which will in turn reduce the add revenue, which can ONLY hurt the Business. It would most likely be Twitter-suicide to charge for a service loaded with adds, that has other issues people don't really like. But it would be interesting to see, and as someone who thinks twitter does way more harm than good, I'd be completely okay with it. Although people would just go somewhere else to spread their hate, and have a space to endlessly complain. At this point it's just modern form human nature.
I mean, buying the company in general was probably his biggest mistake. Granted, Twitter was going bankrupt no matter what happened eventually, all this is doing is accelerating the process.
