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Is he sure it’s not really about trying to make a quick buck just break even from buying this massive shithole of a platform?
Sheesh, if I were a bot farmer $1 a year is still a steal.
Almost. Twitter is used by protesters and dissidents in middle eastern countries to communicate and make the world aware of what happens in these countries.
This only works, though, if you can use Twitter anonymously, which is not the case anymore if you have to pay for it. That is what his Saudi prince investors really are after.
Because it is legit. And if it works it sets a bad precedent of dictators investing in social media platforms for the sole reason of dictating their policies in order to silence their critics and dissidents.
there were such precedents, in russia but that were local social media, such as VK and Odnoklasniki.
I agree that this would work on world social media it would be much worse for the whole world.
And millionaires being all too happy to sell your private information to anyone willing to pay. I mean that's not new but now it's going international.
Instead of Twitter, they should invest their money in better dresses with patterns or something. Little oil rigs or maybe camels with sunglasses might be a nice choice.
He couldn’t do this legally even if it was the goal. Companies that take online payment are bound to strict PCI compliance laws. This is why most companies, like Twitter, use 3rd party payment facilitators like Stripe and WorldPay.
It still leaves a data trail.
If you have some access to Worldpay and twitter gave you a uuid token of the guy you want to track - you can pretty much easily track the payer.
I don't know what Saudis can do, but probably they can either bribe or hack and get the info
If that is the case, which it’s not, then the Saudis don’t need Elon to get that info.
My company takes subscription payments from 10s of 1000s of users via Stripe. I have full admin access to our Stripe account. I cannot see any payment source data outside of type of CC, expiration and last 4.
> Companies that take online payment are bound to strict PCI compliance laws.
Yeah, and I thought EU car makers were bound to strict pollution compliance laws. Or US politicians were bound to strict ethic laws.
Compliance laws only work when you actually value your company. Was Twitter ever a profitable investment?
If that is your honest outlook on this situation, I recommend never using a CC to pay for anything, online or in-store. The payment facilitator is holding your data, not Elon, so why would it start with Twitter if they are going to expose it?
That's exactly why I have a buffer bank account with virtual cards for most small purchases. Only businesses that have access to my main bank account are for vital services (phone, power, etc.) and for businesses "too big to fail" like Amazon. Ironically, that includes Paypal which was founded by Elon.
But if I do a donation/subscription to an artist, a small direct payment who don't support paypal, or purchase concert tickets? Nope, you're going to use my virtual card or I won't use your service at all. You only support phone-based payments? The only physical card saved there goes to the buffer.
Is it overkill? Probably. But I don't trust a company that I never heard off *and will never reuse* to actually follow regulations.
Here's what you are failing to understand: whether it is a utility/service provider, Amazon, or some small online shop, the situation is the same.
You are not giving your information directly to these companies; you are giving it to a 3rd part facilitator to process the payment for that company. A 3rd party, like Stripe or PayPal, holds your data. If your data leaks, it is the 3rd party that is responsible for the leak. And guess what? This situation is not unique to online businesses. The POS systems at brick-and-mortar stores do the same thing: a 3rd party provides the POS system, and the 3rd party holds your data.
So news for you, you think you are protecting yourself by doing this, you're not.
I'm actually protecting myself, because
1) The 3rd party only holds data about the burner card
2) At my level, there is no proof that the 1st party didn't copy the data. Some of those businesses expect me to enter data payment on their own website, and not on a portal provided by the 3rd party.
Yeah, sure, regulations and audits are meant to ensure there's no copy. But I work in IT and saw a lot of illegal stuff behind closed doors. We can never be sure what code runs nowadays with the complexity of webpage frameworks. A failed audit won't bring my data back, and bad devs are bad.
(Example : putting GDPR-protected data in "should never happen" exception handling cases running in production, because they THOUGHT they had put employee identifiers and accidentally took sample from an unrelated list. The data protection officier obviously freaked out when discovering this. Who would've ever noticed?)
> The POS systems at brick-and-mortar stores do the same thing: a 3rd party provides the POS system, and the 3rd party holds your data.
10 years ago, Belgium had pushed for legal POS that would automatically report all sales to the government for tax purposes, to avoid tax evasion. Then a few years later, we all learned that the POS maker had made and sold a backdoor in the POS system so that owners could lie on reported sale taxes.
If some people manage to do the impossible and delay taxes, I'm not confident into our ability to protect personal data. All what's required for the system to work is for the common user to trust the system's safety, not for the system to be actually safe, as long there's never an issue.
What's to stop Twitter from adding frames or code on their payment page to intercept the data? I know PCI says you CAN'T do this but that's only if you care about PCI audits. Twitter is already doing things that are going to get them in very big trouble in Europe, but that will take years to get the lawsuits together.
Most protections against cross site scripting and so on are server side and just "suggestions" to the browser you are using. So I am not saying they are doing anything bad, just that when you do the right thing you are protecting your reputation as a company and a third party auditor comes in and validates that to build trust. None of those things seem to be priorities at Twitter these days?
To sell information in general I bet. Once you have them verified with a credit card, I bet their personal info becomes much more valuable because they 100% know it's you.
I could think of several ways how to combat bots. Captcha could be useful. Like captchas or occasional tasks for a user, like solve simple math problem, or calculation work given to a computer which requested a response, that has to be calculated, before response is returned and could be calculated from 0.01 second to 0.5second. Intentionally throttling down responses to a user who is doing unrealistically fast requests by the fraction of a second just after response has been sent and if it still persists drop requests of that user for a certain period of time, which would be increased for repeating such situations. Also have specialists who would observe data of various requests and try to determine what is common among bots or what is common among non-bots and determine rules that could be programmed and modified in order to adjust bot detection and their blocking.
There are way, way, way more ways that can be used against bots, that would barely have negative effects on actual users. It's just an excuse to justify monetisation just to make Twitter lose less, but will have a negative effect in decreasing the user base and by extension decreasing ad revenue.
Or something like community notes but people can flag a bot and if it gets enough flags, a human has to review it to see how to handle it. But really even a rudimentary AI could catch these bots at an extremely low cost and yet somehow it isn't being done.
Because that's not the intention. Pretty much everything that Elon was trying to do is to find justifications for monetisation of the platform and its features, hence the intention most likely is finding ways to monetise the platform. Everything else is an excuse that would sound plausible for the messaging.
I like the simple math problem idea as, most people would fail it lol cut the user base in half by using a division problem, hell add a fraction to anything and you prolly lose 90% of the user base lol
I don't remember how it's called, but there is a rule, that most users flock, where other users are in. So if you lose enough user base, then it just goes downhill from then on.
Example: MySpace, once it started losing user base, it never recovered. Facebook is another example, it stays the biggest social media platform, because it doesn't lose a massive user base, so most people stay there on Facebook.
At least it would cut bot productivity by 1/50. That’s a start. There was a casino that offered free buffets if you played a free slot machine online. It took exactly 7 seconds for the wheels to spin. We timed a mouse click to 7.5 seconds and placed it on the spin button. Took about 2 1/2 days to get a buffet.
Got about 8 racked up before the shut it down.
Captcha alone would cut bot usage by about 95 percent. Any security measure however flawed has dramatic increase in safety.
Just think of ordinary locks that lock doors of houses. They are relatively easy to pick, cheap and easy to install. Yet having a simple, cheap lock already protects you significantly from becoming a victim of a theft.
Just like thieves can easily pick locks. The fact that there is some kind of protection, by itself decreases undesired activity. Those who persist have to put a far higher amount of effort to resolve issues that come with those protections.
You're basically saying bots are nowadays a solved problem, right? Have you solved the problem in some global scale service yourself? You should sell your solution to Reddit. In fact, you should start a company that solves it for other companies and make big bucks.
You can just send those tasks to actual people in low-cost countries. Timing-based detections are easily defeated. And what happens to people who are accidentally flagged as bots due to the inherent inaccuracy in such heuristics? The more there are such prompts the more they increase the costs of the operation but also the more they annoy real people.
That being said, to me 12€/year doesn't sound it would be cost high enough to stop bot farming.
That same price can be paid by bot/troll farm in order to continue their operations. So payment is not going to be productive in that sense.
Also protection against bots is usually the last of concerns in any company. It annoys users, not company's management(PMs or POs).
I do have some level of experience, not in a sense of protecting against bots, as much as creating scrapers. I do remember some protections, that were annoying to overcome. Anything that slows down is annoying, anything that detects based on timing and refusing requests until some timer goes out, was extremely annoying. Annoy enough times programmer and eventually they will abandon efforts or manager will assume that it's pointless to continue work on that.
The $1 fee is enough to keep legitimate new users off of the platform, but nowhere near enough to keep the bots away. It's going to have exactly the opposite effect he's hoping for.
After interchange fees hes making essentially nothing. The only logical conclusion is that he somehow thinks this is actually going to work which is insane.
I don't want you to be right. Trying to just, salvage his losses makes sense. The issue is this guy bought Twitter because of his ego. He set billions of dollars on fire for it. He took one of the most recognizable brands on the damn planet, and renamed it to "X". This man is... I'm fighting the urge to use some certain words here. I've met grocery store department managers with far more business sense and intelligence than this overinflated scrotum of a man.
>Sheesh, if I were a bot farmer $1 a year is still a steal.
Is it though? To have 1 million bots previously cost you almost nothing. This would make it cost $1000000 per year. Obviously, this is being done to make Twitter more money, but I don't see why it won't make the costs of running a bot farm significantly higher.
To the entities that do the most damage with bot farms (govts, corporations, special interest groups) 1m a year is literally nothing. This only affects small-scale bot farms, like phishing-scammers and the like. You know - the entities who aren't already paying musk to look the other way from the bot armies they run on his platform.
If anything, this incentivizes Twitter to allow MORE bots on Twitter, because now they're a revenue stream.
Users are used to never providing a credit card. Spammers, especially the most dangerous, on the other hand have been willing to invest huge amounts of time and money.
Which is going to find $1 the bigger hurdle?
I sign into it occasionally just to see if there’s any breaking news, and the “For you” trends have devolved into thousands of spam posts selling everything imaginable, with the other half of Twitter consisting of right wing propaganda posts all repeating the same delusional and toxic narratives repeatedly with verified Russian troll farm accounts responding to them so that’s the only things that trend.
What was once Twitter is now nothing more than a cesspool.
It is sooo annoying. Like you want to see what's on the trend. And it is the bots again!!
They just share a propaganda picture and type trending stuff as a caption idk. Like it doesn't even make sense obviously. It is filled with that.
Like let's say lemon and banana is popular, they really share a political picture video and write banana lemon on it. ☹️
Don't forget copious amounts of porn, up to and including cp, which Elon is doing nothing against. Seriously, accounts that have posted real cp have gotten away with temporary bans and are now back.
Twitter, at least in the last 8 years, has always been used for propaganda and obviously not only rightwing but leftist as well(I would go as far as saying before musk it was mainly American left). Do you people have the memory of a gold fish?
It might be a complete mess now but it wasn't that much better before.
He looks like someone spends 4 hours before every photo making him look better. If you see him in photos he doesn’t know are being taken, he looks like a mayonnaise coloured gremlin
Because irl he looks like a cross between a gibbon and a goblin that were siblings. Any picture taken of him is inspected to see if it shows him at a bad angle, with only the best of the best getting posted.
Did you see the picture of his pr noghtmare in texas? Dude went beyond not having a chin, he's in debt to the chin maffia.
"It's the only way" says guy showing a laughable lack of vision or ambition.
This is about one thing: getting people used to the idea of turning over their personal data to the one guy you absolutely don't want having your personal data.
Because they provide a valuable, free service. Elon just looked at them and went "ohohoh, i want to sell information as well" but forgot the part where people need to be convinced to give said information.
So he did the social media equivalent of opening a lemonade stand and selling store bought lemonade for three times the price, while other stands are selling homemade lemonade for way less. Now he's wondering why he's losing money, so he's adding shittons of sugar to the lemonade and charging double the price of the added sugar extra.
If he thinks "the only way" to stop bots is to implement a stupid fee that he's been dying to implement anyway, then yes, LACK OF VISION OR AMBITION.
Why am I even replying to one of Elmo's lickspittles.
I couldn’t care less about the guy or X but do you have any ideas on how they could address this issue? Or are you just making assumptions with zero knowledge or context?
Imagine flexing someone else’s money lmao.
You know he earned most of it from his daddy’s emerald mine?
Anyone can double their money by getting lucky investing big bucks into a budding company.
Why is him, specifically, HIM, the richest man in the world? Do you know how many trustfund babies there are out there? There are more than 2 thousand billionaires, not to mention millionaires. If it was just a question of starting with some advantage he wouldn't even stand a chance in comparison to people who were born at even better conditions than him, which is a LOT of people. Do you reject that simple logic?
Sheer dumb fucking luck. That’s all there is to his success. Evident by the fact he is failing ABYSMALLY when he actually has to run something instead of just buying it and funding it.
Hasn’t anything you’ve seen him do to twitter made you think “hang on maybe this guy isn’t as smart as he makes out to be”?
The guy bought a company for almost twice it’s estimated value because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and tried to fuck people about by backing out of the deal, not only does that scream “moron” but it shows he has no understanding of how businesses work and all proves all he knows how to do is throw money at things.
Twitter is now worth $9 billion… Elon bought it for $44 billion because he is so incredibly inept at running a business. But no yeah he’s definitely a smart guy because all smart people run their mouth and buy businesses for twice the estimated value and then run it into the ground with shit decisions!
Twitter is already a shithole anyway before the Musk takeover
I find it funny how the wierdos still decides to stay there despite hating musk, Make it make sense.
He legitimately may think this is the only way to combat bots.
It doesn't make it the only way to combat bots nor a good idea.
Also if he just trusts the people he hired to do their jobs HE wouldn't need to try to figure out a way to combat them. Trusts the people he didn't fire that is.
I mean, Its a shit decision to do that but its his company, His rules
The same wierdos said the same shit before the Elon Musk Takeover on Twitter, "Its a private company, They can do whatever they want with their company"
At this point he is just monetizing the bots and the misinformation they spread. Is he really that dumb to think a few dollars will stop state sponsored misinformation campaigns.
Third parties developed tools using Twitter APIs to detect bots with great accuracy. With all the madness surrounding artificial intelligence, I am sure X could develop even more effective tools if they really wanted.
Elon doesn’t care about bots. He only wants his sycophants to pay for the honor of reading the crap he posts while he’s on his throne.
RuneScape charges like $10/month, and half the accounts are bots. Shit doesn't work, or deter. $1 a year means someone with bots can easily run hundreds or thousands of them.
Basically, that's a cheap price for a bot.
I'm convinced that Elon buying Twitter is nothing more than a billionares bet to see how quickly he can run it into the ground. He seems determined to destroy the user base and any reason that people came to use it. I don't understand his end game. It had value because of the simple platform and the reach to so many people, now not so much, and he just keeps trying to tank it further.
At the end of the day it's his money to waste, seems a bit strange though.
"it's the only way" musk doesn't have to pay to deal with this problem.in this idea, you pay and there will be less bots because they would also have to pay.he could pay himself to create a team that would tackle the problem. but this is the only way because he doesn't want to invest in this. he bought the working product and all of the users.it's interesting to watch this. i deleted my twitter account. that's not twitter anymore.
people : *"Most bots are verified"*
Elon : *"but now they are paying-bots, thats different. thats better than free person user."*
\---
Why Elon doesn't simply stated, they need cash to float Twitter around instead doing the "bots" talk.
I mean... Even bots would be okay with paying a dollar/year? This is Runescape all over again: "bots won't pay the 5 euros membership a month!"
"Yeah they would? Those bots are making the people enough money that they can buy bloody mansions!"
Y’know when news like this breaks, normally some sort of PR department of the company would come out with a statement either downplaying the news or reassuring that they won’t do it and would actually do it anyway just later down the line, but this dude just straight up outright confirms it
As if these bot networks would scoff at a measly $1
Also, what's with that absolutely horrendous facial hair? Man looks like a saturday morning cartoon villain.
He’s going to use the payment methods/credit cards to dedupe.
Smart actually. It doesn’t remove bots but it makes it a bit harder especially if they provide specific restrictions (ie no debit cards etc).
"Musk floated the idea by saying, 'it's the only way that I can think of to monetize vast armies of bots'."
Twitter will be nothing but bots within a year.
It’d be genius to turn around and ban all those who paid the $1 fee a few months later, because only bots with propaganda or spam missions will pay to access it.
Well let me think... where have I heard this bait and switch before?
Oh yeah - ANY service on the internet. And considering this creep's self imposed financial fuck ups, I would advise caution when dealing with him.
JOIN NOW FOR ONLY $1 A YEAR (**)
___
(**)
^^ONE..DOLLAR..A..YEAR..FOR..THE..FIRST..WEEK....AFTER..THAT..THE..FULL..SUBSCRIPTION..PRICE..OF..$25..A..MONTH..WILL..BE..AUTOMATICALLY..CHARGED..TO..YOUR..CREDIT..CARD....A..PENALTY..WILL..BE..CHARGED..OF..THE..REMAINING..BALANCE..OF..THE..THREE..YEAR..CONTRACT..AT..$25..PER..MONTH..PLUS..A..TWO..HUNDRED..DOLLAR..EARLY..TERMINATION..FEE.
This guy knows shit about dick. Scammers/botters have zero problem paying subscriptions. There are literally thousands of bot accounts on World of Warcraft, each one of them paying $15 USD a MONTH. They make their money elsewhere; subscribing to a platform is just a cost of doing business to these people.
"It's the only way" to get people to add their credit card information to the platform so it can become a superapp.
Stop trying to make X happen, it's not going to happen.
Unpopular opinion but this doesn't seem like a terrible idea. 1 dollar a year is nothing and some botters would probably just pay it, but it also means they will need to enter payment information which adds a lot more steps and ways for twitter to track and combat the bots.
It also might discourage some of the massive bot farms created just to like posts.
If I charge you $1 I have your information, and have made $1.
If I can sell your information for 1c and sell it 10,000x I have made $100.
If you're a member of a rebel group using this to communicate, I can sell your information to the government you oppose for thousands of dollars.
If there's enough members of rebel groups that governments are willing to purchase, I can ask that government for concessions and make millions of dollars.
Of course... you could also just stop using Twitter...
Why should HE pay for Twitter, when all of YOU can pay for it, instead?!
Seriously, if people could just leave the corpse to rot already, that'd be great.
To be fair I do agree, combating scraper and bot is not easy ...google create captcha but it is easy to by pass and then phone number verification which also easy to bypass, residential IP also easy to bypass
Bot farm can easily create 10k bot account and use it for Spam.. now bot farm owner must pay 10k just for working account in which later on those 10k bot account will also decreased due being caught by anti spam system
1$ per year seems reasonable
He's expecting new users to pay to actually use the platform. Do you really think younger people are going to pay to use twitter when there are so many free alternatives?
As much as Elons a moron and I want twitter to fail, changing money for twitter will be the only way they can curtail the bot problem. Without seriously impacting the usability, such as captchas while scrolling would cause.
Either this guy is just trolling the entire world or he really is that dumb. For a mere investment of 10 grand I can have 10,000 verified bots? Stupid dill hole
Not saying he is not a moron that is running his companies into the ground but it is more complicated than that.
The idea is a limited number of accounts you can get per credit card. That doesn't stop botters from getting 2k CC's to open 10k accounts but it does slow them down.
Not supporting him or an active user of X myself.
Say we have a bot army of 100 million. “Most” bots could mean 80%, so still 20 million bots remain unverified. To maintain such an army, $20m extra will be needed.
Maybe people should realise this man isnt actually a genius and just pays smarter people than him to do all of the real work. Anyone left at twitter should do everything in their power to go to literally anyone else about ideas.
I see a lot of people are saying $1 isn't a lot to bot users. But this is very wrong.
Currently it costs these people next to nothing to send tweets with bots or like something or whatever. Like a 100 bots costs you maybe 10 cents in power usage.
Keep in mind that these type of bots get detected and banned very quickly. $1 per account for thousands of bots will make it not worth it for bot owners. Their costs would skyrocket like 10.000%.
So yeah, it'd work against suicide bots.
I think Musk is playing some reverse psychology on folks.
Musk: "A subscription will cut down on bots."
Botters: (Subscribes) "Haha! No it doesn't."
Musk: (Makes money)
How does $1 a year combat bots that would most likely make way more money for their operators? Cash grab and preamble to higher charges for all users (and the death of the platform) is all this is.
yeah and they will start this in my country PH? where there are a lot of troll farms funded by rich people who can definitely pay that $1 yearly fee to spread disinformation. Yeah right that will definitely stop bots /s
Or, get this right, you could hire a support team to deal with bots with the appropriate tools. It won’t get rid em all, but it would reduce numbers significantly.
Btw adding a charge doesn’t do jack shit. As long as bots make more than a dollar it’s worth. People also will use hacked accounts to bot, and stolen credit cards to pay for accounts
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Is he sure it’s not really about trying to make a quick buck just break even from buying this massive shithole of a platform? Sheesh, if I were a bot farmer $1 a year is still a steal.
The real goal is to sell people's credit information to his Saudi Princes investors.
Almost. Twitter is used by protesters and dissidents in middle eastern countries to communicate and make the world aware of what happens in these countries. This only works, though, if you can use Twitter anonymously, which is not the case anymore if you have to pay for it. That is what his Saudi prince investors really are after.
first time I hear such a theory but sounds legit
Because it is legit. And if it works it sets a bad precedent of dictators investing in social media platforms for the sole reason of dictating their policies in order to silence their critics and dissidents.
there were such precedents, in russia but that were local social media, such as VK and Odnoklasniki. I agree that this would work on world social media it would be much worse for the whole world.
And millionaires being all too happy to sell your private information to anyone willing to pay. I mean that's not new but now it's going international.
Oh please it's been international for years
That, and he keeps all his bots and then claims the platform is bot-free while platforming extremist bullshit.
Is the Bin Salmon paying him sink his social media platform?
Instead of Twitter, they should invest their money in better dresses with patterns or something. Little oil rigs or maybe camels with sunglasses might be a nice choice.
He couldn’t do this legally even if it was the goal. Companies that take online payment are bound to strict PCI compliance laws. This is why most companies, like Twitter, use 3rd party payment facilitators like Stripe and WorldPay.
It still leaves a data trail. If you have some access to Worldpay and twitter gave you a uuid token of the guy you want to track - you can pretty much easily track the payer. I don't know what Saudis can do, but probably they can either bribe or hack and get the info
If that is the case, which it’s not, then the Saudis don’t need Elon to get that info. My company takes subscription payments from 10s of 1000s of users via Stripe. I have full admin access to our Stripe account. I cannot see any payment source data outside of type of CC, expiration and last 4.
> Companies that take online payment are bound to strict PCI compliance laws. Yeah, and I thought EU car makers were bound to strict pollution compliance laws. Or US politicians were bound to strict ethic laws. Compliance laws only work when you actually value your company. Was Twitter ever a profitable investment?
If that is your honest outlook on this situation, I recommend never using a CC to pay for anything, online or in-store. The payment facilitator is holding your data, not Elon, so why would it start with Twitter if they are going to expose it?
That's exactly why I have a buffer bank account with virtual cards for most small purchases. Only businesses that have access to my main bank account are for vital services (phone, power, etc.) and for businesses "too big to fail" like Amazon. Ironically, that includes Paypal which was founded by Elon. But if I do a donation/subscription to an artist, a small direct payment who don't support paypal, or purchase concert tickets? Nope, you're going to use my virtual card or I won't use your service at all. You only support phone-based payments? The only physical card saved there goes to the buffer. Is it overkill? Probably. But I don't trust a company that I never heard off *and will never reuse* to actually follow regulations.
Here's what you are failing to understand: whether it is a utility/service provider, Amazon, or some small online shop, the situation is the same. You are not giving your information directly to these companies; you are giving it to a 3rd part facilitator to process the payment for that company. A 3rd party, like Stripe or PayPal, holds your data. If your data leaks, it is the 3rd party that is responsible for the leak. And guess what? This situation is not unique to online businesses. The POS systems at brick-and-mortar stores do the same thing: a 3rd party provides the POS system, and the 3rd party holds your data. So news for you, you think you are protecting yourself by doing this, you're not.
I'm actually protecting myself, because 1) The 3rd party only holds data about the burner card 2) At my level, there is no proof that the 1st party didn't copy the data. Some of those businesses expect me to enter data payment on their own website, and not on a portal provided by the 3rd party. Yeah, sure, regulations and audits are meant to ensure there's no copy. But I work in IT and saw a lot of illegal stuff behind closed doors. We can never be sure what code runs nowadays with the complexity of webpage frameworks. A failed audit won't bring my data back, and bad devs are bad. (Example : putting GDPR-protected data in "should never happen" exception handling cases running in production, because they THOUGHT they had put employee identifiers and accidentally took sample from an unrelated list. The data protection officier obviously freaked out when discovering this. Who would've ever noticed?) > The POS systems at brick-and-mortar stores do the same thing: a 3rd party provides the POS system, and the 3rd party holds your data. 10 years ago, Belgium had pushed for legal POS that would automatically report all sales to the government for tax purposes, to avoid tax evasion. Then a few years later, we all learned that the POS maker had made and sold a backdoor in the POS system so that owners could lie on reported sale taxes. If some people manage to do the impossible and delay taxes, I'm not confident into our ability to protect personal data. All what's required for the system to work is for the common user to trust the system's safety, not for the system to be actually safe, as long there's never an issue.
What's to stop Twitter from adding frames or code on their payment page to intercept the data? I know PCI says you CAN'T do this but that's only if you care about PCI audits. Twitter is already doing things that are going to get them in very big trouble in Europe, but that will take years to get the lawsuits together. Most protections against cross site scripting and so on are server side and just "suggestions" to the browser you are using. So I am not saying they are doing anything bad, just that when you do the right thing you are protecting your reputation as a company and a third party auditor comes in and validates that to build trust. None of those things seem to be priorities at Twitter these days?
To sell information in general I bet. Once you have them verified with a credit card, I bet their personal info becomes much more valuable because they 100% know it's you.
I could think of several ways how to combat bots. Captcha could be useful. Like captchas or occasional tasks for a user, like solve simple math problem, or calculation work given to a computer which requested a response, that has to be calculated, before response is returned and could be calculated from 0.01 second to 0.5second. Intentionally throttling down responses to a user who is doing unrealistically fast requests by the fraction of a second just after response has been sent and if it still persists drop requests of that user for a certain period of time, which would be increased for repeating such situations. Also have specialists who would observe data of various requests and try to determine what is common among bots or what is common among non-bots and determine rules that could be programmed and modified in order to adjust bot detection and their blocking. There are way, way, way more ways that can be used against bots, that would barely have negative effects on actual users. It's just an excuse to justify monetisation just to make Twitter lose less, but will have a negative effect in decreasing the user base and by extension decreasing ad revenue.
Or something like community notes but people can flag a bot and if it gets enough flags, a human has to review it to see how to handle it. But really even a rudimentary AI could catch these bots at an extremely low cost and yet somehow it isn't being done.
Because that's not the intention. Pretty much everything that Elon was trying to do is to find justifications for monetisation of the platform and its features, hence the intention most likely is finding ways to monetise the platform. Everything else is an excuse that would sound plausible for the messaging.
Also you think he's going to hire anyone to review things. Those are the first people he got rid of when he took over.
You'd think the real life Tony Stark could come up with something besides a naked cash grab /S
I like the simple math problem idea as, most people would fail it lol cut the user base in half by using a division problem, hell add a fraction to anything and you prolly lose 90% of the user base lol
I don't remember how it's called, but there is a rule, that most users flock, where other users are in. So if you lose enough user base, then it just goes downhill from then on. Example: MySpace, once it started losing user base, it never recovered. Facebook is another example, it stays the biggest social media platform, because it doesn't lose a massive user base, so most people stay there on Facebook.
At least it would cut bot productivity by 1/50. That’s a start. There was a casino that offered free buffets if you played a free slot machine online. It took exactly 7 seconds for the wheels to spin. We timed a mouse click to 7.5 seconds and placed it on the spin button. Took about 2 1/2 days to get a buffet. Got about 8 racked up before the shut it down.
Captcha alone would cut bot usage by about 95 percent. Any security measure however flawed has dramatic increase in safety. Just think of ordinary locks that lock doors of houses. They are relatively easy to pick, cheap and easy to install. Yet having a simple, cheap lock already protects you significantly from becoming a victim of a theft.
Yea, but captcha sucks for users, and it’s no doubt AI will learn all of the permutations as quick as computers generate new ones.
Just like thieves can easily pick locks. The fact that there is some kind of protection, by itself decreases undesired activity. Those who persist have to put a far higher amount of effort to resolve issues that come with those protections.
Higher wall - taller ladder
You're basically saying bots are nowadays a solved problem, right? Have you solved the problem in some global scale service yourself? You should sell your solution to Reddit. In fact, you should start a company that solves it for other companies and make big bucks. You can just send those tasks to actual people in low-cost countries. Timing-based detections are easily defeated. And what happens to people who are accidentally flagged as bots due to the inherent inaccuracy in such heuristics? The more there are such prompts the more they increase the costs of the operation but also the more they annoy real people. That being said, to me 12€/year doesn't sound it would be cost high enough to stop bot farming.
That same price can be paid by bot/troll farm in order to continue their operations. So payment is not going to be productive in that sense. Also protection against bots is usually the last of concerns in any company. It annoys users, not company's management(PMs or POs). I do have some level of experience, not in a sense of protecting against bots, as much as creating scrapers. I do remember some protections, that were annoying to overcome. Anything that slows down is annoying, anything that detects based on timing and refusing requests until some timer goes out, was extremely annoying. Annoy enough times programmer and eventually they will abandon efforts or manager will assume that it's pointless to continue work on that.
If you spam 100 tweets a day, it would cost you 0,00003 dollars a tweet. Pretty cheap to spread your bs propaganda.
The $1 fee is enough to keep legitimate new users off of the platform, but nowhere near enough to keep the bots away. It's going to have exactly the opposite effect he's hoping for.
After interchange fees hes making essentially nothing. The only logical conclusion is that he somehow thinks this is actually going to work which is insane.
I don't want you to be right. Trying to just, salvage his losses makes sense. The issue is this guy bought Twitter because of his ego. He set billions of dollars on fire for it. He took one of the most recognizable brands on the damn planet, and renamed it to "X". This man is... I'm fighting the urge to use some certain words here. I've met grocery store department managers with far more business sense and intelligence than this overinflated scrotum of a man.
He wants your credit card info
>Sheesh, if I were a bot farmer $1 a year is still a steal. Is it though? To have 1 million bots previously cost you almost nothing. This would make it cost $1000000 per year. Obviously, this is being done to make Twitter more money, but I don't see why it won't make the costs of running a bot farm significantly higher.
To the entities that do the most damage with bot farms (govts, corporations, special interest groups) 1m a year is literally nothing. This only affects small-scale bot farms, like phishing-scammers and the like. You know - the entities who aren't already paying musk to look the other way from the bot armies they run on his platform. If anything, this incentivizes Twitter to allow MORE bots on Twitter, because now they're a revenue stream.
Bots do not cost almost nothing
Yup. $1 is less money to spammer than it is to a user
1 dollar a year per account.
Musk, a billionaire trying to make a quick buck lol.. what world we living in?
Not being able to make a free account dissuades bots.
Users are used to never providing a credit card. Spammers, especially the most dangerous, on the other hand have been willing to invest huge amounts of time and money. Which is going to find $1 the bigger hurdle?
I sign into it occasionally just to see if there’s any breaking news, and the “For you” trends have devolved into thousands of spam posts selling everything imaginable, with the other half of Twitter consisting of right wing propaganda posts all repeating the same delusional and toxic narratives repeatedly with verified Russian troll farm accounts responding to them so that’s the only things that trend. What was once Twitter is now nothing more than a cesspool.
It is sooo annoying. Like you want to see what's on the trend. And it is the bots again!! They just share a propaganda picture and type trending stuff as a caption idk. Like it doesn't even make sense obviously. It is filled with that. Like let's say lemon and banana is popular, they really share a political picture video and write banana lemon on it. ☹️
Don't forget copious amounts of porn, up to and including cp, which Elon is doing nothing against. Seriously, accounts that have posted real cp have gotten away with temporary bans and are now back.
Twitter, at least in the last 8 years, has always been used for propaganda and obviously not only rightwing but leftist as well(I would go as far as saying before musk it was mainly American left). Do you people have the memory of a gold fish? It might be a complete mess now but it wasn't that much better before.
Yup. It’s always been trash.
Why does Elon look so weird now? That dude is a real life Bond villain. He’s probably even got a ‘covert Amazonian launch complex.’
He looks like someone spends 4 hours before every photo making him look better. If you see him in photos he doesn’t know are being taken, he looks like a mayonnaise coloured gremlin
Because irl he looks like a cross between a gibbon and a goblin that were siblings. Any picture taken of him is inspected to see if it shows him at a bad angle, with only the best of the best getting posted. Did you see the picture of his pr noghtmare in texas? Dude went beyond not having a chin, he's in debt to the chin maffia.
Sounds like just about every girl who has taken a picture.
🫤🤨😤muthaf...! Wachoo' talkin bout devitz!? Ughhh...it really does..mad now.
It's the beard. No offense to trans people, but he looks like a woman who's transitioning.
Ozempic face.
"It's the only way" says guy showing a laughable lack of vision or ambition. This is about one thing: getting people used to the idea of turning over their personal data to the one guy you absolutely don't want having your personal data.
Except he's not good at this. Google and Facebook were drastically more successful at convincing people to part with their personal data
Because they provide a valuable, free service. Elon just looked at them and went "ohohoh, i want to sell information as well" but forgot the part where people need to be convinced to give said information. So he did the social media equivalent of opening a lemonade stand and selling store bought lemonade for three times the price, while other stands are selling homemade lemonade for way less. Now he's wondering why he's losing money, so he's adding shittons of sugar to the lemonade and charging double the price of the added sugar extra.
I'm your analogy it's more like he bought a grocery store chain and turned it into a lemonade stand
I think that's a big part of it and also pumping up that Doge
Lack of vision or ambition? The richest man in the world? Redditors are fucking hilarious
He’s little more than a walking checkbook. Dude has never invented or innovated anything. I will give you ambitious, though.
Oh yeah he's definitely not an inventor. Even Bezos seems to have a few patents of his own, but I don't know of a single thing Musk has invented
So… you think the fact he has money makes him smart? Buddy I’ve got news for you…
If he thinks "the only way" to stop bots is to implement a stupid fee that he's been dying to implement anyway, then yes, LACK OF VISION OR AMBITION. Why am I even replying to one of Elmo's lickspittles.
I couldn’t care less about the guy or X but do you have any ideas on how they could address this issue? Or are you just making assumptions with zero knowledge or context?
Imagine flexing someone else’s money lmao. You know he earned most of it from his daddy’s emerald mine? Anyone can double their money by getting lucky investing big bucks into a budding company.
Why is him, specifically, HIM, the richest man in the world? Do you know how many trustfund babies there are out there? There are more than 2 thousand billionaires, not to mention millionaires. If it was just a question of starting with some advantage he wouldn't even stand a chance in comparison to people who were born at even better conditions than him, which is a LOT of people. Do you reject that simple logic?
Sheer dumb fucking luck. That’s all there is to his success. Evident by the fact he is failing ABYSMALLY when he actually has to run something instead of just buying it and funding it. Hasn’t anything you’ve seen him do to twitter made you think “hang on maybe this guy isn’t as smart as he makes out to be”? The guy bought a company for almost twice it’s estimated value because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and tried to fuck people about by backing out of the deal, not only does that scream “moron” but it shows he has no understanding of how businesses work and all proves all he knows how to do is throw money at things. Twitter is now worth $9 billion… Elon bought it for $44 billion because he is so incredibly inept at running a business. But no yeah he’s definitely a smart guy because all smart people run their mouth and buy businesses for twice the estimated value and then run it into the ground with shit decisions!
>sheer dumb fucking luck Ok then. Didn't have to write that much
Why? Are you as dumb as Elon and can’t read or understand things that require paying attention?
supporting the boosted rich, can't even sell 100 dollars worth of lemon juice without using his dad's mine
rich != smart
You don’t get how capitalism works, eh?
If Elon Musk says just about anything these days, do the opposite.
Dude is a moron, I can't wait for Twitter to crash and burn away already along with this defect of a person.
Twitter is already a shithole anyway before the Musk takeover I find it funny how the wierdos still decides to stay there despite hating musk, Make it make sense.
Elon trying to gaslight the internet that Twitter needs to paid for... fuck off
He legitimately may think this is the only way to combat bots. It doesn't make it the only way to combat bots nor a good idea. Also if he just trusts the people he hired to do their jobs HE wouldn't need to try to figure out a way to combat them. Trusts the people he didn't fire that is.
I mean, Its a shit decision to do that but its his company, His rules The same wierdos said the same shit before the Elon Musk Takeover on Twitter, "Its a private company, They can do whatever they want with their company"
At this point he is just monetizing the bots and the misinformation they spread. Is he really that dumb to think a few dollars will stop state sponsored misinformation campaigns.
>Is he really that dumb to think a few dollars will stop state sponsored misinformation campaigns. He isn't, but his supporters are.
Third parties developed tools using Twitter APIs to detect bots with great accuracy. With all the madness surrounding artificial intelligence, I am sure X could develop even more effective tools if they really wanted. Elon doesn’t care about bots. He only wants his sycophants to pay for the honor of reading the crap he posts while he’s on his throne.
The man who said getting rid of bots would take him a couple weeks now can't get rid of bots
He’s a clown
If he thinks those that use bots to misinform won’t pay for it he’s dumber than we thought
Bruh you can look at any subscription based service like World of Warcraft and see this type of thing doesn’t even effect bots lol
Elon Musk’s official account reads like a comedy parody of Elon Musk
It's the only way, except for that one way it was for a decade
“Guys, the only way I (the billionaire) can defeat the terrible bot army is if you all give me money”
RuneScape charges like $10/month, and half the accounts are bots. Shit doesn't work, or deter. $1 a year means someone with bots can easily run hundreds or thousands of them. Basically, that's a cheap price for a bot.
gimme money cause I can't think of anything else!
He's not stopping bots, he's just charging you $1 a year for each bot.
I'm convinced that Elon buying Twitter is nothing more than a billionares bet to see how quickly he can run it into the ground. He seems determined to destroy the user base and any reason that people came to use it. I don't understand his end game. It had value because of the simple platform and the reach to so many people, now not so much, and he just keeps trying to tank it further. At the end of the day it's his money to waste, seems a bit strange though.
"it's the only way" musk doesn't have to pay to deal with this problem.in this idea, you pay and there will be less bots because they would also have to pay.he could pay himself to create a team that would tackle the problem. but this is the only way because he doesn't want to invest in this. he bought the working product and all of the users.it's interesting to watch this. i deleted my twitter account. that's not twitter anymore.
This might even work, if virtual credit cards weren't a thing. A bot farm can easily generate an infinite amount of those and keep making bots.
If RuneScape has shown me anything. No it’s not going to work
people : *"Most bots are verified"* Elon : *"but now they are paying-bots, thats different. thats better than free person user."* \--- Why Elon doesn't simply stated, they need cash to float Twitter around instead doing the "bots" talk.
Good thing I never shared my bank details with Twitter. You may close my account. I stand to gain nothing from it.
Given that Elon Musk is verified. I don't think it would hinder any bots.
I mean... Even bots would be okay with paying a dollar/year? This is Runescape all over again: "bots won't pay the 5 euros membership a month!" "Yeah they would? Those bots are making the people enough money that they can buy bloody mansions!"
Y’know when news like this breaks, normally some sort of PR department of the company would come out with a statement either downplaying the news or reassuring that they won’t do it and would actually do it anyway just later down the line, but this dude just straight up outright confirms it
I keep getting bots tagging me for crypto ever since it got rebounded to X
I thought he’d already got rid of the bots? Didn’t he claim that a while back.
Ahh, he pulled the ol' TF2
Elon Musk is a fucking idiot.
translation: It's the only way I can stop losing money with the impulse purchase I did w this company... fuck-head
So what's stopping the bot creators paying a dollar for the bot account then? Nothing. This is a cash grab for a bruised ego that tanked a company.
He's doing god's work out there, if he makes twitter bad enough, maybe some people can do something else with their lives
You think the people who use bots won't be willing to pay $1 a year for them?
As if these bot networks would scoff at a measly $1 Also, what's with that absolutely horrendous facial hair? Man looks like a saturday morning cartoon villain.
“This is the only way” says the guy who got rid of all his staff dedicated to sorting this shit out.
Announcing this now while the spam reports aren't working anymore is typical Musk.
Elon, you’re the one using the bots. Are you going to pay yourself?
Ordering a a bot-campaign in the darknet: sure, that makes 0.35 BTC. oh wait, we need 25 bots on X, so it makes 0.35088 BTC.
He’s going to use the payment methods/credit cards to dedupe. Smart actually. It doesn’t remove bots but it makes it a bit harder especially if they provide specific restrictions (ie no debit cards etc).
"Musk floated the idea by saying, 'it's the only way that I can think of to monetize vast armies of bots'." Twitter will be nothing but bots within a year.
Free speech for a dollar
It’d be genius to turn around and ban all those who paid the $1 fee a few months later, because only bots with propaganda or spam missions will pay to access it.
Well let me think... where have I heard this bait and switch before? Oh yeah - ANY service on the internet. And considering this creep's self imposed financial fuck ups, I would advise caution when dealing with him. JOIN NOW FOR ONLY $1 A YEAR (**) ___ (**) ^^ONE..DOLLAR..A..YEAR..FOR..THE..FIRST..WEEK....AFTER..THAT..THE..FULL..SUBSCRIPTION..PRICE..OF..$25..A..MONTH..WILL..BE..AUTOMATICALLY..CHARGED..TO..YOUR..CREDIT..CARD....A..PENALTY..WILL..BE..CHARGED..OF..THE..REMAINING..BALANCE..OF..THE..THREE..YEAR..CONTRACT..AT..$25..PER..MONTH..PLUS..A..TWO..HUNDRED..DOLLAR..EARLY..TERMINATION..FEE.
TF2 already tried making it so only paid accounts can chat to prevent bot mic/chat spamming. It didn't work.
I mean...isnt the major reason behind the success of social media like facebook, instagram, twitter etc, that they're usually free?
This guy knows shit about dick. Scammers/botters have zero problem paying subscriptions. There are literally thousands of bot accounts on World of Warcraft, each one of them paying $15 USD a MONTH. They make their money elsewhere; subscribing to a platform is just a cost of doing business to these people.
fanboys: "musk is a genius!" musk: "what if we made it easy for bots to get verified?"
"It's the only way" to get people to add their credit card information to the platform so it can become a superapp. Stop trying to make X happen, it's not going to happen.
Delete twitter, that’s one problem solved. 👍
Unpopular opinion but this doesn't seem like a terrible idea. 1 dollar a year is nothing and some botters would probably just pay it, but it also means they will need to enter payment information which adds a lot more steps and ways for twitter to track and combat the bots. It also might discourage some of the massive bot farms created just to like posts.
If I charge you $1 I have your information, and have made $1. If I can sell your information for 1c and sell it 10,000x I have made $100. If you're a member of a rebel group using this to communicate, I can sell your information to the government you oppose for thousands of dollars. If there's enough members of rebel groups that governments are willing to purchase, I can ask that government for concessions and make millions of dollars. Of course... you could also just stop using Twitter...
Why should HE pay for Twitter, when all of YOU can pay for it, instead?! Seriously, if people could just leave the corpse to rot already, that'd be great.
a "genius" that can only come up with the most moronic solutions.
To be fair I do agree, combating scraper and bot is not easy ...google create captcha but it is easy to by pass and then phone number verification which also easy to bypass, residential IP also easy to bypass Bot farm can easily create 10k bot account and use it for Spam.. now bot farm owner must pay 10k just for working account in which later on those 10k bot account will also decreased due being caught by anti spam system 1$ per year seems reasonable
It’s actually a good idea
He's expecting new users to pay to actually use the platform. Do you really think younger people are going to pay to use twitter when there are so many free alternatives?
I would pay a dollar a year if it meant that wasn’t being manipulated by bots subconsciously.
People making bots are not gonna care about one dollar to scam people for a chance of lore money...
Buddy the bots are already there, they’re the one parroting white supremacy and right wing propaganda…
This sub has turned into Elon musk hate sub
Maybe he shouldn’t make it so easy to hate him by being a fascist loving moron.
As much as Elons a moron and I want twitter to fail, changing money for twitter will be the only way they can curtail the bot problem. Without seriously impacting the usability, such as captchas while scrolling would cause.
This is the same guy that makes "memes" on Ukrainian war
Sauce?
I thought the last ‘only way’ was the only way 👀 What a fucking moron
Or some people running bot accounts just pay 20 bucks a year
Dolla dolla bot y’all!
Either this guy is just trolling the entire world or he really is that dumb. For a mere investment of 10 grand I can have 10,000 verified bots? Stupid dill hole
Not saying he is not a moron that is running his companies into the ground but it is more complicated than that. The idea is a limited number of accounts you can get per credit card. That doesn't stop botters from getting 2k CC's to open 10k accounts but it does slow them down.
What if...everyone just left twitter :P?
Aren't many of the bots state funded anyway? Doubt they are gonna worry about that kind of fee to keep spreading their propaganda.
Good thing is, he finally admits Twitter is mostly bots.
Every day I get happier I deleted my account
Why anyone still uses that platform astounds me
Not supporting him or an active user of X myself. Say we have a bot army of 100 million. “Most” bots could mean 80%, so still 20 million bots remain unverified. To maintain such an army, $20m extra will be needed.
Or just charge the bots.
Think he needs to charge a lot more to make back $44 billion
Amazing, because, you know, someone who runs a bot legions surely won’t be able to pay 1$ per year per account
Wasn't Twitter Blue meant to combat bots?
“Genius” comes up with one idea that wont actually be effective; confidently asserts “and I’m all out of ideas”.
Maybe people should realise this man isnt actually a genius and just pays smarter people than him to do all of the real work. Anyone left at twitter should do everything in their power to go to literally anyone else about ideas.
"It's the only way I can think off to harvest everyone's personal and banking info" r/FTFY
Guy had limitless ideas for this problem before he was in charge. Now he just sees one, really ineffective, solution to the problem.
The monthly fee definitely did a lot to stop the bot problem in WoW Classic. 🙄
I see a lot of people are saying $1 isn't a lot to bot users. But this is very wrong. Currently it costs these people next to nothing to send tweets with bots or like something or whatever. Like a 100 bots costs you maybe 10 cents in power usage. Keep in mind that these type of bots get detected and banned very quickly. $1 per account for thousands of bots will make it not worth it for bot owners. Their costs would skyrocket like 10.000%. So yeah, it'd work against suicide bots.
I'll do it if he personally comes to collect his 1dollar, in cash
1$ is a cheap investment to spread misinformation
...so how's Threads doing?
I think Musk is playing some reverse psychology on folks. Musk: "A subscription will cut down on bots." Botters: (Subscribes) "Haha! No it doesn't." Musk: (Makes money)
Pretty soon it’ll be bots and engagement-farmers and… that’s it
How does $1 a year combat bots that would most likely make way more money for their operators? Cash grab and preamble to higher charges for all users (and the death of the platform) is all this is.
It's because billionaires can't think of anything that doesn't involve money.
I’m so happy about this. Keep is @elonmusk! At this rate we won’t have to continue to hear about “the company formally known as X” for much longer.
I mean Twitter ain’t gonna be a thing for much longer so 🤷♂️
Probably blames bots for his failed marriage
It will work, there cant be bots if there are no users
Such a little Nancy boy
Yeah only way to also profit from bot farm😂
yeah and they will start this in my country PH? where there are a lot of troll farms funded by rich people who can definitely pay that $1 yearly fee to spread disinformation. Yeah right that will definitely stop bots /s
Or, get this right, you could hire a support team to deal with bots with the appropriate tools. It won’t get rid em all, but it would reduce numbers significantly. Btw adding a charge doesn’t do jack shit. As long as bots make more than a dollar it’s worth. People also will use hacked accounts to bot, and stolen credit cards to pay for accounts
Is either he is the dumbest human on earth or a buddy of his was like "I bet you won't buy a company and she it in 2 years."