yeah, i bet they won't lose 100 user per seconds by doing that. not to mention he said "Elon Musk says his new AI firm will use Twitter data" not only he tried to scam you money, he also stole your data and fed it to AI like your data was a trash
They $1/year is just a foot-in-the-door approach. "$1/year doesn't hurt you, right? Neither will $1/month, right? We have the user payment credentials now - let's put a sneaky upgrade-to-premium button somewhere. Let's raise it to $3/month..."
@@GuardedDragon Slippery slope policy is when you defend an action that, say, restricts your rights because it doesn't restrict too much of your rights yet. You then defend the next action that restricts your rights because it's a small difference. This happens a few times and by the end of it, you realize that you've given up a lot of your rights. If you don't support actions that have a negative effect on you, there's no fallacy.
Most spam bots that I have come across on Twitter aren't even new accounts, they are hijacked accounts stolen from other users. So charging $1 isn't actually going to stop that.
And that gives me a lot of concerns. We Filipinos don't have that proper exposure to online security threats. I'm pretty sure the government only took the threats seriously just recently due to the number of attacks on government websites. It's pretty ironic when the I Love You virus originated here.
Not to mention Bots are usually made for a reason. and ppl pay for that influence anyways. All this means as they might get a couple less bots (if they cant be stolen accounts) and X takes a cut of there provits
@@nontypicalguy Just the other day a dozen brand new accounts, all with verified, began liking and retweeting my tweets. Guess what over half of them were doing on their profiles? Promoting crypto.
The Ssniperwolf thing was hilarious because every time the X(Twitter) account for UA-cam put out a statement, Community Notes shot it down in spectacular style for being bullshit meaningless platitudes.
Yeah, Community Notes are the best form of fact-checking bar none. It was really bad before, where some people were above criticism, such as the Biden administration or big corporations.
@@4.0.4 that's why they hate it so much. That being said, it's not immune to brigading. There were quite a few straight misinformation in community notes improvised by leftist brigading (right is too disorganized but even they've managed a couple). But for the most part it has been a net positive change.
How do you add a community note on twitter? Does an admin need to do it? If it's part of the twitter blue thing maybe that's why I haven't seen an option for it, because I ain't paying for it. Turns out I value my $8 more than billionaire Elon would.
I saw UA-cam damn near doubling the price UA-cam Premium for students, forcing me to fork over like twice as much per month than when I first got premium instead of grandfathering me into the lower price I initially agreed to. Was I naive for expecting my subscription price to not change? Perhaps, but now I know there's nothing stopping Twitter from saying "hey i know you paid a dollar last year, but this year you need to pay $10."
The thing that you are missing here is that UA-cam uses YT Premium for profit, while this $1 fee will not be a significant change to total revenue for twitter. I definitely agree it's possible that they'd up the cost, but I do not see a financial incentive to do so (in fact, it might have a negative effect because fewer new users means fewer Blue subscriptions, which is a much more real revenue source).
@@Ryan-093Not the same, McDonald's raw materials increased in price, for UA-cam and twitter the running costs per user should be the same (if not lower with the layoffs) since they aren't adding any higher resolutions or extra services.
$1 is meaningless to what revenue bots make for the people running them, it's a minor cost of doing business. This is purely about Twitter trying to make money.
This entire thing doesn't work and I can explain why in 5 seconds. Prepaid visa/master card with $10 is now 10 years for a bot on Twitter, and then a call or text now number, is free. Zero thought went into this and you can really tell....
Sure, for a little while. But when the bots are truly gone everyone will flood back and gladly pay. You'd have to admit you preferred the bots in order to do otherwise.
@@tf5pZ9H5vcAdBp Ummm the site might not survive for the people to flood back to. It's already soo borked other wise paying user have left. Soo that's insane.
@@tf5pZ9H5vcAdBpthe only way the bots go is if there’s no one for them to influence, which is what’ll happen if people leave the platform. if people do return when there are a lot less bots, that’ll only trigger the bots to come back. $1/year is not a lot considering these bots usually pay the $8/month for the blue tick
@@tf5pZ9H5vcAdBp Like L33tSkE3t said, there are already plenty of bots that already are verified anyways. This literally does nothing from people who literally give their bots the TwitterBlue subscription.
@@tf5pZ9H5vcAdBp If the bots are every truly going to be gone.. it depends on the bot, and the value proposition - If you can create a bot that spams your products, and creates more sales than $1, the $1 loss is neglectable
"haha this mf paid for twitter" is already a common meme to mock blue users. People already make fun of others for paying for twitter. People will just leave.
Its for NEW users only. It literally doesnt affect ANYONE that is already on Twitter in any way shape or form whatsoever. You dont lose ANY users. Jesus Christ people.
@@NinjAsylum You say that like you believe the company wont later implement this fee across the board. It's not about bots. It won't even stop bots. Bots doing what they do earn more than the $1 cost plus the cost of setting up a bullshit phone number or whatever else it takes to "verify" them. Plus they have plenty of time to stockpile on accounts now for later use anyway since they announced this openly. This is about Elon drowning in debt with this platform and how he can convince users to pay for it.
Yet from a users perspective I've never really found bots a problem. What puts me off using the site is so many adverts now slapped into discussion threads.
October 15, 2003 - Microsoft pulled the same stunt with MSN Chat, cutting off NZ (and other countries) because "spam" unless they paid for MSN premium access. Effectively killed the platform in short order.
As someone who uses twitter to find clients for commissions, no this will not work. When the checkmark became something you could pay for, it became FLOODED with bots to the point that every popular tweet wasn't even worth checking the replies because you have to scroll for a few minutes just to get past the boring bot replies. If that didnt work, i don't see any way for a smaller charge to matter at all.
Unfortunately, I think there’s a good chance that Linus is blind to the reality of digital artists relying on Twitter for their social media presence and therefore livelihood.
There are 2 things here. 1. I shouldn't have to pay to have a voice. 2. bots happily pay for the spoiled blue tick, what makes him think they won't pay an 8th of that just to tweet?
Laziness is the only thing stopping me from deleting my Twitter. If they shift to charging existing members, I will bounce. I ain’t spending $1 on Twitter.
i feel like 90% of the people that *want* to pay money for twitter are already doing so. and elon's biggest fanatics are also some of the world's biggest suckers, so paying $1 for access to them is a negligible amount compared to what they can make scamming them. it might get some spam bots, but for anyone making money, it's just the cost of doing business AND it adds legitimacy to what they say because they paid to do it. nobody would pay money just to lie to you, right? nah. nobody would do that.
It's less $1 per year, more that you need to register with phone number. It's harder to generate new phone numbers than paying. Also paying $1 can link your bank account to the account which means that if 1 acc gets banned all others are easily traceable to terminate as well and making new bank accounts is even harder.
The reason they use New Zealand is because it's a relatively low population and a wealthy country with very good tech infrastructure and historically high rates of early adoption of new tech e.g., EFT-POS (electronic payments, online banking etc). It's not unusual for it to be used as a test country for this sort of thing. Philippines, on the other hand, no idea
Because the Phillipines is a very low wage / highly tech literate country where scams are rife. A LOT of bot traffic comes from the country. There's also a lot of paid bot-like traffic because Filipinos are usually great English speakers, and are hired en masse by crypto companies (and others) to act as human bots to technically avoid breaking rules, so I imagine this will actually make quite a bit of money long term.
We just had a large scammer raid for 500 peeps here in the Philippines a couple of months ago. And $1 is one bag of chips. Or a 500ml pet bottle of gatorade. That's nothing.
Agree to disagree, Linus. How hard is it to a) get a burner phone number and b) get a burner credit card? The latter I know is harder but they can just steal one from a scam victim/data breach.
@@BlueKnight87 True, it is still linked to a legit card, BUT the service doesn't actually see the card it is linked too, all they can know is who the issuer of this virtual card is, so in the event of a data breach or other compromise, only that virtual card is compromised.
Forums and communities like SomethingAwful benefit from the subscription because it pays for costs and the incentive to bot is already very low, so it almost entirely eliminates botting. X doesn't benefit from this, this "solution" by Musk will cause bot networks to raise prices and X will continue its decrease in users which will naturally reduce botting on the platform anyway.
0:45 Before listening further, I'm going to say that phone numbers can be generated as easily as fake emails, and $1 per year to scam people is piss in an ocean.
XS, S/A, HardOCP, B3d forum... Most of the niche enthusiast forums seemed to have died off as OCing and gaming became much more straight forward and mainstream, not to mention the "original" users/members aging and therefore diving into careers and having families(I'm guessing the majority would be ~30-50yo now). You also had people switching to larger, more mainstream forums, that seemed to attract "new" users. The hobbist extreme OCing scene dwindled due to all the OEMs scooping up the top10/20 individuals/teams and sponsoring them in ~2010. Eventually the DIY OCing scene pretty much died after 2014 due to the integrated power management and boost hardware maturing enough to push the chips very close to their full potential.
Charging $1 to prevent spam on the message-boards only fixes that one problem, it doesn't fix other problems. I used to use email aliases so that if I started getting spam, I'd know who leaked my address. I don't remember spam being a problem on Rage3D, but I do remember getting a lot of spam from the email-address dedicated to that site because they either sold my address or were breached. (YT Premium only stops ads, it doesn't fix the garbage UI/UX that makes the site unusable. 😒)
I'm seeing a lot of blue ticked accounts posting in replies with exact same comments drumming up engagement stats, I'm starting to think the bots are already in the house
A lot of stand alone websites use off the shelf comment embedded templates and API. Lots of bots network target these API to spam propaganda on these website comment sections. The most common ones I see that are flooded are EVs and Breaking News comment sections. They all sing in unison and no human actually spends that much effort to comment on these sites. I bet this works very effectively and influences alot of readers.
Well... Imagine you live in Cuba, where you can't pay using PayPal or stuff alike. It will mean no one here will be able to create a new Twitter /X account if this goes global.
Does this come with an anonymity clause that "X" will not reveal information about your account to any government agency as your account will no longer be fully anonymous due to your debit or credit card being required to make the payment..
The reason for the 1 dollar fee (and the reason they launched it in the Philipines) is not to combat botting, but to combat Child Pron, Elon doesn't want to say it out loud but twitter is riddled with it and if you have to pay to post, you're trackable
So setting up a new bot farm in Phillipines costs around $1000-$3000 now, and I assume that paying reduces overall ban rate on accounts. And now bot owners can charge clients more because of the "difficulty". Oh, and the bigger ones are already charge more for a single client engagement than it would cost to do this whole process 5 times. Good job Muskrat, you've done it again.
$1 a year. Sure. That makes it $8 a year. One real person and 7 bots. Plus, I'm not paying to be part of a platform that allows 3rd parties to skim my data for AI model training.
1$ is acceptable actually - if it works on their end. The reality of internet today is that if you've paid $1 straight to your favourite content creator, they would get more value than out of all your views on their videos combined during that year and watching ads. Ad revenue today SUCKS ASS. Just do yourself and your favourite content creators a favour, run adblock whenever you can and donate 1$ directly to each of your top 10-top20 creators. They will be better off and you won't be feeding corporation that hates you...
The take on "it will get rid of the crappy scum, so the good effective ones will get even better" is a very interesting take. It's like using hand sanitizer. You kill off all the competition keeping the bad stuff that survives it at bay, so now it's free to run rampant.
looking at it purely for the bots: it's not a big problem. 1$ a year isn't much for me and even less for most bot makers. Not saying it's dumb, just... slightly ineffective (most likely)
What bots are used to is not to write comments. Comments are usually written by people and then use bots to increase their like ratio. This is seen a lot on UA-cam recently with naked women profile pictures and 1k liked comments. I've seen these accounts answer to people in the comments as well.
from someone who has programmed bots to be used for advertising, aslong as the customer is getting there money back and making profit a $1 fee aint going to stop them and the confirming account with a phone number is easy to bypass with current systems already out there, its not to stop the bots its just another money grab, as they know many ppl have multiple accounts so the reduction they will see is from 2nd accounts used by normal ppl which will reduce overall activity on then site
Scammers and bot users will definitely be able to pay for it, but I think what they're trying to do is group user accounts by the payment method they use and identify potential bots. If a credit card is used by hundreds of accounts, that's a pretty high guarantee that those are bot accounts.
ChatGPT is a thing. AutoGPT is a thing. You can't say for sure anymore that a comment is not from a bot but from a real person working at a content farm.
View counter is quick, easy and wont take long. I would implement it as an endpoint with an in-memory NoSQL database. Each client pings it on connect and then every 30 seconds, with its session ID. In response, the client gets a cached, periodically recalculated number representing unique session IDs that have pinged in the last minute or so. Something like that would barely use any resources at all apart from RAM.
Money doesn't solve modern bot issues. It never did, if anything it helps. Since its much simpler to get 'verified' by simply paying. People make money out of bots, if paying a little bit can make the process much easier, they gladly would.
As long as verifications cannot be done with Google voice. Cause then there would be ever decreasing phone numbers that people can verify with and then get banned. As a registered bot user and all acciunts assosiated to that number would get flagrd and investigated.
Kind of annoying to have to use my non-Google voice number for things though. I don't like giving out my actual cell number, and what about people who choose not to buy a phone plan, since they would rather not spend money on something they don't need?
Elon works miracles. I never cared about Twitter and somehow i care about it even less. I disliked Zuckerberg and his products and now im rooting for Zuckerberg and his products 🤦♂️
as someone living in the Philippines, as far as i know, Twitter isn't very popular. we're also cheap as hell so we're probably all gonna move to threads since everyone here already likes instagram. So yeah basically they just wont have any local business here probably.
One thing a learned about bot farms, is that bots and people behind them pay money for their existence, it's more likely this would help bots to spread fake news and remove users to combat the fake news.
The only people this would really effect are people in very low income countries. I still dont think it would be too much (dont quote me on that tho), but for them $1 would be a lot more than it is for Americans.
@@aesieaiyahcloe I wasn’t saying it was a lot for the Philippines or New Zealand, I meant that if he decided to roll this out to the rest of the world it could have an impact on some countries
The problem with this is the value of what bots do, in terms of swaying public opinion and bumping shit takes - far outweighs the cost of $1 a year for 5,000 bots
Honestly this is the first idea he had that actually sounds reasonable. At least until you realise it would basically kill growth because no new users would pay to sign up and it would just kill engagement
How dose it take a lot of time and money to implement a concurrent view counter? Having no idea how your system is set up mind you; That seems like an extremely straightforward thing to implement. you just look at how many individual ip addresses are calling for content and then display that information, update that value every second or so and that will be more then accurate without adding a large load to your system.
I would implement it as an endpoint with an in-memory NoSQL database. Each client pings it on connect and then every 30 seconds, with its session ID. In response, the client gets a cached, periodically recalculated number representing unique session IDs that have pinged in the last minute or so. Something like that would barely use any resources at all apart from RAM.
@@MyAmazingUsername precisely, there are many different ways to go about solving for this. It seems like something that could be built, tested and implemented in a matter of days by someone familiar with there websites backend. Now obviously there is a cost associated with that persons time, but this is a business that just made a video about buying the entire front end stock of some old electronics store for something like $35k. Almost everything that they bought was e-waist, but it was something that they wanted to do. So I would think that they could find some funds to pay for a couple of days of work for a basic feature that the owner of the company apparently keeps asking for. But that’s just my 2 cents.
Ok, I don't think this is about the bots at all. There are plenty of ways for a company like Twitter to deal with that issue without a paywall. What I think is the more crucial angle here is that in Elon's mind, Twitter is a financial platform, an everything app. The $1 entry fee is a way to make the new customers immediately break that first spending barrier (it is known that in any game or service people have a natural adversity to paying, so making them overcome that barrier once makes future purchases MUCH more likely by virtue of them already spending some cash, even if it's a few cents).
The truth revealed. Linus a while ago: I don't watch the videos, I just skim through the comments to get the gist of it. Linus now: I don't often head into the comments section.
If you can't get rid of the bots, monetise them.
modern problems require modern solutions 😎
4D Chess
Their $8 not-a-bot program has been so successful; surely $1 will be an even more effective solution.
yeah, i bet they won't lose 100 user per seconds by doing that.
not to mention he said "Elon Musk says his new AI firm will use Twitter data"
not only he tried to scam you money, he also stole your data and fed it to AI like your data was a trash
Except all the bots have twitter blue so it didn’t work
@@Poosaycvm [Rainier Wolfcastle voice] That's the joke
@@Poosaycvm r/whoosh
The idea the Elmos buddy Vlad won't pony up $1 a month to keep the vatniks online is laughable.
They $1/year is just a foot-in-the-door approach.
"$1/year doesn't hurt you, right? Neither will $1/month, right? We have the user payment credentials now - let's put a sneaky upgrade-to-premium button somewhere. Let's raise it to $3/month..."
Slippery slope fallacy at work
@@pablomaquaire6251it ain’t a fallacy when it’s the truth tho lol
You pay us 3/month already what is 3/week...
@@GuardedDragon Slippery slope policy is when you defend an action that, say, restricts your rights because it doesn't restrict too much of your rights yet. You then defend the next action that restricts your rights because it's a small difference. This happens a few times and by the end of it, you realize that you've given up a lot of your rights.
If you don't support actions that have a negative effect on you, there's no fallacy.
Most spam bots that I have come across on Twitter aren't even new accounts, they are hijacked accounts stolen from other users. So charging $1 isn't actually going to stop that.
And that gives me a lot of concerns. We Filipinos don't have that proper exposure to online security threats. I'm pretty sure the government only took the threats seriously just recently due to the number of attacks on government websites.
It's pretty ironic when the I Love You virus originated here.
Not to mention Bots are usually made for a reason. and ppl pay for that influence anyways. All this means as they might get a couple less bots (if they cant be stolen accounts) and X takes a cut of there provits
that, and most bots are already verified. They're fine with paying $8, so I'm sure paying $1 won't be a problem for them.
Too bad most of the bots are paying bluechecks, otherwise this might actually work.
The "Needing a phone number" is honestly 100x the bot screening than charging a single buck
@@Naokarmaissue is voip are how many people get calls now and those autoblock voip since so many bad actors use them for that reason
Source? Acting like a hive mind "NPC" is not the same as a literal bot.
@nontypicalguy Perhaps not in physical reality but can you really tell a difference in a text medium 🫠
@@nontypicalguy Just the other day a dozen brand new accounts, all with verified, began liking and retweeting my tweets. Guess what over half of them were doing on their profiles? Promoting crypto.
The Ssniperwolf thing was hilarious because every time the X(Twitter) account for UA-cam put out a statement, Community Notes shot it down in spectacular style for being bullshit meaningless platitudes.
Yeah, Community Notes are the best form of fact-checking bar none. It was really bad before, where some people were above criticism, such as the Biden administration or big corporations.
@@4.0.4 that's why they hate it so much. That being said, it's not immune to brigading. There were quite a few straight misinformation in community notes improvised by leftist brigading (right is too disorganized but even they've managed a couple). But for the most part it has been a net positive change.
How do you add a community note on twitter? Does an admin need to do it? If it's part of the twitter blue thing maybe that's why I haven't seen an option for it, because I ain't paying for it. Turns out I value my $8 more than billionaire Elon would.
except when Elon gets community noted, then the community note just gets deleted.
@@4.0.4people still are. But worse. Because now Elon cherry picks it. Especially himself.
I saw UA-cam damn near doubling the price UA-cam Premium for students, forcing me to fork over like twice as much per month than when I first got premium instead of grandfathering me into the lower price I initially agreed to.
Was I naive for expecting my subscription price to not change? Perhaps, but now I know there's nothing stopping Twitter from saying "hey i know you paid a dollar last year, but this year you need to pay $10."
The thing that you are missing here is that UA-cam uses YT Premium for profit, while this $1 fee will not be a significant change to total revenue for twitter. I definitely agree it's possible that they'd up the cost, but I do not see a financial incentive to do so (in fact, it might have a negative effect because fewer new users means fewer Blue subscriptions, which is a much more real revenue source).
The price of a McDouble has more than doubled from 10 years ago. McDonald's wants me to starve to death!! 😡 /s
Yeah I'm about to cancel youtube red 😅
@@Ryan-093Ramen hasn't changed 😅
@@Ryan-093Not the same, McDonald's raw materials increased in price, for UA-cam and twitter the running costs per user should be the same (if not lower with the layoffs) since they aren't adding any higher resolutions or extra services.
WhatsApp used to charge $1/year before FB bought them ... never had ANY spam back then, now I get spam DAILY from all over the world.
we've had Bayesian networks to detect spam for as long as I have lived.
@@ea_naseer yeah but it doesn't really work. I still get spam on WhatsApp nearly daily.
I feel that's because no one was on it. It probably costs more to get a phone number.
@@RafaelScarpaso you think Facebook bought a messaging service for $20 billion that nobody was using? 🤣
WhatsApp is also a backdoored fork of Signal, which is free, more secure, open source, and never has any spam.
$1 is meaningless to what revenue bots make for the people running them, it's a minor cost of doing business. This is purely about Twitter trying to make money.
This entire thing doesn't work and I can explain why in 5 seconds.
Prepaid visa/master card with $10 is now 10 years for a bot on Twitter, and then a call or text now number, is free.
Zero thought went into this and you can really tell....
I feel like this is just going to push more casual users off the platform. Plus, I imagine a lot of bots are paying for verification anyway…
Sure, for a little while. But when the bots are truly gone everyone will flood back and gladly pay. You'd have to admit you preferred the bots in order to do otherwise.
@@tf5pZ9H5vcAdBp Ummm the site might not survive for the people to flood back to. It's already soo borked other wise paying user have left. Soo that's insane.
@@tf5pZ9H5vcAdBpthe only way the bots go is if there’s no one for them to influence, which is what’ll happen if people leave the platform. if people do return when there are a lot less bots, that’ll only trigger the bots to come back. $1/year is not a lot considering these bots usually pay the $8/month for the blue tick
@@tf5pZ9H5vcAdBp Like L33tSkE3t said, there are already plenty of bots that already are verified anyways. This literally does nothing from people who literally give their bots the TwitterBlue subscription.
@@tf5pZ9H5vcAdBp If the bots are every truly going to be gone.. it depends on the bot, and the value proposition - If you can create a bot that spams your products, and creates more sales than $1, the $1 loss is neglectable
"haha this mf paid for twitter" is already a common meme to mock blue users. People already make fun of others for paying for twitter. People will just leave.
Annnnnnd no one has left, spectacular take brother
@@Thadon36 You realize that "people will just leave" was in response to the $1 usage fee, which did not happen. Reading comprehension, brother.
@@BinaryCounter classic Elon hater response, no one cares. Brother
@@Thadon36 🤦♂️
@@BinaryCounter ha you mad
Positives: Less bots on your platform
Negatives: Lose so many users that your platform wouldn't be worth botting in the first place
I feel like there are enough people desperate to troll Elon enough to where the bots will still exist. Real people, however..
Its for NEW users only. It literally doesnt affect ANYONE that is already on Twitter in any way shape or form whatsoever. You dont lose ANY users. Jesus Christ people.
@@NinjAsylumThat's what Elon wants you to think
@@NinjAsylum Then... it won't do either of the things I mentioned!
Since most of the bots are old hacked accounts anyway :?
@@NinjAsylum You say that like you believe the company wont later implement this fee across the board. It's not about bots. It won't even stop bots. Bots doing what they do earn more than the $1 cost plus the cost of setting up a bullshit phone number or whatever else it takes to "verify" them. Plus they have plenty of time to stockpile on accounts now for later use anyway since they announced this openly. This is about Elon drowning in debt with this platform and how he can convince users to pay for it.
Yet from a users perspective I've never really found bots a problem. What puts me off using the site is so many adverts now slapped into discussion threads.
October 15, 2003 - Microsoft pulled the same stunt with MSN Chat, cutting off NZ (and other countries) because "spam" unless they paid for MSN premium access. Effectively killed the platform in short order.
As someone who uses twitter to find clients for commissions, no this will not work. When the checkmark became something you could pay for, it became FLOODED with bots to the point that every popular tweet wasn't even worth checking the replies because you have to scroll for a few minutes just to get past the boring bot replies. If that didnt work, i don't see any way for a smaller charge to matter at all.
If anyone wants to know how these bots are, check every Elon/XDaily tweets replies
Unfortunately, I think there’s a good chance that Linus is blind to the reality of digital artists relying on Twitter for their social media presence and therefore livelihood.
It was sooo much better when having the right opinions got you the check mark.
@@SlyNine except a lot of the checkmarks were noname journalists that posted regurgitated bot articles
@@Shuroiistill better
There are 2 things here. 1. I shouldn't have to pay to have a voice. 2. bots happily pay for the spoiled blue tick, what makes him think they won't pay an 8th of that just to tweet?
Laziness is the only thing stopping me from deleting my Twitter. If they shift to charging existing members, I will bounce. I ain’t spending $1 on Twitter.
There won’t be any bots on Twitter after this. Or people. Or income. The site will die.
i feel like 90% of the people that *want* to pay money for twitter are already doing so.
and elon's biggest fanatics are also some of the world's biggest suckers, so paying $1 for access to them is a negligible amount compared to what they can make scamming them.
it might get some spam bots, but for anyone making money, it's just the cost of doing business AND it adds legitimacy to what they say because they paid to do it.
nobody would pay money just to lie to you, right? nah. nobody would do that.
elon when scammers spend a dollar per yeat to scam ppl :O
*Per Yeet
it is done to reduce botting.. not just about removing all scams.. thats impossible on any communication tool since you can lie to another human
It's less $1 per year, more that you need to register with phone number. It's harder to generate new phone numbers than paying. Also paying $1 can link your bank account to the account which means that if 1 acc gets banned all others are easily traceable to terminate as well and making new bank accounts is even harder.
This program isnt about bots, its about getting people to connect their bank accounts to twitter.
The reason they use New Zealand is because it's a relatively low population and a wealthy country with very good tech infrastructure and historically high rates of early adoption of new tech e.g., EFT-POS (electronic payments, online banking etc). It's not unusual for it to be used as a test country for this sort of thing. Philippines, on the other hand, no idea
Because the Phillipines is a very low wage / highly tech literate country where scams are rife. A LOT of bot traffic comes from the country.
There's also a lot of paid bot-like traffic because Filipinos are usually great English speakers, and are hired en masse by crypto companies (and others) to act as human bots to technically avoid breaking rules, so I imagine this will actually make quite a bit of money long term.
We just had a large scammer raid for 500 peeps here in the Philippines a couple of months ago.
And $1 is one bag of chips. Or a 500ml pet bottle of gatorade.
That's nothing.
New market for bots: create thousands of twitter accounts to sell for 50ct each after the policy is enforced internationally.
there will probably be more hackers trying to reclaim old inactive accounts to use for spam now
Agree to disagree, Linus. How hard is it to a) get a burner phone number and b) get a burner credit card? The latter I know is harder but they can just steal one from a scam victim/data breach.
you can create one time credit cards or limited credit cards on some banking, and even some third parties app
@@neolordie ...except that they are still linked to a legit card
@@BlueKnight87 True, it is still linked to a legit card, BUT the service doesn't actually see the card it is linked too, all they can know is who the issuer of this virtual card is, so in the event of a data breach or other compromise, only that virtual card is compromised.
Commercial bots cost from 200$/month per bot. No, 1$/year won’t stop them.
I think it will be interesting to see how big of a dent a dollar puts in spam operations. Also I like Luke's take on Twitter, it is all hilarious.
Don't you already have to pay to have the bots running? This would just be a little more operational cost.
Forums and communities like SomethingAwful benefit from the subscription because it pays for costs and the incentive to bot is already very low, so it almost entirely eliminates botting.
X doesn't benefit from this, this "solution" by Musk will cause bot networks to raise prices and X will continue its decrease in users which will naturally reduce botting on the platform anyway.
I think "You don't have to be a good billionaire, you just have to not be the worst one" is a pretty profound statement. Something to think about.
I'm gonna be the best.
0:45 Before listening further, I'm going to say that phone numbers can be generated as easily as fake emails, and $1 per year to scam people is piss in an ocean.
So effectively Elon wants more data on people on his platform.
Jokes on Elon... I don't use Twitter and never intend to
16:48 Well, for my part, I'm glad getting around ad blockers is really annoying (and presumably difficult). Just the way I want it. 👍
In New Zealand we get left out of a lot of stuff. Finally we're getting.... wait what are they doing? OH FOR FUCKS SAKE!
XS, S/A, HardOCP, B3d forum... Most of the niche enthusiast forums seemed to have died off as OCing and gaming became much more straight forward and mainstream, not to mention the "original" users/members aging and therefore diving into careers and having families(I'm guessing the majority would be ~30-50yo now). You also had people switching to larger, more mainstream forums, that seemed to attract "new" users.
The hobbist extreme OCing scene dwindled due to all the OEMs scooping up the top10/20 individuals/teams and sponsoring them in ~2010. Eventually the DIY OCing scene pretty much died after 2014 due to the integrated power management and boost hardware maturing enough to push the chips very close to their full potential.
The good ending
These called “Troll Farms”, government funded and extremely widespread in Russia 😂
Charging $1 to prevent spam on the message-boards only fixes that one problem, it doesn't fix other problems. I used to use email aliases so that if I started getting spam, I'd know who leaked my address. I don't remember spam being a problem on Rage3D, but I do remember getting a lot of spam from the email-address dedicated to that site because they either sold my address or were breached. (YT Premium only stops ads, it doesn't fix the garbage UI/UX that makes the site unusable. 😒)
I'm seeing a lot of blue ticked accounts posting in replies with exact same comments drumming up engagement stats, I'm starting to think the bots are already in the house
$1/year will not do much to affect botting
A lot of stand alone websites use off the shelf comment embedded templates and API. Lots of bots network target these API to spam propaganda on these website comment sections. The most common ones I see that are flooded are EVs and Breaking News comment sections. They all sing in unison and no human actually spends that much effort to comment on these sites. I bet this works very effectively and influences alot of readers.
Well... Imagine you live in Cuba, where you can't pay using PayPal or stuff alike. It will mean no one here will be able to create a new Twitter /X account if this goes global.
Does this come with an anonymity clause that "X" will not reveal information about your account to any government agency as your account will no longer be fully anonymous due to your debit or credit card being required to make the payment..
The reason for the 1 dollar fee (and the reason they launched it in the Philipines) is not to combat botting, but to combat Child Pron, Elon doesn't want to say it out loud but twitter is riddled with it and if you have to pay to post, you're trackable
Since I never used Twitter(knew it was a problem from the beginning character limits) this just makes me laugh.
twitter is still a dumpster fire anyways, so oh well.
Remember when whatsapp use to charge you $1 for a year to get more features and no ads
So setting up a new bot farm in Phillipines costs around $1000-$3000 now, and I assume that paying reduces overall ban rate on accounts.
And now bot owners can charge clients more because of the "difficulty". Oh, and the bigger ones are already charge more for a single client engagement than it would cost to do this whole process 5 times.
Good job Muskrat, you've done it again.
LOL, Linus just discovered China's 50-Cent Army by accident hahaha
$1 a year. Sure. That makes it $8 a year. One real person and 7 bots. Plus, I'm not paying to be part of a platform that allows 3rd parties to skim my data for AI model training.
1$ is acceptable actually - if it works on their end. The reality of internet today is that if you've paid $1 straight to your favourite content creator, they would get more value than out of all your views on their videos combined during that year and watching ads. Ad revenue today SUCKS ASS. Just do yourself and your favourite content creators a favour, run adblock whenever you can and donate 1$ directly to each of your top 10-top20 creators. They will be better off and you won't be feeding corporation that hates you...
I mean, bots already pay $8 a month to have the checkmark
The take on "it will get rid of the crappy scum, so the good effective ones will get even better" is a very interesting take. It's like using hand sanitizer. You kill off all the competition keeping the bad stuff that survives it at bay, so now it's free to run rampant.
Give your credit card information to the website where people are constantly hacking accounts, great idea
Virtual cards exist
looking at it purely for the bots: it's not a big problem. 1$ a year isn't much for me and even less for most bot makers. Not saying it's dumb, just... slightly ineffective (most likely)
I support this. No one is going to register, pay the dollar, and get banned for botting.
glad i got off that platform and all social media platforms.
What bots are used to is not to write comments. Comments are usually written by people and then use bots to increase their like ratio. This is seen a lot on UA-cam recently with naked women profile pictures and 1k liked comments. I've seen these accounts answer to people in the comments as well.
from someone who has programmed bots to be used for advertising, aslong as the customer is getting there money back and making profit a $1 fee aint going to stop them and the confirming account with a phone number is easy to bypass with current systems already out there, its not to stop the bots its just another money grab, as they know many ppl have multiple accounts so the reduction they will see is from 2nd accounts used by normal ppl which will reduce overall activity on then site
Scammers and bot users will definitely be able to pay for it, but I think what they're trying to do is group user accounts by the payment method they use and identify potential bots. If a credit card is used by hundreds of accounts, that's a pretty high guarantee that those are bot accounts.
Ok but $1 a year isn't that bad as a subscription fee, it could be worse
ChatGPT is a thing. AutoGPT is a thing. You can't say for sure anymore that a comment is not from a bot but from a real person working at a content farm.
View counter is quick, easy and wont take long. I would implement it as an endpoint with an in-memory NoSQL database. Each client pings it on connect and then every 30 seconds, with its session ID. In response, the client gets a cached, periodically recalculated number representing unique session IDs that have pinged in the last minute or so. Something like that would barely use any resources at all apart from RAM.
Yeah, they're gonna have to pay ME if they want me to make an account.
"Well... Guess I'm a Bot now!"💀
Money doesn't solve modern bot issues. It never did, if anything it helps. Since its much simpler to get 'verified' by simply paying.
People make money out of bots, if paying a little bit can make the process much easier, they gladly would.
$1 a year doesn't sound bad... Unless you have 10,000 bot accounts.
So what you're saying is that I can pay a dollar per bot account and not be suspected of being a bot? Dammmmmnnnn
Bye bye Twitter :) and with all my existence, fu elon
Wait. What does viewer count have to do with adblockers? Can't the servers know how many simultaneous connections there are from which source?
"And not because of Threads." I literally forgot it exists, my man.
As long as verifications cannot be done with Google voice. Cause then there would be ever decreasing phone numbers that people can verify with and then get banned. As a registered bot user and all acciunts assosiated to that number would get flagrd and investigated.
Kind of annoying to have to use my non-Google voice number for things though. I don't like giving out my actual cell number, and what about people who choose not to buy a phone plan, since they would rather not spend money on something they don't need?
Should’ve been $1.05. Freedom costs a buck-o-five.
so a mobile number? that kicks me off....
Elon works miracles.
I never cared about Twitter and somehow i care about it even less.
I disliked Zuckerberg and his products and now im rooting for Zuckerberg and his products 🤦♂️
as someone living in the Philippines, as far as i know, Twitter isn't very popular. we're also cheap as hell so we're probably all gonna move to threads since everyone here already likes instagram. So yeah basically they just wont have any local business here probably.
One thing a learned about bot farms, is that bots and people behind them pay money for their existence, it's more likely this would help bots to spread fake news and remove users to combat the fake news.
The only people this would really effect are people in very low income countries. I still dont think it would be too much (dont quote me on that tho), but for them $1 would be a lot more than it is for Americans.
I live in the Philippines, $1 is one bag of chips. That's nothing.
@@aesieaiyahcloe I wasn’t saying it was a lot for the Philippines or New Zealand, I meant that if he decided to roll this out to the rest of the world it could have an impact on some countries
Elon: "We're lowering bot count."
Me who's still getting tagged by bots in crypto scam posts: *doubt*
I wouldn't trust elon with my financial info and my real name. Twitter is dying and I don't want to go there anymore. Eff that place.
Genuinely would've been fine paying $1/year for any social media service...before Elon bough twitter.
Engineer title should be as protected as other licensed professional titles, like doctor, lawyer, etc...
The problem with this is the value of what bots do, in terms of swaying public opinion and bumping shit takes - far outweighs the cost of $1 a year for 5,000 bots
To pay you need to identify yourself if you identify yourself you can be sued 🤭
Honestly this is the first idea he had that actually sounds reasonable. At least until you realise it would basically kill growth because no new users would pay to sign up and it would just kill engagement
And now he's beefing with Wikipedia!!! Melon is so dumb.
So does Facebook, turns out Elon is "industry leading" now. Hee hee!
Elon Musk is going to lose his shit once he finds out most bots are from financed business 😂
How dose it take a lot of time and money to implement a concurrent view counter? Having no idea how your system is set up mind you; That seems like an extremely straightforward thing to implement. you just look at how many individual ip addresses are calling for content and then display that information, update that value every second or so and that will be more then accurate without adding a large load to your system.
I would implement it as an endpoint with an in-memory NoSQL database. Each client pings it on connect and then every 30 seconds, with its session ID. In response, the client gets a cached, periodically recalculated number representing unique session IDs that have pinged in the last minute or so. Something like that would barely use any resources at all apart from RAM.
@@MyAmazingUsername precisely, there are many different ways to go about solving for this. It seems like something that could be built, tested and implemented in a matter of days by someone familiar with there websites backend. Now obviously there is a cost associated with that persons time, but this is a business that just made a video about buying the entire front end stock of some old electronics store for something like $35k. Almost everything that they bought was e-waist, but it was something that they wanted to do. So I would think that they could find some funds to pay for a couple of days of work for a basic feature that the owner of the company apparently keeps asking for. But that’s just my 2 cents.
Something Awful did the same thing years ago.
If I was a nation state actor that wanted a big botnet a 1 dollar per bot fee would not stop me.
If Elon wants to get rid of bots, he should stop using twitter himself.
Luke with the legendary adlibs 😅
Ok, I don't think this is about the bots at all. There are plenty of ways for a company like Twitter to deal with that issue without a paywall. What I think is the more crucial angle here is that in Elon's mind, Twitter is a financial platform, an everything app. The $1 entry fee is a way to make the new customers immediately break that first spending barrier (it is known that in any game or service people have a natural adversity to paying, so making them overcome that barrier once makes future purchases MUCH more likely by virtue of them already spending some cash, even if it's a few cents).
You mean the cost of making a bot army is only $1 per seat? I'll take 100 please
I think Linus underestimates the power nationalism
I'll delete my account, I ain't giving Msuk my banking info.
Im with Luke here. this shit is just funny. Twitter is trash anyway so lets just let it burn.
The truth revealed.
Linus a while ago: I don't watch the videos, I just skim through the comments to get the gist of it.
Linus now: I don't often head into the comments section.