My guess is Elon Musk will sell Twitter at a loss within a year.
There will be nothing left to sell. If the destruction of Twitter is not intentional, Elon is truly among the most incompetent business owners I can think of.
Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle
141–150 of 222 posts
Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle
#142It's super funny that identity verification of authors of things published was basically more than half of the value twitter provided to its users, both readers and writers and the first thing Elon did was to destroy it. Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing. It kind of reminds me how a w…
The only thing they had to do was have someone's nephew draw a different symbol for the $8 tier and use that instead of the very well known Verified badge. That's it. This whole debacle would've been instantly avoided.
True, but who wants the dollar-store version if the verification mark? Twitter is/was selling the prestige of the badge and what it represents to some, specifically "I am a notable individual". Any other symbol would only mean "I paid $8 for this", and my guess is that isn't quite as compelling.
Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think it just helps to be a user of the product and have a deep understanding for it before you make any changes. Elon used twitter a lot, but in pretty unusual fashion (because he's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted. And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively. For instance, in this case they sh…
> And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively This is what gets me. He's basically speedrunning a world-class demonstration of the lesson of Chesterton's fence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
If twitter is bleeding money so fast, slow changes of direction are not the first choice
Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think it just helps to be a user of the product and have a deep understanding for it before you make any changes. Elon used twitter a lot, but in pretty unusual fashion (because he's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted. And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively. For instance, in this case they sh…
> And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively This is what gets me. He's basically speedrunning a world-class demonstration of the lesson of Chesterton's fence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Great quote for this. And a lot of other situations software people find themselves in.
Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's classic "If I don't understand it, then it must be easy" syndrome. Oh, Twitter is full of bots! So when I'm in charge I'm going to press the "no more bots" button and save Twitter! Also, the company only needs half this much staff, so we're going to spend a few days firing half of them and then the company will be better off! Elon's not gonna learn because that would tarnish his image of someone who has any idea…
And the company is doing too many RPC calls. And we will take down overbloated "microservices" (where the apostrophes kinda give suggest he is not at home with the concept).
One of those appears to be the SMS verification one.
Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle
#146People in this thread know nothing about brand value. smh. Musk is just as clueless
Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle
#147I've never seen a kid break a toy that fast.
Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle
#148It's super funny that identity verification of authors of things published was basically more than half of the value twitter provided to its users, both readers and writers and the first thing Elon did was to destroy it. Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing. It kind of reminds me how a w…
> I think it just helps to be a user of the product and have a deep understanding for it before you make any changes. Elon used twitter a lot, but in pretty unusual fashion (because he's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted. And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively. For instance, in this case they sh…
>> he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted.
This is particularly surprising to me also, for a different reason. Since Musk was a key player at PayPal, he should have learned that although the vast majority of users are well-intentioned and harmless, there are a small group of scammers and criminal who MUST be dealt with or they will rapidly bankrupt you.
On Twitter, we must add to the list of scammers & criminals the additional bots, trolls, and pranksters, all of whom can rapidly destroy trust in a community (online or off).
Why he didn't carry that lesson forward to this platform is baffling (unless he's in a contest with Kanye and the FTX crypto guy to see who can create the largest and most rapid-burning money bonfire).
Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle
#149I actually liked the ~idea~ behind this but not the execution, which I can't believe was so bungled In my ideal world, Twitter Blue would act as "identity verification as a service". Pay $X/month and provide some proof of identity linked to your display name on Twitter. If the two correlate, you get the check. I think identity could be fairly flexible- could be "I am John Smith", but also could be "I am CorpA" or "I…
I thought it would use a service similar to this from Canada Post [1]. Obviously would only work for Canada, but I'm sure many other countries have a similar service. People will balk at the in-person side of things, but it would create a safer service if your real identify was verified. For users, not wanting to use their real name, perhaps they could opt into a low tier service with a different badge. I know there…
Woah what is this thing?
I've never been prompted to use it though, have you? in which context?
Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle
#150Are people aware that impersonating a company’s customer is, like, fraud and opens them up to being sued for damages when something like this happens? There are kind of two things that happened, here. One is a kind of rushed implementation of a questionable feature. The other is a breakdown of social taboo of just violating the law and/or acting in a damaging way. We all know that spam and bots are rampant on the Int…
Honestly, that's more on Twitter than anyone who is doing the impersonating, whether parody or not. Their design and brand language put the "blue checkmark" front and center as a badge of legitimacy, giving it away for $8 to anyone is just asking for fraud.
Alternatively: this sort of thing will always happen because it has the potentially to be very funny