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X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

bbc.co.uk

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Re: X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

#81

Post by SXX »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #39
SXX wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If X or Twitter or whatever accept payments via Apple Pay or Google Pay then there is absolutely no way to track anything. It's those services simply dont provide any information back to ex-Twitter. Also there is number of services like privacy.com that allow to hide real card details. And even if person is using real card then payment process have absolutely no way of knowing anything except those few last numbers o…

When performing this kind of verification, you can easily (and usually do) block cards from services like privacy.com by looking at BIN codes. I also don’t think spammers can get large numbers of unique DPANs from Apple and Google Pay since that involves a cryptographic exchange between your device and Apple/Google with involvement from your issuing bank. Also most payment processors provide some sort of key that let…

Yes you can block everything, but with every specific service blocked you limit your ability to accept new users. There also legitimate banks that let you have 5-10 virtual cards or generate unique card each time you pay.

Spammers do have large number of unique phones in their farms as well as budget to have undetectible rooting and hardware ID faking. And Google Pay / Apple Pay as well as majority of banks actually do nothing to prevent you from adding your cards to 10 different phones.

Of course it's all makes lives harder for everyone who want to get a new account, but nothing including literal ID / passport and face verification make is impossible to bypass.

Re: X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

#82

Post by etchalon »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #64
prepend wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the $1, it’s the identity linked to the charge. So now they can be blocked as well as traced back to the funding account. I once was in a charity sponsored therapy group and they had a $10 fee. I was annoyed as this was a pretty wealthy organization and the fee seemed discriminatory, or at least a hassle. I learned that it was just there to validate each participant. So I think this is just a filter to help…

> It’s not the $1, it’s the identity linked to the charge. So now they can be blocked as well as traced back to the funding account. Do people on HN actually think this will work? I'm genuinely curious. Knowing everything we know about the underground economy of sockpuppets, bots and carders - combined the (un)willingness of real people (especially in relatively poorer countries) to pop out their credit card during s…

It's not even about the quality of signups.

It just will not solve the problem he's trying to solve. It will reduce low-effort and out-of-box tooling, but it'll also increase the value of successful networks, which will encourage better tooling and cover the mule costs.

Re: X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

#83

Post by throwaway4aday »

dEnigma wrote: post #10
throwaway2990 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahahhaha there’s less bots now than before Elon took over. Now instead of reply bots tho I get like bots.

I paradoxically only really started heavily using Twitter when it seemed to decay under Musk (because I wanted be along for the fun ride). But I can hardly imagine that there could have been more bots before than there are now. Almost all my tweets are immediately liked by some catfishing bot and there are crypto spam bots under every slightly popular tweet.

Your profile must have a target painted on it because that is not my experience at all.

Re: X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

#84

Post by SXX »

axelthegerman wrote: post #71
SXX wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If X or Twitter or whatever accept payments via Apple Pay or Google Pay then there is absolutely no way to track anything. It's those services simply dont provide any information back to ex-Twitter. Also there is number of services like privacy.com that allow to hide real card details. And even if person is using real card then payment process have absolutely no way of knowing anything except those few last numbers o…

> payment process have absolutely no way of knowing anything except those few last numbers of the card This is just plain wrong. 1. Payment processors know everything because they process the payment 2. Application developers don't know anything besides the last 4 is closer to reality because they're probably not PCI compliant to access the remaining information. BUT some processors such as Adyen will try to provide…

> 1. Payment processors know everything because they process the payment

They know all the information you given, but in practice they can't even verify "name on the card" that you entered in most of countries. In some countries they can check your billing address ZIP code, but that's all about it.

And there absolutely no way for them to find out if you are unique user with one card or you just have 10 cards for the same credit account or created 10 supplimentary cards for all your family and the dog.

Re: X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

#85

Post by noirscape »

ffwszgf wrote: post #68
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH this highlights even more how out of touch they are -- too used to living in a bubble where the rich can get what they want and bypass rules that apply to regular folk.

It’s not like there’s no precedent for this. Look at all the rules WeChat was able to ignore due to their size and influence. I assume Elon expected a similar treatment for Twitter.

WeChat is backed by the CCP, aka the government with a military and de facto legal control over Apples factories. If they don't comply with WeChats requests, the CCP can ban Apple from doing business in China, with force if they have to. Hence, Apple complies.

That's where the precedent comes from - WeChat (as well as basically all major Chinese companies) carry state backing to force their way. Musk has afaict no backing from any government, least of all the DoD (who hate his guts for the shit he's pulled with Starlink in Ukraine).

Re: X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

#86

Post by mrweasel »

threeseed wrote: post #21

This has nothing to do with bots. It's all about getting everyone to provide their credit card details for future revenue streams eg. micro-transactions. And also to give them a competitive advantage in the ad space e.g. allowing companies to target you based on your real life identity.

It would actually be completely fair to say that X now costs $1 per month to use. You'd have to drop the ads as well, which given their fall out with larger advertisers again would make sense. In some weird sense it would fit with my overall view of Musk, if the advertisers don't like what he's doing, he'll block their access to his platform.

Journalists, consultants and influencers could just expense the cost and get a tax deduction or have their employer pay. Given the value most people claim to get from X/Twitter I don't see why $12 - $20 isn't a reasonable cost.

I'm also not sure if a dollar per month would be enough to keep bots at bay, it's also a little unreasonable to simply outsource your vetting of users to the credit card companies and banks in this manor and I doubt that neither VISA nor MasterCard finds the idea amusing.

Re: X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

#87

Post by etchalon »

mikepurvis wrote: post #41
threeseed wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy pre-paid Visa and Mastercard debit cards from many retailers. Availability of cards isn't going to be an issue.

Can you automate that though? Having to buy an individual card per bot could be a pretty annoying secondary cost for a thing whose lifetime value is likely measured in the single digits of dollars.

You don't buy card numbers individually. You buy lists of them, of varying quantity, quality and price and you just cycle the numbers until you find ones that work.

Costs per card about $5 bucks, and will get cycled into a multi-merchant hit to extract the most value from each card. A $1 Twitter charge, $50 bucks in digital gift cards, a "maybe it will work" hit for hundreds in electronics, or clothes, etc.

If nothing else, Twitter just made itself a GREAT place to test stolen numbers, since a $1 charge isn't likely to raise any flags and get the card shut down.

Re: X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

#88

Post by nova22033 »

Well..not so easy, is it?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-text-messages-revea...

In another April 14 message, angel investor Jason Calacanis messaged Musk: “You could easily clean up bots and spam and make the service viable for many more users — removing bots and spam is a lot less complicated than what the Tesla self driving team is doing.”

Re: X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

#89

Post by prepend »

Ensorceled wrote: post #45
prepend wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you need millions of bots and the marginal return on spammers may be thousands of a cent. So even $1/year may be too much for botnets. Imagine a botnot and if each node cost the operator $1. The economics require near zero marginal costs to ddos or spam or whatever. It seems to cost $10-20 to buy 1,000 followers [0] so I expect lots of those accounts get turned over frequently. It will be interesting to see i…

There are a ton of blue check bots right now and that is more that $1/year. It might eliminate some of the like bots and other noise, but might also make the blue check bot network cheaper to run.

It doesn’t need to eliminate all bots, just reduce the number.

And I think there are far fewer blue check bots to regular, free bots.

Re: X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

#90

Post by prepend »

ceejayoz wrote: post #54
prepend wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Id expect they are. And that will allow them to shut off more accounts.

The people making those charges don't care about the accounts; they're using the $1 charge to test that the stolen card details work before going and buying a $500 gift card somewhere else. The victim eventually does a chargeback, which are expensive and risk your merchant account.

> they're using the $1 charge to test that the stolen card details work before going and buying a $500 gift card somewhere else

Why would they start using twitter for this rather than the current merchants they use?

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