from Hacker News

Twitter Blew

by thallavajhula on 4/23/23, 7:56 AM with 12 comments

• by epistasis on 4/23/23, 8:35 AM

  >You pay a certain amount of money, for say, 10,000 followers and expand your network. You didn’t have to post good content or had to wait for a few years. You solved both the problems by throwing money at the problem.

  >With this expanded network, you apply to Twitter to verify your profile and Twitter obliges and marks your profile as verified and gives you the verified checkmark. Being a verified user, the possibilities are now endless

  This whole blog is just based in a fictional world unconnected to reality

  Having a blue check mark didn't give anybody anything except pride and letting people know it was the person with the name. It didn't bring you followers or fame. Having a bunch of bot followers isn't going to get you verified either.

• by buro9 on 4/23/23, 8:38 AM

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie...

  The story is cantered around the Sneetches, a group of yellow bird-like creatures. Some Sneetches have a star on their belly, thus making them special. The Sneetches without a star are discriminated against. Sylvester McMonkey McBean is a greedy entrepreneur who convinces the Sneetches without the stars to get a star tattoos if they pay him money. This makes the star Sneetches jealous and they pay him to have their star removed so they remain special. At the end, the Sneetches all remain penniless and McBean walks away a wealthy man.

  (Summary from https://www.gradesaver.com/the-sneetches-and-other-stories/s... )

• by CrampusDestrus on 4/23/23, 8:42 AM

  The character limit works soooooo well that people spin up endless chain of replies or post plain old screenshots of text just to express an opinion.

• by unsupp0rted on 4/23/23, 8:34 AM

  > The user would have to submit some sort of a government issued ID to verify that they are who they claim to be.

  I don’t trust Twitter with my government ID.

• by seydor on 4/23/23, 8:35 AM

  a lot of opinions yet twitter is ... fine for me? It's a little faster but other than that it has been the same dumb RSS replacement as before. I agree that long tweets are a bad idea and i tend to skip those. It's also fine if they want to charge people for verifying their identity and remove impersonators, after all a lot of banks do that.

• by quaintdev on 4/23/23, 8:45 AM

  Elon unknowingly funded migration of people to mastodon and other federated social media when he brought Twitter. This is just another step on that long term plan.

• by imaginarycoder on 4/23/23, 8:01 AM

  In a good way.

• by illiarian on 4/23/23, 8:38 AM

  So now:

  - Elon is running around handing out free blue checkmarks to people he's afraid if losing on the platform (pretending he's doing it as a joke). And this resulted in predictable backlash from those people

  - Removal of legacy verification also removed verification from news agencies, alongside with "state-sponsored" labels. Russian propagandists have already thanked Elon for that

  It's all fine

• by galfarragem on 4/23/23, 8:33 AM

  An anecdote: I never used Twitter but this year I created an account to “vote” for Elon. He isn’t a saint for sure but I believe our world needs him.

  Feel free to downvote if I “upset” you.