I think pay-for-verification is going to be dominant on all real-identity social media.
Reason is simple: AI
1.You can now trivially create an avatar photo, of any level of attractiveness, of any race, of any age. You can even reproduce the same character reliably in different environments/costumes via stable diffusion + LORA.
2. You can now easily create a comment history on that account, thanks to ChatGPT.
3. You can even produce voices reliably with just a few samples.
There's no real defense against AI impersonation at scale, except for charging-for-verification. The money drastically increases the cost for impersonators and scammers/catfishers, and provides resources on the other end to moderate impersonation.
I think the pay-for-verification might solve those problems ship sailed when Twitter decided that a symbol which had previously meant they'd attempted verification could be given to pretty much anyone who paid them $8 a month...
Impersonation-at-scale depends on scale, not verification of individual accounts as authentic people with authentic notability and opinions, and impersonation not at scale sometimes feels more motivated to pay the $8 than the person or position being impersonated.
I get the "i hate Twitter/elon" attitude, but the truth is that the CA system has been dependent on pay-to-verify for some time now and despite whatever grievances you have against verisign or whoever it's brought us to today safely enough.
I think the problem was not that Twitter started charging $8/month ago much as that they gave up the expensive-to-perform ID verification workflow that had been in place.
The CA system, on the other hand, has more or less abandoned the expensive, manual "extended verification" process in favor of the zero marginal cost "domain verification" process. This switchover drove the cost of a new cert to $0 for almost all users.
So I'm really not following your analogy, since Twitter gave up the workflow and started charging (aka, a cash grab), whereas CAs gave up charging and adopted a more efficient workflow (aka the expected behavior of efficient markets).
I have to disagree that it was more transparent and sensible when it meant the person had been verified. I only ever used twitter to follow bands and writers, it was useful to know it was them behind the account (or their social teams).
They muddied that water, I just don't bother with the site much anymore. I never gave a shit about the gen pop on there and it's just amplified a bunch of strangers and nobodies - I'm sure their friends and families love them, but I didn't come on the internet to see them and since twitter blue all kinds of stupid shit from nobodies with blue checks magically makes it into my feed. It's just a garbage website now.
But now (with Twitter) I can't trust anything I read without double-checking carefully it is not a fake account (and even then I cannot be sure). At least beforehand I was able to trust that Twitter has done the basic KYC.
The Meta implementation therefore seems smarter (depends on gov ID).
Why did you ever trust anything on twitter without double-checking? Consider how much misinformation you have processed over the years because of too much faith in a platform to disseminate facts over fiction.
I don't think he's talking about the information in the tweets, but the source. If I'm a fan of X and I go find X on twitter, I used to be able to more or less trust that X with a blue checkmark was the twitter account representing X. Before the hilarious shift to the gold marks, it was a lot of sifting through stupid meme accounts.
People were doing verified accounts for my ISP support twitter that day, lol
If we accept the logic that we should not trust anything posted by anyone on Twitter, then Twitter would no longer be a viable source of information whatsoever. Do you see the problem? It is poisoning the well.
someone created an account named USEmbassy_SaoTome and that had twitter verification = that was indeed the official account of the US Embassy there.
consider after Twitter Blue
someone creates an account named USEmbassy_Kiribati and has the twitter blue mark. You dont really know this is an official account. anyone can pay for this
PS: this is just hypothetical I dont really know if those embassies exists.
And the problem with pay for identity is you can buy other people's identities. The news was full impersonations right after Twitter initiated it's pay for blue check marks. That we don't here about it now may just be a matter that the news stopped caring. URL squatting was a problem for a long time - the decision that trademark holder could seize domains helped but a web address today isn't considered a solid identity at this point so "the system working" is a bit of an exaggeration.
Also, I'd note the gp didn't bad-mouth Elon or Verisign so your comment is a kind of riding a trolly false accusation.
The pay-to-verify is the reason why a significant chunk of the Internet didn't have HTTPS. It was the inception of free CAs like Lets Encrypt that made 90+% HTTPS penetration.
They already had a verification feature deployed which wasn't perfect but was reasonably strict. Then they debased it for a new revenue stream.
I don't see them making the now that we've got a bunch of people paying for it, lets reduce our revenue by suddenly becoming strict on it again decision. Or people taking the badge more seriously now it just means someone subscribed to Twitter Blue
It was an award for being an authentic notable person or entity, on the basis that the notable people and entities were most likely to be parodied or faked. Now it's an award for people that pay up
It started out as “this is who you expect it is” for things like Obama or Trump, then it became “this is a person who speaks with authority of some sort, listen to them” and now it is just “someone pays eightbux”
> “this is a person who speaks with authority of some sort, listen to them”
Rather, "this is a person that people at Twitter have blessed with authority. It's astounding that you care what we think."
> “someone pays eightbux”
To have their identity verified. This is where I pretend to be shocked that a certain class of people prefer arbitrary credential grants by unelected authorities, and that they look at a simple identity verification service that accepts anyone who is willing to show their papers and pay with absolute contempt.
> This is where I pretend to be shocked that a certain class of people prefer arbitrary credential grants by unelected authorities, and that they look at a simple identity verification service that accepts anyone who is willing to show their papers and pay with absolute contempt.
No, they think arbitrary credential grants by unelected authorities that attempted to verify people were who they said they were represented a more useful verification service than one which initially made anyone who was willing to pay $8 a "verified" account in the name of a famous person and still doesn't actually check identity.
This is where I pretend to be shocked that a certain class of people will insist a clusterfuck of such epic proportions they had to suspend it for a month after launch was actually a genius move.
It was never a pageant. It was a way for people to know they were following the famous person they wanted to follow and interact with. You're kind of scaring me that there's an actual contingent of humans that felt slighted by the notion nobody cared who they were, but people would like to know they're actually following taylor swift.
Maybe, but at least the verification seemed meaningful. And it feels like a meaningful verification doesn't generalise well: it's easy to pick a few people (arbitrarily) and truly verify them. But verifying millions of people... that's hard, unless you don't truly verify (in which case it's meaningless).
Agreed it doesn't completely invalidate it as a concept, but Elon turning the highest profile somewhat reliable implementation of an authenticity badge into a culture war artifact doesn't exactly bode well for it being a social media must-pay-for. The fact Facebook once aspired to be the platform where everyone used their real name and now can't be bothered to deactivate friendspamming sexbots without most users caring suggests that ordinary people won't exactly be queueing up to pay them $144 per annum because of their inherent trustworthiness as a verifier either.
It'd probably work a bit on LinkedIn because of the nature of the user base and lots of people already expensing Premium accounts, but funnily enough I'm not sure LinkedIn actually has that much of a fake account problem...
> but funnily enough I'm not sure LinkedIn actually has that much of a fake account problem...
Oh it does for sure, unfortunately many people are more than happy to connect with anyone who wants to connect with them because “LinkedIn doesn’t have a fake account problem”. And many people post resumes, entire employment history, all professional social connections, etc. and so all you need to do is pretend to be a student of your targets alma mater and now you have all of that personal info with the click of a Connect button. I’ve noticed trends where someone would try to connect with me and they’d be connected with some acquaintances of mine, but not once have I ever heard of that person. Those types of accounts exist, are fake, and steal information.
If you haven’t 1-1 met someone before in person or via actual business relationship you should definitely not connect with them on LinkedIn.
Most of those accounts are actual people registered with their actual name using spamming tools (some of them LinkedIn approved) to connect with as many people as possible though, usually to boost the appearance of their personal profile and have as wide a possible audience for promotional messages they share rather than to circumvent LinkedIn's information paywalls. Spamming people loosely connected with your industry with what you're doing at work is, after all, LinkedIn's intended purpose...
Oh no doubt, but I would put that in the same categorization as "fake accounts" in the sense that the intended purpose is general malfeasance. I.e. connecting not just to boost their own profile potentially but also to try and harvest any personal information you have published on the site.
> turning a $8 subscription into a culture war artifact
"Culture war artifact" is not a real term. I've never had what looks like a reasonable combination of three words come up with zero hits in a search engine.
What happened is that Musk decided to charge for identity verification instead of granting it to favored media people, and other people already involved in a culture war where Musk plays the villain added that to their long list of incomprehensible grievances.
>'"Culture war artifact" is not a real term. I've never had what looks like a reasonable combination of three words come up with zero hits in a search engine.'
Is this really your barometer for discussion, that all grammatical phrases must first exist in Google search results for them to be considered valid self-expression? If so that's pretty out there.
There's a wonderful irony here in that this a discussion about a Megacorp validating people's identity and here you are telling someone that their words are not valid because they haven't been validated by some other Megacorp.
The phrase "culture war" itself wasn't in use in English before it was used in the title of a book in the early 90s [1]. There were no search engines then.
> There's no real defense against AI impersonation at scale, except for charging-for-verification.
There is: have the state take care of that as you are a citizen that pay taxes (you already are paying for this "verification") – an ID card that contains a proof of you being... you.
But the U.S. has a phobia of any form of national ID card, so I doubt that the USDS will be able to build anything soon. It's such a shame. At least having it as an option could allow society's to start experimenting with it as a solution to these problems.
I'd like a govt service where you can verify that you're a real person but not your identity or anything of the sort. Sort of like having the third party registering with the government and then you get a token per account you make so the service can verify there isn't more than one accounts per person but they can't identify you across the services. Would also be immensely helpful useful for stopping cheating in online video games, while not requiring you to give our your real name and identity to anything
Actually the fact that it's paid makes it even more useless, because the vast majority of users will NOT be verified. I would never, ever, pay for this verification for example.
Therefore a non-verified user will not look less trustable than a verified one.
Agreed. Either they get it right (and then congrats, the Facebook account is now a passport), or they don't, and it's completely meaningless because it still means "well don't trust it though".
Who cares? Is the AI gonna RSVP to my event? Haggle over my 2nd hand item? Comment on whatever the local council has planned?
All these schemes tend to fall apart at the first contact with reality.
(Also, you are talking about "Facebook verifying users". They can't even verify who is paying them for political ads, and they certainly don't seem to care very much.)
They will definitely haggle over your second hand item. Ever tried selling an Apple product on Facebook marketplace?
You get a ton of scammers and you can't tell with some of them (until they try the actual scam, by which point you've wasted time messaging them, packaging the item, etc.)
God yes. I absolutely hate it when people cite 1984 as “what happens when you have large government.” As if no one could write a dystopian fiction novel based on whatever world view that person has.
I'm not sure, they usually work on volume. They might make 1000 fake accounts and only profit from a handful of those. They might only make a few thousand $ from those accounts, and adding $10,000 on top wipes it out entirely. Sure if they are doing some sophisticated spear fishing attack them the $10 doesn't matter, but in practice that's not what usually occurs.
Shouldn't there be a difference between "verified" and "paid"? If bad actors can just pay to have a "verified" account, then it's completely meaningless, isn't it?
Either they truly verify (which is probably hard) and I can pay to be verified, or they don't, and it's completely useless because nobody should trust the verification...
It’s not that black and white, most of these things are a mix. Some verification up front, and the normal ongoing monitoring of behavior. Putting it all up front usually presents too large a barrier to users, and causes conversion to suffer (and it’s harder to be sure than just catching bad behavior once they start using the service). Taking money makes getting banned a much larger penalty for bad actors. And that makes a lot of bad behavior unprofitable, and that subset will stop, and reduce load on their spam fighting efforts.
Right, that's interesting! Thanks for the insights :)
> and the normal ongoing monitoring of behavior
Now I get another question: say you have millions of paid, verified users (that's the goal, right?). If you can monitor millions of account successfully, then it's most likely automated, isn't it? And then it should scale to all the users, maybe? In which case again, "verified" feels meaningless (because they just improved the bot situation overall).
> And that makes a lot of bad behavior unprofitable
I wonder if the bad behavior that can be reasonably well detected is the unprofitable one. Say I can leverage the "verified" badge to scam people more efficiently -> probably I can pay 8$ for an account that will scam a few people, right? So really paying 8$ would be a deterrent for bots that purposely do disinformation, but there it's hard to know if it's a bot, isn't it? I mean many people do disinformation just out of a lack of knowledge, and that's not a reason to qualify them as bots, right?
Again, it's a mix. In many automated anti-abuse systems, there are humans in the loop for training/verification. Like, take something that's trying to catch home rental ad scammers by running basically a spam classifier on the messages they send, except trained on scammy language, like "please send the security deposit to xyz, and I'll mail you the keys". But that classifier isn't perfect, and you probably don't want false positives banning legitimate users' accounts. So instead, it just leads to a temp suspension so that if they are a scammer (high likelihood, so this is fairly safe), and drops the message in a review queue, to be verified or reversed by a human reviewer. If it reverses, that's valuable training for the automated model.
If you're charging $8/mo/account, you can justify a lot more verification than if it's just an effort to keep the user base free of scammers for nebulous brand value reasons, and there are likely to be far fewer scams to moderate anyway, since it makes it a lot more expensive/risky to ramp up 10,000 accounts, which might all get banned at once if they identify commonalities between them.
Yeah maybe. I don't know, it still feels to me that "people should not trust verified accounts because they may be scams", and bad actors can still make 10k unverified accounts.
If people learn to trust verified accounts, it becomes a risk (they shouldn't, since it is not completely reliable / it was completely bad for Twitter), right? And if they don't learn to trust verified accounts, then scammers have no reason to pay for them.
Email verification raises the cost of making a fake account, IP filtering raises the cost of making a fake account, SMS verification raises the cost of making a fake account, random algorithmic banning of new accounts raises the cost of making a fake account ...
>"There's no real defense against AI impersonation at scale, except for charging-for-verification."
What's to stop a generative AI from generating a state issued drivers license or similar to go along with that avatar photo though? Also how different is that really though from all the existing non-AI generated fake accounts?
If McDonald's required showing your driver's license to pick up your order, would it be a felony to show a fake license and pick up an order? You're not lying to a government organisation. You're just obscuring your identity to a private corporation. I fail to see how that can be any more than unethical.
Can you explain how an AI-generated fake ID for a fake social media account constitutes a felony? On what grounds exactly? Facebook despite attempting to normalize the handing over of government-issued identification to an advertising platform, is not a government entity.
I don't know enough about your legal system to be sure, but just as an option, wouldn't it be possible that the mere act of creating a my fake ID could become a felony, if it isn't already?
Just like the act of defacing your currency is illegal, even if you don't pay with that money.
For me, the safest verification is what I had to do for my first email address in Germany, which is that the postman comes to your house and verifies that you are who you claim to be. Alternatively, and pretty much equally secure, our passports include the option of digitally verifying your identity at home. However, I'm not willing to do either that for Facebook, the last option is probably not possible with US passports, and the first option would be rather expensive.
I have 3 distinct pieces of ID. Both my ID card and my passport should theoretically be usable to verify my identity online. We also have a digital only[0] tool at our disposal. It’s insane to me that we still don’t have a reliable way to verify an identity online.
You are not generating a real physical ID but a representation of an ID, a jpeg. Nor would you be using that representation of an ID to identify and actual person for something that legally requires proof of ID like purchasing alcohol, opening a bank account or driving a car. The sole context for this representation is for a fake persona that exists solely on a social media service.
While it is true that using a fake ID to commit other crimes is generally more serious and is the more common case, producing an image of a fake ID is still recognized as a felony.
"There's no real defense against AI impersonation at scale,"
Defamation liability. I'm not sure the laws have worked out yet, but I suggest that these companies may be in for some lawsuits if thing go awry, and they have not shown to be actively working against it.
> Most people use social media to keep track of people they already know.
And most people who drive for Uber are just doing so to make a few bucks in their daily life. And most people on AirBnb are renting their spare room or couch.
/s
Most people follow a handful of a famous people or companies, and some friends. Especially on twitter, which was very "one to many" following relationships. Thats why verification was so impactful, it gave the "one" in "one to many" something special, and a way to establish authenticity.
It would be quite a challenge to re-create what FB circa 2006-2010 or so was like. Before influencers and engagement farming. Before it became "social media" and was just a "social utility"
The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.
Group chat apps somewhat fill this product void, but not completely. There was something magical about a social network being somewhat open & organic that group chats can't capture
> The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.
We need the Craigslist of friends and family social networks. A company that is just aggressively disinterested in bloat or hyper engagement.
Something where "re-sharing" doesn't exist and links are deemphasized in the UX, so it's more focused on your content (hopefully you talking about your own life, thoughts, etc.). Especially text content, with photos/videos present, but a bit deemphasized.
Absolutely no business or "influencer" pages, of course.
There is an app like that. It’s called mewe, when Facebook was being especially egregious in some privacy overreach a bunch of people I know checked it out, but we were so burned from all the other social networks that we weren’t willing to use it like we had used to use Facebook. I think that time has just passed.
It was already starting to go downhill in mid-2006 (when it became available to anyone). The golden age was 2004-2006. I remember after it opened to the public most college students already decided it wasn't that cool anymore.
> The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.
This doesn't make sense to me: the Facebook from back then didn't support "engagement optimizers" as it didn't have a pervasive programmatic newsfeed trying to show you posts from random people you might like: it showed you posts from your friends, and if none of your friends were "influencers" you simply couldn't see any influencer content even if every other user on the site who wasn't your friend was an influencer.
The group chat is the new social network. Chronological, you know who’s in there, photo sharing, reactions, reply’s. It has everything me and my close friends need.
How does that handle overlapping friend groups? Each person in my friend group has their own friend group, and their friend groups often include people who I am not friends with.
It would seem that we'd need multiple group chats to make it work reasonably. Is that what you do?
If we wanted it done with only one group chat it would seem it would have to include the union of all the friend groups of people who are in the chat, which would result in there being for most people in the chat a bunch of people they don't know also in the chat.
We'd probably then want some kind of filtering. I'd probably only want to see posts that are from my friends, and maybe posts that my friends have reacted or replied to.
...and then we are essentially back to a Facebook-like or Twitter-like thing except maybe with better filtering.
I question the value of trying to combine multiple friend groups into one group chat. They may have overlapping friends in them, but the groups are distinct and have their own character and collective identity, and I present myself slightly differently to each group. What do I stand to gain by combining my interactions with these different groups into one "social network"?
If you are in multiple group chats and have something to say (e.g. a life update), do you post in each individually? Or do you pick and choose which groups get the update? If your groups overlap, now some people get the same update twice - are they supposed to react in both?
Group chats are intimate by design and don’t seem like a good fit for “broadcast” style updates like “I bought a house”, “moved to CA”, etc. That’s the value in the Facebook feed of old. Something like that also helps you stay connected with more distant friends/acquaintances, people you might not talk to daily but you would still be happy to see how they are doing in life.
Again, it's instructive to think how things worked before Facebook.
People would announce things like that to each group individually, and often chose to not mention it in some groups because they're not intimate enough. We used to just be okay hearing and discussing the same announcement multiple times ("some of you already know this, but..."), most likely with different parts of the story told in different settings and triggering different conversation because the groups are different.
For the more distant acquaintances, people wrote Christmas cards (or equivalent) for the occasional updates. These can still be handled very nicely with an email list, and really don't call for the kind of instant-update sharing that Facebook et al encourage.
Is it less efficient to write and read the same updates multiple times? Sure. But is efficiency really what we should be striving for in human relations?
I mean, sure it worked before Facebook, but having grown up using Facebook, it feels much more natural to use social media than a Christmas card, email list, or whatever! Besides, those alternatives still feel intimate - you made an effort to reach out - and now you have to consider whether the other person wants that level of intimacy, will feel obligated to respond, etc.
The value that Facebook brought is now people can _choose_ to respond to you, and you can also silently see what others are up to without needing to explicitly catch up. It’s kind of like bumping into someone you know in public, and the resulting interaction (e.g. comment or DM from seeing the update post) feels much more organic as well.
> If you are in multiple group chats and have something to say (e.g. a life update), do you post in each individually? Or do you pick and choose which groups get the update?
Where's the problem here? Too many options and too much control? Nothing's stopping you from blasting every group chat you're in other than that you'll annoy the people in chats that don't want to hear about your problems. Maybe just send to your family and close friends.
> now some people get the same update twice - are they supposed to react in both?
This is a non-problem. Do people have to react to everything you say every place where you've said it? Is it difficult to decide how to deal with getting news over the phone and having that person announce the same news at the book club meeting? How will you know where to answer?
Broadcast-type announcements can be a little weird to announce in a group chat though. A very basic example, but let’s say you’re in a group chat mainly for gaming together. Are you going to be the first to make a big personal announcement, like “I just bought a house”? You could, but it almost feels weird in that you’re specifically putting the spotlight on yourself and also soliciting direct responses (some of which might just be a token “congrats!”). Whereas if you post a similar announcement on Facebook, Instagram Stories, etc, nobody feels compelled to respond unless they really want to.
You could say “if you don’t think people care, only tell your close family and friends”. But broadcast announcements can cause more spontaneous reactions from people, and I often find myself reconnecting, even if only in a short conversation, with people I don’t generally talk to otherwise. It’s a better way for staying connected with old friends, who you might not have reason to talk to frequently (e.g. via group chat), but would happily spend a day catching up with if you were in the same city.
In my friend groups, you post it twice. Generally you react in the most intimate group chat you encounter the post in. It is a bit complicated, but much simpler than using a dedicated broadcast social network.
My intimate friends are almost all in group chats. Many of them are not technical at all.
You are thinking about chats like a soapbox perhaps, by calling them posts, and trying to make them cater to a network. They are conversations, when you add people, it is so they can join the conversation, naturally that's not your soapbox.
So you just don't do any of those things you mentioned, people rarely broadcast using group chats. You are trading quantity and breadth for quality and depth by choosing just a small group of people to keep in contact with meaningfully.
Social media does really help people stay connected no doubt, but it breeds shallow connection habits, and I wager it makes less meaningful connections out of people who could have been very close had they not been given that feeling of connection through shallow means. Like eating a fast food burger instead of a nutritious meal, you are satisfied so you don't seek more, but you robbed yourself of a better opportunity.
> How does that handle overlapping friend groups? Each person in my friend group has their own friend group, and their friend groups often include people who I am not friends with.
> It would seem that we'd need multiple group chats to make it work reasonably. Is that what you do?
It's not that complicated. If you really need to you create multiple groups. Generall it's not necessary. Groups are usually topic-related, not just based on friendship. Most of my friends come from various interests, so I just participate in the right topic groups and I see them there.
The volume is also not a problem. I quickscroll through it once a day or so and if I miss something important I'll get reminded by someone.
The thing is that social media have really screwed themselves up by screwing with our feeds, adding suggested crap and removing stuff we want to see.
now we just have baby boomers pretending to be told something by someone that doesn't care about them, making conversation with you as if they were part of a social circle they’re telling you about
I'm building a fediverse project that aims to fill this exact niche. It's basically a recreation of an early-ish version of VKontakte (Russian Facebook) but federated and in green instead of blue. It's not really ready yet, and there are lots of important features missing, but I do use it daily for my primary fediverse account.
I, too, am sick of all the existing social media companies trying their damnest to cater to the entertainment use case no one ever asked for.
As long as you stay in the left part of the app, where your chats and your people live.
But then there’s the right section of Snapchat — “Discover” and “Spotlight”. We DON’T GO to the right half of Snapchat, because it’s just complete and utter garbage.
It's more about connections to acquaintances and mutual friends... maybe you just had to be there in ~2009 but there's really nothing like it today. For better or worse.
> subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID
In this scenario, government ID is like a taxpayer-funded "Layer 1" network that does all the heavy lifting, so that a "Layer 2" network can extract rent for storing a single bit that never changes between initial verification and kill switch/glitch invocation.
Should governments impose a tax or monetization limits on corporate citation of government ID?
Should governments compete with corporate ID verification services?
Centralizing power always has predictable outcomes
Corporate x2
1. Rent-seeking (aka they will capture some of the networks effects $$$$)
2. Less innovation (they will block competitors)
Political x1
1. Power. Raw unlimited power. The person in control of those databases is a God
Wait what? Why? The purpose of having governments isn't to extract money from private activity. The purpose is to enable privacy activity to be efficient by providing a baseline level of services that would be difficult or inefficient to produce privately. Having reliable ID provides benefits to many private individuals and corporations, and their economic activity results in taxes that fund the government (likely far in excess of the costs of providing such an ID service).
I pay the equivalent of USD $420 every ten years to have government-issued ID. Facebook wants to charge me $12 a month, for them to look at this ID once. That is $1440 over 10 years. The two services offered are pretty similar: check it once, issue a stamp of approval, then administer that system over time. Why is Facebook's service 3.5x the price?
Why all this catastrophising over verifying with a government ID? It works well for flying places, collecting post, registering visitors, so why not this.
The rent extraction argument sounds preposterous. Should a bouncer have to pay compensation to the government if he uses a driving license to make sure his clientele are of age?
Step 1: charge for govID (premiumfi it)
Step 2: make govID freemium
Step 3: drop the pretense & de facto req govID
Bonus Step: blame the govID req on Ey Ay
> The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) is a US government initiative announced in April 2011 to improve the privacy, security and convenience of sensitive online transactions through collaborative efforts with the private sector, advocacy groups, government agencies, and other organizations. The strategy imagined an online environment where individuals and organizations can trust each other because they identify and authenticate their digital identities and the digital identities of organizations and devices.
With programmable money (CBDC) proposed by multiple countries and draft EU/UK/US regulations to impose criminal liability and mandatory audits on developers of "critical software" like operating systems, there aren't many hurdles remaining for dystopian unification of offline and online identity, e.g. after a hypothetical "cyber" crisis.
The government works for us (the people, as well as businesses owned by people). We already pay for government services in the form of taxes. If anything, government services should generally be free (we do make some exceptions for use fees to avoid free rider problems and general waste, but we would balk at very high fees).
You aren't using the term 'rent seeking' correctly. Rent seeking is manipulating government policy to extract profit, in the absence of any actual benefit. For example, paying lobbyists to convince the government to give your industry a subsidy. Rent seeking doesn't mean 'capturing profit', that's just normal economic activity.
Notably, it appears you'll still see ads and get tracked.
Websites tracking their users and shoving ads in their faces isn't really the "alternative" to paid services. It's something paid services often do in addition to charging money, because they're unwilling to leave any money on the table in any situation, and you can always get more money by charging your users and harvesting their data.
Elon Musk said there would be another subscription option for a Twitter app like YouTube premium with zero ads for those who can afford it. He said the price would be more than Twitter blue, and work is in progress. The question is, how many premium ad-free subscriptions can one person get? YouTube? Tumblr? Twitter? Facebook? Insta? It could easily be $100 per month.
> He said the price would be more than Twitter blue
This is the other thing that pops up, in the rare instances where services like this are offered, they're often pretty inflated. It's notable that Youtube Premium comes with a music service and it's impossible to de-bundle them. I honestly think that part of the reason for this is to make people think that ad-free services aren't economically feasible.
I'm supposed to believe that the cost to Twitter to deliver ad-free and tracking-free text streams is higher than the cost for Netflix/Google to stream unlimited HD video to all of my devices on demand.
> The question is, how many premium ad-free subscriptions can one person get? YouTube? Tumblr? Twitter? Facebook? Insta? It could easily be $100 per month.
The thing is, what we're seeing is a push to monetize more services through subscriptions anyway. Like, this is a better argument if Twitter and Facebook aren't both pushing people to give them roughly $10 a month anyway.
I think that the advertising industry and traditional media companies have sold people on this idea that ads are somehow magically keeping the Internet free and and it would collapse otherwise, but if the trend continues and they all start charging anyway, then...
> I'm supposed to believe that the cost to Twitter to deliver ad-free and tracking-free text streams is higher than the cost for Netflix/Google to stream unlimited HD video to all of my devices on demand.
The price is not based on the cost to provide the service, it’s based on the current or potential revenue they can bring in via ads. A company won’t switch revenue models if it means a 50% reduction in revenue.
> The price is not based on the cost to provide the service, it’s based on the current or potential revenue they can bring in via ads
Eh, technically it's based on what the market will bear, but your comment also kind of demonstrates my point.
You can extrapolate out from what you've said to explain why the ads are not going away. Because if you can make $X with a paid service, and $X + $Y from ads, a company will do that. My point is, it's a mistake to think about "what would the Internet cost without ads." The sites will do whatever they can to make the most money possible, they are not going to leave ads and user tracking off of the table just because you gave them money. That would be throwing away revenue.
The framing of "this keeps the Internet free" is incorrect, the Internet will cost as much as is it can get away with costing, and the ads will just be another part of that equation. If the users tolerate the ads, then they'll get ads, regardless of what else the service is doing.
I wonder if we can quantify the “don’t see ads” value. If you make $google a month and see no ads at all, how much less do you spend compared to someone who saw them all?
The bigger question is…why is this a monthly charge? Verification is a one time service.
A monthly charge for support may make sense, but what value is there for the rest of the people who would want to prove it’s themselves but not need support?
The primary motivation is they gotta fill their coffers every month.
They can't charge all users because they might lose too many people to other social media like Tiktok. But with such tactics they can provide additional perks like fewer ads, preferred support, etc..
You must not confuse yourself with whatever coating they put on the thing. It's rent extraction, built on the already established power that is Facebook, and the preconceptions people have when they recognize the branding (Facebook, and the verified check mark). The rest is irrelevant.
thats because it is a misnomer, “verify” isn't a verb it is a noun in this case. It is a state that isn't perpetually relevant to the person that is in that state.
the utility has value for a little while
for consumer protection purposes it is totally broken for an account to move out of verified status, but thinking further, this is actually better than whats currently happening, where perpetually verified accounts are hacked
Imagine if Experian announced that you need to pay $11.99/mo to make your credit report secure and to stop your identity from being stolen and allow you to do something about it if it was. Sound familiar?
The only thing that’s going to stop every random company you have an account with from trying to extort a fee just to make sure an account is actually you is going to be regulation.
Or, you can just leave them. HN is currently my only social media account. And to be honest I don't miss any of the others even though they were at times useful they are also a huge distraction and time sink. My productivity has absolutely jumped up since ditching them. As soon as you start to be treated like a captive audience on account of the social graph and the networking effects it is high time to remind the petty billionaires that in the end they are rich by the grace of their users and that what goes up can very well be brought down again.
Was talking to a lawyer recently (making a will; I'm old), and he saw my email address was firstname@lastname.net (my lastname is almost globally unique), and he asked if I had bought up "the rest" i.e. lastname.com, .org, .com.au, .org.au, .net.au, .id. I told him my paranoia had met it's match in my laziness, and he looked at me like I was an idiot about to have his identity stolen.
PSA: Having a will is not just if you are old. Every one should have one and if your affairs are straight forward you may be able to it yourself with a kit.
Makes things easier for when you're gone. You'll probably have some next of kin, even if you're on bad terms with them.
If you die without a will, the state ends up determining what happens with your possessions. That usually means that they'll go down a list of relatives and ask them "hey, this person died, do you want to inherit their belongings". If they find absolutely nobody (this happens a lot with people that die with a lot of debt, since you also inherit the debt), the will instead falls to the state.
The order makes some sense (first is spouse, then kids, then siblings, then direct family and finally extended family), but it's of course something left up to the present state of the law and depending on how that might change, something could occur you're not happy with.
One specific example of this (albeit not for your case) is in the event you're gay; gay people often had to prepare their will specifically because the state wouldn't acknowledge them as the spouse (this was even with the "civil arrangements"), so the state would just skip over their spouse for inheritance and relinquish stuff to their family instead.
This doesn't apply of course if you're not married, but it's one simple example in how that default order might have some asterisks that are easily avoidable if you just have a will.
Basically it's useful to have one to avoid a lot of complications in the event of an untimely death (which can happen for all sorts of reasons).
You do not necessarily have to inherit the debt, even if you don't know about it beforehand. Where I live that is called 'accepting an inheritance beneficially', it may have a different legal term where you live. The essence is that you only accept the inheritance if, and only if it brings you a net benefit and otherwise you reject it. Usually this costs a few units of your local currency to arrange.
Note that all this stuff can get very complex in a hurry especially when taxes are involved (and they usually are) so you should definitely hire the help of a professional when dealing with this for anything exceeding a few thousand.
> Makes things easier for when you're gone. ... even if you're on bad terms with them.
Thanks for your detailed answer. You haven't convinced me it is important either way, but I at least know now that I havent missed something important.
It seems like you've only made the case for people who don't like the standard list of inheritors or for gay people, not everyone like you mentioned before.
Regardless, if you like the standard list of inheritors, it's still worth writing it down. That means that the executor of your will knows that that is the order you prefer. Laws can be changed at any point and it could say, be changed in order to prioritize your parents over your siblings; if you don't care at all about what happens with your belongings after your death, yeah fair, there's nothing I could do to convince you, but for anyone else that's worth taking into account. Having it explicitly spelled out in your will ensures that that doesn't change, even if the law does.
Gay people was just an example of what might seem sensible on paper could still have a strange asterisk attached to it.
If you went to the trouble to accumulate resources in life you might find it interesting to give some of it to your friends. If anything, I could see the argument that someone doesn't really need a will if one has kids or a spouse as they would get everything by default anyway, and the will us just a way of carving it apart, whether for tax reasons or to prevent infighting... but if you don't have family then without a will your belongings are essentially forfeit :(. I definitely have people in my life whom I want to receive my assets when I die (though I also haven't taken the time to make a will, despite it coming up weirdly often... I think the universe might be hinting at me).
If you're married then pretty much everything goes to the spouse by default. Kids, likewise, are usually a default inheritor as well. Can get messy if you have a bunch of kids, but the default is usually an even split.
But what happens if you don't have a spouse or kids? Do you want that cash to go to a charity? To your shitty relative who you don't like? You gotta make it explicit.
That is a pretty good argument for having a will, indeed.
For me personally, I am not attached to the concept of cash/assets enough to really care what happens with excess assets after I am gone.
It is something entirely different if you have offspring, and want to pass accumulated assets to them, I get that. However, given how much money was printed recently, all the cash I leave behind might as well be burnt, I really dont care either way. If I have friends in need, I might as well pass some of it on to them before I go.
Because otherwise you may find that your estate goes to the state, when in fact you want it to go somewhere else. Subject to the inheritance rules in your legal arena, which can vary considerably.
> he looked at me like I was an idiot about to have his identity stolen
I won't call you an idiot, but I will say you're significantly increasing the risk of social engineering. I had a vanity domain email and someone use another TLD and tried to switch my bank accounts using it. The bank customer service agents are very willing to believe in the equality and authenticity @lastname.com and @lastname.net. If you go to a HN post on vanity email, there are countless stories about customer service agents not understanding how email addresses work.
I still use the vanity email, but you just have to think about the phish-ability of it. I typically use login@domain.com or similar for logins, instead of first@domain, or first.last@domain. It is not guessable if someone knows my name, while being easy enough for me to remember and read out on the phone or say to a person.
I do own (or have a family member buy) most of the common lastname.tld's that exist. I'm just hoping that the confusion of uncommon tld's are a good defense. Eg. I hope CS agent won't easily believe login@vineyardmike.com should be login@vineyardmike.club or .wiki
I do like your idea of trying to trademark the name (and I considered it too) but my name is common enough (and a word in a European language) that others have tried already, and its already in use with a handful of businesses across the world.
The difference is that there can only be one owner of JohnSmith.com in the ICANN WHOIS database but there can be millions of John Smith on META platforms.
Yes, I accept that. I'm personally lucky that all the people alive with my surname in the world are related at the great-grandparent level. There's less than a handful with my firstname.
I briefly looked into trademarking my personal name (legal to do in Australia) but its cost prohibitive (vs verifying for multiple online platforms).
I even thought briefly about legally changing my name to include a new middle-name that was my PGP short key id. But Australia does not permit the use of numeric symbols in names. (Though I guess you could shift the hex string by 10 so 0-F maps to A-P. That wouldn't break the rules.)
Those are all interesting things you could do, but in what way would they help when we’re talking about the Meta platform? We’re considering the case where someone is actively choosing to use a name that’s not their own for some reason, and if that reason required impersonation they’d just make an account using your publicly available PGP middle name as well.
But most people would not be typing john@smith.net or any of the variants you mentioned into their browser address. My point still stands that domain names have a completely different set of constraints.
By now it’s become pretty clear that it’s not possible to preemptively defend against this. There are a bazillion gTLDs and on large social media sites display names are not unique.
It’s not just social media either. I remember reading something a few years ago recommending that you create an IRS online account to prevent someone else from fraudulently creating one on your behalf to steal tax returns. :/
Yes, that is very true. But it is a risk I'll have to take. But a good reminder to check if there are still 'dangling pointers' to old social media accounts.
I don’t think any of this really matters. You can just not have a Facebook account, almost none of us are in positions to defend our social status or prevent social engineering on Facebook. If you’re famous, that’s one thing, but there’s no point if you’re an average person.
Can't you just threaten to sue if they don't delete it? In the EU one could probably use the GDPR to lawfully take down a fake account. In France there's a right to one's image law that can also be used.
By that definition, email would then fall into the "social media" category, along with letters, postcards, telegrams, telephone calls, dinner parties etc.
There are three I just cannot get rid off it seems: WhatsApp, Youtube (incl. Youtube Music) and HN. And Youtube is becoming such a pain lately, with all those crap channel recommendations and whatnot, that I am sometimes considering subscribing outside of Youtube, e.g. Patreon or so, to the one or two channels I regularly whatch. Which would leave Youtube Music and Whatsapp, both of which are just too convinient for the time being...
What the fuck is deleteme. "Please pay us to have you removed for 1 year". And then what? They'll use all the info I provided to add me back? Lol, no. I'll end up worse than I started. And also that's a shit ton of money.
Edit: Looks like they also publish guides on how to do it yourself, that's actually kind of helpful. I guess the high price is to have someone continually checking and submitting removal requests on your behalf.
DeleteMe collects your information then does searches for that info against the databases that power all the online "people search" websites. If there are hits, they pay to have them removed.
If you don't renew your account, they just delete your data.
LIving in this capitalism that we are in has warped us as humans. People no longer do good shit, they figure out some grift that optimises some crap in such a way that makes them rich and uses marketing to make it seem like it benefits people. How long must this shit go on.
Funnily enough I was saying the same thing tonight. Here in the UK I think it became all out screw people over when Margret Thatcher and the City of London had their 1980's yuppie boom.
I under stand why the older generation in the former Soviet Union harp back to the good old days of the soviet union, life was simpler and more stable for many people.
Now we have to navigate recessions about about 7-10years, have so many financial products in order to not get screwed over because the state is no longer up to the job. Life has become a bit of a free for all, and the extent and deviousness of some people to get money or manipulate people is off the scale imo.
I also understand why we had to come off the gold standard, if we were every really on it, because it was/is arguably holding back the economy and innovation, so with fiat its easier to print money and keep the plates spinning, but in a global world, 3rd world country's have the cost advantage which is why so much is offshored to 3rd world countrys. When looking at central bank digital currency, the fact that digital money can be expired unless its spent, I think is a poor attempt to reduce the risk of boom and bust, good times and recessions. It also shows how money is being used by govt's and central banks to manipulate people like holding a carrot out in front of a donkey.
You're either too young or you were living in the West during the USSR years. I think you should watch Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation documentary. It equally applies to the USSR and today's Western world.
> Here in the UK I think it became all out screw people over when Margret Thatcher and the City of London had their 1980's yuppie boom.
The one constant in all of it is the dehumanizing and scapegoating of the hated "others". It's not a new thing either, it's been pretty well documented from our earliest history. I would have thought The United Kingdom has a long tradition of doing just that, stretching way back before 1980, before the industrial revolution, even before feudalism.
The motivations of Satan in the Bible are very clear, so scapegoating or false demonizing isn't happening.
Religions are not by nature inherently sexist, see veneration toward the Mother Mary or toward Mahadevi. But there are countless examples.
All religions (a.k.a governments) that have lasted the test of time put men and women in a complementary position, as opposed to the modern state-mandated one, which actually is incredibly sexist, and seeks to scapegoat and demonize men in a frantic and irrational way.
>The motivations of Satan in the Bible are very clear, so scapegoating or false demonizing isn't happening.
Or is Satan a representation of the health of the individual and knowledge obtained by crypto haters? For example, the missionary's have a position which is highly recommended to increase histidine and histamine. That can put people especially teenage boys in awkward situations.
Or we could look at the garden of eden and the apple, knowing the effect the ursolic acid found in fruit peel (Victorian Xmas Pudding) like apple skin and some herbs can have on the body. We know about health effects of old style apples, not necessarily the new breeds found in food malls and stores, because of old proverbs like the Pembrokeshire Proverb.
>Religions are not by nature inherently sexist
Who are you trying to kid? Just look at their hierarchical structure and history of employment and storytelling. I'll tell you know the Roman Catholic church is massively sexist, because AFAIK there has never been a female pope! Ergo Catholics are sexist if not overtly, certainly subconsciously with their beliefs. Same goes for a lot of other religions.
> see veneration toward the Mother Mary
Ah yes, the immaculate conception, so putting aside how the immaculate conception was inspected, I think the Japanese have a word pertaining to this form of unusual insemination, its called bukkakeru.
> opposed to the modern state-mandated one, which actually is incredibly sexist, and seeks to scapegoat and demonize men in a frantic and irrational way.
I think the modern state-mandated one are trying to address the sexism in society, which is a great form of psychological warfare against males, which the military will love because they are always looking to undermine insurgents and terrorists, whilst not recognising their own actions are radicalising individuals in society.
I feel the same way. The sad thing is when companies do something horrible and people just say "What do you expect them to do? they exist to make money!" Like it's some impossibility to make money and treat people with decency.
Given the climate crises, the failure to distribute covid vaccines, mass hunger, and mass homelessness, it is hard to believe that capitalism has proven anything except its ability to prevent mass revolts.
I'll give you climate change, but the rest is a huge stretch. Go back at any time in human history and you'd be hard pressed to say they were better off under authoritarianism, monarchy, or feudalism.
The climate crisis and the sixth extinction is unfortunately the only issue that really matters from a historical point of view.
For two centuries, we have had exponentially increasing consumption, exponentially increasing production, and exponentially increasing waste.
Unbounded exponential growth is impossible in a finite planet. But capitalism requires unlimited exponential growth to function - "return on investment" is literally exponentiation.
Unfortunately, there is a multi decade lag between the causes and the effects.
Already, disaster is baked into the amount of carbon dioxide we have pumped into the atmosphere, and we aren't turning around. There are trillions of dollars of commitments for fossil fuel generation plants that will be still operating in 30 years and more.
The idea that people today will give up their standard of living so that their grand children will not experience catastrophe turns out to be completely unreasonable. No one will ever give up their standard of living. Technology will continue to advance, and this will continue to accelerate the growth of resource consumption and waste production.
> authoritarianism, monarchy, or feudalism.
I too find those systems enraging and unfair, but future historians will say, "They did not decimate the biosphere - only capitalism did that."
I am no supporter of the USSR nor of planned economies in general, but at no point were rulers in the communist party of the Soviet Union informed by their scientists of the effects of increased emissions, and then decided to double down on fossil fuel, and engage in a mass disinformation campaign to keep increasing pollution at the cost of our climate. I’m sure they would have, but they’re government collapsed before they were able, so, so far the climate crisis is a uniquely capitalist problem.
As for Poland, it is thoroughly a capitalist country. All of the largest coal mining companies and energy companies there are publicly traded (although some, including PGE is majority [58%] owned by the state). It is safe to say that Poland’s continuing carbon emissions are more then happy to continue under a capitalist rule.
> I am no supporter of the USSR nor of planned economies in general, but at no point were rulers in the communist party of the Soviet Union informed by their scientists of the effects of increased emissions, and then decided to double down on fossil fuel,
What do you base this on? Greenhouse effect was scientifically established in the 1800s and evidence of CO2 induced global warming in the mid 1900s. The IPCC was set up in 1988. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
> and engage in a mass disinformation campaign to keep increasing pollution at the cost of our climate. I’m sure they would have, but they’re government collapsed before they were able,
USSR may have have believed they would be a strategic winner in warming temperatures. At best they would not have been particularly inclined to sacrifice their energy and industrial development when their rivals were not.
> so, so far the climate crisis is a uniquely capitalist problem.
No it's not, even if you strangely ignore USSR's massive past contribution to atmospheric CO2. China emits more CO2 than all western countries combined, and plans to continue increasing output. You'll say China is capitalist to some degree, but its heavy industry, electricity generation, and fossil fuel industries (and more) are all under absolute control of the communist dictatorship.
The IPCC published their first report on climate change in 1990, the Rio conference took place in 1992, and the first real UN climate deceleration wasn’t until 1997 with the Kyoto protocol (I say real because this is the one where government promised to limit their greenhouse emissions; and then proceeded to fail). So I say that even thought the climate crises starts with the industrial revolution, 1997 is the year we start seeing the climate failure that will doom us all.
Just to state the obvious, if governments would have acted in 1997 like they promised to, then climate change probably wouldn’t have reached this catastrophic proportions which we are observing today. We had recently saved the ozone layer using similar measure, so there is no reason the Kyoto protocol failed other then the profit motive of fossil fuel companies which successfully lobbied against following through with the promises. The efforts of ignoring the Kyoto protocol were led by the USA which failed to ratify it. I believe there was significant lobbying involved from fossil fuel companies that influenced the senate’s decision to not even vote on it.
It's not a gotcha if you can support your claim. You claimed something that clearly isn't supported by the history of those events. Soviet scientists and officials certainly would have known about the link between fossil fuel usage and global warming, and obviously seen it at odds with their drive to expand their economy and production just as their rivals did.
Bringing capitalism into it is just silly. "Capitalism" is not to blame, removing capitalism does not fix it, and people don't need to give up capitalism to improve global warming. It seems to be bringing an unrelated personal bias against capitalism in and tying it to global warming, which is really anti-scientific misinformation.
We are arguing in alternative history here, which is never going to be a fruitful conversation.
My statements was about fossil fuel companies internal scientists discovering the link, which resulted in them thinking only about their shareholders’ profits when it came time to react. You have no proof a similar situation ever happened inside the soviet union.
Off course there were scientists within the soviet union which knew about the link, and even some that realized the scale of the human impact before the political collapse. But stating how the soviet leadership would have acted in the wake of the Kyoto protocol is pure fiction that has nothing to do with the world we live in.
Communists certainly contributed to the climate disaster, and continue to do so today, but by the time push came to shove, and we were set up to enact the essential international agreements to prevent it becoming a disaster, it were capitalist countries, and capitalist countries alone, that resisted.
I am addressing the contents of your initial comment.
> Communists certainly contributed to the climate disaster, and continue to do so today, but by the time push came to shove, and we were set up to enact the essential international agreements to prevent it becoming a disaster, it were capitalist countries, and capitalist countries alone, that resisted.
Also incorrect. China is a strong resister. Of course they like treaties that puts restrictions on the west and allows them to continue increasing emissions, which is what they push for.
I believe this is part of the misinformation campaign that the oil lobby pushed to kill the Kyoto protocol, and it holds no merit.
Western nations are responsible for the majority of historic emissions, and have gotten rich at the cost of everyone else’s future. They have the financial capacity to build out the required infrastructure with the money they have already made off of their pollution. This is the logic behind the exceptions to the Kyoto protocol. The US (or rather the oil lobby) touted this as unfair (which it isn’t) and instead continued to pollute at an accelerated rate. It was also always understood that the Kyoto protocol was a start which would get stronger in a later agreement, so China was never going to be exempt forever, and they knew that.
When the US killed the Kyoto protocol they killed every future prospects with it as well. The disagreement was always about this issue you point out, but COP after COP, non-western nations (including China) proposed a reduction (e.g. in COP 2009 China promised a 40-45% reduction from 2005 by 2020; this puts China in the same category as Europe with governments that promise action but fail to deliver) but COP after COP it was always the USA that brought up this as a disagreement and we continued to not make an agreement (COP-15 resulted in a non-binding agreement and China missed this target).
But this is all irrelevant when discussing capitalism as the only culprit of the climate disaster because most (all?) of China’s pollution companies are publicly traded either in Hong Kong Stock Exchange, or in the New York Stock Exchange, or both, with the Chinese state as its majority owner, for over a decade now. These companies operate for the profits of their share holders, not for the benefits of their workers like a communist entity would. These are firmly capitalist entities, one might call them state capitalist.
This is going a long way into the weeds I don't have an interest in trying to discuss it here. But you seem to be equating USA with capitalism or that historic emissions and economic development somehow means the blame can be pinned on "capitalism", again ignoring current and historic emissions from communist countries, or poor capitalist countries. Or that the CCP does not exercise de facto authority over all large corporations operating in China.
Sorry, I'm just not going to buy it. It just looks like you have a hatred of capitalism and trying to pin things to it. Better tighten up your argument a whole lot before you try it out on somebody else.
Most of Poland's energy infrastructure dates from the USSR days - energy grids don't just change on a dime. The point is: if industrialized countries, both capitalist and communist, emit greenhouse gases what's the rationale to point it out as a fault of the former?
Yeah, bring back rickets and toiling in the fields for sir and Vikings pillaging your village! Those halcyon days…
We've another comment replying to this one that bemoans Maggie Thatcher when I'd be willing to bet they weren't alive in the 80s and display a complete ignorance of, well, basically all recorded history prior to that. I'd say you couldn't make it up but it's actually very easy to parody and predict.
I'll leave you with Ray Davies singing a rendition of how his record company, manager, and agent ripped him off - sorry, exploited him as a worker, comrade - in the 1960's. Yes, grift and centralising of power to prey on the weak and ignorant are new inventions, if you were born yesterday!
Life will never be without challenges. We get comfortable in one way that used to be hard work, inconvenient or expensive and some new challenge pops up somewhere else to take its place.
In answer to your question, I think we died as a race when we gave up the nomadic life. We stopped moving around, got comfortable and started accumulating property.
> The only thing that’s going to stop every random company you have an account with from trying to extort a fee just to make sure an account is actually you is going to be regulation.
Remember the backlash when Eric Schmidt was pushing for identity verification for Google+. This is the flip side of that coin; we can't have it both ways.
> Remember the backlash when Eric Schmidt was pushing for identity verification for Google+. This is the flip side of that coin; we can't have it both ways.
No, that was a separate problem: Google+, and later YouTube, both pushed for having to always use a verified identity *without* the option to be anonymous, pseudonymous, or to otherwise assume a fictional identity - especially in venues where people would have many legitimate reasons to not use their real-identity that aren't nefarious, criminal or misleading at all: anything from teenagers with abusive parents, forums like Erowid; Google has enough furries and otaku in their own ranks who'd be opposed to this policy anyway - and there is genuine democratic value in being able to speak anonymously - I'm surprised it isn't an enumerated constitutional right in more places, really.
With Facebook/Instagram/Twitter's Verified-identity-costs-money feature the problem is that it seems the onus is on the individual to stump-up to avoid having their identity hijacked or misrepresented by someone else.
What the Internet clearly needs is the good-parts-of-both: no-one should be forced to use their single real-life identity on the Internet, but also that no-one should be allowed to hijack another real-life identity - and that, ideally, no-one should have to pay to have to protect their own real-life identity from hijacking or misrepresentation either. These are not mutually-exclusive or otherwise incompatible goals - and paying for identity verification is not unethical in itself either.
> Google has enough furries and otaku in their own ranks who'd be opposed to this policy anyway
Yeah, I would be absolutely devastated if I were required to link a "real life" identity, especially since I do not identify with that. Species dysphoria makes me uncomfortable. I need spaces to express myself. Not the body I happen to be trapped in.
(Basically agreeing with you and confirming that these people totally exist.)
It’s probably some sort of missing childhood syndrome, where you didn’t get to experiment enough with identities as a child. But as long as you are doing this with similar people and in a community, who cares, be happy.
What’s ridiculous is the types who want to force this play on others, especially the aggressive trans types, who claim any misgendering is basically violence, or want biological males in female changing rooms, because that’s the game they want to play. It’s extremely damaging narcissistic behaviour and wanting to control others.
> It’s probably some sort of missing childhood syndrome, where you didn’t get to experiment enough with identities as a child.
It could be the opposite. I was given a computer with internet access around age 5 and allowed to experiment all I wanted. I was a faceless entity at first, but after around a decade, I started exploring animal roleplay and eventually animal identities as I saw others doing those things.
Found a form that I felt like I identified with... and now that's my honest identity.
> as long as you are doing this with similar people and in a community, who cares, be happy.
I am <3 species euphoria is great, when I can express myself~
> I was given a computer with internet access around age 5 and allowed to experiment all I wanted.
Most identity experimentation games happen from age 2-3, and much of it depends on parent and environment feedback. Sitting at your computer "experimenting" is highly unlikely to be what our psychology and evolution needs for us to become fully mature adults. It's much more about direct feedback and interaction with parents, siblings and others.
Well, I'm autistic and have ADHD bad enough that my body will not even respond to my attempts to move sometimes. There are a million reasons for me to be unhappy with it, feel trapped and isolated inside my own head, want to escape/avoid reality, and choose to do so through fantasy. But it doesn't change the fact that I honestly identify this way now, no matter how I got here. I think explaining it away as some syndrome or illness is a bit minimizing. My identity is important to me.
Almost everyone finds ways to cope with the issues of life, or the traumas of childhood, whether that's extreme sports, or alcohol, or however you've been able to cope. As I said in my first post, that's fine, everyone has to find a way, and we shouldn't judge each other.
Except when your coping mechanism has negative implications for other people. As soon as you are forcing others or damaging them (note: easy to see how that works with alcohol for example), then it's not ok. Find a way to cope, fine. Just don't expect me to play along with it (we have interventions for alcoholics for a reason).
This kind of unnecessary combatism doesn't belong on HN in my opinion. It is (by some very limited measures, at least) a somewhat diverse community, and that works better when people aren't at each other's throats.
> I'm pretty sure thinking you're not "supposed to be" human is a mental illness and you should be seeking treatment for it, not leaning into it.
That's not what I meant by "dysphoria". I use "dysphoria" to mean that I feel a mismatch between my inner identity and outer body. It doesn't mean that I think the body is somehow wrong or incorrect, but rather that I'd prefer to be inside a different one and I am uncomfortable with this one.
I never think "I was supposed to be born as something else", because that isn't true. I was born exactly how I was supposed to be. Autism and ADHD are merely genetic differences. But one can grow to dislike their own existence and desire a different one, and that's not necessarily a mental illness in itself. I don't have delusions of transformation or rebirth or religion. I just feel like I identify as something else.
It's similar to how some people feel gender dysphoria or gender euphoria. HRT and SRS exist for gender/sex transitions, but unfortunately transhumanism or "species transition" isn't really possible. So I have to tough it out and try to make myself as comfortable as possible despite that.
This includes expressing myself online the way I want to instead of a way mandated by the laws of "reality". Having to identify online using the body would indeed be very dysphoria-inducing because I don't identify that way and I don't want to be seen that way online.
Going through ADHD treatment is helping me significantly (and with other mental illnesses too), because some of my discomfort probably stems from executive dysfunction (i.e. the body not listening to me when I tell it to do certain things), but I will never not be otherkin; take that as you will.
After seeing your Twitter account I can see that you're being sincere, but your reply to my post really does come across as edgelord - just letting you know.
Sorry about that, expression of "ugh yeah I'd hate that" tends to overlap significantly with sarcasm. Being autistic also hurts the tone a little.
I was being sincere, yeah.
(I... usually forget to put emotion into my text here. I'm always self-conscious about my comments getting reported somehow if I act too playful or anything. I try to be more serious and informative.)
I think the cases where you italicized might be better bolded? For me personally, italicization could emphasize certain words but sarcasm-ized others depending on the context.
I think this is the same problem, not a flip of it.
Tying real world identities to online accounts is bad, and Google+ did a lot to create the problem. Before that, it was unrealistic to believe that the name of an account was particularly meaningful
To be fair, using Meta isn't exactly required, and they have no power over you if you don't use it. Experian will collect information about you as long as you take any credit ever, even if you never directly interact with them.
I thought so too. Then when I wanted to sponsor my wife's immigration application, the government wanted to see that we'd posted sufficient photos of our relationship on social media as evidence that it was a legitimate relationship and not visa fraud. Once something becomes normal, there's a penalty to being different, I guess.
> government wanted to see that we'd posted sufficient photos of our relationship on social media as evidence that it was a legitimate relationship and not visa fraud
You’re fine if you say no. If you say you don’t have social media and they find you do, of course that’s fraud. But I know several couples off social who were asked, explained, and then showed photos off their camera roll and were fine.
I assume if you have a good excuse, like being Amish, they let it slide, but you'd probably need to make up for it with support letters from your Amish community leaders attesting to the realness of your marriage.
I never opted in to Experian or any of the credit reporting agencies.
Anyone who sets up a Facebook account has chosen to do so because they find value in it. If they ever stop finding value in it they can delete it.
I don’t see a problem with them offering an option for people who want it to validate themselves for a fee. Seems like a direct copy of Elon Musk’s idea for Twitter which I also don’t see an issue with.
I don't know what you mean by "opting in". The credit reporting agencies keep track of you without your consent by providing services to other companies and agencies.
Have you ever had a bank account? Gotten a credit card? A mortgage? Missed a student loan payment?
When I got my very first credit report, which I was entitled to by law, the reporting agencies asked me to very information they already had about my life and financial history dating back to my early teenage years.
It pays to check credit files, British Telecom linked someone else's bad debts to my file simply for trying to broker a repayment plan for the other person, and I got financially linked to other people I wasnt financially linked to.
Especially important if sharing properties as a student.
>When I got my very first credit report, which I was entitled to by law, the reporting agencies asked me to very information they already had about my life and financial history dating back to my early teenage years
Thats because they dont know if the data supplied to them is genuine or not. Postal addresses were also a problem, I know of programmers who would boast about how quickly they could clean millions of records a second in the 90's (in memory rather than disk), but the credit reference companies main issue is getting clean data. A bank might have one address for you, and another bank or loan company might have a different address for you, both work in that the post office deliver the mail but the addresses are different.
example
House Name
House No, Street
Town/City
Postcode(zip code)
House No, Street
Town/City
Postcode(zip code)
House Name
Street
Town/City
Postcode(zip code)
Post office should deliver to all 3 addresses, but a computer program see's differences, ergo cleaning data and recognising these differences were one and the same involved a lot of time.
Other examples is the name of someone.
A.N. Surname
Arthur N Surname
A. Name Surname
All the same person, 3 different but legal ways to do a name on paperwork.
>The credit reporting agencies keep track of you without your consent by providing services to other companies and agencies.
The contracts signed with banks and lenders of sort have blanket clauses where they can share their data with whoever they like. You have no control over this. So they do have consent and they sometimes use this for "fraud detection", so either dont deal with them, go cash and/or crypto.
> If they ever stop finding value in it they can delete it
Actually I can’t delete my Facebook account. I forgot the password years ago, and I get the recovery questions incorrect (I have to recognise people in photos from extended social graph and I don’t know them!). I’m not sure I even have the email account any more. I can’t delete the account.
You should be able to still delete it with a GDPR request. However if you have no actual way to prove the account is yours then it's not really reasonable for them to delete it.
The problem I have with it is that it's rent-seeking. Since FB and Twitter are as ubiquitous as they are, any company will suffer if someone is impersonating them on there. So companies will now be paying FB and Twitter for this "service" not because it gives them value but as protection. That will apply to a lesser extent to individuals as well.
Don’t creditors have to disclose that they are going to report to a credit reporting agency before you decide to take out a line or credit?
For example, I’ve always seen something like this in my credit agreements:
> You agree that we will give information about the Account to credit reporting agencies. We will tell a credit reporting agency if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. This may have a negative impact on your credit report.
Indeed. And it is barely possible to keep from having a credit report at all depending on what you do. But it is difficult to avoid any of those forms.
I wonder what the age breakdown is. I could see a lot more younger people never having needed to get credit yet. If you still live with your parents and go to college or whatever you don't really need credit.
After that though you can't even really rent an apartment without a credit check so I'm not sure what you would do (I guess if you have a partner that handles it for you).
It is mostly the unbanked who have no credit. College track kids often get their first credit in the form of student loans or low limit student credit cards.
There are plenty of places that rent without credit checks. Where do you think all the people with no credit (or no SSN!) live? It might not be on the nice side of the tracks, though.
I thought it was all the people reading the domain as "Expert Sex Change" and being infuriated when they discovered it had nothing to do with gender reassignment.
As long as there is price transparency, people will vote with their feet.
Now - the 'sleight of hand' thing where you buy one thing and the later they change their structure, that's a hustle for sure - but otherwise, for 'new customers', I view this as just part of the pricing structure. And BTW I think they will mostly drop it because people won't like it and won't see a lot of value in it.
Maybe I'm behind the times, but isn't the whole deal of Facebook that I've chosen to be friends with these people who I know in real life? Why do I need them to be verified?
There are spam accounts generated that appear to be the real person you already know.
Often actual people either lose their FB accounts because they forgot their password, lost the email associated or the 2FA etc... or they closed the account down.
Then real people open another account and re-connect to their old friend groups.
Spammers mimic this behaviour by replicating peoples accounts and then sending out new friends requests that appear to be from someone you know.
Once you accept the spammers friend request they begin to send you malware phishing links and so on.
I'm sure there are other scams around this I havent heard of! :-)
This is for the Lady Gaga's and Elon Musks of facebook. Followers want to be able to know if they are following the real deal, and the real deal wants to be certain that they can be differentiated from the fakes.
It used to be that you could search for "John" and it would show you a range of Johns that you might know. I just tried it and it recommended several "John Wick" pages. I found the button to set the search to only show "People", and it now shows me several Keanu Reeves accounts (probably all fake). I guess if you accept that this is what they want their search to look like, the "verified" angle does work.
the value generated by having them on the platform is probably thousands of times greater than that, so it's weird that they're charging a token fee for the privilege
They should fleece the celebs better. Verified celeb (you are the real Tom Cruise not just share his name) pays $10k/m. That would still only be $200m though. Barely a seed round.
The real world system actually works in reverse to this ... the little people make large numbers of micropayments through pay / ads / donations / etc and the celebs get paid a big pile of cash after the platform takes its cut.
Musk and Meta are trying to reinvent this, but they have it backwards - if your platform depends on people to post "content" you should be rewarding the people that draw the masses to your platform not raising pointlessly small amounts directly from them.
Facebook want to harvest my data for free and now want me to pay them too? Not going to happen. Every online service is asking for money. I will just switch to alternative freemium if I dont care my privacy. If I care, Facebook is on the lowest pecking lists of all my online services....and that is a very long list.
'if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.' is a form of logical implication !A => B (where A is 'paying' and B is 'I'm the product), Your phrase 'If I'm paying for it, I'm the customer' is effectively stating A => !B, which unfortunately does not follow.
You can validly infer "if we're not the product we must be paying", but more realistically you'll be both paying and the product (i.e. paying a subscription and receiving ads, a la cable tv).
This saying was bullshit to begin with. The user is a product also, whether they pay or not. One example is cable television. The fees are huge, and there are lots of adverts.
I think that at the end of the day, the natural order is that every entity is trying to maximize the goodness it can get, be that businesses, people, governments, churches, or any other. This is exacerbated with the fact that often it's a competition. If you don't do the level of shady shit that others are doing, you get less goodness, or even fade into irrelevance. Which is why good regulation, and culture matters a lot. Entities are powerless against systemic issues like this, the only way is to change the playing field itself.
In short: A subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, for $11.99/month/web or $14.99/month on iOS. Support included.
If this removed ads, added more controls on what you see and what is shared/sold to 3rd party, I'd actually consider it!
But ads are not mentioned and ads are probably worth more than 12$/user/mo and.. this would probably help them track you "better".
Even if it was 20$/mo (higher than top yearly average), I'd consider it if it became a privacy service and focus shifted from the users to the product.
The problem is that people who are willing to pay $20/mo for privacy are much more valuable to advertisers than those who can't.
If those users go away, the average $/user from ads goes down, because the only people seeing ads are those who are too poor to avoid it.
To an advertiser, poor people who direct their attention towards whatever is put in front of them are worth a lot less than rich people who carefully curate what their attention is directed towards. It's grody, but that's the advertising industry for you.
Counterpoint, the main demographic for this already uses ad/tracker blockers. I'm sure Meta has some ways around that but getting that $20/month is much easier from a willing participant.
That is definitely not true. Tech workers and people who are tech savvy use ad/tracker blockers, regardless of how good of an ad target they are. They are a very small slice of consumers with excess income.
In other words, a lot of people who use ad blockers are good ad targets, but the converse is not true.
The lack of ad blockers on mobile is the real sweet spot. I pay for Youtube 100% to use it on mobile/ipad without ads. So even ad-blocking privacy people still see lots of ads if they use these apps.
Firefox on iOS isn't really Firefox, Apple doesn't allow that. It's a thin skin around the platform-provided web view, essentially Safari. This really limits what Mozilla can support on iOS.
Firefox's usage rate on Android is tiny, among that I doubt even >10-25% know you can install an adblocker (which is generous but they are probably more technical). And I use iOS on mobile.
Right, someone willing to regularly pay $20/month is probably worth closer to $40/month to potential advertisers.
It probably scales all the way up until $10k/month, which is near the upper limit of what super-luxury brands, that would buy ads online, can earn per customer.
So the curious implication is that such services could be 'free' or $20k/month.
But with a changing advertising market and lower budgets, FB might view the alignment of incentives more beneficial.
I don't think this "subscription service" is actually for the user I think it's for the advertisers. I think the fee is just a smokescreen. I imagine FB having access to something like a driver license gives them your address, height, eye color, signature, data of birth etc. I'm sure they will monetize this in all kinda of new ways. For example maybe political adds since you can target based on voter precinct, auto insurance, neighborhood demographics and of course a premium tier of "blue checkmark verified" eyeballs to advertisers.
YouTube seems to make much less from ads per user. Not sure why, you'd think that video ads would be more lucrative. Maybe more people have ad blockers?
We already do identity verification in the real world, it's called government issued IDs.
There should be opt-in OS-level identity verification based on zero knowledge proofs and tied to your government-issued digital ID. This also solves issues like preventing minors from accessing adult sites, etc.
I should not have to verify with 1000 third parties and hand over my personal data and then hope it's handled properly and doesn't get leaked. We have zero knowledge proofs and we can get OS makers to make this seamless for us.
This will be the end of a lot of things, to include the internet we grew up with in the 90s. It's holding on by a hair, but you can still visit personally-owned and hosted websites, and not run any non-free code.
I agree that we need a better identity solution than sharing email addresses or phone numbers with hundreds of third parties. I disagree that digital identities should be tied to government records, or that networked identification is an operating system level problem to solve.
Problems with this approach:
1. Participation in the internet should not be contingent on being documented by a government.
2. There are ~200 countries, so this adaptation will require worldwide collaboration by a lot of parties. Governments and borders change or are disputed all the time. Are all 200 countries trustworthy as identity issuers on this network? Who decides who is trustworthy?
3. This will increase the leverage a government has over it's citizens, by giving them an avenue to cut their communication lines with the rest of the world.
4. Governments are notoriously slow for adapting new technologies. Governments are notorious for wanting backdoors in technologies. Can we trust them to keep this up to date, secure, and to migrate to any new advancements that are to come?
This uses a government ID for the actual identity and most of the "verification". I'm not sure what more you're looking for? Facebook can't use zKP because existing government IDs don't support that.
And there is no OS in this case, it's a product feature for Facebook that allows users of Facebook to be told that Facebook verified the account's government ID.
There’s ID.me [0], which the IRS uses. They seem to be geared towards government services but I’ve always thought a natural extension is auth for other sites.
You verify your identity with one or more level 0 identity services. Level 0 services would be the most secure, but as is often the case that heightened security would likely come with a cost. It would likely take some effort to establish your identity with a level 0 provider. It might also might take some effort to use a level 0 provider to prove you identity to someone.
Level 1 services would be built on top of level 0. You make an account at a level 1 service using a level 0 service to prove your identity. Level 1 is likely not as secure as level 0, but it is easier to work with and to use when providing identity to someone else.
Similarly, level 2 builds on level 1, and so on. Some of the services at these levels might function both as identity verifiers and as providers of end user services.
Level 0 would best be handled by long lived entities that have actual offices that you can visit. Banks would be a good candidate for providing level 0. To set up an identity account at level 0 you'd have to show up in person and with whatever proof of identity is generally required in your jurisdiction to prove identity.
Some good entities that might provide level 1 service are domain registrars and email hosting companies. The key things they would have to do to be a level 1 service is (1) let you associate your account with an identity proof from a level 0 service, and (2) set a flag on your account that says anyone claiming to be you trying to recover from a lost password or lost 2FA token or something must verify against the level 0 service to prove they are really you before recovery is allowed.
Lets say I'm using my domain registrar for level 1.
For me then level 2 might be my email host. An email host acting at level 2 for someone with their own domain would be similar to an email host acting at level 1, except you associate the account with the domain and anyone trying to take the account has to prove ownership of the domain.
Below that I'd then use my email as my identity at places like Facebook, my ISP, Amazon, and anyplace else I need to create an account. Account recovery would require being able to respond to emails sent to me.
Then maybe below that I might use login by Facebook or login by Apple at a few places. (I normally just go for traditional email/password if I can, but sometimes a site or service makes that so painful I give up. For example the McDonalds mobile app. But that's a rant for another time...).
Level 0 providers would also provide something like certificates of identity. That would be a way to get a certificate from them that says that at the time the certificate was issued the person with real identity X, which they have verified in person, is also the person with email address Y (or telephone number Z or whatever), and they have verified this.
So if I need to prove to say Facebook who I really am, I can get such a certificate from my level 0 provider and give Facebook a copy.
With this we can continue to use the fairly simply way we identify ourselves to most sites (email), but if we have to we have a good way to prove real identity, and we have a reliable way to recover if our account at a site gets compromised by anyone short of a major state actor.
If end sites get compromised, email recover works. If email gets compromised, that can be recovered based on domain ownership, and then once email is recovered end sites that were compromised via the compromised email can be recovered. If my domain gets compromised that can be recoved by going to my level 0 and using that for domain recovery, then I can recover email, and then end sites.
This sounds very reasonable. Some of the replies in this thread are misinterpreting what I said. I didn't say the government should run the APIs etc, just that we already have identity in the real world and it generally works, so we can use that (but maybe not necessarily only that, there could be other options too). I should be able to use my Gov ID to get a Layer 0 verification from some provider, which then integrates with higher level providers, etc.
And again, it would be opt in, just like verifying with Facebook / Twitter etc is opt in. And for people who are concerned about government surveillance, they can already do that if you verify your social media account via your credit card, that's kind of the point there, that the credit card ties a social media account to a real world person.
This would completely kill fluid discourse. People would not want to post anything controversial since it could be tied back to them. That being said I’m illogically for it.
Voter ID is only suppression if access is difficult.
Does it cost money? It’s a problem
Is it only available in certain neighborhoods? It’s a problem.
Are you unable to get it on vote day? It’s a problem.
Other countries have solved this by doubling down on making voting easy to do.
The problem with many attempts at voter ID in the USA is that they’re thinly veiled attempts at disenfranchisment because they purposefully don’t address the above issues.
In other countries, they exist, to vote you just register with the independent voting commission, and on the day they confirm your registered address and give you the paper forms. No voter id required.
The OP can verify with proper ID and be safe. The gov just needs to regulate that rather than keep copies of all the originals. They just have something like a checkbox, where you're either verified or not and a human / smart system is involved and no record is permanently kept of the docs.
Anyway, I don't anticipate this feature working out for meta.
> In what world does anyone care about meta impersonation anymore?
My 84 yr old mother does. It really annoys her when someone steals her profile picture, makes an account in her name and starts sending friend requests to her friends. I told her Facebook could fix this easily but they don't want to.
Now I can tell her they want to charge her to fix it.
Will this actually solve this? Her account may be verified but that doesn't stop another unverified account from spoofing her.
The announcement mentions "impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you" but I'm skeptical how advanced that's going to be. It can't stop name reuse (because real people have the same name). And preventing someone creating a second account with the same image would be perfectly possible today, with no verification system, so I doubt that's it either.
It’s a chicken and egg problem. You want people to start ignoring unverified accounts and make the social expectation that only verified accounts are good. But people. won’t do so until it’s common.
Once established it’s a great network effect. But networks with effects are hard to start.
You are assuming that everyone the spoofer contacts is going to know that grandma is a verified user and so this can't be her. Of course, the vast majority of people would not give it a second thought and so this would have no effect on the spoofing problem.
Keeps happening to my family members as well. For all of them their initial response is to tell all their contacts that they have been hacked, their anti-virus has failed and they have changed all their passwords on all sites... I keep telling them they have not been hacked, it is just Meta/Facebook being inexcusable poor at detecting obvious new cloned accounts.
Some just panicked and closed their accounts making the fake one the only one with their name left on FB...
I can't imagine any of them wanting to pay to be verified to avoid this though.
It's happened to my mother several times. Nearest I can tell, they want to see her non-public posts for advertising purposes and this is why Facebook doesn't fix it. More money for them. It causes her a significant amount of distress, so simply put, Mark Zuckerberg abuses the elderly.
We may find it pathetic for a different reason - when everyone was so down on Elon taking over Twitter and how he was running it into the ground, and now Meta is saying actually that’s not a bad idea, in fact it’s a great idea and we’re going to do it even to the point of taking a huge blow to our ego
It certainly was the handling and the strategy how they'd introduce it. First, they obviously should haven't repurposed an existing badge. Im my opinion, setting a lower price in the 1st three months and openly communicating that the price will increase a bit seems like a choice to get quick adoption. 8$/month is too high when people can't experience the value of it yet.
It is both. It was an asinine play obvious to anyone that thought about the trolling for half a second, and the purported benefits were what? Now you too can get a blue checkmark? Sure the verification process was capricious crap, but now he's ransoming back features to people.
Musk is a fool. But Zuck is the fool that follow him.
Twitter went from an unprofitable business to a very unprofitable business. It may be comforting to call it a “media narrative” but facts are facts. Maybe they can somehow turn it around but I don’t see how.
Advertisers trying to reach the most number of people don’t want to associate with toxic discourse that disparages a lot of the populace. It’s about as free market as it gets.
They replaced their bill for a somewhat productive workforce with a bigger, completely unproductive interest bill. So no, Twitter didn’t become less unprofitable.
TBH, that is the definition of media narrative. I don't see any dollar value in the report for twitter losses. It could be that the market is flexible and those advertisers were replaced by someone else(not saying that happened, but the article is hardly proof of twitter's losses)
I think it becomes troublesome when the data is confidential and the company is private. Do we just not talk about anything when we don’t have hard data?
On the other hand, they are reporting a study that they may have even paid for and don’t actually share the details of the study. So I certainly see your point.
On the other other hand, I think the “soft” signals like Elon asking people to hit the like button for ads, or the various reports of orgs pulling their ad campaigns suggests that there is general distress. Which is what’s on my mind when I think it’s more than a “narrative,” which I tend to interpret as hand wavy “media bias” used to explain away anything that doesn’t support one’s own narrative.
Got any financial documents about it that you'd care to share? I'm sure they'd be of interest. I was also under the impression that Musk blew a huge hole in the finances of an already marginal business, but I don't think I or anyone besides Twitter insiders actually have the numbers now.
Which part? It's public knowledge that Twitter was barely afloat before Musk. Since then most of the pumps (advertisers) keeping water out of the ship have been lost overboard.
Twitter's debt management alone is a billion dollars per month.
By all means go ahead and inform us on the actual reality? This is what I had read:
> Overall, advertising spending by the top 30 companies fell by 42% to an estimated $53.8 million for November and December combined, according to Pathmatics, despite an increase in spending by six of them.
The next sentence of that quote is pretty illustrative.
> Pathmatics said the previously unreported figures on Twitter advertising are estimates. The firm bases its estimates on technologies that track ads on desktop browsers and the Twitter app as well as those that mimic user experience.
> But the company said those estimates do not account for deals advertisers may receive from Twitter, or promoted trends and accounts. “It is possible the spending data could be higher for some brands” if Twitter is offering incentives, Pathmatics said in an email.
It's all speculation across the board - people want musk to finally fail, and that possibility produces some delicious schadenfreude. I am in this industry, and don't trust for a second the estimates "Pathmatics" cites. Everytime I've seen these types estimates on properties where I know the real numbers, they are off significantly, in both directions.
The numbers come from comps, and some sampling of Desktop ad impressions and a twitter client. That's so far away from what the real numbers are that it's just a fuzzy guess.
That's a 4.47% decline year-over-year. Stock -15% YOY vs -5% for the SP500.
Unless they pivot soon, they're in deep trouble, with a declining user base (particularly young people) and a consistent loss in ad revenues. One big problem Meta has is they went "all in" on a VR bet, that isn't working.
In 'deep trouble' with 2 billion daily active users on each platform: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, resulting in the stock doubling in less than 3 months of screaming about the chorus of the end of times for Meta.
I guess betting against HN is somewhat a profitable move when everyone was scared to buy the stock at $88.
What makes you say "isn't working"? VR and the Metaverse are long term bets, they're not meant to be working yet. Far too early to write off as failures.
In the last earnings call it was reported that Facebook had just broke 2 billion MAU. The user base is inclining. Meta's family of apps' MAU increased by 4% year over year.
Google never removed "don't be evil", but that's a super common urban legend, because Gizmodo ran an (incorrect) story headlined "Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct". You can just go look at their code of conduct and see that this is false.
(I don't care, and don't think "don't be evil" really ever meant much, but urban legends drive me a little batty.)
Interesting. I was even at Google when they "removed" it, I remember the internal uproar about "removing" it, and I was sure it was removed. Of course now you reminded me that the problem was "just" changing the "main" slogan to "do the right thing", and it was not actually removed. Funny how memories work.
I never thought it was part of the code of conduct. I thought it was the answer to the business plan question before they decided on advertising or maybe their motto.
To be clear, they moved it to the bottom - but I still can't comprehend why they did that. It did no favors to the public relations, LOTS of senior staff resigned, there was no legal binding to it - so they even could have just kept it there at the top and just... not mean it. Maybe I need perspective.
“Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.
The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put “Don’t be evil” into practice. ...
My point is that it is still in the code of conduct. Even if it doesn't have a whole paragraph explaining it, don't be evil is still part of the code of conduct
I mean, if you read that article, it makes it pretty clear that the phrase is retained in the final sentence, but was once much more prominently placed. It doesn't claim that the phrase is completely gone -- it has the same information Wikipedia has. Are you claiming that article and Wikipedia are both just making things up here?
The headline of this article is "Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct". There's really not much to argue about here. Read headline, pull up code of conduct, command-F search, done.
Google removed the "don't be evil"-preface, which I suppose technically isn't a "clause"...
So really, you're implying the article claims something more extreme than it _actually_ claims... which is a little like starting your _own_ clickbait urban legend - how meta!
Google’s unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase “don’t be evil.” But that’s over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.
You're almost there; documents like this work on a basis of continuing to provide information as they go along, right up until the end.
Unless you feel the content at the end of documents doesn't count, because no one would ever actually read it...? Bit of a trap there!
That was too low hanging to leave and I know I'm being a total asshole there, which I'll try to stop -- but come on, having to read to the end isn't at all like the article is straight up lying.
The status of "unofficial motto" was conferred by the preferential position the concept was given in the doc, a symbolic gesture of corporate culture, and that entire block was removed for a much lesser reference at the end. It is made motto no more, because that specific phrase which started the doc was removed, as was reported.
Now, I grant you: a lot of people have the wrong impression of what precisely happened here, and I agree, the article is just here for the clicks. It could start off by clarifying that the idea isn't totally erased, and that might have served the precise truth better.
But the world is complex and nuanced! The thing called Google changed into a thing called Alphabet, and at that time, Alphabet dropped the phrase completely, while Alphabet's new child company (now called Google) seriously demoted the phrase+idea. Some web journalists then editorially simplified their titles about it all to get more clicks, while providing the full facts inside.
In spirit, at that time, Google kicked the ethos into a hole, and that's what people broadly understand. It's not at all like Google and its entire code of conduct are just what they ever were, and it's similarly disingenuous to claim the whole idea here is some crazy urban legend as it would be to claim that Google and friends have e.g. purged any and all references to good moral conduct from official documents -- neither is true.
But in the long view, Google stopped caring about this idea, and that popular understanding is roughly correct. That's the story, and it is not an urban legend.
That was Jack Dorsey. Jack Dorsey doubled down on the policy for his other company, Square. Some of their leadership and highest ranking employees are fully remote. I'd bet against this policy ending.
Elon canceled WFH for a multitude of reasons. Mainly to encourage willing employees to leave and those that remained to work harder.
They spend time commuting. They suffer constant distractions. They deal with physically relocating in the office multiple times per day. They experience physical discomfort in an environment they cannot control.
What in office employees don’t do is deliver more value per minute to the company because they waste energy just trying to exist in an office.
Why do we have to go completely for or against something. There are pros and cons to both. Situations where one trumps the other. Why can’t we have both?
> What in office employees don’t do is deliver more value per minute
Isn’t this contextual?
> They spend time commuting
Also this. Commute can be productive especially in cities where people can safely cycle to the office.
> They suffer constant distractions.
Lots of the folks I meet in the office currently, have more distractions at home.
> They experience physical discomfort in an environment they cannot control.
>>Lots of the folks I meet in the office currently, have more distractions at home.
WFH is productive only if you are single. Or have single like benefits. Like kids who are off to school and a spouse who doesn't talk to your for hours.
Other wise you are better off working at office. At home you get peppered by spouse/kids/chores tasks during your working hours.
The internet isn't the place to get nuance. Everything apparently has to be either 100% good or 100% bad. (I do have higher expectations for HN, but I guess not that much higher).
People take a lot of time off when they work from home. I am as guilty of this as anyone. People tend to focus more on work while they are in an office. Also, it is much easier for managers to organize the work when the people being organized are within line-of-site. The pattern I've seen emerge at New York City startups is:
1. the leadership and most important employees meet at the office 3 to 4 days a week.
2. less important employees are allowed to work from home
The workers in group 2 are in direct competition with outsourcing firms in India, Vietnam, Brazil, etc. If you are just an average frontend programmer, and allowed to work from home, there is a good chance that your work can be sent overseas. So workers in this group are seeing more downward pressure on their wages, and have a more precarious position.
I call bull on this. I work HARDER at home. When there's no clean delineation between where you work and where you live it's a lot easier to work late or on the weekend because your commute is all of 10 seconds.
This is absolutely unhealthy behavior, but my WFH problems have never been because I'm slacking off since I'm at home.
People with integrity will work. People without integrity will find ways of avoiding work. Location doesn't matter. Hire or work with the former; avoid the latter.
Conversely, I work very little at home. Probably like 4-6 hours/day max, sometimes more like 2-4. When I used to go to the office it was a solid 8+ (sometimes 10+). At home I can go play video games whenever I want, my kids are around to play with after school gets out, etc.
I zone out at work all day waiting for people to bring me problems, then when I get home and finish my chores and get the kid to bed I get to work on actual work projects with measurable progress.
To be clear, I'm showing up to be seen and available.
Well, I am not going to waste time I spend in the office on working. Not after the pandemic and realizing human society can be taken away at blink of an eye. Have an hour and a half lunch, talk to teammates about their lives. Work is for home.
Building stronger ties with teammates is part of work. Progressive companies encourage this, and this is why some progressive companies have pushed people to return to the office.
Your comment tells me you don't know what you are talking about. I have been working in tech for more than two decades, tons of that in offices and tons of it remote. Different people thrive in different environments. Some people who are very productive remotely will struggle in an office. Some will do both in either. Some do better in offices. Not every office is the same either. When Google first started introducing the kind of office benefits they did in the early 2000s people said silly things not unlike your comment; those benefits "spoil" employees, there's no way they will have good productivity when they make the office like a resort hotel, etc.
Don't be a reactionary. Think about things more and you'll be right more often than you are now.
This has been my experience as well. Also, not every company is the same. When COVID hit, I started working remote, and the company was very poorly equipped to deal with work from home. Communication disappeared and culture died out. I stopped being interested in my work and left the team, and later, the company.
Fast forward to my new company. It’s remote-first. More than half the workforce is remote and it saves the company what I’d imagine to be a pretty sum in office supplies, rent, etc. I’m hybrid now, but 90% of the time is remote. I’m much happier now than in my old remote experience. I don’t have to commute and I haven’t missed out on any of the perks of an office because of the company structure and techniques, and a few other decisions by myself.
The things I think are game changers:
- Slack, or similar. My old company used Teams. It was slow and buggy and I disliked it. Having channels is a game changer for remote work! Being able to have channels with many people creates a place for banter and common, shared experiences. That makes a remote team feel much more personal.
- Having a good home office. My first stint with remote work, I was ill prepared. I had no desk and was working at the dining room table. I had no good peripherals, no good chair, etc. Not a good environment. Now I have a standing desk, a mouse and keyboard I enjoy, nice monitors, a good chair, a separate area of the house dedicated to work. This has made a huge difference in my mindset. I’m “at work” by being in an area of my home I reserved exclusively for work, and I’m comfortable in it. I dread going into the office where the water doesn’t taste as good, the air is stale, there’s little natural light, I have limited control over my environment. I’m now much more productive at home. As a bonus, I get back an hour (or more, depending on traffic) of my day, and save myself all the accompanying stress of commuting.
There are some very valid reasons why it should be encouraged to work from the office, and yea they do include productive hard work, I’ve heard this first hand from both bosses working in big and small companies and from employees. The group that appreciates work from office and has noticeable productivity improvement is new recruits and fresh grads that move to get a job, as they need new friends, and if there’s no office culture and work colleagues to have lunch with or at least the occasional AW, then they get lonely, unproductive and they eventually leave.
For older more mature people who have families it’s an amazing gift to be able to work from home, for some it absolutely isn’t. The point is that you can decide how to run things in your company and try to be flexible.
It is true in my opinion, but most bosses I heard just think employees are cheating their work and this is something I do not agree.
I've worked for a company who had to go full remote due to covid and productivity increase a lot because people were not being bothered by senseless interruptions and calls.
When asked why move back to the office in a meeting where people could ask "anything", the CEO just said he doesn't believe in working from home and he does not want that for the company but provided zero reasons for his beliefs. :/
Also commuting is such a pain that it makes me feel depressed. I took about 2h each leg and sometimes it was even worse.
I usually get so much earlier in the office to avoid not being late and I had to simply not do anything as I could never leaver earlier too :(
Some do and are able to manage their time very well; others cannot and without the structure of the office are left floundering and apt to not be available for communication for prolonged periods…
It's signal they'll stop bothering the anonymous Facebook accounts my friends have. Why not let those few people wanting Facebook verification have it?
Honestly, all of this "pay for a verified badge" BS from Twitter, now FB and others seems exactly equivalent to when companies release software with vulnerabilities and then also charge you for the antivirus software to protect against that (thankfully, that seems to be less of an issue these days).
Why don't these companies have a responsibility to prevent fraudulent signups in the first place - especially Facebook which has, from day #1, prevented non-real-person signups in their Ts-and-Cs.
i actually support the pay to verify feature. my reasoning for this is it gives authenticity to the user. if the user is verified then i know that the user is most likely not a bot account and gives some credibility. could this be free? certainly, it’s how the old twitter verified works but now since all users can be verified, it democratizes this feature and i think its better overall. i notced discussions with similarly verified users are more civilized probably due to the personal information being shared and makes them think twice about doing anything malicious or otherwise.
"Good morning and new product announcement: this week we're starting to roll out Meta Verified -- a subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support. This new feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services. Meta Verified starts at $11.99 / month on web or $14.99 / month on iOS. We'll be rolling out in Australia and New Zealand this week and more countries soon."
Seems to be a lazy clone of Musk policy from Twitter... Isn't it crazy that now private companies (not even in conjunction with governments that issue IDs) are selling online legitimacy?
These moves are driven by ignorant (outright) class-ism, and social media is quickly becoming a system of fraud that supports the wealthy while disabling people who don't pay. It's going to corrupt every aspect of life from news to entertainment if it hasn't already.... Trending topics used to be somewhat accurate because they were based on everyone's posts rather than just the posts of people who could afford to pay for verification. Because platforms got greedy and couldn't make platforms work with corporate sponsoring advertiser funding alone, they turn on users, the very people already working for free... This is not sustainable business. These platforms create schemes like crypto and NFT scams, info harvesting, unfair moderation, user account lockout extortion schemes, fake followers, payola promotion, ban extortion, industry plants, and many other criminal things to extort their user base. It's the modern day large-scale criminal enterprise to run a social media site.... The reason it's not obvious is because no one sees the code at work, they just see the end result of content creators.
This is really short-sighted (stupid actually) tech leadership based on profit desperation. I hope people begin to defund these large social media entities, as they are no good for anyone's progress, except for the company CEOs and Investors perhaps... Ugh.
I've known people with several thousand followers whose accounts get stolen ("hacked") and then they have no way to get Instagram to restore their access, so they're forced to make a new account.
I guess it'd be helpful for people like them to have dedicated support lines.
People who say that don't want their identities prostituted. Whether or how useful it is is irrelevant. I don't want to have my identity prostituted based on the degree of how much I get in return.
We had a case where our ad account got hacked through an agency that was managing it and set up ads for enormous amounts, which drained all our funds within 2 days. After praising and trying to get it solved and refunded, after 6 months we still haven’t come to a conclusion with Facebook’s poor customer service. During that time we were unable to use their platform to recover the funds on the ad accounts. I’m not sure how they plan to improve the customer service, but this attempt just feels like pouring more frustration to our team with Facebook.
The key feature seems to be access to customer support. If you have a large audience or following on Facebook and it's relevant to your business then I could probably see it being worthwhile. For regular users the value proposition seems questionable?
I'd probably be more fine with a one-time fixed-cost verification service, considering it probably requires a human to manually verify and approve each request. But a monthly subscription? That feels like a rent-seeking cash grab. Do you suddenly forget about someone's verification status as soon as they stop paying?
If anyone reading this comment is considering paying for this service I'd love to hear what makes this service worthwhile for you.
Love or hate Elon, he could definitely have an impact on the tech industry.
In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought, that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship, and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
Too early to tell any of those things. The layoffs on sales might make the business worse in the mid term. The layoffs on product and engineering might make the product worse, even obsolete in the mid term. There is absolutely no way to tell if light handed moderation will work. There is no way to know if the service revenue makes any difference compared to ad revenue.
You are wishful thinking the best case scenario for Musk decisions. It is just as likely, in my opinion, that in a year or two the worst scenario will be the outcome of Musk tenure.
The worst case scenario, in my view, is something like the revenue never recovering to pre-acquisition levels (which weren’t great already), the product not having any significantly valuable new feature, and suffering from long outages and ended up being sold for ~$10bi.
Overstaffing a company doesn't mean it makes great products too, it tends to create more bureaucracy, deep hierarchy structure, and pointless products (some companies putting more effort on these products then focusing on their best ones...).
It's extremely difficult to find the right balance, almost impossible when the company is sky rocketing, like Twitter was.
Trying to analyze it from a business man perspective, I see that Elon's trying to find that balance and I see that as positive. He can be wrong, things can go wrong, but sometimes you must make this kind of decision, take the consequences, and adjust to fix what you broke.
That's a really good question that I think is also too early to see. Certainly Twitter lost a lot of developer confidence, I think people's perception of the service has changed. But does that matter? I'm not sure.
A bunch of 3rd-party devs jumped ship, and it's tempting to say "they'll remember that" if Twitter tries to lure them back,but we don't know yet if that's true or not. A bunch of advertisers jumped ship, but they could come back. The cost is that users look at these decisions and trust the platform less.
But we don't know the cost of that cost, if that makes any sense. We don't know if this ends up sparking a death spiral or if everyone complains about the decisions and then forgets about it by the end of 2023.
He also exposed that radical leftists executives were colluding with US govt to promote propaganda, censor topics and fundamentally manipulate election outcomes, through established journalists.
There has been light to no coverage from mainstream press as it doesn't advance the left's current agenda.
The “exposure” has been underwhelming, with plenty of evidence that twitter fulfilled the wishes of republicans, including modifying their own moderation policy wrt xenophobia to accommodate Trump tweets.
Or … none of those could end up being true. I remember a lot of projection about how Elon was going to restore Twitter to the ‘early days’, and none of that has come to pass either.
I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
I remember having a bit of hope that an easy win could be he making changes to regain trust from developers and make Twitter a more dynamic platform with a more open API. Turns out, he did exactly the opposite and led to even more distrust from third party developers.
It adds nothing to reply to someone saying that the changes at twitter could be good and influential by saying "but they could also be bad." It's already implied in the could.
> I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
If you're leaving all prediction and forecasting to other people, why complain when they do it?
I'm not pointing out that they could be bad — I'm pointing out that there's a good track record of them not happening at all, particularly when it comes to Musk.
He may very well prove that you can make a social media service more profitable by making it more harmful to users and damaging to the community in general.
I'm not sure selling sausages made out of sawdust is a big win or even that interesting of a business solution. It's a short-cut that most companies could take if they were to chuck their ethics out of the window (and possibly be willing to break the law).
But if it makes money a large swath of the tech industry will hail it as an innovation and follow suit. Which is kind of sad. And also, at the end of the day, why we need laws against selling sausages made out of sawdust.
> He may very well prove that you can make a social media service more profitable
I'm not sure that anyone should be looking at Twitter and thinking, "this is a good strategy for making things more profitable." Is Twitter making more money? They were already losing money before, and my understanding is that post-transition a bad situation has turned into a crisis.
What are the odds that Twitter ends up being seen as something to emulate in business and not as a cautionary tale? I mean, never say never, but the impression I've gotten about Twitter's financial prospects is not optimistic.
People are actually going to start arguing that Twitter and other social media were healthy up until he bought Twitter just to spite bad meme man, aren't they?
> He may very well prove that you can make a social media service more profitable by making it more harmful to users and damaging to the community in general.
By removing the very politically-biased censorship he already did a very healthy move for the whole world.
The first link is just straight speculation and bad reporting as it shows the authors disdain and bias for the subject matter. The second link is even worse beginning with an editorialization of “thin skinned” the whole rest of the article is moot. We can’t know if any of it is accurate if the author starts off with such bias against the very subject of the article. The third link has nothing to do with Elon. It’s a low profile block of an account that was breaking multiple laws. Not sure what you expect there.
He did but we see both the liberal and autocratic governments of the world lament that they wish Elon would be open to government censorship. Now, some people don’t want to have this be acknowledged but it’s what we’re seeing.
>>In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought
The notifications feature on Android App is already broken and hasn't been fixed since like eternity now. Messenger notifications don't show up either. It takes hours, at times even days for the notifications to show up. There are times when the messages are not properly ordered. They just removed 2FA. Messaging was a nice way to talk to people of common interests, and that's barely working these days.
The app/website are randomly down and you often have to scream on Twitter to get it up and running.
Nothing is really working in Twitter at this point in time, It could get fixed eventually but the strategy has clearly backfired.
Perhaps people underestimate what sort of effort it takes to run operations of that magnitude. If you have a $50 billion site. It is not really a bad idea to pay a few people to keep something like notifications and messenger running. The sheer amount of losses in terms of user trust, experience and eventually money numbers themselves would far exceed expenses paid in salaries.
Twitter had many profitable quarters before Musk bought it, and lots of cash on hand with a lot of runway. It was not dying in any meaningful sense. His changes have only destroyed profitability by substantially reducing advertising revenue.
The company had some profitable years pre-covid, and Elon's first action was to nearly double their debt _and_ slash their income.
He may have done far worse things as well but that depends on your opinion of his product/feature changes. But the additional debt he has saddled them with and the revenue he deprived Twitter of aren't really arguable, and his attempts to cut costs by short term slash and burns don't make anywhere near the dent needed to offset them.
With 40 billion dollars on the line? I think it’d make more sense to think through things and evolve it over time rather than shooting from the hip constantly. Morale at Twitter must be even lower than Amazon at this point.
There's probably some pyschopaths that enjoy the chaos and power vacuums.
There are a lot that don't want to be there. A lot returned out of necessity. Mostly from h1b visa stuff and avoiding being deported. Or getting a new job isn't as easy right now as some think it is. Teams are tiny so people are over worked and elon is making demands that require people to over work and do things immediately.
To my understanding most people there are moreso hanging on because either they have nothing else lined up or because their H1B visa is going to be automatically revoked if they quit Twitter, which would force them out of the country with no grace period.
Reports from inside the company suggest a rather grim attitude. Musk has fired several engineers, even those directly aligned with his vision for the site, often over fairly minor errors and mistakes. There's no sense of loyalty to either the company, the product, the boss or even the vision, Musk has basically eroded all of that.
Musk has been treating the employees as completely expendable. He fired one of his last two principal engineers for daring to suggest that the reason he had less views was just because people weren't into his antics anymore. Then he forced 80 employees off of their current tasks just after the Superbowl to artificially boost his own priority in the algorithm over the weekend because Joe Biden got more views on his Superbowl tweet than Musk did.
I gave an example of someone who doesn't need an H1B visa and who has been involved in the tech scene for a long time. Someone who could likely get another job relatively easy.
People want to find doom and gloom, but the reality is that if Musk wants priorities changed, he is the boss and should be able to do so. 'Forced' is a pretty strong word given that he's paying their salaries and people should be able to switch tasks if the boss wants it.
Well sure. Musk risked a lot more than that and almost lost Tesla on the Model3 ramp. He risked a lot more than that on reusable rockets, he's risking a lot more than that on Starlink & Starship.
If you want to do something extremely impactful, you've gotta take big risks.
Playing the safe game is pretty mundane and boring, and to be honest it's not a very exciting way to live, and not a very fast way to improve something.
he's not the first to even do this... Snapchat added a premium tier with actual (small) perks way ahead of others, and they have 2.5M subs for it. telegram did it too. People only focus on musk cause he's loud but he's following the trends of the industry, he's not inventing the ideas from thin air. Remember when he said he'd make twitter a "super app"? kinda like how IG, wechat, Snapchat and others have been for a while.
FB was losing money due to Apple clamping down on privacy policy. It should not surprise anyone that FB would look for different revenue stream. IMHO FB had no choice, and I wouldn't be surprised if their introduce other paid products.
I wish FB would have a free verification service so everyone can be verified...so when I look through comments I can filter by such.
Not sure your point...if I lost 20% of my salary I'm gonna find a way to make more money which may include changing employer. If you don't mind parting with a 20% loss every year, I'll let you know where to venmo me some money.
>In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought
Fact: The site has repeatedly had significant technical issues since he took over, with repeated down time, massive waves of complaints from top users about flakey behaviour.
Fiction:
> that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship
Fact: His first move at Twitter resulted in a collapse in ad revenue and massive stock market shocks for companies as impersonators announced new policies on the platform. Since then he has taken far more overarching, far more capricious, moderation decisions than the previous management.
Fiction:
>and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
Fact: Twitter revenue is in freefall. The revenue from Twitter Blue is entirely inconsequential and the loss of ad revenue has completely eclipsed it. It is an open secret Musk is fundraising to cover his enormous losses.
I think this tells us one very clear thing that we've known about the industry for a while. It operates on vibes not facts. Does everyone love the idea of a subscription based model rather than Ads? Sure! People were talking about that for years before Musk turned up. Does that mean Musk has succeeded? Fuck no! He's made an absolute mess of it. Welcome to Twitter Blue, perks include everyone on twitter thinking you're a mug for paying Elon Musk $8 for your brand new blue badge.
I have heard through the grapevine that a lot of companies in SF/SV were hoarding employees they did not need to prevent competitors from getting them. Elon Era Twitter seems like a confirmation of that (or at least a data point).
A lot of people thought Twitter would collapse immediately due to all the cuts. Granted, as you wrote, it isn't as good as it was, so he probably cut too much.
Again, it's been a theory for a long time that top companies like Google were hoarding talent, but there just isn't any evidence for it. Not least, because if that were the plan Google is doing a shockingly poor job of it. People are getting confused by the timing, but two things happened. 1: Elon Musk got angry that the Babylon Bee got kicked off twitter and became so online that he burnt $45Bn pursuing an unhinged vendetta. Separately to that interest rates suddenly went from a historic low to shooting up - the result being these high growth companies saw their forward returns crushed and their stock values cut in half, so the equation of "invest for growth" vs. "Return cash" tipped massively. It's easy to conflate these two things, but they really have nothing to do with each other, it just so happened that Musk managed to time it incredibly badly. Big Tech is responding to macro trends, Elon Musk is personally accusing his own employees of being pedophiles, there's a slight difference.
I think Elon started the ‘disk defragmentation’ process for employee efficiency and other companies are seeing the benefit. There is a lot of slack in tech companies. When staff have time to unironically have video shorts on how pampered they are and how little work they get to do, there is a lot of ‘defragmentation’ opportunities.
Companies were afraid to be first but Elon plus the new malaise economy gives them the right condition to follow suit and start it.
Those companies haven't really trimmed back to even where they were at the start of 2022 yet. They over hired a little, but nobody is going to cut 50% or more like Musk did. Those useless moonshot products they're "wasting money" on sometimes turn out to be the next ChatGPT. Of course, ChatGPT is a bit of empty hype, but there is an enormous amount of money to be made. Can you imagine if Google just had nothing like that ready because they were too afraid to accidentally over hire?
The most unexpected angle to me was how people who just do their job become the prime targets to get rid of. If you want promotion or simply for people to stop laughing at you behind your back you have to drop your productivity way way down to average - ideally below.
No. As I mentioned, leaving your feelings about him personally aside, he is challenging the model for social media and now having the approach cloned by the market leader.
I hated the moderations/censorship on these platforms and I dislike the adtech/tracking business model so he has my support on both of those angles.
Meta also appear to be bundling in customer support which is probably my third objection to big tech. So I’ll thank Elon for that one too.
What he has demonstrated so far is that you don't need those things if your goal is to lose money, and you can stay alive a little longer in those situations by simply ignoring several laws wholesale.
He still has yet to demonstrate any other outcomes than making twitter vastly less profitable.
You would love mastodon then. There is no censorship at all, but at the same time everyone is free to ignore you either personally or for their whole instance. Best of both worlds.
No one can stop you from finding or starting an instance with your values. Its the same kind of freedom the copy machine or the home word processor gives.
No, it doesn't let you be a prick with someone elses resources. They have no obligation to listen or amplify you.
Perhaps people's expectations of free speech are a little greedy?
You seem to be confused. No one on mastodon can stop you from speaking. They can just choose not to listen. Censorship would be stopping you from speaking. As long as you're not breaking any laws, no one is going to shut you down and prevent you from being on the network (eg, your hosting company shutting you down). All you stand to lose is a generous system administrator doing the work of staying online for you for free.
Is free speech in your mind something someone automatically has obligation to share? Thats forced, not free.
I must not be the target audience for this because I can't see how paying nearly as much as Amazon Prime is worth it so I can get comment priority and a little star next to my FB account, which is friends-only anyway. If they threw something useful in, like a music or video streaming service with a decent catalog or airline miles or a discount at Target, then maybe.
I think it's a response to the incoming AI revolution.
Just because someone writes in your name and your style online won't mean it's you when ChatGPT or the next version can clone your writing style in seconds.
Being verified online is going to be more important for businesses and people as the internet degrades into the quality level of recipe sites.
> Being verified online is going to be more important for businesses and people as the internet degrades into the quality level of recipe sites.
Now someone is thinking and making sense. But I don't think this current AI cycle is anything of a 'revolution'. It is more like a pure hype and mania driven reaction over a hallucinating AI generating sophistry.
There is no breakthrough in this other than 'train it on more data and watch it go off the rails' like what we have seen with Bing AI. This is just Tay 2.0.
No breakthrough for sure, but the usability at an adequate level for almost any text or code generation, doesn't mean we need full AGI to start breaking society.
If feels like people are expecting robocop, but owning an electric table saw, KitchenAid mixer and a electric golf cart - in the year 1800 - would still be revolutionary even if those are just stupid tools.
ChatGPT is a stupid tool, but what that tool, in unskilled human hands can do, will be more revolutionary than ChatGPT becoming some self-aware robot.
As someone who likes to pay for things I use, I'm in the target customer/user group here. Couple of questions -
1. Is it only for FB or across all Meta services (FB, IG, WhatsApp, Oculus etc.)
2. Are ads going to be shown to verified/premium subscribers?
2nd point is particularly important. Especially if key value prop is about security and privacy. Looks like ARPU for Meta is $40 annually. So financially they can afford not to show ads to verified subscribers (annual sub of $100+). However, for verified subscribers it's only about "blue badge" I doubt there will be huge uptick unless it has other "sweetners" like "no ads" like youtube premium.
Overall - this is a great move by Meta. As it gives them ability to diversify revenue streams from ads where they are dependent on 3rd party platform privacy policies. YouTube premium has shown that social platforms can thrive with freemium model and they have roughly 80M subs ($1B+ revenue). Meta is trying to replicate same success with their brands.
YouTube Premium has a clear value prop though w/no ads—I’m still not sure what I’m getting for Meta Verified… a blue check? Direct support if I (probably won’t) need it?
Twitter Blue now allows for longer tweets, and there is (or at least was) cachet around having a checkmark, so there is some cultural heritage there.
Blue checks on Instagram have some clout, but I’ve never heard of someone eager for verification on Facebook. Protecting against impersonation is something these platforms should be doing for free.
If this removed ads across the platforms then maybe there’d be value in this, but I really just don’t understand who this is for or why anyone would pay $100+/year.
I think the bigger news is they’re offering “priority customer support” for a monthly fee. Imagine if this became a trend among other big tech companies.
In an ideal world that could be nice. In practice the allure of ignoring support problems under the guise of "the automation says there's nothing we can do" is far too high, and eventually pervades all manner of tech company user accounts unless legislatively punished.
As we see with paid Google customers, business and otherwise.
This is an interesting sneaky way of making social media a subscription service for many, but I'd think the benefits for any business seriously using social media are probably good enough to justify the fee. That said, why offer 2 different payments for web and mobile? This just introduces too much confusion for an entirely new concept like this.
Anything that gives people some possibility of human contact in the event of a problem is a welcome baby step forward, but this isn't really good enough. If Meta screws up something with blocking/banning your account and you're not subscribed, are you still completely unable to get in touch with anybody, for any price? These are the people slipping through the gaps that I worry about.
>That said, why offer 2 different payments for web and mobile?
Mobile (Google Play, Apple App Store) takes a cut from transactions made through them. Companies don't want to lose money. Companies have been doing this for as long they could. It is not anything new.
I don’t really care about my Facebook account but I would absolutely pay $100+/yr to ensure I have some recourse should I ever be locked out of my gmail account.
I have heard about many gotchas that appear if an account is “upgraded” to Workspace. No longer on the happy path, so a variety of services and features no longer work the same as a free account.
I think it might already be. A few times in the last month I've stumbled across sites with this offering when joining/subscribing (the names escape me now) and everytime I thought who would pay for that? Now you mention it clicked maybe it's a new thing?
Imagine that. No wait, lots of tech companies that have customers (i.e. one way or another directly paying for stuff) offer "priority support" (i.e. 1 on 1 with an actual human). It's expensive and eats i to your profits but it's necessary.
I believe it's already a thing with a lot of companies.
I worked at a company that had restaurant delivery app, very similar to Uber Eats / DoorDash (but not in the US). ~10% of top spenders there got priority support.
tbh, I'd prefer the option of paying for support over literally no support at all, ala. Google.
If my Gmail account is compromised, I'd be pretty fucked, despite doing my best to make backup arrangements - it's still the skeleton key to the rest of my digital life and my primary point of contact for everyone who interacts with me.
I'd happily pay some small fee to have an actual human help me resolve the issue. But right now, that's not even an option.
Will this generate any meaningful revenue for any company? AFAIK Twitter has 300 000 global paying users. And I assume you would need few million paying users before this has any meaningful effect.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-has-ju...
Shortsighted. If they're willing to stoop this low, they should have started by selling multiple kinds of badges for smaller monthly amounts.
$0.99/mo for emojis. $1.99/ to show your support for various causes. $3.99/ for sports teams. $4.99/ for ID verification. $0.49/ of your red cross badge goes to earthquake survivors.
“I am not a bot/intelligence services construct/foreign troll masquerading as an citizen etc.”. Is a pretty valuable service for the network.
Right now it’s a property not advertised to network participants. But in the near future you might seem the following above unverified accounts posting about controversial topics
“Careful. This person could not be identified. They may be a bot or falsifying their identify to misrepresent opinion”
At which point, the value of verification goes up. Maybe.
> “I am not a bot/intelligence services construct/foreign troll masquerading as an citizen etc.”. Is a pretty valuable service for the network.
It is valuable to Facebook to maintain a healthy pltform. But is it really worth $15 a month to you to broadcast this to others?
Unless the culture of the platform shifts to a point where non-verified accounts are considered second-class, the only reason to pay this is basically as a status symbol. In which case, I think the tiered approach makes more sense. And maybe "Facebook Gold" for people who want to pay even more for a badge....
Twitter had their checkmarks established as an artificially constrained status symbol you couldn't buy with money... and then, under Musk, they altered the terms of the deal by saying you have to pay, but you get tangible perks in terms of platform features, visibility of your content, etc. Unless Facebook wants to do that, I can't see people paying this much on their own...
I have family members that have hundreds of people they've never met on their friends lists. Some of those personalities are obvious scammers/grifters etc. But aging people have diminished capacity for detecting that kind of stuff.
Example:
My MIL is 'friends' with a prominent US based surgeon who is also a leading founder in a biotech company. He convinced her to buy stock in said biotech company, when its price was peaking. Of course it was a classic pump and dump and the value plummeted a few weeks later.
Would identity guard rails have saved her? Possibly not. But telling her "if you don't see a verified XYZ they are a scammer" might move the needle.
Fair enough. Maybe that doctor’s account would benefit from paying for verification? He is a public figure of sorts. For accounts where most of its “friends” aren’t actually friends then some verification makes sense. I would guess that most accounts don’t fall into this category though.
I don't want to sound like I'm defending Meta, but at least there's something behind this verification.
On Twitter, there's just so many face-less spam troll accounts that are verified, and all a blue check means is that the person likes Elon enough to give him $8. At least Facebook requires a government ID, and the verification confirms that the person is who they say they are.
(I do think if they really cared, especially in the face of looming AI advancements, this would be free. This only really works if most real people are verified, otherwise there's nothing suspicious about a non-verified account.)
>At least Facebook requires a government ID, and the verification confirms that the person is who they say they are.
I photoshopped my dad's driver's license 25 years ago. I used it to successfully confirm to a website that I was over 18. I'm pretty sure that method is still viable today
> At least Facebook requires a government ID, and the verification confirms that the person is who they say they are.
But Facebook has already required this for years to run advertisements. So they're now charging for the thing that they were previously doing for everyone for free, making the site less safe and secure.
But seriously. What's the value add here? Perhaps it's for influencers who post a lot? For me as a user who only follows there's no point then. I don't use FB anymore anyway, only insta.
I'd pay for social media IF AND ONLY IF they do the following:
- Not datamine me for tracking
- Don't show ads
- Don't use algorithms to control my feed - just let me follow who I want and show everything they post and add zero 'suggested' content
However this is not going to happen of course. They're still going to monetize. So there's no point.
The problem with this is that people usually underestimate what they are worth to a company like Meta and "I'd be willing to pay 5 bucks for no ads" is usually not above the LTV/month threshold.
Not for me, personally. FB without ads still has no interesting content for me. YouTube premium is the best value for my money out of all my subscriptions due to content.
On Facebook the network effect that made it cool in the beginning has now died and it will keep it from ever coming back for the same reasons it was great in the beginning. I'm very confident people I really care about will not start posting there, and they probably have the same thought process. It's just uncool.
Does that mean that we can use fake names again? I mean, you can get "facebook verified" just by getting locked out of your account and having them demand photo ID to let you back in again. Facebook certainly force-verified me.
Facebook lets you create 4 additional profiles with pseudonyms for users who don't want to use an account with their real name. Your main account still needs to use your real name, but you can just not use it.
Quite desperate of these companies to charge their most important assets, the influencers/publishers. $10 is the cost to run their own website with complete editorial freedom, and if people want to follow them, get an RSS reader. The whole advantage of FB/twitter is that it 's cheaper and broader.
And this model doesnt even scale up. FB makes ~$60 per user/year which is comparable. If people start verifying en masse, they dont have the capacity to really verify the users identity, that the users haven't sold their accounts etc etc. They are shooting their moneymaker here
What i like about these payment schemes is that they put a real value on the company, based on what customers are willing to pay for the service, not the nebulous advertising return. The results of these programs should also inform investors about the true value of the companies.
As a VC and someone who's invested in some companies involved in crypto, even though I keep a rather low profile, I constantly have to deal with impersonators on my Facebook and Instagram accounts, trying to scam people. I've tried repeatedly to (1) get Facebook support to shut down the impersonators, and (2) to secure a blue tick so this stops being effective. Meta has dropped the ball on both of these, so I have to deal with this constantly. I will happily pay to avoid this.
Second — the ads on Instagram have become overwhelmingly annoying and frequent. I would happily pay for a premium version of IG that gets rid of ads. Hopefully this is that.
We don't know much since there's not any details, but in theory at least you're supposed to see less ads on Twitter's premium tier. I figured there's a possibility that a similar policy is in place here. Maybe I'm being too optimistic, it is Meta after all.
> Meta Verified -- a subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support.
> extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you
My tech-ignorant father-in-law who has 3 friends on Instagram had a fake profile created that was identical to his and matched his username except 1 minor character difference. I reported it to Facebook and the reply was "We get so many requests, we haven't had time to review yours, so we are closing it out. Sorry."
Funny that now you can pay $12/mo for them to... maybe not ignore reports of impersonators?
"we were overwhelmed with requests, so now we charge money to process them" sounds reasonable. It also aligns incentives: Facebook now has a reason to have enough support people to respond to requests from paying customers, otherwise they might stop paying.
So if I leave Facebook, they will allow others to claim they are me? The only way to protect is to actually have an there account and pay Meta? I mean - are they serious?
You know I hope this is the start of finally normalizing paid subscriptions for social networks, because it means eventually someone may try to build a social network funded purely by subscriptions rather than ads, and then we might finally have simple timelines again that aren’t focused on maximizing user views and retention through algorithms. The result can be a less enraging and addicting experience for users.
It's strange for ID verification to be presented as a subscription offering, given that it should suffice to verify it once (or for relatively long periods).
Obviously, Meta is after that sweet sweet MRR. But the consumer should recognize that they're paying for a one-time or infrequent task as if it involves ongoing effort.
From the consumer standpoint, a one-time fee makes much more sense.
I remember when Facebook was a private network until they saw Twitter was getting the numbers with public tweets. And they made posts public by default.
Now they are copying Twitter again!
And btw. This isn't actually very meta at all!
But seriously... I know why they all need to do this now. And it has to with the coming botpocalypse. Soon your identity will be tied to your reputation. Which is fine and everything, except it will be on CENTRALIZED BIG TECH SITES. Enjoy your social credit score, plebs!
Can anyone steelman an argument that this move won't make verification and blue ticks effectively useless for determinig the authenticity of accounts?
My initial thought is that this creates an incentive for the companies to have more permissive verification processes, since that would make sales easier and reduce costs.
Makes perfect sense, it's an easy way to generate revenue from everyone who earns money on Instagram. I wouldn't pay $12 each month for a blue checkmark, but for nearly everyone who profits from sponsorships or who advertises their business it's a cheap way to get a bit of extra clout.
Genius to announce this after Twitter. Musk gets all the flak and takes the weight so they can do the same thing and everyone will think it's cool as they are used to the idea and Zuckerberg is nothing special to get inflamed about as he keeps himself quiet.
Probably standard PR tactics than genius upon reflection!
I’ve actually purchased a number of things through instagram ads, so I would say that they are getting better. Now I can also say I have been disappointed by the quality of some of the stuff I’ve bought through ads… so now if I see something interesting I’ll google/amazon/reddit it. It at least makes me discover new types of things to buy.
$20 is a steep price to pay, but I think users who would pay to see less ads are most likely users who don’t click on ads? So from that perspective it might be a different calculus?
Also, twitter got away with half as many ads or something like this. Personally I’d pay $10 a month, but I don’t know about others.
I don't understand why Meta and Twitter are charging a monthly fee for this. Surely, it's in their best interest to have as many verified users as possible on their respective platforms? Surely, they want to get to the point where there are so many verified people, that you don't trust anything that comes from a non-verified user?
I understand there's a massive logistical challenge with verifying users across the globe, but there must be a better way than charging a non-trivial monthly fee for the "benefit" of being verified.
It's kind of ridiculous to think that the act of verification is somehow an ongoing service that's needs a monthly fee. When you open a bank account or line of credit or anything else that requires identification that action generally takes place once. If you prove you are who you are claiming to be then next week or next month or next year you are still verified. What does FB do every month for that $12 or $15? There is no ongoing maintenance for verification. It's a one time thing.
So what if somebody has the exact same name as you and use a profile picture that does not show personally identifiable features like a face? What counts as impersonation here?
I wonder if this information will be available to people using Facebook as single sign in.
Many sites are happy to have free accounts but only one to a person. They want to avoid sock puppets and abuses like spam. If you had to pay even a tiny bit it would drastically cut down on it, but most users won't.
If everyone had a pay for account somewhere that they could use elsewhere, others could piggyback off of it. (It might even be worth a small fee to Facebook, for a service they provide very cheaply.)
So I get to be verified ONCE, but pay monthly for the same thing I have to do to unblock my hacked account? No extra benefits, like fewer ads and sponsored tailored content?
Does anyone suspect this is little more than a ploy for them add government issued IDs to their trove of user data?
I'm guessing this is a way for Mark to sell a new premium tier of data to advertisers. He can charge advertisers for access to a "blue checkmark" tier of user data for an extra fee.
The idea that they are asking users to now pay FB for the privilege of giving them even more personal data is so twisted that I think only Zuckerberg could come up with it.
I personally like this. However, the pricing is bonkers and demonstrates how out of touch Zuck is.
"It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?" — Lucille Bluth
Sorry Meta, I'm not giving you $576/year (family of 4) ongoing. Validate that I am who I say I am for a one-time fee of $99, or $19/person/year, and I'm in. I'll even pony up $29/person/year for a "no ads" plan.
$12 per month and user for a "social experience" that still tracks you and spams you is an insane amount.
If you consider that amount × 1000 for a very modest open source fediverse instance hosting circa one thousand users, that is more than enough to sustain admins, moderators and spare change for some development.
The economic model of social media never made any sense and its hard to see how it will sustain going forward.
They are several years late to this. I think had Facebook done this before smartphones took their Facebook Games marketshare and done perks for subscribers they could of really gotten a lot of subscribers. We are seeing as Apple cracks down on advertisers snooping more than they should that social media platforms will have to switch to subscription to supplement their income loss.
Pay Monthly to Verify your ID once - if anything looks indicative of an industry struggling to monetise, big time; much like the traditional/Print Media went through.
The ID issue is an Auth-issue and trivial compared to the bigger issue in Media, namely Content (being: subjective, polarised, spam, nonsense/trash etc).
Would be glad to pay, if my privacy will be respected, and I won’t just be now paying money for the same stuff.
Actually I’d rather more companies transition to paying models, instead of spying on me however way they can to ensure they can make money.
Would you also? Or would you rather have it free regardless of what that implies?
Real-Verified is the next logical step. Twitter will being following suit very soon. That said, how does this add value to Meta? Isn't this just another indication that Meta through its products sees less value in actual relationships and more in algo-driven timelines?
Snap seems to be the only social network left that is personal.
The fun thing is how you stop being verified if you cancel your sub after a month, when you've already proved you're a real person by having money change hands, even if you do not change any of your profile information.
It seems to be a common theme to charge for something you already provide. From taking away ports so you can charge for dongles, adding in ads so that you have to pay to take them away, to charging subscriptions for previously free services.
Damn, I was reading the words "Facebook Announces Meta Verified" and I took "verified" to mean you can see content that is "fact-checked" or at least filtered for some kind of accuracy.
Feels like this is the wrong approach for Meta, given that they're paying creators in various ways now. Turning around and demanding them send some money back to get protection against impersonators is going to seem very unfriendly.
Pretty sure they just use Yoti to provide the digital government identity verification. Which is also a reason this is being rolled out in Aus/NZ first where Yoti has a bigger footprint here / working with the govs here.
they invented the concept of paid verification for a major social platform and everybody dunked on them, now others copy them. Kind of like when Apple removes jack port → people dunk on them → then every competitor removes it too.
Part of the reason for this is that paid support has been needed for awhile. Prioritizing support for billions of people is very difficult. It's a lot easier if people want to pay that they can priority support.
What support do people need with Facebook anyway? Been using it since the private days and never really thought of something I would want to contact support for.
Someone no doubt will create some sort of verification as a service to centralize the entire process. If I’m an app creator this will enable me to make sure all of my user accounts are real.
"Free" and subsidised services online and in "Tech" e.g. uber are just the same old monopolistic tactic of "dumping" to get market share then jack up prices.
We can already buy any fake press release...verification is just a visual cue online akin to a press release indicating that its value is now somewhat below zero.
Hahaha. This is actually hilarious. They won’t budge to change and innovate so instead they copy and paste what Musk did on Twitter and just leave it at “fuck it”.
My first impression of this is literally "So, maybe a good idea, but isn't this Zuckerberg just copying yet another person like he's always done forever?"
Why would that merit a recurring charge? In other words, what ongoing expense is incurred by the company to display a particular icon next to your name?
A multi billion dollar company full of some of the brightest minds in the world, and this is what they come up with, basically just copying Twitters strategy? Sigh.
how about meta trying veifying all those shady advertisers on its platform and blue checkmark them so I know I am buying a product from a less than shady company.
It's cute, but the joke's on them: I don't really use Facebook for anything but marketplace these days. Cutting social media use has been a great boost for my mental health.
Is this in reaction to, or because of Twitter? Many seemed yo have denounced the paid verification feature, but does this signal that it's something people will pay for?
The format of pages, content structure and reach of facebook, linked to real world profiles and people, means that having a verified account makes a lot more sense.
Twitter is an announcement platform. Facebook is a discussion platform. Comments, replies to comments, no content length limit, ability to upvote, etc.
Perhaps neither. The post indicates that it's rolling out in Australia first. Australia has been, for years, working toward tying social media use to authenticated identity.
Uber re-wrote their 1 million loc mobile app in 3 months.
How much time should it take to implement a subscription payment?
With all the respect to Facebook scale, more than 1 month would be a failure.
I'm not saying that Facebook did it because Twitter did it, but the timing of it seems more than a coincidence and they are using the same justification for doing it as Twitter.
It's quite likely that Twitter doing it successfully overcame the risk aversion that large corporations are oversupplied with.
Facebook isn’t a start up, thinks are not moving as quick as you think. The actual development probably went fast but the PM meetings, legal, etc all take a long time. I bet this has been in the works in some form since Apple’s crackdown on tracking.
Notaries public can verify your identity for much cheaper ($2.00 in Georgia).
I got a document for state pension in the mail; it had instructions for creating an online account with a default username and password. Bad idea, right? But to activate the account, I would have to sign a document saying "I have created an online account with <username>" and have it notarized.
Social media companies could use notaries to verify identity tomorrow.
3 problems I can see with notarizing documents:
1) Paper signatures / scanned documents. It costs money and time to verify uploaded scanned documents, and users could try to forge documents.
Solution: some notaries can sign documents digitally with their publickey: https://www.notarypublicstamps.com/articles/online-notary-di.... I'm not sure how secure this is or how the certificate authority (which publickeys to trust?) works since I'm not a notary, but it seems promising.
2) Notary fraud: unscrupulous notaries could verify impersonators. But if caught, they would lose their license and also be charged with a felony. 99% of us aren't important enough for someone to take that risk.
3) Users losing control of their account at a later date. Just because someone associates their identity with their account doesn't mean that an imposter could take control of the account at a later point in time. But that's what 2fa is for, and you could still ask the website to take your account down, or go through notary again to fully reset your account. This problem is common to every system that doesn't have 24/7, social-engineering-proof customer support.
Anyway, I just think notaries are good way to verify identity. It's also more democratic -- almost anyone without a criminal record can become one with a few hours of training and a small fee. The government has a responsibility to make it accessible because it is required for many government and legal processes.
It's worth noting that this is for the US, and notary systems also vary by state. There are some 3rd party companies that seem to standardize the verification process a bit, which probably adds some added fee. Trusting the notary systems of all 50 states, or these 3rd-party companies, can add risk because impostors will use the weakest link. But I think the added volume would bring attention and scrutiny to these systems and hopefully pressure them to become more secure.
Lastly, public notaries usually don't make much money. Many people do it to feel civically engaged and help their neighbors, as well as making a few bucks on the side. I think an influx of millions of social media users would either overwhelm or bemuse them.
Would be interested to see comments from actual public notaries, what do y'all think?
>which will let users verify their accounts using a government ID and get a blue badge, as it looks to help content creators grow and build communities
Useless bullshit. I was hoping for a paid model where you can get rid of ads for good. Instagram has become unusable over the past year as they shove ads into more and more places. Its like reading a book and every time you turn the page, you have a random chance of getting smacked in the face.
I don't have an Instagram account, so please excuse my ignorance, but I was under the assumption that a lot of content on Instagram is "sponsored content" anyway? So you're looking at ads anyway?
Instagram used to be mostly photos from people I knew or followed or whatever. Nowadays it is 95% ads/sponsored/influencer content. Almost pointless to visit. But I think this might be a result mostly of people not posting photos as much.
The irony is that the most promoted company on Facebook isn't paying for those ads with sponsorship.
I just opened Facebook and here's the top "suggested post". Of course it's a "news" story, which is itself just a repost of someone's Tiktok video. The Tiktok logo is prominently displayed in the tumbnail.
In between all that content, is Facebook Reels. Most promoted Reels are just reposts from Tiktok. There was literally a "Content Creator" named "It's gone viral on Tiktok!" that for a while was the most commonly promoted Facebook reel I would see.
Those are just ads. The posts up thread making a distinction between ads and sponsored content I take to mean influencers shilling company products/services directly in posts outside of the Facebook ad network.
problam with paying to stop ads is - the people most willing to pay to stop ads are richer than average and meta earns more from serving ads to them than they are willing to pay
YouTube made 28bn in ad revenue and probably somewhere in the range of 5-10bn (and growing) in ad-free subscription revenue last year, so it's clearly a viable model even if what you say is partially true. That said, I'd argue that YouTube's content is far more valuable than Meta's, and its ads are far more intrusive, so the incentive to pay is much higher.
That's a good point, I had never looked at it that way. But here's my counterpoint: the people willing to pay to stop seeing ads are the ones who are most hostile, and therefore least susceptible, to online advertising. I've been online since the early 90s and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've intentionally clicked on an ad.
Still, I guess you are not that certain how many times an ad has affected your subconscious and triggered some change in your commercial decisions later on. The whole brand awareness, etc.
I don't think the target audience of this service is regular user, but instead they are targeting companies and influencers who would definitely pay this price to protect their brand and image on FB and Instagram.
The intended customer is probably social media managers for companies or influencers who spend a whole lot more on their business than $12 a month. Not Aunt peggy.
"...get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support"
How about not having my account locked for 7/14/30 days for sharing a meme that I find on Facebook? How about not locking my account for a racy image I posted 3 years ago?
How about Facebook do a better job of removing the obvious scam accounts like the ones claiming that they're giving away free meals & travel tickets? How about removing the "omg! shocking news video! click here" spam comments that are all over the place?
Nope. Sorry Facebook, if you had a product worth paying for, I might consider it. I'm out.
Reason is simple: AI
1.You can now trivially create an avatar photo, of any level of attractiveness, of any race, of any age. You can even reproduce the same character reliably in different environments/costumes via stable diffusion + LORA. 2. You can now easily create a comment history on that account, thanks to ChatGPT. 3. You can even produce voices reliably with just a few samples.
There's no real defense against AI impersonation at scale, except for charging-for-verification. The money drastically increases the cost for impersonators and scammers/catfishers, and provides resources on the other end to moderate impersonation.