So what is stopping people from creating fake accounts of content creators, spending the $8 to steal and monetize their content and look legit?
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Presumably if you pay $8 and want verification with the blue check, they will still verify that you are who you say you are. It will be somewhat easier than it is now, since they’ll have your payment information.
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I doubt that. Musk has basically hobbled the entire content moderation team to an insane degree, and I believe that will be a permanent status from now on.
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Also:
Can’t wait until Weedlord420GokuHitler is given priority to make sure the gamer word appears under every post about games he dislikes.
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I slowly stopped using twitter ever since I heard echoes of his potential acquisition. I erased the the app from my phone, and PC. It was difficult for the first week as it was my main source of information for all things science, comics, movies, and books. But, I do remember a life without Twitter, and it wasn’t so bad. In the foreseeable future I will be full on erasing my account (which I had since circa 2007ish I think).
My twitter exists for the few things linked to it, like Granblue Fantasy and the few artists and things I follow there, but I check it maybe once a week at this point.
I looked at this suggestion and signed up. I’m still in the waiting period for account approval since it’s still in beta, but I can browse while I wait.
It looks good from what I see so far. No ads, no algorithm nonsense, and I don’t see any Nazis so far. You can also make long, blog-style tweets and not worry about an arbitrary character count. It also has personal content filtering. It’s like a mashup between Twitter and Tumblr.
As other people have already pointed out, this is pure bullshit. He is basically abolishing a merit based system in favor of a wealth-aristocracy and pretends he is doing the direct opposite.
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The Volkswagen Group joined several other companies in recommending that its automotive brands, which include Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley and Porsche, pause their spending on Twitter out of concerns that their ads could appear alongside problematic content. The Danish brewing company Carlsberg Group also said it had advised its marketing teams to do the same. The outdoor equipment and apparel retailer REI said it would also pause posts in addition to advertising spending “given the uncertain future of Twitter’s ability to moderate harmful content and guarantee brand safety for advertisers.”
Civil rights groups including GLAAD and the Anti-Defamation League held a conference call on Friday urging other companies to abandon Twitter, saying that mass layoffs there were gutting what they described as an already anemic content moderation staff.
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It’s really something to watch this moron destroy something that he has absolutely no understanding of it’s inner workings.
Like when I first ever had a PC and decided that these dll files were taking up too much hard drive space and decided to delete a bunch.
Like, you can’t even open them, they don’t do anything. 
Twitter will definitely not be the same even if Musk concedes (which he won’t do, he’s going full Trump mode).
In the same way that TikTok is just Vine 2.0 we should consider Twitter dead and look for Twitter 2.0.
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My heart is breaking for Art Twitter. I mostly follow artists on Twitter, which was already a hellscape thanks to thieving bots and AI plagiarism.
Really hope that a newer better platform will emerge post-Musk.
There’s this famous image I think about often.
How all the different functions of Craigslist were carved up into separate apps. Craigslist was jack of all trades, master of few/none. People were able to make great apps that did just one of the things Craigslist did, only way better. Eventually Craigslist fell from grace, although it lives on.
Twitter could be easily carved up in the same manner. Cute bots that spit out a gif a day. Journalists providing and ingesting a news ticker of their special area of interest and also posting links to their long form works. Politicians stumping. Artists selling. Companies providing customer support. All these functions of Twitter can be carved up.
The problem is that a lot of these functions on Twitter, unlike Craigslist, have synergy. For example, companies providing support because they want to resolve customers who are saying negative things about them in a very public space.
The artists though, it’s tough. If someone made a platform just for artists to hype their work (uh, deviantart?) they also need lots of art buyers to join. That includes not just people who buy actual artwork, but people who hire artists to produce artwork. The buyers have other reasons to be on Twitter, since it has other functions. If art gets into their feeds, that builds audience. A dedicated art platform would only get the people who are seeking art with intent.
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I’ve got bad news for you.
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What I mean is, once inevitably Musk fails and Twitter is shutdown completely.
I hope I didn’t somehow imply that I’m rooting for Musk to succeed.
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I don’t think this will happen. It will take a massive failure for it to shutdown completely. It will probably just carry on with whatever reduced userbase sticks with it. It will carry forth as a shadow of its former self, as many already do. LiveJournal, Blogger, these kinds of services are still out there.
The collapse-of-civilization failure mode! It’s not like the Maya/MySpace/etc literally disappeared, just that the population fell to some low fraction (say like .1%) of the high water mark.
My favorite one is that the Pinboard guy bought the husk of del.icio.us.
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The redesign of the Verge website into a Twitter-like feed is pretty relevant. It has a ”story stream” so their reporters can post links and small comments about tech news, rather than writing full articles, and rather than just giving over that short-form content to Twitter.
My CoHost account has finally been activated.
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