Not a x/twitter user much these days (mostly quit a long time ago) but I’m happy when companies put a minor barrier up to stop botting. So meh, good idea I guess?
Anyone running a TwitterBot through an LLM or other AI tool is paying far, far more than $1/year.
This $1 'fee' monetizes and benefits bot-accounts more than anyone else.
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Let's say I setup 10,000 bot accounts for $10,000/year total. Will I really be banned from Twitter? Or will I be treated like the high paying customer that I truly am?
Is $10,000 expensive for a marketing team pushing a new product? Sounds like easy-astroturf to me.
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The economic incentives here are all wrong. Astroturf / marketing companies pay $10,000,000 for a singular 30 second Superbowl ad. They absolutely don't give a crap about $10,000 for an easy army of astroturf accounts that will upvotes and generate fake LLM discussion around products.
In my mind this is not about spammers not having the money to create 10k accounts.
but about how many CCs would they put for 10k accounts? If you have 1000 accounts with the same CC it does seem to make it a bit easier to say maybe these 1000 accounta are bots.
but let me tell you what Musk can do to actually let bots run: allow crypto payments :D
I think this severely overestimates the sophistication of bots. You don’t need to give coherent, thoughtful replies. You just need keyword detection and link spamming.
I'm not a programmer, but it seems like they could make it non-trivial to automate the payment process. If I have to click 30 times per account, with a captcha, and wait a minute for the payment to clear, 10,000 accounts suddenly starts to become very expensive in terms of time/effort.
Maybe the top end of the distribution is doing that. That’s an entire criminal operation which no doubt does happen of course. But not all spammers put in the same amount of effort. Cutting down spam is about sealing off the big leaks first.
dragontamer|2 years ago
This $1 'fee' monetizes and benefits bot-accounts more than anyone else.
------
Let's say I setup 10,000 bot accounts for $10,000/year total. Will I really be banned from Twitter? Or will I be treated like the high paying customer that I truly am?
Is $10,000 expensive for a marketing team pushing a new product? Sounds like easy-astroturf to me.
-------
The economic incentives here are all wrong. Astroturf / marketing companies pay $10,000,000 for a singular 30 second Superbowl ad. They absolutely don't give a crap about $10,000 for an easy army of astroturf accounts that will upvotes and generate fake LLM discussion around products.
gls2ro|2 years ago
but about how many CCs would they put for 10k accounts? If you have 1000 accounts with the same CC it does seem to make it a bit easier to say maybe these 1000 accounta are bots.
but let me tell you what Musk can do to actually let bots run: allow crypto payments :D
janalsncm|2 years ago
hcurtiss|2 years ago
iamdelirium|2 years ago
janalsncm|2 years ago