The $10 barrier only works if users are actually at significant risk of getting banned for breaking the rules, Twitter just let the bluecheck spambots run rampant.
Yes. Twitter is rampant with people posting outright Nazi praise among lots of other social ills.
I spent a few hours reporting the obvious ones on 4/20 just to see if anything would happen, mostly out of curiosity to explore the rabbithole and chain of accounts. Out of 50 reports: 0 bans, suspensions, or deletes.
The posts were all consisting out of direct threats to other users or support of genocide. I didn't even bother reporting the Hitler praise because I knew that wouldn't cross the line for X.
It needs to be coupled with effective and merciless moderation towards that behavior. When your single spam post costs you $10 and it was deleted and you were permabanned within a few minutes, the only thing it's effective at doing is draining your wallet. That's not so say you don't see that behavior on SA, but it's pretty unnoticable unless you go looking for it (and it keeps the lights on there).
twitter has created the problem for themselves of few moderators relative to users, allowing spam, and giving the benefit of the doubt to suspected bots
Are you sure? It sure seems to me like it would if every spam spree resulted in account shutdown with the result that to continue to spam, the spammer had to pay another $10.
I think the argument you want is that it discourages desirable signups too much.
> Are you sure? It sure seems to me like it would if every spam spree resulted in account shutdown with the result that to continue to spam, the spammer had to pay another $10.
I talked to someone who worked at a PR firm that used puppet accounts and voting rings to get things upvoted on sites like Reddit and HN.
$500 would be a relatively small part of their budget from what they charge clients. An obstacle, yes, but not a show stopper.
part of a larger network. The cost is perhaps $500 to have a group that can cordinate votes to raise the profile of posts (for marketing and other reasons), to downvote | flag negative coments, etc.
With AI such things can fly more and more under the radar and will be seen by some as a valid expense for the gain they seek.
That is called "warming up" spammer accounts, a technique most spammers use and the warmup method and timing will vary by the intended use. Some spammers don't really know how to do this correctly.
I did something similar to this a long time ago on IRC when channels would be operated by "power trippers". I made a bunch of accounts spread out over months, then would slowly join them to a channel with a power-tripping operator. When they would kick/ban myself or others for disagreeing with a statement, a warmed up account would reply. They would kick/ban and another account on another IP would reply ... and so on. So there are multiple use cases for warming up accounts. Sometimes I could get another operator to kick/ban the power tripping operator and sometimes it was just entertainment. Eventually they would realize that 65+% of their audience they were power tripping in front of was just me and they would never know if they kicked all of "me".
If anything the spammers and trolls are the main people buying the blue checkmarks to try and make their obvious 10-min-mail-ass account look at least partially legitimate at first glance.
