In the next chapter of the slow and steady decline of X/Twitter, we have the latest news that Elongated Muskrat feels the only solution to the “bot” problem on the platform is… get this..
Charging new users a small fee for “write access” (in layperson terms, to actually post and interact with posts on the platform, not just only read things) immediately upon making their account, or them waiting 3 months for the aforementioned write access.
I’ll bring up the obvious that everyone else is and I’m sure just about everyone thought of the moment they learned of this: won’t the bots just wait the 3 months and then, once the accounts can go wild, they will let them loose… and when those accounts get banned the accounts they have had waiting for the past few months will reach the 3 month threshold and the cycle goes on and on just like it is now?
Like, come the fuck on… this is the best this idiot can come up with? This supposed “genius” that people have been virtually jerking off for the past 10+ years… can’t come up with anything better?
Oh, right, basic captcha is now easily passed by, and I quote “current AI (and troll farms)” and so that doesn’t work. Hmn, how about you try to come up with a better validation system? Captcha is broken? Make a new one! Shit, email address creation dates are something that can be parsed, and you use an email address when you sign up — how about pull the age of the address and if it was just created be like “woah wait a minute?” I want to think more people than not actually keep and use email addresses and the like for more than, I don’t know… a week at a time? Maybe I’m wrong.
Then again there are accounts that are tied to just phone numbers… I think, anyway, so that kind of breaks down there but.. well, those would be old accounts so, I dunno. Just thought about that aspect so I felt I needed to bring it up, lest someone want to start an argument because I didn’t address it.
Anyway… yeah, make people pay a small fee to begin using the site. Sure, I pay for a Premium subscription but that’s because ads fucking annoy me and I wanted verification for the fucking joke of it. Contrary to the shitty meme, I don’t “pay for Twitter” but I do pay to make the experience slightly better, and for the joy of the prioritization of my talking shit in replies.
…Where was I? Oh, right, this being what amounts to a cash grab… a very poor one. I mean, honestly I wouldn’t call it a cash grab but it’s not a practical solution to the problem. Actually putting a team on the task of coming up with a novel solution to the “are you a human, are you a good faith actor” problem shouldn’t be that hard, especially for a man with that much money, but, after firing damn near all the Twitter staff and making himself even more of a pariah in the tech sector (something I knew would happen eventually) he clearly can’t actually get enough people together to do such.. or, more likely, just won’t try, because the man isn’t a genius. He’s just another egomaniac with more money than sense who, quite frankly, needs his ass kicked by Hank Hill.
That’s all there is to it — this is another fine example of his outright incompetence and ego combining together to yet again demonstrate the pathetic reality of a guy who bought a social network just because he could.
Oh, by the way, the spammers and scammers could always just, you know, pay the fee as well, knowing they likely will recoup that cost sooner or later, if they do things right.
This isn’t even about Twitter, though. I’ve said before I don’t actually care if / when it dies, I’m just enjoying watching everything burn. However, I also can’t ignore such prime examples of the myopic and pathetic idea this man has for solving a problem that he started.
Fuck Musk.