Plus the opening of the 'verified' tag to anyone and everyone lets anybody with a couple bucks get a boost of validity for people who haven't internalized the new normal of Twitter.
Except now the blue checkmark means the exact opposite to me: it's usually total randos who feel like they live half their life on Twitter, so now the blue checkmark to me means "people dumb enough to pay for something they think means 'status'".
A lot use it for boosted visibility forcing their comments to the top even if they're bad. Also because it used to be a stamp of being somehow 'important' enough to garner the verification it was (and I suppose still is) considered a mark of status to some. The US right in particular seemed to have a particular fascination with verification/"blue checks" before Musk's purchase and the changes to the system.
There's also the siren call of the monetization splits for the new blue check system though beyond some early large payouts my impression of it is that it was very disappointing. I'm not even 100% sure without looking if it's still happening or if it's been rolled back.
> A lot use it for boosted visibility forcing their comments to the top even if they're bad.
Which is why it's important not to hide it for an end user - it helps you distinguish between organic posts (non-checked) and boosted ones (blue check).
The blue check is mostly a negative signal at this point, except for the fact that people over certain follower numbers automatically are forced to have it.
Blue no longer means "verified." It now means "X Premium Subscriber." Features listed here[0]. The Gold/Grey checkmark is now the old Blue "Verified" checkmark (Gold for orgs and Grey for Government/Elected Officials).
In essence they redefined "Blue checkmark" from notable person/org to "gives us money" and then directly replaced it with something else.
That's not a new thing, just search for "password reset" or tweet something at a big company account about your account. You'll instantly see replies from fake agents funneling you to some IG account or group where they are apparently trying to help you recover access.
Luckily for them this got a lot easier with the "verification" badge for everyone.
"Take a respected mark of quality and juice it for cash until it becomes meaningless" has been a staple move of companies since before I was born, but they really did a speed run with the Verified check mark.
Initially, yes. It later came to be available for notable accounts, or ones Twitter deemed of public interest. That isn't a mark of authenticity, per se.
None of the accounts I followed were blue checks for anything other than the purpose of verifying they statements made were legit from the source, which would be a mark of authenticity, what accounts were just given checks for whatever it is you're insinuating? (pre elon drama)
This example (because of the underlying rule change) explains why this has been such a focus of the right wing and of Elon. I never really cared about that mark and didn’t understand the focus on it. Literally one of the first things they changed after the takeover.
Rarity tends to evolve towards prestige. I've witnessed it with things as mundane as office chairs. All the chairs were the same model, a small subset were in company colors and developed very high demand. Often, departing employees would "will" their special chairs to colleagues
I assume you're speaking about the quality of the content, which would be subjective, but I think platform quality is relevant here. My personal use for twitter was following some bands and artists I like, I followed them there because I knew it was them or someone authorized to represent them. Once God Emperor Elon took over that went out the window and the quality of the platform, for me (and others), went to 0.
I mean that prior to the change, twitter gave the checkmark to famous people and brands who's identities were verified, not to accounts that they thought posted particularly good content. It was never intended to be a mark of quality in the first place. If [famous celebrity] was posting nothing but their fart schedule, they were eligible for a check. If [random grad student] was posting insightful findings from their research, they weren't eligible for a check mark because they lacked the requisite notability/fame.
It still was correlated with quality to a degree. Most celebrities and notable people or businesses are not going to post their fart schedules or any other kind of similar garbage. This worked as a good heuristic, because even if it missed the highest-quality posters, it would still beat the average Twitter poster by a wide margin.
I disagree, most celebrities were/are posting what may as well be their fart schedules. Why would anybody care the vacations or fancy meals or random musings of some guy famous for being in movies? Some people evidently do care (voyeurism, and they'd care just as much about his fart schedule) but the point is the such an account doesn't have a check mark because it posts relevant or interesting content but rather because the guy is famous for things completely unrelated to what he posts about. The checkmarks for celebrities had nothing to do with what they posted and everything to do with who they are.
I think it's more due to general social media burnout and companies waking up to how much of a PR nightmare social media is, and that it might be doing more harm than good. No company wants to post online just to get relentlessly antagonized in the comments as most companies do.
It's likely KLM probably didn't think integrating Twitter with its customer support platform is worth the $40000[1] per month Musk was asking for.
1. Off the top of my head. May have been $50000 or in that ballpark. He seemed to overestimate the value of Twitter to corporates and transport agencies, and that the flow of value was in both directions. It's insane to think a quasi-governmental agency would spend tens of thousands to tell Twitter users the train or bus will be late; then again he probably doesn't know how much a banana costs, to steal from the Arrested Development trope.
I almost fell for this when I had issues with my banking app, until they asked for my pin...yeah no, the bank told be in that giant billboard that they'll never ask for my PIN, so I hurled insults at the person and blocked them.
My local credit union sent me a damn email from a DIFFERENT EMAIL ADDRESS to my private email that said I had "an important message" on my account that I had to click a link to go to a THIRD UNAFFILIATED WEBSITE I had never heard of before to get it.
I emailed their support directly asking if I was being phished. They said I was not. I still didn't look at the "important message"
Really glad my accounts with them are unimportant.
Everyone bashing Twitter, no one is blaming the companies going to such a platform in the first place? This pinwall website was never a good place for customer support.
It was a convenient platform where a lot of people were. It's also where a lot of people went to complain if they were having issues with the regular support channels so of course companies would go there to perform damage control and act as a kind of level 2 support channel where issues with the normal support would be voiced. Also doing it in a quasi public channel is a bit of PR advertising "we look after our customers" even if it's only partially true given they had to take to twitter to start with.
Isn't that his point? The normal channels (that the company directly controls) don't work, so everyone ended up using the twitter wall of shame out of desperation.
The companies didn't go there first, that's where people were publicly complaining about their service. Companies quite obviously found it prudent to respond to those complaints by funneling them into their customer service pipeline.
Thing is, it basically worked fine for a lot of people for about a decade. If your risk model is “I can’t use anything that an idiot might buy and ruin”, that limits you. Like, in principle it can always happen, but there’s no great defense against it.
I think the bigger issue here is companies (ab)using social media for their services. How did anyone ever think this was a viable customer service solution? It's publicly visible, you do not control the platform, impersonation has always been a risk (Musk made things worse, but the flaws were already there), and at some point you're going to need to share personal info so you're going to need to funnel people to your actual platform anyway!
Are these companies now planning to move customer service to Facebook and TikTok, or was this always insane?
You couldn't (and still can't) get customer support from Google and many other customer-hostile companies, so you had to just publicly blast them on Twitter.
Their fear of bad PR outweighed their fear of spending money to support users.
Yeah, I remember during one of Mojang's migrations I lost access to my Minecraft account. Nothing happened from my communications through support. The only reason I have a twitter account was to whine at a Mojang representative and it actually resulted in the problem being solved.
> You couldn't (and still can't) get customer support from Google and many other customer-hostile companies
Not to derail you but I have an anecdote. I had an issue with my Google Fi account. Support was a breeze. I completed a web form that said "call me" and within a minute or two I was on the phone with a very helpful human who actually fixed my problem.
That wasn't Google's customer support though. IIRC, they initially partnered with Sprint to handle the infrastructure and support (and later one of the other companies, but that was after I stopped caring). That's who you were talking to.
Depends. Can they actually represent Google? If you call, saying you cannot access your account, will they help you or just refer you to Google? If you call and ask about AdWords, will they transfer you to an AdWords representative or refer you to Google. White label support is much different than outsourced support.
It is different because literally no other service they offer has even basic customer support. My friend's agency was buying $1M/year of ads and couldn't get his account unblocked after it was flagged for no reason. Google admitted it was flagged by accident and just put him in an endless cycle of "we're working on it" emails.
My brother is mentally ill, and he hadn't set up 2fa on his Gmail account. It asked him to do that, and then it somehow got flagged as suspicious activity.
I spent the next 6 months in a hellish loop trying to recover it. I was even able to forward them the invite email I sent him from ~2004 when Gmail was invite-only to prove that he was the owner of the account.
It was never reviewed by a human. I would have paid $5,000 to talk to a human for 10 minutes to resolve it. It was a devastating problem because there were so many accounts and documents we were locked out of. It delayed his mental health care for months because of a similarly Kafkaesque issue with his hospital.
I finally got a human to respond by tweeting to Google about it. They informed me that they couldn't help unless I logged in the Twitter with the email address he couldn't access and then tweeted at them.
We'd still be locked out of the account if I didn't have a friend's husband working at Google with access to their internal support.
So your anecdote means basically nothing when Google casually allows people's lives to be destroyed because they were ignorant enough to trust Google's word on anything.
Yep this is scary, and is absolutely one of my fears. Years ago I forgot my Google password and couldn't follow the normal recovery path for some reason. (Forgot my backup email password? I forget.) I had to go through a lot of automated hoops and weird verification steps but eventually I broke through.
It wasn't their idea, but it was their choice. They chose to support this, now they're choosing to stop supporting it. Surprise, that's causing even more issues.
I understand this was a business decision, I just think it was always a risky one.
> How did anyone ever think this was a viable customer service solution?
It was pretty great actually, I got far better service from airlines via Twitter (RIP) than I did by phone. It was a pretty well-known approach.
They do provide some support through Facebook via Messenger, but it was never as popular. TikTok isn't a great medium for this kind of thing but if it helps them reach their customers, why not?
[edit] > ...and at some point you're going to need to share personal info so you're going to need to funnel people to your actual platform anyway!
Customer service issues generally get escalated when someone starts advocating against your company, as there is now a tangible cost involved in not fixing the issue. Companies saw people hurting their reputation on twitter and wanted to be able to respond to prevent and minimize damage. It makes sense that if someone complains publicly, you would want to respond publicly, at least initially.
Problem is then company is going to only act if they are HN front page or enough people tweet and put pressure then it is not a viable solution for most of us without the social media connections to make that happen.
Also forcing people to use a social media platform to raise a support ticket for something completely unrelated to media or even tech is not a good thing. Not every user of a product (say a kitchen appliance) is going to even know how to use social media
Initial contact would be public. Followup would be private. Much easier, not needing to create yet another account on some CS site, and a much better app experience via DM on Twitter.
> Either way it sucks.
Nah, it was great. Lots of people really liked it.
Keep in mind, it generally wasn't the only option for support, but an option you could choose.
> Nah, it was great. Lots of people really liked it.
That's great! Except now it's gone and you've spent years conditioning all of your users to complain publicly about any issues instead of using your customer support service, and you've just lost the ability to send replies. Is that a bug? Who knows! You can't fix it either way.
> It was pretty great actually, I got far better service from airlines via Twitter (RIP) than I did by phone.
Oh, I totally believe it, and that is exactly my point. X offering the best-in-class UX for customer service is great for users but (in my opinion) an egregious failure for the companies affected.
Companies are choosing to operate a critical portion of their business using somebody else's infrastructure with no contractual obligations! X is not responsible for architecting their platform to suit a service they do not offer and that nobody pays for.
> Not in my experience, they just moved to DMs.
I'm horrified but unsurprised that people are willing to share their personal info such as trip itineraries (hopefully not credit card info) with X. I am surprised (still horrified) companies choose this too.
To be clear, I am not a Musk apologist. I will never have an X account, and that's yet another issue with the current system. I can now expect to be treated as a second class citizen to airlines unless I opt to share my details with Musk.
The nice thing about funneling people through twitter is that you can discriminate based on following. Is this an influencer who will create a shitstorm if we don't do anything? Better suck up to them. Is it a loner who has no chance of creating a fuss? Just ignore them.
Which is why you see people coming to HN to get help when Google inevitably locks them out of their account with no customer support to be found.
In 2020-21, some forms of online DMV support were only reachable via Twitter. Here I was thinking I could safely ignore social media, but I had to go make a burner just to get the right number to call about my PNO.
That’s not an abuse of the platform. It was one of the main use cases for many people. Getting support from an official account is much more convenient than creating an account on some bespoke platform.
And if you’re hung up on the “social media” aspect just know that getting customer support and chatting with your friends are some of the main use cases of the Chinese super apps Musk wants to emulate.
If I have a question about a product and I see that the company selling it is on Twitter, I'll tag them and ask them. It takes less than a minute and I'll get feedback in an app that I already use. Strangers can also chime on and help me out.
Compare this with having to look up their website on Google, then having to track down where their customer service is. Ask a question there, then either have to wait for an email (annoying, often ends up in spam), or I have to keep a tab open just for their customer service chat.
There's some selection bias in here too. People who have had excellent customer service experiences on Twitter aren't taking into account the number of people who did call or email customer service versus the substantially fewer people who used Twitter for the purposes of contacting companies for customer service.
Of course a company should have used Twitter for customer support - fewer requests, and the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising. Win win.
> the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising
This cuts both ways. If you have a well-oiled customer service team working in public, great! But if something major goes wrong one day and you have 3 million people @ing you with no easy way to identify their account in your system and suddenly your hashtag starts trending... that's free advertising too.
> I think the bigger issue here is companies (ab)using social media for their services. How did anyone ever think this was a viable customer service solution? It's publicly visible
You seem to think this was the only option for support. Instead, you are arguing for them shutting down an avenue of support that people used and liked. It would be like saying "Good thing they shut down phone support!"
You also seem to think that all support happened in public rather than just the initial contact. It was an easy entry way into getting support.
And it wasn't companies "abusing" Twitter. Rather, it was companies adopting to users using Twitter as a way to get support. If you don't see that, I don't know what to say.
I think nothing of the sort. I'm currently watching them shut down an avenue of support people use and like, and I think it's because they failed to assess the inherent risks that have always existed with using the service in this manner.
Twitter is the only viable support option with some places. During the pandemic lockdowns, anything somewhat complex involving the California DMV had to start with contacting them on Twitter. I guess cause that's a whole separate intake process that was more nimble than their site.
You can see some profiles when not logged in, at random, but it’ll often show you posts from years ago. Whether this is a deliberate silly decision or a bug is somewhat unclear, like many things about Twitter today.
People were on Craigslist, until they weren't. Twitter's downfall will be like that, gradual and with different replacements for different use cases. It won't be fast and one-to-one like MySpace to Facebook.
Frankly, because the risk of getting publicly shamed on one of the biggest networks was too high to ignore. As Twitter sheds users and usage[1] some companies are evaluating this differently.
Also worth noting that you could, for a very reasonable price, make a few API queries a day before just to see who was complaining about your company and now to do so directly it costs $42,000 a month. Maybe if there was still a way to programmatically get your data then the calculation would go differently.
Man I’m really just now starting to notice all of the auxiliary things Twitter was useful for that have become non-viable. Musk should’ve leaned into those. Add a fee to large companies for using it for customer support, but add features that make the experience better.
So he just wanted to blow away 30 billion of his own money? He felt he had too much money but he did not want to give the money to the needy or anything woke like that he just wanted to waste it in an extravagant gesture?
I think the answer is different. He wanted it to succeed he was sure it would succeed, but like many people blinded by previous success and personality worship he thought it would be easy and a bunch of half baked simple solutions would be sufficient. Fire most of your employees and increase fees for most of your users. Seems very simple, right? Guess not.
Very little of what made Twitter successful was its engineering. Thats what he didn’t understand. It’s a social network. Network effects are the most important. People will use a second rate network if all of their friends are on it.
what's $30bn to someone with $260bn? that's like the average person buying a mac, or maybe a cheap car, except less important because Elon Musk doesn't need the other 7/8 of his wealth to survive on
I sincerely do not think Elon Musk is that stupid. you don't build Tesla, Paypal and SpaceX with the kinds of decisions that have been made at Twitter, and I think it's quite silly to take the basic assumption that no one ever buys a company to deliberately destroy them. why wouldn't that happen?
You do realize he didn’t have hundreds of billions laying around, right? He had to take out loans to raise the cash. He used his best asset (Tesla stock) as collateral as well as promises of future Twitter profits.
Having stocks as a part of your valuation means it’s not easy to spend a lot quickly. It would be like if you had $100 but spending $20 means you only have $65 left.
none of this is relevant. so what he has to take 2 extra steps to access the wealth? it's still there, and it's not like he has to sit down and do it himself
What would he have wanted it for then? Just a toy to mess around with and annoy people as it fails? Or he's burning it down as part of some as-yet-unrevealed long term strategy?
Twitter/X is/was the biggest ever platform for public organisation. Unionisation, protests, independent journalism, all things that an authoritarian like Musk and his Saudi backers would very much like to crush. what's $30bn to a man with $260bn? if I was that rich, you can be damn sure there'd be businesses I'd be buying and deliberately running into the ground
That’s giving him way too much credit. Let’s not forget he tried his hardest to back out of the deal before the Delaware courts forced him to buy (based on the terms he agreed to, or pay $1B to get out). If he wanted to tank Twitter, he would have bought it happily.
No, he said some things online, then signed a legally binding document, then realized he was in over his head, then proceeded to perform exactly as well as an owner in over their head (actually worse, since the status quo was not nearly this bad).
When a number of the very same companies that use X/Twitter have settings that ensure only Verified (i.e. Subscription) users can message them, it fails to be useful for regular customer support like it was.
That aside, scammers and fakes have only gotten worse on the platform post-takeover.
One of the most important reasons companies are no longer engaging via X is that their tools don’t work anymore:
> Another change is that it is no longer always possible for companies to load questions asked via DM on the platform into their customer service systems.
This is related to API access for the tools in question, I’d guess. So many businesses and ideas grew up around Twitter’s flexibility and relative openness. Many of those ideas don’t work at all in a monetized model.
We’ve known this as a culture for a long time. It’s why we created and continue to use public utilities. Not everything needs to be a profit center.
Why were they keen to provide better support to customers contacting them on Twitter than customers contacting them via email, phone or their own support site?
(Spoiler: I think we all know that Social Media was one budget item and Customer Support was a different one, and executives were happy to "invest" in the former and wanted to spend as little as possible on the latter...)
> Why were they keen to provide better support to customers contacting them on Twitter than customers contacting them via email, phone or their own support site?
I don't agree with the framing that companies were intentionally providing better support via Twitter.
Social media is usually handled by a dedicated marketing team/person; Twitter used to be a completely open platform where people loudly complaining would get noticed. The result was an ecosystem where marketing teams were incentivized to help resolve people's issues and avoid negative PR.
Kneecapping this interaction hurts Twitter and its users, not the companies. Twitter no longer has a strong network effect and is no longer open/accessible, so there's little reason for companies to pay even if the use case made sense.
There's a massive difference between going from free to say a few hundred dollars a month to $42k a month. It's not even whether the org can afford $42k, it's the process. Say 300 USD a month is something a low level boss can easily fit in an existing budget. But $42K a month is something you need to change the budget for. You need to go up very high the chain for that and prove it is worth it. Hint: it is not for most. And even if it does, more than a few orgs will not do it abruptly unless it threatens their core business. Say, you are an airline and a war breaks out so now you need to fly less fuel efficient routes, of course you will find the money for more fuel. But for this, with less than a month notice?
> There's a massive difference between going from free to say a few hundred dollars a month to $42k a month
For an airline, with enough Twitter staffers to operate 24x7 including holidays, all trained to cope with disruption, reroute/rebook tickets, that figures really seems like it should be a drop in the ocean.
Of course, going back to (not) answering the phones is an easy choice for an airline VP of customer (dis)service.
Just as long as you're not one of the customers needing timely assistance with a disrupted itinerary while travelling...
Among frequent travellers it's an open secret that you will often get stuff actioned faster by contacting your travel provider via Twitter than you do by contacting the provider directly via phone/email/webform.
Remember we're talking about private messaging a provider with your details and issue, so it's not like it's some sort of overt "public shaming" the customer services team into prompt action.
Maybe there's a(n implied) threat of public shaming given it's Twitter?
Excellent, that means you've been on there 3 years longer I have :) I only wish I'd found it sooner.
> Yes you can contact airlines via twitter for sure but I don't think those are the same people who have access to the GDS
The CS agents answering the phone when you call AA/UA/DL/BA/whoever may not have (direct) access to the GDS either, given the number of times I've been fobbed off with comments like "we have to send this to the ticketing team", "this won't price on my system so I'll have to send it to the back office" (when I have an itinerary in ITA Matrix, the availability in Expert Flyer, and have it priced on Google Flights too). Remember that - for example - BA no longer has any agents with direct ticketing training or capability physically present in the public areas at Heathrow Airport. I'll repeat: no ticket desks at their home airport. The mind boggles.
However that's all academic, it's not about who has access to what system, it's about how well resourced and empowered any particular team is to resolve customers' problems, and how quickly results are achieved. If a team is able to reach out to other resources and get assistance, then customers probably don't notice, and certainly won't care.
Twitter is definitely a channel that's more empowered and better resourced - at least relative to the number of customers using it - than the telephone, and certainly way more than email.
I've had the displeasure of working with their "new" APIs - the documentation is all over the place, their playground and examples are non-functional, the dashboard looks and works like someone started it as a "your first react project" and didn't bother finishing, and the prices are astronomical.
Exactly what you would expect from an underfunded and understaffed team at a social media site that doesn't want to be a social media site anymore, I would be surprised if anyone was actually working on this beyond what they need internally. The developer sign-up has been broken for weeks by the way, it will show you a 500 error in the console without any feedback and you have to spam it to let you in, like most other things in their console.
It wasn't profitable when Elon took over. Elon made it profitable. If doing that makes it non-functional then perhaps that's because there's no actual business here.
It was profitable in 2018/2019. It had a big loss in 2020 and almost recovered in 2021. All in all, they weren't doing terribly bad at the time (but not well either).
Musk has not as far as I know claimed that Twitter is profitable, though he has rather unconvincingly claimed that it _will_ be profitable. So this is actually a case of transElonian levels of nonsense.
> It’s why we created and continue to use public utilities. Not everything needs to be a profit center.
But the market knows aAAAAaaaaAAAAAaallll.
My favorite is the segment of HN readers that think things like ISO safety for manufacturing should be repealed and let the market decide (via insurance premiums) as if the money is more important than the prevention of human suffering.
Generally I appreciate Elon Musk’s work a lot. He created two world-changing companies in SpaceX and Tesla. I wanted him to be good at running Twitter/X.
It seemed like a good match. Staid company meets indefatigable executive.
His early moves prompted a lot of pushback but were generally wise: Diversified away from ad revenue. Introduced breaking changes to accustom the user base to faster development. Cut costs they couldn’t afford by shuttering a data center. Shrunk a bloated team to die-hards via whaling-and-culling. Not least, open sourced some recommender system code, and largely solved the content moderation problem via Community Notes.
Individually, all good steps. Sure, there were many misfires along the way: the verification system, launch of Twitter Blue, and erratic public ideation of potential features.
But I am ready to declare the Musk&Twitter/X experiment a failure.
The crux of the matter is this: Twitter exists as part of an ecosystem. Elon has alienated a large part of that ecosystem, both in terms of creators and advertisers.
I don’t know whether the network effect will tip or the business will run out of cash first, but I am confident it will not grow enough to justify the investment.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe alternate revenue streams and the value of Twitter’s data for AI training will be enough to keep it viable.
He was forced to due to ad revenue plummeting as a reaction to his own actions and policies.
>Introduced breaking changes to accustom the user base to faster development.
What does faster development have to do with breaking almost a decade's worth of UX and muscular memory? You can ship _bad_ changes quickly. I lost track of the amount of times I tapped Reply instead of Retweet after they shifted all buttons right when they introduced viewcounts.
> Shrunk a bloated team to die-hards via whaling-and-culling.
I'd argue there's a reasonable middle ground between "a bloated team" and "just the die-hards".
> largely solved the content moderation problem via Community Notes.
Community notes existed before Musk, and their role is to dispute a claim or provide context. They don't moderate content in any way.
>He was forced to due to ad revenue plummeting as a reaction to his own actions and policies.
That’s incorrect. The need to diversify away from ad revenue was a topic discussed with Jack prior to the acquisition. The rationale was that advertisers effective control content moderation policies due to the revenue which they provide.
This is true. Whether it’s bad on or not depends on your viewpoint and ideological position. What advertisers want for now, e.g. with regard to social policy, may be aligned with what you or I want now.
But there’s no guarantee that will be true in the future.
>I’d argue there’s a reasonable middle ground between “a bloated team” and “just the die-hards.
Layoffs are painful, and they were handled poorly. But there can be no doubt the prior company was massively overstaffed.
If you’re going to cut, generally you want to cut deep to prevent future rounds. Arguably not increasing the size of the first layoffs led to the second, and more people could have been preserved in total.
There’s very little virtue in “middle ground” in this context.
> Community notes existed before Musk, and their role is to dispute a claim or provide context. They don’t moderate content in any way.
It doesn’t moderate content in any way… except for placing large labels to “dispute a claim or provide context.”
Sure, if you very narrowly constraint content moderation to the Trust and Safety definition of removing content and administering bans it doesn’t.
Birdwatch existed, but the prominence of the feature and improved reliability of the feature weren’t launched until after acquisition.
It solved the main edge cases for content moderation by only displaying labels when moderators who disagreed sufficiently on other issues agreed on that particular label.
It has significantly impacted the disinformation at scale problem for the better.
Ad revenue diversified away from Twitter, and Musk is desperately trying to get any cashflow he can while refusing to pay bills
>Introduced breaking changes to accustom the user base to faster development
Why is this a good thing, on any planet? "We broke shit on purpose so that you would be used to us breaking shit regularly"
>Shrunk a bloated team to die-hards via whaling-and-culling
This is a weird way to say "fired anyone who told him that he was being dumb"
>Not least, open sourced some recommender system code
No he didn't. This one irks me so much. I work with machine learning models every day, and if you were familiar with working with ML, you would easily recognize what was "open sourced" (it's just source available) as just the basic scaffolding code AROUND the model. It would be like if you said you were going to open source your excel spreadsheet of important data, and you just put up the code for OpenOffice on github. You didn't "open source" anything that matters, and certainly not "the algorithm"
This is the kind of highly emotional reaction that’s not helpful.
Yes, I am quite familiar with building ML models, both training and building my own for which I’ve been paid large sums of money, and I’m here to tell you that you don’t know what you’re taking about.
There’s so much more information about an ML system than just the trained model that is important for understanding the effects of the system on a society, and its legal, ethical, and social ramifications.
Just seeing the type of RS being used, the ranking approach, and the information on SimClusters is enough for RAI folks to start to understand the ecosystem effects and how that can show up downstream in social effects.
HappyFox (Twitter integration into customer support tickets) $40-$100 per user per month
Twitter: Unprofitable
Maybe this wasn't sustainable all along, even pre-Musk implosion. Everyone was making money except Twitter. Yet they were completely dependent on Twitter
What prevents Twitter from providing whatever KLM/HappyFox/anyoneElse offers in house to bring that revenue in house? I'm looking for any answer other than Musk.
Had an experience recently where I tweeted at booking.com's profile @bookingcom
only to be tweeted back by 5-6 different lookalike profiles all pretending to be customer support and asking for my personal information and a WhatsApp phone number to resolve my issue. All the accounts were something like @Bookingcomx @BookingCom_44 @BookingCom__4
I'm thinking how hard can it be to automatically block this from Twitter's end? They were all using the official booking's profile image and had something in their profile info indicating they were "booking". It's just a few simple checks and then at the very least require extra validation of the account before allowing them any further.
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[ 22.0 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadExcept now the blue checkmark means the exact opposite to me: it's usually total randos who feel like they live half their life on Twitter, so now the blue checkmark to me means "people dumb enough to pay for something they think means 'status'".
There's also the siren call of the monetization splits for the new blue check system though beyond some early large payouts my impression of it is that it was very disappointing. I'm not even 100% sure without looking if it's still happening or if it's been rolled back.
Which is why it's important not to hide it for an end user - it helps you distinguish between organic posts (non-checked) and boosted ones (blue check).
The blue check is mostly a negative signal at this point, except for the fact that people over certain follower numbers automatically are forced to have it.
It's a really bizarre system.
In essence they redefined "Blue checkmark" from notable person/org to "gives us money" and then directly replaced it with something else.
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blue-check-hider/j...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blue-blocker/
I've no idea how well these particular ones work, but there seem to be a lot of them going around. Caveat Emptor.
Luckily for them this got a lot easier with the "verification" badge for everyone.
Do you mean that it became a mark of endorsement?
1. Off the top of my head. May have been $50000 or in that ballpark. He seemed to overestimate the value of Twitter to corporates and transport agencies, and that the flow of value was in both directions. It's insane to think a quasi-governmental agency would spend tens of thousands to tell Twitter users the train or bus will be late; then again he probably doesn't know how much a banana costs, to steal from the Arrested Development trope.
'Death Spiral' just announced its world tour!
'I've been practicing my 'Death Spiral' all morning!'
And then their card rewards side sends me emails with a link to auto enroll in upcoming discounts.
I emailed their support directly asking if I was being phished. They said I was not. I still didn't look at the "important message"
Really glad my accounts with them are unimportant.
You go where your customers are.
Are these companies now planning to move customer service to Facebook and TikTok, or was this always insane?
You couldn't (and still can't) get customer support from Google and many other customer-hostile companies, so you had to just publicly blast them on Twitter.
Their fear of bad PR outweighed their fear of spending money to support users.
I hate it.
Not to derail you but I have an anecdote. I had an issue with my Google Fi account. Support was a breeze. I completed a web form that said "call me" and within a minute or two I was on the phone with a very helpful human who actually fixed my problem.
My brother is mentally ill, and he hadn't set up 2fa on his Gmail account. It asked him to do that, and then it somehow got flagged as suspicious activity.
I spent the next 6 months in a hellish loop trying to recover it. I was even able to forward them the invite email I sent him from ~2004 when Gmail was invite-only to prove that he was the owner of the account.
It was never reviewed by a human. I would have paid $5,000 to talk to a human for 10 minutes to resolve it. It was a devastating problem because there were so many accounts and documents we were locked out of. It delayed his mental health care for months because of a similarly Kafkaesque issue with his hospital.
I finally got a human to respond by tweeting to Google about it. They informed me that they couldn't help unless I logged in the Twitter with the email address he couldn't access and then tweeted at them.
We'd still be locked out of the account if I didn't have a friend's husband working at Google with access to their internal support.
So your anecdote means basically nothing when Google casually allows people's lives to be destroyed because they were ignorant enough to trust Google's word on anything.
Working exactly as designed, requiring you to be rich and powerful enough to have the influence necessary to get the help you need.
Google employs just the right amount of support to ensure that they do not have to interface with the poor.
I understand this was a business decision, I just think it was always a risky one.
It was pretty great actually, I got far better service from airlines via Twitter (RIP) than I did by phone. It was a pretty well-known approach.
They do provide some support through Facebook via Messenger, but it was never as popular. TikTok isn't a great medium for this kind of thing but if it helps them reach their customers, why not?
[edit] > ...and at some point you're going to need to share personal info so you're going to need to funnel people to your actual platform anyway!
Not in my experience, they just moved to DMs.
That's the problem, not the solution. Why the hell was this the case? I guess because it was public.
Either way it sucks. Obviously (good) CS should be via a private channel.
That trend started before the trend of smartphones/texting/mobile.
Also forcing people to use a social media platform to raise a support ticket for something completely unrelated to media or even tech is not a good thing. Not every user of a product (say a kitchen appliance) is going to even know how to use social media
> Either way it sucks.
Nah, it was great. Lots of people really liked it.
Keep in mind, it generally wasn't the only option for support, but an option you could choose.
That's great! Except now it's gone and you've spent years conditioning all of your users to complain publicly about any issues instead of using your customer support service, and you've just lost the ability to send replies. Is that a bug? Who knows! You can't fix it either way.
Exactly the opposite. The interaction being public keeps companies (a bit more) accountable and that can do wonders.
Oh, I totally believe it, and that is exactly my point. X offering the best-in-class UX for customer service is great for users but (in my opinion) an egregious failure for the companies affected.
Companies are choosing to operate a critical portion of their business using somebody else's infrastructure with no contractual obligations! X is not responsible for architecting their platform to suit a service they do not offer and that nobody pays for.
> Not in my experience, they just moved to DMs.
I'm horrified but unsurprised that people are willing to share their personal info such as trip itineraries (hopefully not credit card info) with X. I am surprised (still horrified) companies choose this too.
To be clear, I am not a Musk apologist. I will never have an X account, and that's yet another issue with the current system. I can now expect to be treated as a second class citizen to airlines unless I opt to share my details with Musk.
Some will even share these things with the whole world!
Which is why you see people coming to HN to get help when Google inevitably locks them out of their account with no customer support to be found.
And if you’re hung up on the “social media” aspect just know that getting customer support and chatting with your friends are some of the main use cases of the Chinese super apps Musk wants to emulate.
So you don’t need to funnel them. In many cases the ideal resolution is they go away.
If I have a question about a product and I see that the company selling it is on Twitter, I'll tag them and ask them. It takes less than a minute and I'll get feedback in an app that I already use. Strangers can also chime on and help me out.
Compare this with having to look up their website on Google, then having to track down where their customer service is. Ask a question there, then either have to wait for an email (annoying, often ends up in spam), or I have to keep a tab open just for their customer service chat.
Of course a company should have used Twitter for customer support - fewer requests, and the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising. Win win.
This cuts both ways. If you have a well-oiled customer service team working in public, great! But if something major goes wrong one day and you have 3 million people @ing you with no easy way to identify their account in your system and suddenly your hashtag starts trending... that's free advertising too.
You seem to think this was the only option for support. Instead, you are arguing for them shutting down an avenue of support that people used and liked. It would be like saying "Good thing they shut down phone support!"
You also seem to think that all support happened in public rather than just the initial contact. It was an easy entry way into getting support.
And it wasn't companies "abusing" Twitter. Rather, it was companies adopting to users using Twitter as a way to get support. If you don't see that, I don't know what to say.
Edit: seems only some profiles can be seen w/o auth.
Frankly, because the risk of getting publicly shamed on one of the biggest networks was too high to ignore. As Twitter sheds users and usage[1] some companies are evaluating this differently.
Also worth noting that you could, for a very reasonable price, make a few API queries a day before just to see who was complaining about your company and now to do so directly it costs $42,000 a month. Maybe if there was still a way to programmatically get your data then the calculation would go differently.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/twitter-traffic-on-downward-trend...
I think the answer is different. He wanted it to succeed he was sure it would succeed, but like many people blinded by previous success and personality worship he thought it would be easy and a bunch of half baked simple solutions would be sufficient. Fire most of your employees and increase fees for most of your users. Seems very simple, right? Guess not.
I sincerely do not think Elon Musk is that stupid. you don't build Tesla, Paypal and SpaceX with the kinds of decisions that have been made at Twitter, and I think it's quite silly to take the basic assumption that no one ever buys a company to deliberately destroy them. why wouldn't that happen?
Having stocks as a part of your valuation means it’s not easy to spend a lot quickly. It would be like if you had $100 but spending $20 means you only have $65 left.
I have to think Hanlon's razor applies.
No, he said some things online, then signed a legally binding document, then realized he was in over his head, then proceeded to perform exactly as well as an owner in over their head (actually worse, since the status quo was not nearly this bad).
That aside, scammers and fakes have only gotten worse on the platform post-takeover.
"X Assistant Support to Elon Musk"
The possibilities.....
> Another change is that it is no longer always possible for companies to load questions asked via DM on the platform into their customer service systems.
This is related to API access for the tools in question, I’d guess. So many businesses and ideas grew up around Twitter’s flexibility and relative openness. Many of those ideas don’t work at all in a monetized model.
We’ve known this as a culture for a long time. It’s why we created and continue to use public utilities. Not everything needs to be a profit center.
Don't work at all, or don't work for free?
(Spoiler: I think we all know that Social Media was one budget item and Customer Support was a different one, and executives were happy to "invest" in the former and wanted to spend as little as possible on the latter...)
I don't agree with the framing that companies were intentionally providing better support via Twitter.
Social media is usually handled by a dedicated marketing team/person; Twitter used to be a completely open platform where people loudly complaining would get noticed. The result was an ecosystem where marketing teams were incentivized to help resolve people's issues and avoid negative PR.
Kneecapping this interaction hurts Twitter and its users, not the companies. Twitter no longer has a strong network effect and is no longer open/accessible, so there's little reason for companies to pay even if the use case made sense.
For an airline, with enough Twitter staffers to operate 24x7 including holidays, all trained to cope with disruption, reroute/rebook tickets, that figures really seems like it should be a drop in the ocean.
Of course, going back to (not) answering the phones is an easy choice for an airline VP of customer (dis)service.
Just as long as you're not one of the customers needing timely assistance with a disrupted itinerary while travelling...
( https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/34726322-post1.html is just one completely random example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. )
Elon or no Elon, this is wrong on several levels.
Remember we're talking about private messaging a provider with your details and issue, so it's not like it's some sort of overt "public shaming" the customer services team into prompt action.
Maybe there's a(n implied) threat of public shaming given it's Twitter?
Yes you can contact airlines via twitter for sure but I don't think those are the same people who have access to the GDS.
Excellent, that means you've been on there 3 years longer I have :) I only wish I'd found it sooner.
> Yes you can contact airlines via twitter for sure but I don't think those are the same people who have access to the GDS
The CS agents answering the phone when you call AA/UA/DL/BA/whoever may not have (direct) access to the GDS either, given the number of times I've been fobbed off with comments like "we have to send this to the ticketing team", "this won't price on my system so I'll have to send it to the back office" (when I have an itinerary in ITA Matrix, the availability in Expert Flyer, and have it priced on Google Flights too). Remember that - for example - BA no longer has any agents with direct ticketing training or capability physically present in the public areas at Heathrow Airport. I'll repeat: no ticket desks at their home airport. The mind boggles.
However that's all academic, it's not about who has access to what system, it's about how well resourced and empowered any particular team is to resolve customers' problems, and how quickly results are achieved. If a team is able to reach out to other resources and get assistance, then customers probably don't notice, and certainly won't care.
Twitter is definitely a channel that's more empowered and better resourced - at least relative to the number of customers using it - than the telephone, and certainly way more than email.
Q: Why is that?
Exactly what you would expect from an underfunded and understaffed team at a social media site that doesn't want to be a social media site anymore, I would be surprised if anyone was actually working on this beyond what they need internally. The developer sign-up has been broken for weeks by the way, it will show you a 500 error in the console without any feedback and you have to spam it to let you in, like most other things in their console.
It wasn't profitable when Elon took over. Elon made it profitable. If doing that makes it non-functional then perhaps that's because there's no actual business here.
Elon has not made it profitable as far as I know. In 2022 90% of revenue was from ads which got gutted after Elon. 3 months ago, there were still under https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-twitters-c... and I haven't seen anything really positive since. And that's ignoring ongoing lawsuits. It still wasn't profitable in September and they don't think it will be until next year https://fortune.com/2023/09/28/linda-yaccarino-x-twitter-ceo...
But the market knows aAAAAaaaaAAAAAaallll.
My favorite is the segment of HN readers that think things like ISO safety for manufacturing should be repealed and let the market decide (via insurance premiums) as if the money is more important than the prevention of human suffering.
It seemed like a good match. Staid company meets indefatigable executive.
His early moves prompted a lot of pushback but were generally wise: Diversified away from ad revenue. Introduced breaking changes to accustom the user base to faster development. Cut costs they couldn’t afford by shuttering a data center. Shrunk a bloated team to die-hards via whaling-and-culling. Not least, open sourced some recommender system code, and largely solved the content moderation problem via Community Notes.
Individually, all good steps. Sure, there were many misfires along the way: the verification system, launch of Twitter Blue, and erratic public ideation of potential features.
But I am ready to declare the Musk&Twitter/X experiment a failure.
The crux of the matter is this: Twitter exists as part of an ecosystem. Elon has alienated a large part of that ecosystem, both in terms of creators and advertisers.
I don’t know whether the network effect will tip or the business will run out of cash first, but I am confident it will not grow enough to justify the investment.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe alternate revenue streams and the value of Twitter’s data for AI training will be enough to keep it viable.
But I’m just not seeing the path.
He was forced to due to ad revenue plummeting as a reaction to his own actions and policies.
>Introduced breaking changes to accustom the user base to faster development.
What does faster development have to do with breaking almost a decade's worth of UX and muscular memory? You can ship _bad_ changes quickly. I lost track of the amount of times I tapped Reply instead of Retweet after they shifted all buttons right when they introduced viewcounts.
> Shrunk a bloated team to die-hards via whaling-and-culling.
I'd argue there's a reasonable middle ground between "a bloated team" and "just the die-hards".
> largely solved the content moderation problem via Community Notes.
Community notes existed before Musk, and their role is to dispute a claim or provide context. They don't moderate content in any way.
That’s incorrect. The need to diversify away from ad revenue was a topic discussed with Jack prior to the acquisition. The rationale was that advertisers effective control content moderation policies due to the revenue which they provide.
This is true. Whether it’s bad on or not depends on your viewpoint and ideological position. What advertisers want for now, e.g. with regard to social policy, may be aligned with what you or I want now.
But there’s no guarantee that will be true in the future.
>I’d argue there’s a reasonable middle ground between “a bloated team” and “just the die-hards.
Layoffs are painful, and they were handled poorly. But there can be no doubt the prior company was massively overstaffed.
If you’re going to cut, generally you want to cut deep to prevent future rounds. Arguably not increasing the size of the first layoffs led to the second, and more people could have been preserved in total.
There’s very little virtue in “middle ground” in this context.
> Community notes existed before Musk, and their role is to dispute a claim or provide context. They don’t moderate content in any way.
It doesn’t moderate content in any way… except for placing large labels to “dispute a claim or provide context.”
Sure, if you very narrowly constraint content moderation to the Trust and Safety definition of removing content and administering bans it doesn’t.
Birdwatch existed, but the prominence of the feature and improved reliability of the feature weren’t launched until after acquisition.
It solved the main edge cases for content moderation by only displaying labels when moderators who disagreed sufficiently on other issues agreed on that particular label.
It has significantly impacted the disinformation at scale problem for the better.
Ad revenue diversified away from Twitter, and Musk is desperately trying to get any cashflow he can while refusing to pay bills
>Introduced breaking changes to accustom the user base to faster development
Why is this a good thing, on any planet? "We broke shit on purpose so that you would be used to us breaking shit regularly"
>Shrunk a bloated team to die-hards via whaling-and-culling
This is a weird way to say "fired anyone who told him that he was being dumb"
>Not least, open sourced some recommender system code
No he didn't. This one irks me so much. I work with machine learning models every day, and if you were familiar with working with ML, you would easily recognize what was "open sourced" (it's just source available) as just the basic scaffolding code AROUND the model. It would be like if you said you were going to open source your excel spreadsheet of important data, and you just put up the code for OpenOffice on github. You didn't "open source" anything that matters, and certainly not "the algorithm"
This is the kind of highly emotional reaction that’s not helpful.
Yes, I am quite familiar with building ML models, both training and building my own for which I’ve been paid large sums of money, and I’m here to tell you that you don’t know what you’re taking about.
There’s so much more information about an ML system than just the trained model that is important for understanding the effects of the system on a society, and its legal, ethical, and social ramifications.
Just seeing the type of RS being used, the ranking approach, and the information on SimClusters is enough for RAI folks to start to understand the ecosystem effects and how that can show up downstream in social effects.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-sourc...
HappyFox (Twitter integration into customer support tickets) $40-$100 per user per month
Twitter: Unprofitable
Maybe this wasn't sustainable all along, even pre-Musk implosion. Everyone was making money except Twitter. Yet they were completely dependent on Twitter
I'm thinking how hard can it be to automatically block this from Twitter's end? They were all using the official booking's profile image and had something in their profile info indicating they were "booking". It's just a few simple checks and then at the very least require extra validation of the account before allowing them any further.
You can go right now and look at everyone sending tweets to the official account, their replies will be full of scammers https://twitter.com/search?q=%40bookingcom&src=typeahead_cli...
Quite hard when you've fired everyone :-)
2) Decide that driving traffic to your platform will now cost a bajillion dollars rather than being free
3) A high number of entities that drive traffic to your platform decide to leave
4) ???
Business genius