Saved you a click: New Zealand and the Philippines are the countries.
Thats hilarious. Does a vpn get around this? Because if so, it wont stop botting
It would unless they started banning VPN IPs. I guess Musk is stupid enough to do it
Dont most vpn companies cycle their active ips? Or is that more of a niche thing only one or two options do
They have dedicated blocks of IPs assigned to them, he would just have to block the blocks.
Vpns are open source, commodity software. You can set one up with a script at any webhost. He would have to block every site that lets you spin up server, which is most of the internet.
Its not possible to actually block vpns without nation state access to interent infastructure, and even then it’s not easy.
If I’m a bot owner and I could pay $500/year to ensure my 500 bots run unfettered, it might be worth it. I can influence a significant amount of discourse with 500 accounts xitting, rexitting the original xit that was xit out, etc.
If he thinks he can make money from bot managers, it may make sense.
It will probably decrease trust in the whole xitty system, but maybe Musk doesn’t care?
And you’ll use 500 accounts for that?
I think that when they are banned, you’ll have to come up with 500 new ways to pay
- It has nothing to do with bots. Bots were his way of trying to get out of being forced to make good on his legally binding offer to buy Twitter. He goes on and on about bots, but he’s stopped reporting metrics about monetizable users and just started reporting made up metrics like number of user-seconds and crap like that.
- The funny thing would be to use a VPN to simulate traffic from NZ so it looks like they try accessing it and then just give up.
Rounding, let’s say that there are 125 million people in the Philippines and New Zealand. And let’s say that for some reason they all decide to make a new Twitter account and pay for it in perpetuity. Elon paid $44 billion for Twitter. At this rate, this move would allow him to recoup his investment in…352 years.
While the “not a bot” argument exists, it is a weak one. I suspect the goal of this is,
A. Convince users outside of NZ and the Philippines to either create an account or at least keep (not delete) their existing account. Twitter needs to prove to advertisers that Twitter has reach/influence and with this they can say “you may have heard Twitter is bleeding users, but did you know the number of new Twitter users has actually increased xx/yy?” and it won’t technically be a lie.
B. Elon really does think this service will be an everything app of the future. He and anyone who believes this is absolutely bonkers and should genuinely seek help. However the value of an account that is already onboarded (e.g. had a credit card on file) is worth far more than any regular account. Convincing an account to spend their first dollar is much harder than convincing them to spend their second and so on.
Okay this is the point where I start to buy the theory that he’s purposely tanking the site
I mean it’s hard to tell because he is very, very stupid, but he’s also just such a convenient idiot that I have to wonder at this point
