Originally published at: Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to hide their checkmarks to avoid shaming and mockery | Boing Boing
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So you spend the $8 but you don’t want people to know that?
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How much longer before the Muskovites start hiding the Tesla emblems on their cars with Nissan logo stickers?
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lacking a hat (and much of the cunning) but a bit like Sylvester McMonkey McBean.
Nice satire poetry!
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First, well done with the Dr Seuss pastiche!
Second, is Elon charging an additional $8 to hide the checkmark above the initial $8 paid to get the checkmark? In other circumstances I wouldn’t feel the need to ask, but this is Elon Musk we’re talking about.
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Oh man, I was thinking Sneetches before I even started reading.
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Maybe they won’t. A couple of days ago I was behind a Tesla with an Elon Musk Signature on its right rear fender. I don’t know if it was a third-party sticker or if it was an option provided by the dealer for an extra $8.
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“Oh sure, I should believe you, Steve-bunch-of-numbers and eight bucks.”
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It’s honestly a bit striking how frequently the twitter fiasco comes back to “people who don’t deserve respect genuinely baffled by the attempt to buy it”.
If this were fiction I’d suspect it of being just a little too on the nose; but here we are, with a nontrivial number of (in some cases arguably) functional adults genuinely baffled by the fact that this was not going to work.
It’s extra surprising because there’s not really a shortage of unlikeable money that does have some understanding of the various sleights of hand and PR campaigns necessary to engineer respect(even Elon himself was making the ‘abrasive and maybe a bit odd; but definitely a Real Business Science Genius Man’ thing work until pretty recently); but that plot seems to have been completely lost in favor of a cunning plan that’s literally “see those status symbols that people we hate and envy have? I’m going to offer something visually indistinguishable for $8 a pop and obviously everyone will continue to view the status symbol as it was before; rather than as a receipt for an $8 purchase by an idiot!”
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Next up, a Tesla that transforms into a Ford Fiesta so you don’t need to be seen driving a Tesla.
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Doesn’t the blue check effectively amplify your tweets in the algorithm, in various ways? (I forget if that was just Elno spitballing at one point, or it made it into the specs…)
Seems kind of problematic to pay for amplification but not having that be obvious, though I suppose it’s no worse than all the other shit Elno’s done to the site.
If anyone has a bad (or really any) opinion, people absolutely pile on them for having a checkmark, so I can see why people don’t want it to be obvious. There are memes about it already. But it (hilariously) underscores how Elno just utterly screwed up checkmarks, completely failed to understand how and why people use the app, and has no coherent logic underlying his changes.
Seems like I’ve already heard of that happening…
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As long as I can continue to block them, I’m happy enough.
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Oh I blocked them a long time ago.
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Oh, the Ford Fiesta! My parents had a II that lasted forever, got 40 mpg, and never seemed to need an oil change. I think they had it for 20 years before the rust binding it together finally gave way and they had to send it to the scrap yard. The engine still turned over, though!
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Having been in nearly everyone of these designs over the years by close ones to me owning them, thank you for this retrospective and the joy it brings, genuinely 
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Moskvichs?
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2 things.
1 Reach has been reduced from pre-EM days. To compensate we are told that if we don’t want to be throttled, we can pay up. So it’s not paying for reach, it’s paying to not be throttled.
2 It doesn’t work. My friends who tried it to see if reach increases have reported no change. So it’s a scam.
Bonus thing - Using the internet to take money for a service that is not delivered on is, in the US, considered “wire fraud”.
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