[hcurtiss]

I'm not a programmer, but it seems like they could make it non-trivial to automate the payment process. If I have to click 30 times per account, with a captcha, and wait a minute for the payment to clear, 10,000 accounts suddenly starts to become very expensive in terms of time/effort.

[dragontamer]

You literally buy Filipinos to do this for you for like 5-cents per account. Maybe 1 cent, account creation never was an issue in today's bot / astroturf meta.

Hell, for like 5 cents/account, you probably can get Filipinos to post enough legitimate traffic about innocuous topics to look like a human before being turned into an astroturf bot.

IIRC, the typical Filipino baker makes $5/day. They literally can make more money making accounts for you all day long at 5-cents per account than legitimate jobs in their town.

That's 100 accounts made in a 8 hour period. More than doable.

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Like seriously, ever since 'Mechanical Turk' and other websites made cheap labor from 3rd world countries available, this has been a solved problem.

https://www.mturk.com/

[hcurtiss]

It seems like they could also limit the number of accounts per credit card. 10,000 credit card numbers are not easy to come by. And all of this is creating a pathway for law enforcement. I’m skeptical it’s as easy as you say.

[dragontamer]

Why would Twitter reject $10,000 coming out of one credit card?

The economic incentive of this model is backwards. A person paying $10,000 for 10,000 bot accounts is a bigger source of revenue than a $1 normie.

[hcurtiss]

You think they’re making money on $1 per account? Processing fees will eat most of that. It seems likely to me they’re doing it to improve the user experience, which if that recruits more users will be worth much more to them than the 10,000 bots each paying $1/year.

[dragontamer]

Its easier to make money from 100 users willing to pay $10,000 each, aka $1 million/year in revenue, than to recruit 1,000,000 individual users.

Bonus points: bots want the blue-checkmark to look more legitimate, so bots are also more likely to pay $8/month for the blue checkmark. The actual revenue is going to be far higher in practice when you consider that any bot-farm / astroturf will obviously have some blue-checkmarks + an army of normies in some kind of mix.

[hcurtiss]

Somebody with some actual experience/authority on the subject:

https://x.com/troyhunt/status/1714529503823953990?s=46

[throwaway4aday]

you honestly think they make less than $1 in ad revenue per account per year where this calculation would make any sense?