It does work. People are distracted and are not reading every message correctly. And payment processing in the appstores is also kind of easy - so you might be able to scam a few people into subscribing and they might not notice this directly. You know that you are not checking your credit card bills in details every month. So you can get a nice revenue stream of unsuspecting customers for a few month until you’ve burned down every little bit of trust and user base you had

Yeah, you can’t do a reliable poll in Palestine. Normally polls are done by calling random people and asking them about their opinion, but nobody in Hamas territory would give a random caller the answer that he hates Hamas because it also might be that it is Hamas who is calling. We also know that the phone network in Gaza is currently down, so you can’t even call people.

Take a look at their method:

The sample size of this poll is 1231 adults, of whom 750 were interviewed face to face in the West Bank and 481 in the Gaza Strip in 121 randomly selected locations. The sample is representative of the residents of the two areas. Due to the war in the Gaza Strip, we conducted interviews in the central and southern regions inside the selected sample homes, with the exception of one displaced area, where residents were interviewed in the shelter area where they had taken refuge. As for the northern Gaza Strip, residents were interviewed in 24 shelter locations, of which 20 belonged to UNRWA and 4 to governmental institutions. A total of 250 interviews were conducted in these shelters, and another 21 were conducted in the homes of relatives and friends of displaced people from the north. Despite the large representative sample, the margin of error for this poll is +/-4. The increase in the margin of error is due to the lack of precision regarding the number of residents who stayed in their homes, or in shelters, in the northern parts of the Gaza Strip which we did not sample. http://www.pcpsr.org/

So they have field interviewers doing interviews with random refugees in the gaza strip during a cease fire. I’m not really sure if you could do a poll like that.

Those 120 people have family and friends. A workplace or a school. So if 120 people die, nearly everyone in a city of 60000 would have known one of the dead.

One of the biggest problems with this AI-spam in every app is that there is no workable business model. You can’t run the AI locally on most end user computers. And running it in the cloud or via OpenAI API is expensive and won’t work in the long term. So you’re looking at another one of those stupid subscriptions, but who really wants to pay monthly for his PDF reader so he can ask it questions?

TBH Amazon has a whole zoo of devices. Even if they are putting a small team of 2 or 3 people in charge for porting this to each device, they might end up with a few hundred people

This - Twitter is currently not usable without an account. You can’t see any posts and there’s no way to ensure that your followers will see your posts. Therefore it’s really useless as a communication channel for government information.

How was their free service abused?

I really would like to be able to buy a car like that. Looks fun and practical

It’s a smart move for a spammer to create a lot of accounts in the early days of a platform, before more restrictive signups with mail verification, phone verification or captchas are in place. Look at how difficult it has become to register on Twitter or Facebook.

It’s still really petty - Elon is one of the richest guys on earth. Take the username, but send him a Tesla. Invite him to a SpaceX launch.