The dynamics on Twitter are quite weird. There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life. If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is basically part of your job so maybe you should have to pay a bit more just like the customer of some business software ($100 pa seems pretty cheap there). Indeed maybe media publications should be paying for the blue checks for their staff. But on the other hand, these people are going to represent a large part of the draw of Twitter and so maybe Twitter should be paying them instead.
But other people use Twitter in different ways. If you mostly use it as a social network between your friends you might not care because they’ll presumably see your tweets because they follow you rather than because they found them in search or whatever.
If you’re using Twitter as a forum for discussions about some topic of your interest, maybe you’ll end up feeling crowded out in replies by people with the check. But if you’re at risk of being crowded out then maybe Twitter isn’t working so well as a forum. And I think that if eg A follows B and B retweets you, A should see your tweet whether or not you have a check. Maybe that isn’t so true with the non-chronological feed. If people in the community follow you then, depending on the dynamics, your opinions could still be spread via retweet rather than getting lucky in your position in the replies, no?
If you’re some reply guy, maybe your tweets should be downranked but then if you’re serious about it then I guess you’ll pay.
That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal. So every user paying $X/mo to solidify their place in the graph makes some conceptual sense.
In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are consumers. If you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.
An average user (part of the 99.9%) isn't going to care about any status or badges – they are only there to look at memes.
Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line, and (2) the platform needs them as much as they need platform.
So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.
Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world". It gives them an easy way to reach their audience on their own terms without any middlemen.
As a centralized platform, Twitter creates more value for those who follow than those who broadcast. Because the broadcasters are primarily known for something other than the "content" they create on the platform, they would find their audience anywhere. Followers, on the other hand, can conveniently follow many people on the same platform. Regardless of whether they are interested in global celebrities, local politicians, or professionals in a specific subfield, they can often find those people on Twitter.
Blogs used to be popular among many of the groups you can now find on Twitter. I guess Twitter replaced them, because the short message format forces you to focus on the essentials. Creating a new post is much faster, and you will reach many more people, because reading the post is not a significant time investment.
Twitter replaced blogs because blogs were not discoverable or aggregated. Twitter accounts are.
Twitter was born out of the short "status updates" fad at the time, on both Myspace and eventually Facebook.
Those were born out of MSN Messenger and other IM programs at the time that had customizable social profiles of sorts - including an updatable Status that was shown as a subtitle in your contacts' respective friends lists.
I remember the general sentiment of Twitter when it started was that the short character count (120 characters or whatever it started with) was a fun novelty, nothing more. It wasn't seen as a "social network".
Twitter gets its name in part from the saying "A little birdie told me ..." intersected with the fact that your phone twitches (vibrates) when you receive an update. It mimicked the other popular app names at the time that often omitted a vowel, such as 'flickr'. The original site was thus called twttr.com. The whole point was to be short, concise, non-serious communication. "Yo" tried to take this to the extreme several years later and ultimately failed (or pivoted, not sure which).
When Twitter started gaining traction, it was clear that more involved discourse was nearly impossible with the shorter character count, thus the limit was bumped up to what it is now (240 or 280 or something). The initial response was, understandably, negative. People predicted at the time that this would devolve the platform into another battlegrounds for shouting matches and arguing just as Facebook had. In hindsight, they were mostly correct.
Threads were also added to improve cohesion within lengthy conversations, and those features alone are now what form the core of Twitter's major feature set.
It's worth noting that Twitter hasn't changed much, which is pretty widely regarded as a feature in itself and can earn long term retention even with on-the-fence users (see: Steam).
However, this is mostly just my recollection of events.
Technically true, but I think the comment you're replying to was thinking of the era when celebrities had to go on late night shows in order for people to hear what they had to say. Like literally, the middle man had limited airtime and got to pick and choose who was allowed to be broadcast.
If you had some opinions on the latest whatever, if no television station felt like interviewing you, you just told it to your friends or whatever like everybody else. No matter how famous you were.
> Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world".
Absolutely true, but it doesn't PRESENT itself that way. It PURPORTS to be an egalitarian platform. The truth is that the specific way Twitter's network effects work, you simply don't matter unless you're a celeb (either in Hollywood, or in some particular niche) or a journo. Celebrities I can understand. I don't know why Twitter is so bent around journalists, but it is, and it's obvious. To me, it goes back to the insinuation that the platform has been specifically engineered to influence national public opinion, but I suppose it might be just a "lucky" side effect. In any case, just being a random person on the platform can sometimes be pretty frustrating, because all the engagement is eaten up by people with hundreds of thousands of followers.
I looked the top 50 in that list and maybe ~5 of them are what you describe. The rest are big music labels, TV channels, artists and other such independently popular figures, not very different from Twitter.
Unclear why this is getting downvoted, it is accurate statement. Only 20 of the top 50 channels are not brands. Of those 20 if you exclude music channels like BTS, Blackpink, Justin Bieber, etc. you're only left with 10 channels.
BTS was popular in SK way before they got big on YouTube. But their massive explosion of popularity in the west (and outside of SK in general) happened perfectly in sync with them getting big on YouTube.
I think the point still stands. 6 of the top 10 on Youtube got their large followings being making content for Youtube. 0% of the top 50 on Twitter are primarily known for their tweets.
> 0% of the top 50 on Twitter are primarily known for their tweets.
Why limit yourself to the top 50? 0% of all Twitter users are primarily known for their tweets. Tweets are, by design, unsuitable for publishing content. They're useful for advertising content you publish somewhere else.
I know for (indie) games, twitter is a lagging indicator. That means you don't get famous through twitter, but twitter is a lagging indicator of the success on Steam. I can look up the source of this statement if you're interested.
Marketing wise the difference is huge. Say you release a new game, and want to know which marketing channels to focus on. As it turns out, Twitter will not give you much new customers that haven't come into contact with your game before.
I agree with you that once you have those followers, you can leverage that with other content. But building up your audience mainly needs to happen through other channels.
Anecdotal but Lil Nas X was very well known on twitter before he got popular. I recognized his handle from screenshots and made the connection only after Old Town Road came out.
Yeah, the only analog bouncing around my brain are accounts like that one, and, say, SwiftOnSecurity. There are people who are really big within a particular niche, and become a "sun" within a solar system. I'm blocked from both of those accounts, but I don't know why. (It's odd, because I usually avoid strong comments of ANY kind). The net effect on this sort of behavior on traffic patterns at Twitter works out quite a bit differently than on YouTube. You probably wouldn't block people on YouTube for the same comment you see on Twitter, and when you do it on Twitter, you're hard-limiting your audience.
Well yeah. If you exclude people like him who got famous on YouTube, then it, indeed, will turn out that nobody becomes famous on YouTube. I have zero idea what your point is trying to illustrate.
What's so special about Justin Bieber that disqualifies him from being counted as someone who became famous on YouTube?
It's VERY different in the way that Twitter is dominated by the US. YouTube, while heavily favoring India and to some extend the US, is much more mix in regards to country of origin.
I agree with the observation that Twitter is for people who are already famous, especially those made famous by US media. YouTube seems to at least allow for creators to build their own following and more importantly: Make money off their work.
If you're famous, you'll almost certainly have a twitter account, although there are obviously exceptions. The same just doesn't seem to go for YouTube. Creating content on YT is a lot more time-consuming than creating it on Twitter, of course.
That's silly. While you can't directly monetize your Twitter account, it can expand or straight up create your reach which you can use as a funnel to whatever monetizable content you have. That probably makes it less valuable for Twitter Inc., but it sure is valuable for Twitter users.
As a recent example, think of Pieter Levels (@levelsio). You think he would've gotten $10k first day sales on his avatar AI project without his Twitter account's reach?
Yeah, but that did a hasty negotiation that resulted in a no-due-diligence contract at that figure, tried very hard to escape the deal, including openly repudiating it and being sued to be forced to consummate it, and only relented and agreed to close on it in the face of court action to force him to which might have imposed additional costs as well.
So, while it is probably worth something, we can say that it is pretty clearly not worth $44B in the clear light of day, even to Musk.
There's not enough "room" to produce interesting content solely on Twitter vs YouTube — you have to hiccup out your value in segmented tweet threads. Thus if Twitter does provide value to followers it is in referencing outside material. Elon is supposedly directing Twitter engineers to go full-steam on reviving Vine so we'll see if that can turn things around.
The vine crowd has long moved to Tiktok; even IG and YT couldn’t steal mindshare from them. Vine has no chance, given that they’re starting with a 6yr old product
I don't know much about Vine, but anecdotally I have ended up spending way too much time on YouTube reels, and have also now been drawn into the equivalent on Facebook, whatever that's called, and I barely use FB. So I don't think the super short form video market is a winner takes all one by any means.
On the contrary there's plenty of room for genuine innovation in this space. For example FB short form videos don't have a dislike button, so I have no way to guide the algorithm, and YouTube reels seems to zero in on some local maximum (in my case, game of thrones and golf videos). There's so much room for improvement in this space.
> There’s not enough “room” to produce interesting content solely on Twitter
While I think that Musk’s plan is going to backfire, it is worth noting that he tries to address this in a narrow respect, in that paid users under the new plan would be able to distribute longer video/audio content with tweets.
The idea that what matters most is having the most followers is very arbitrary and not relevant to many strategies for enjoying Twitter. In my experience, Twitter is best as a place to have conversations, and this is optimal at some number of followers below 10k. There are many accounts out there having an amazing time at small numbers, having curated a medium-sized following of people who are interested in talking with them about the things they want to talk about.
> Twitter has no real "content creators", YouTube does.
I don’t understand the logic. They can be both well known outside of Twitter and create content. Sure, that is not their source of income, but it is harder to monetise a Twitter account, so that’s more or less by design. From the point of view of random people there is not really any functional difference.
In a way Twitter fills the space of being a proliferator of existing content, in a more concise form. In this way people don’t have to choose “do I create on platform X or Y” and instead they create on platform X and feel empowered to share on platform Y because it fills a different use case.
Nice observation. It's more like a direct marketing channel than an actual consumable. The most successful users are directing users to YouTube, e-commerce, voting booths or news sites to actually convert.
If I were YouTube right now, I'd be evaluating the opportunity to eat Twitter's lunch as it'll get distracted by a randomizing new owner. The YouTube posts product really isn't relevant in the current YouTube app, but as a separate experience focused on posts, it might have some value for non-creators on the platform. Bad as it is, YouTube has more of its act together than Twitter when it comes to designing and enforcing content moderation policies at scale.
Today while selecting a handle I was wondering why YT is doing this. There is no real added value except for using a standardized symbol used in social networks.
In my eyes YT is no social network, even though many claim it is.
The comment section, where the discussion and interaction takes place, is like SMS is to WhatsApp, in the sense that it has no surface to enrich dialogue. For example, you can't add images in replies to a comment, comments can't be embedded in websites.
I don't see how they can expand to a multimedia platform, which is what Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are. They're just a video platform and lack everything else which could move it towards a multimedia platform.
Sure he's successful in the real world but having money doesn't make you a celebrity. I wouldn't recognize most of the Forbes list if I passed them in the street. He's actual famous, instead of Wikipedia famous, because of how he's engaged his supporters through Twitter. The chance to interact with him or have him like your meme is the content.
Tho, big difference is that moving to Canada is huge effort and risk. Many people doing that would be mass migration and Canada would try to stop it.
Meanwhile, platform dying cause people left is something that happened many times already. Usually they don't leave with one bang and they won't here. It happens over months slowly.
So I guess they are actually planning to pay Stephen King after all, if he stays Twitter Blue. (Presumably his share of the money would be more than $8/month.)
How they distribute the money will be key. Would it be based on generic follower counts & likes & engagement - which will surely drive massive waves of spambot activity - or will each user's $8/month be distributed to the accounts they follow, almost Patreon or Flattr style? That might actually be interesting.
As someone who doesn't use Twitter, remarks like this have left me very confused. Clearly these people found Twitter valuable before. Does not having the checkmark make it less valuable? Is there an alternative service that provides similar value?
The blue checkmark is a service. Now they want money to continue that service. If you don't want it, don't pay for it. Leaving over concerns about Elon's vision for the platform makes sense, but I really don't get leaving over the checkmark subscription.
I wish I could remember where I saw this to credit (and not paraphrase), but I saw a tweet which said, basically: "Twitter somehow got Stephen King, Taylor Swift and thousands of others to produce content for them for free. And now they want to lose them over $20/month?"
> Twitter somehow got Stephen King, Taylor Swift and thousands of others to produce content for them for free
That's true, but for very small values of "produce content". After all, being rude or posting hot-takes in 140 characters has limited utility outside of your cohort of fans/friends.
Because the content on Twitter is generated by a relatively small number of users. A lot never tweet, quote tweet or retweet but it goes beyond that number once you weight it by audience. A small number of people have a large amount of reach and thus are responsible for a good chunk of the content.
That content is why the users are on Twitter and it is those users who are advertised to that pay for Twitter to exist. That's what Stephen King means.
Now you can turn this around and say that those power users are only there because the audience is and that they get value for being there but platforms need users and users follow creators more than the platform as a general rule.
Maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding of what compels people to use Twitter. I thought the few people in question use Twitter as a convenient tool to communicate with wide audiences (i.e. marketing) and the rest are mostly especially dedicated followers who want to be marketed to. Are there actually people who primarily use Twitter for "content"? Are the blue checkmark people (i.e. celebrities) even the ones generating that content?
The content for billboards is also "generated by a relatively small number of users", but those users still have to pay to use them. I've always seen Twitter as a personal billboard, and a checkmark as a coveted signal booster. But maybe that's wrong?
I’m a research scientist and mostly use it to keep up with people working in similar fields.
There’s certainly some marketing (“Check out our new paper”, “My lab is hiring”, etc), but it’s not particularly top-down; everybody does it to some extent. It’s also mixed in with actual scientific discussion, lab “hacks”, and some silly banter/blowing off steam. All in all, it’s been pretty helpful for me careerwise. I think I’ve gotten more useful advice about grant writing and papers to read than many more formal mentorship arrangements.
There are a few “blue checks”, but they’re mostly a) early adopters or b) people with some kind of public presence. As far as I can tell, neither I nor most others care about the checkmark per se. I talked about my research (twice!) with John Carmack and it was cool to know that it was really the Doom Guy, but I think I probably would have engaged with anybody equally curious about my work.
I'm in a few niche Twitter interest bubbles but none of us are "blue checks". If you're on Twitter for your small niche circle this is a lot of hubbub over little.
It seems rather symbiotic to me. twitter has nothing to offer without people of note. People of note use it to become more popular. I think generally people of note don't need twitter to be successful but twitter needs them
Honestly, Stephen King probably loses more brand equity than that just from what he posts on Twitter. It’s gotten to the point where I actively avoid following any writers or creative types on Twitter just to avoid my perception of their work being colored by how they conduct themselves on Twitter.
Everyone seems to either be assuming King somehow cares about paying $$ instead of making a political statement and/or Elon was making a serious earnest reply to King, instead of being his usual needling shitposter self. Neither of which both of their histories supports.
Stephen King will quit Twitter just as credibly as Jay-z “retired” from rapping.... like Elon Musk gives a shit about convincing a person worth $500M+ that $20 vs $8/m is too much to ask.
I'm sure there's politics involved in the fact that King is the first person we're seeing in this public argument with Musk, but the dynamic he's talking about is apolitical and pretty obvious. For true celebrities, of which King is obviously one, Twitter needs them more than they need Twitter. Twitter should pay them to use the platform. Nobody has ever bought a copy of Carrie because they saw the blue checkmark next to Stephen King's name.
Musk hasn't addressed how he will compensate or at least incentive creators yet. Having a mainline stream of subscriptions certainly provides more avenues for such a thing.
So personally I think the compensation or promotional quid pro quo deals are a very different animal than checkmarks. Unless it means multiple tiers of checkmarks.
He needs something, because he's tied tens of billions of dollars of his own money in an LBO that left him in control of a company with about a billion dollars a year of debt service cost.
I don't need Twitter, since I rarely post on the social, I don't use it for work, and it kind of annoys me too, and if it disappeared I would forget about its existence in two weeks, like I forget about my favorite podcast three days after they started their 3-week summer vacation.
I don't need to go to the gym, but I have been going for about 30 years. If they forced me to spend an extra $8 a month, maybe I would move to another gym where I pay less, but how ridiculous would my statement be, "I don't need the gym, bye"?
Stephen King doesn't need Twitter to publicize his work, and he doesn't even need to work, since he seems to be quite well off. But most celebrities -- "most" is vague, I know -- live to be the center of attention, to be heard, to be considered. And a few years ago the platform was Facebook, then Twitter, after Trump's election, became more and more the place to be if you want to participate in the "discourse."
King needs Twitter now or another platform now or in the future because, apparently, he needs to be heard, to be part of the conversation, to have his old man criticisms heard. But now that platform is Twitter.
On a similar note I feel like Elon is the Ultimate Tweeter in the sense of validation (and amount of validation) he seems to get from posting. I've been wondering if it colored his perception of how the average person interacts with Twitter.
Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience. That's what's so funny about this particular example. There are indeed Twitter celebrities who depend on Twitter for their audience, but King isn't one of them: he's pumping more credibility into Twitter than he's extracting from it, and the platform (and all the Twitter celebrity remora attached to it) depend on people like him to keep doing it.
He's right: Twitter should be paying him. That's not true of all blue-checks, but it's true of many of the most popular of them.
I think it is true of most. If your identity is worth verifying by Twitter, it is apparently worth something to Twitter. If you wanted to prove that your twitter account was you, you wouldn't need their permission, right? Surely you could sign a file on your Twitter account with your PGP key or whatever.
This has always been the bullshit story Twitter tells itself about the blue check. In reality, the value of the check has practically nothing to do with verifying identities, and everything to do with conferring status on people "notable" enough to qualify. The energy source for that status is, in fact, people like King, Swift, LeBron, Obama (and Trump), J. Lo and Jimmy Fallon; Twitter trades off the idea that the check puts its users in the same status tier as those celebrities.
How you know this is, there's a huge population of well-followed Twitter accounts without blue checks, and identity verification controversies virtually never occur. If you found a non-checked 50k-follower account tomorrow and tried to spoof them with a fake account, you'd get shouted down quickly enough that it wouldn't be worth the effort.
My point, again, is that the "verification" part of this is horseshit. It's not the value. It's not why anyone cares about the checks. The checks are endorsements of popularity and importance, and that's all they are.
Diluting that value (to zero, as seems to be the Twitter Blue plan) probably won't chase many celebs off the platform. Why would they care? Twitter isn't doing them any real favors; it's rather the opposite. But it'll lay bare the real dynamics of those stupid blue checkmarks. That might be a positive development for Twitter! But it's not going to make blue checks the next Bored Apes.
(Again: who knows? Maybe a critical mass of Twitter randos will pay for Twitter bling. Weirder things have happened; see apes, above.)
To be fair, it was specifically introduced because of how impersonation of well known people was becoming a problem. Twitter was sued by Tony La Russa because of an impersonation and had a bunch of celebrities complaining about it. [0]
That it has also taken on a status aspect does not take away from its original intent and ongoing usefulness as a verification mechanism. That's especially true for celebrities, politicians, organisations, and journalists.
This is all accurate in my experience but I’d add an additional dynamic that I’ve noticed in a lot of accounts I follow- people who are somewhat popular but not huge celebrities who do have blue checks who since the announcement was made seem to be upset that their coveted blue check is going to be indistinguishable from one someone who didn’t “earn” it who is just paying for it. It’s somewhat like rewarding some kids in the class with a gold star then deciding later everyone gets one. Case in point: https://twitter.com/garyblack00/status/1587332152072568832
The other group are those who have decent followings who have wanted a blue check and have used the imposters argument as a reason for deserving one to protect their followers. In reality it’s a thinly veiled attempt to get what they believe is a symbol conferring status.
The whole thing is pretty pathetic and funny to watch and reminds me of the sneetches.
>> Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience.
Is that really true? Suppose King goes to a new social platform. Sure, I might install that app, but without a critical mass or others on that platform, what are the chances I actually check that app frequently?
Yes, this is really true. People on HN will see less of Stephen King, to the extent that they're not part of his audience (maybe HN is more of an Ari Aster crowd). But that doesn't matter: people aren't spending hundreds of millions of dollars on 2019 movies based on books he wrote in the 1980s because he's driving lots of Twitter engagement.
This whole discussion about King's relevance is super weird. I think it's just Internet poisoning (it happens to all of us). The fact is: Stephen King is probably more culturally relevant than Twitter. That a lot of people on this thread wouldn't even entertain this thought is a cognitive bias that comes from being very online. Most people aren't very online, and even among the very online, Twitter's relevance has been waning for many years.
Most people don't use Twitter at all! But it's actually possible that a significant fraction of the American public --- maybe even most of it! --- has seen or is deeply familiar with a Stephen King film. The #1 film in the IMDB Top 250 is a Stephen King film!
I agree with you to an extent, but I will note that while most Americans don't directly use Twitter, I think a much much larger fraction are exposed to it. It's hard to escape when every news outlet and gossip farm cites it constantly and you have to factor that in when discussing its relevance.
I simultaneously don't think I personally know a single person that uses Twitter regularly and yet I equally don't think I know a single person that doesn't know what it is and sees second hand content from it regularly.
This is so true. Virtually all content in my feed is absolute shit and Twitter unlike Facebook and tiktok is terrible at driving engagement. Everything that’s suggested is crap. Probably just the nature of the platform and its content. I visit the site pretty frequently as a way to gauge stock market sentiment and for that it’s pretty decent but make no mistake the site overall is a bubble of a small sect of society who think they and the site are far more important than they are.
I don’t know a single person in real life who uses the site at all.
While this is true, I think twitter still greatly increases his outreach. It's the only reason most of us are hearing about him. Otherwise, I would definitely not be reading his blog. While I'm sure he would have a dedicated audience, it's not twitter. Not only that, but the more people start personal blogs the less viewers the harder it is to compete for views. For Stephen King, a generational talent, it may not matter-- but there is a calculation to be made for a lot of celebrities. It's kind of like what happened to Netflix; if every celebrity tries to start their own personal blog fans aren't gonna go check all their favorite actors, musicians, writers, developers, socialites, and youtubers blogs'.
Anecdotally this isn't true. The only time I have heard anything about Stephen King in the past few years has been in relation to a tweet he has made.
I think this is true for many significant accounts on the platform: I'm not going to read their blog or watch their Youtube video, but I'll probably see someone resharing a tweet they have made, whether on Reddit, HN, a news website etc.
Which is where I see the huge value in Twitter: a mainstream platform designed to present content in bite-sizes, appropriate for discussion or resharing. Twitter is a reach multiplier for many accounts for this reason.
People who have not heard of King before Twitter and only hear of him from Twitter are not going to be the people buying his books.
So even if there were significant amount of people like you, he is not gaining anything from people seeing his Twitter. On the other hand, I have relatives who created Twitter accounts only to follow authors they like - the number of curated lists of notable literary figures is a testament to that fact.
I'm not saying Twitter is worthless to writers - readers talking about the books certainly helps sales, but that occurs regardless of whether the author themselves are on Twitter or not, and Twitter is certainly not the main platform people use to discuss books.
Trump had 88.9mm followers on twitter.
He has 3.9mm followers on Truth.
Trump will have people listen to him no matter where he’s writing, but one of these platforms is certainly a downgrade in terms of audience than the other.
It's quite a lot, but I wouldn't put it in the realms of addiction. It seems to be quite typical compared to even the personal (i.e. non famous) people I'm following; the higher profile accounts I follow tweet multiples of tens per day.
He wasn't haggling. He was mocking the blue check status symbol in King's face and audience.
$8 makes it cheaper than a Netflix subscription for something that previously exclusive and had no dollar value attached to it. It was literally unbuyable.
We're not really discussing reality if you believe that Stephen King gets status from the blue check rather than it working the other way around. There are people that do (sadly, pathetically) extract status from blue checkmarks, but they're only able to do that because people like Stephen King play ball with this system. The "blue checkmark status" could literally be phrased as "people as high-status as Stephen King and those like him".
Obviously, substitute Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, and LeBron in as appropriate to your particular interests.
The silly way Stephen King distances himself from the unwashed masses is the 400 million copies of his books that he's sold to them, and the various movies and TV properties built on his IP. Again: you're not talking about reality if you think people like King care about blue-check status more than Twitter cares about keeping them happy. You can wishcast that away any way you please, but that's all you're doing. Twitter needs Taylor Swift on the platform talking about Midnights. Twitter could kick Swift off the platform and do nothing at all to her popularity.
What's pretty clearly happening in these conversations is that Twitter-believers are conflating blue-check remora users who have no public profile outside of Twitter with actual celebrities. King is right, and Musk knows it: if he's smart, Musk will in fact find ways to kick things back to King, Swift, and LeBron to keep them happy. He needs them, and they don't need him at all.
No. His last major film, from 2019, had the second-highest opening weekend of any horror film in history. His work might not be relevant to you (it's not especially relevant to me), but we're back in motivated unreality when we start talking about him being culturally irrelevant, or that "nobody knows he's still alive".
Yes. It's a movie from 2019. Stephen King appears in it. I agree: his cultural impact in American is significant enough that books he wrote nearly 40 years ago are the bases for moves that set opening records today. It's pretty nuts!
Twitter needs LeBron James and Taylor Swift and the latest Kpop stars.
It has a sort of symbiotic relationship with world leaders and journalists.
But it does not really need people like James Woods and Kevin Sorbo (to pick two from the other end of the political spectrum). Same goes for 90s grunge bands or 80s hair bands. I fully expect those guys to pay to try to stay relevant. And I would put famous authors from the 70s and 80s in the same category.
In fact, if you visit his IMDB page: <https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000175/>, you'll see that right at this moment, the population of a medium sized city is employed producing content based on his writing.
Except of the social networks I browse, stephenking.com is not one of them. So really no I wouldn't hear of him. I'm sure his die hard fans will though.
You misread what I'm saying. Obviously I would hear his name but I would not be checking what he's posting about online. Which is clearly the situation for a giant writer like King.
I always felt Twitter as "old man yells at cloud" kind of communication. I've never seen proper "content" created (like pinterest, tik tok, etc). Most of the "content" I see are the asinine multi-post threads and text-pictures notices from angry people/companies.
The "content" here is just tweets. It may not be "content" in the way you are imagining, but it's still true that almost all twitter users are using the site to view tweets from a small number of people (call them content creators or influencers if you like) with large numbers of followers.
I’d argue this isn’t true in sports journalism. A news tweet from Woj, Schefter, Rappoport, or Shams has far more reach than the same content in a random ESPN article or sportscenter segment. Without twitter, a whole world of addicted sports fans would have no idea who those guys are.
Agreed. If I like a writer I always find better ways than Twitter to follow them - Substack, etc
And even if they tweet something worthwhile it’s usually followed by 98% garbage replies with “LOL you’re so stupid” so I’m not wasting my time sifting through that trash heap.
It is useful for events with people on the ground to share info - the story of the guy in Pakistan tweeting about helicopters when Bin Laden was killed was pretty amazing to be honest.
But those types of writers tend to die out after the event.
I guess it depends on what kind of content you're looking for. One account I follow tweets what amounts to live reviews of video games (often obscure) with video clips and images. I think that's just as 'proper' as anything I've seen on pinterest or tiktok.
> In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.
Musk is only doing with Twitter what Fark.com did over 20 years ago with TotalFark - you pay a small monthly fee for admission, and you get a shiny badge next to your username, along with a few perks.
Just like Something Awful forums did before that - paid admission - it's an excellent tool to weed out the obvious bots and low effort trolls.
Twitter has no "creators" - it's just a fancy message board.
Everything old is new again. The Gen-Z kids on Twitter and TikTok were still pooping in diapers when these sites ruled the Internet, and now have sadly been relegated to a dusty corner thereof.
Bad actors who are trying to push some agenda to make money for example, are more likely to pay than ordinary lurkers who click the "retweet" button once in a while. Twitter is not that important, if it becomes pay-to-play, I'm out, sorry.
> Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line
As Stephen King rightly pointed out: Twitter should be paying him - not the other way around (IHO). Anyway, this is going to be interesting.
>f you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.
Maybe I'm an outlier but of my hundreds of follows ~1% have checkmark. The bulk of my followers are artists, photographers, niche bloggers, subculture news aggregators which are all creating content.
The verified checkmark is basically a non-entity to my time on twitter, maybe it's different if you mainly follow more mainstream western pop culture and political/news media.
But if you are a frequent creator, you're also planning on making the content a viable financial venture. At the very least, Twitter is used as a marketing platform. Which means paying $8 a month for what is essentially free hosting for your marketing, is a no brainer.
I'm not sure why asking consumers to pay would be a good idea because we already have Patreon. Only a fraction of consumers would actually pay for content, so doing this would probably cause a lot of consumers to leave. Whereas the price for a content creator is very low, even at $20/month.
In other words, if you want the blue checkmark, you're definitely interested in the marketing yourself. So, why not pay for that privilege?
I assumed the verification fee serves a different purpose to gathering revenue: the cost to buy influence could go up by an order of magnitude. Economics will neuter the bots.
Everyone working at the IRA.ru troll farm now needs to be issued with (even more) stolen payment credentials and monthly costs go up by $8 per troll account.
Even worse, recruiting useful idiots — unwitting members of the public who are aligned with the troll message and who voluntarily amplify misinformation — is going to get much harder. Now you don’t just need Average Joe to retweet your carefully worded calls-to-action about missing emails or stolen elections. You need him to pay $8 a month too.
> So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money
This sounds like "pay to follow" (or at least "please donate X monthly to your favorite creators" ala Patreon).
I think to most Twitter users, content has a value of €0. If you ask users to pay then they'd rather switch to another free creator, or not use Twitter at all.
If users see any value in creators at all, that'll be having interacted with creators for a long time and having developed a deep connection. Or if creators started publishing "premium content" that's obviously worth in.
Onlyfans may be an extreme example of it, but all such successful platforms – YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and the rest – are paying their popular users a lot of money to stay there.
> > So you want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.
> I think it’s only Onlyfans that can get away with such a business model.
OnlyFans is not (by far) the only site that has a business model of “consumers purchase from producers and the site rakes in a share from that”, nor even the only one (again, by far) with that model where what is purchased is digital content.
How many people are willing to directly pay for content on those other platforms vs those who are not? Contrast that to Onlyfans' monetization success rate.
> That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal.
I doubt you know what thoughts Elon has in his head. He likely has ideas for changes, similar to the linked page. After all, he purchased the company in order to make changes.
He purchased the company because his lawyers finally convinced him he was going to be forced to and that it was a poor choice to continue damaging the asset he was going to be owning.
That's your belief. It is quite likely that the court actions were mean to pressure twitter. That isn't an uncommon tactic. The two facts we know are that Musk stated he would purchase twitter to make changes, and he has started to make changes after the purchase.
> If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is basically part of your job so maybe you should have to pay a bit more just like the customer of some business software
I think this completely misunderstands why social media products like Twitter are successful.
Those journalists (or gamers, or comedians, or porn stars) that you're arguing should be considering $9 a month as cost of business, they are the content creators and the only justification for a business like twitter having any value at all. Principally, twitter is a network, and these users are the highly connected nodes of that network. How fast will superconnectedness decline without them? Superexponentially.
The people with blue check marks aren't your customers or clients: they are your product.
I think you're wrong. The network is stronger than that.
Yes, those highly-connected nodes could easily kill the network... if they all coordinated to leave at once. Which is a real risk here, because of how high-profile and controversial the issue is right now. But normally, they're just as glued to the network as everyone else. Perhaps even more so, because...
... they aren't creating content for fun. They're creating it to make money off the audience. So they have to stick to where the audience is.
People with blue check marks would like to think they're special and valuable to the platform, but they're not. At this scale, they're a commodity too. They play a different role on the platform, but for the platform, users with different roles is just what makes the whole thing tick and print money.
This is exactly right. It's the same as how some popular YouTubers hedge their bets by publishing in parallel to their own sites or to other video platforms, yet they keep letting YouTube dictate their business decisions because it's the only place they can make money.
Nope. That may be true for a thin slice of Twitter's most active and popular users, but not at all for the long tail of people posting in niche interest areas that keep people engaged. The scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers, OSINT researchers, etc who post interesting content and keep people returning to Twitter to engage with it.
Some of those get some reward from it in terms of added publicity, others in terms of building out their network, but a bunch even do it anonymously and seem to get no real world financial benefit from it other than sharing what they're working on and having discussions with other people interested in the same things.
Musk seems to fundamentally misunderstand not only how and why regular people use Twitter, but also how popular but non-celebrity people use it. He only sees it through his own lens, which is as a marketing tool, a way to move markets, and a place to shitpost freely. His changes make sense in that context only.
Think you're over-estimating their value, if they were posting their thoughts elsewhere without the blue check next to their name no one would be engaging with it, it's honestly such bad content.
There's journalism and there's "journalism". There's certainly standup publications with great authors who make names for themselves by writing great articles. I've been really enjoying Heather Knight's coverage of public waste/corruption in SF for example. On the other hand, there's a lot of really crappy journalists who churn out top 10 lists on shady publications to get paid and desperately need that blue check to add whatever legitimacy they can grasp for to their names. The former category will have no trouble without Twitter, the latter will struggle. That's the steelman anyway. Most crappy journalists would flame out with or without a blue checkmark though.
If you’re a journalist (or your other suggestions) then you’re basically using Twitter as free advertising to (a) your followers and (b) people who read your tweets which have been retweeted. Having people coming towards the way you actually make money is probably worth a lot more than $8 per month to you, even considering that journalists aren’t so well paid (the idea of blue checks getting paywall bypass could be very good for journalists too – they could end up more directly getting value out of people coming to their work from Twitter).
Paying $8 per month for this free advertising seems pretty great. How much would it cost to send this out via actual ads or eg mailchimp (but of course it is much easier to have new people see your tweets than your marketing emails)?
Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc.
Blue checks should never be pay to play. They weren't designed that way. The problem is the ambiguity of the blue check leads to arbitrage that it seems all parties are interested in cashing in on. If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. Elon's backtracking about price parity just illuminates the capitalist nature of the entire thing. Charge what we can, not what we should.
We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.
> We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.
25% of US Adults produce 97% of tweets on Twitter. 75% of Twitter users don't post a single tweet per month. 42% of Twitter users that produce < 20 tweets / month find civility issues with the platform, and only 27% of them feel politically engaged. Twitter has nothing to do with "humanity as a whole". It's obvious that the group that uses Twitter is niche yet highly engaged. Matters relating to Twitter's "social and intellectual needs" are only relevant to highly engaged Twitter users.
This is normal for a community. These statistics naturally fall in line with the Pareto Principle, and the concept of the vital few. [0]
> Twitter has nothing to do with "humanity as a whole". It's obvious that the group that uses Twitter is niche yet highly engaged.
You are confusing posting on Twitter with using it. The vast majority are lurkers who still consume information and then regurgitate that information in real life on other platforms. The statistics you provided don't paint an accurate picture of the "usefulness" of Twitter in modern public discourse.
Do you have a better popular example of a modern day forum?
> This is normal for a community. These statistics naturally fall in line with the Pareto Principle, and the concept of the vital few.
The Pareto Principle is just a rule-of-thumb, it's not an actual law of anything, and is just an expression of power law dynamics. It's true that power law dynamics are common in most online communities, but 97% of content being created by 25% of users is staggering, a much stronger power law than most other forums. This is a highly engaged, medium-sized community (though I realize the nature of the platform (followers, algorithmic priority, etc) means that there are multiple overlapping sets of communities rather than a single community, and that these communities often vehemently grief each other.)
> You are confusing posting on Twitter with using it. The vast majority are lurkers who still consume information and then regurgitate that information in real life on other platforms. The statistics you provided don't paint an accurate picture of the "usefulness" of Twitter in modern public discourse.
Only 23% [1] of Americans use Twitter. Compare that to 81% of Americans using Youtube and 69% of Americans using Facebook. Only 13% of US Adults [2] get their news from Twitter, while 31% from Facebook and 22% from Youtube. Americans are the largest users of Twitter, followed by the Japanese. It's main significance in the public discourse derives from the 69% of American journalists [2] that use Twitter as part of their job, and this is not "public" discourse as much as journalist discourse.
> Do you have a better popular example of a modern day forum?
I know very few people in my real life that actually use Twitter. The ones that do are mostly in subcultures with a large presence on Twitter. My family doesn't use Twitter, most Twitter employees I know don't use Twitter. My partner only uses Twitter because she networks with other artists on it but doesn't actually use it for news or politics. Most of my friends don't use Twitter. Most people in my network know of Twitter only through quoted reports in news articles.
I think, and unless you have statistics to show otherwise, that the idea of a "modern day forum" role for Twitter lies only in the minds of highly engaged Twitter users. I mean I'm a highly engaged user of HN and I would be quite sad if it went away and actively fight to maintain its culture. I've watched a lot of online communities rot over time so I understand what it's like to watch your community change. But I don't pretend that HN or other online communities I'm part of are somehow a vital resource for all of humanity. The only noteworthy thing about Twitter's community is the number of journalists and celebrities talking to each other on it. That's all.
> The Pareto Principle is just a rule-of-thumb, it's not an actual law of anything, and is just an expression of power law dynamics.
I never said otherwise.
> 97% of content being created by 25% of users is staggering
100% agree, it's just not surprising and is within a range observed in other communities. It's also unclear how many accounts constitute as active.
> I know very few people in my real life that actually use Twitter.
I don't know if most citizens necessarily hung out at the forum all day either, I'd be curious what percentage of ancient Greek and Roman populations made use of forums, and how frequently. If, besides commerce, discourse was often left to highly engaged citizens.
> I don't pretend that HN or other online communities I'm part of are somehow a vital resource for all of humanity.
I think positive networking is one of the most important activities our generation should be engaged in. We should be forming rich, useful and sustainable social networks which allow us to tackle problems at scale. A lot of serious relationships, companies, and ideas come out of places where similar minds meet such as Hacker News. Whether it's vital to some arbitrary societal metric is of little interest to me, as it is personally vital to my own life and I'm sure my individual experience is common enough to warrant nurturing.
> 75% of Twitter users don't post a single tweet per month.
75% of actual users or 75% of user accounts? I'm guessing the latter since the former is impossible to count. I'm almost surprised it's not higher — I think I have 5 twitter accounts and I definitely haven't posted from 4 of those for way over a month.
> Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc.
And those areas don't proportionally don't matter to Twitter. Even so, the very next tweet by Musk, in reply to the linked one, says:
> Price adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity
So that addresses this complaint.
> If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. (...) We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.
Since when is Twitter our "modern Greek forum"?
Just until a few days ago, being critical of Musk was strongly correlated with the belief that social media companies are private entities, free to do as they wish (and in particular ban whoever they want). It's ironic how fast things change :).
I understand that Twitter doesn't care about poor minority areas. I agree. I already addressed the parity tweet in my above comment so regarding your question about Twitter being a modern forum, I'd ask you if there are some better popular examples of the digital equivalent of a public, outdoor area where social activity, meetings, debates and more are conducted.
Indeed. This discussion has been far too American-centric and not considered the impact this would have on Twitter users elsewhere in the world. Especially journalists in developing countries and war zones, who have been able to use Twitter to amplify stories that would otherwise have been missed or ignored.
I can't find a reference off the top of my head but earlier this year I saw a journalist post their engagement data on Twitter and it was shockingly bad. If I recall correctly they had hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds of click-throughs to their website.
>> But other people use Twitter in different ways.
Saw a roundtable about this and a film maker said it was really hard when they're about to release a film and someone uses a fake Twitter handle that's close to theirs releases the trailer or footage before they wanted it released.
Paying to have a blue check on their account would cut down this type of piracy or release of trailers before the producer wants to. They said it would be very worth it to maintain the legitimacy of what they're doing.
I'm assuming other types of creators would see the value in being able to say, "If its not from my verified account, then its not (me, my work, my companies work) and you should ignore it."
The most common scam I see on Twitter is imposter accounts replying to a real person with a link to some crypto scam. Right now you can usually immediately tell it's a different person since the reply doesn't have a check mark, this system seems like it will make it easier since the scammer can just get a checkmark.
You really don't though. It's trivially easy to create new valid unique payment information with a free virtual credit card number and a fake name/address. This is a very hard problem to truly solve.
Are virtual cards actually useful for crimes? I assumed they were primarily for ending subscriptions that make canceling orders of magnitude harder than signing up.
Actual scammers I expect have stolen credit card databases to test.
> If you mostly use it as a social network between your friends you might not care because they’ll presumably see your tweets because they follow you rather than because they found them in search or whatever.
One would think, but I rarely see tweets from people I follow.
For example, I just scrolled my feed, and 51 out of the first 60 tweets were from strangers (the other 9 were either tweets or retweets from people I follow). One of the tweets was even from Taylor Swift. I have no idea why Twitter thought I'd want to see that, since I mostly just follow devs. Downranking people who don't pay the subscription means I'm going to see even less of those devs than I already am.
If you scroll back through my post history, you'll see me singing Twitter's praises and telling people that they just need to curate their feed if they don't like what they're seeing. This is no longer the case. I admit defeat.
Personally, I'd be more than willing to pay $8/mo for Twitter if it meant no more ads and helped the company become profitable from something besides ads. I have YouTube Premium for those exact reasons. I hate what the attention economy has done to user experience, and if paying for Twitter gave me a significantly better user experience, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I went into twitter hoping to find more of the SWE community. I took the approach that when you're posting it's you to everyone. I went to a few conferences and made a few connections. But often times it thins out, and you really don't maintain that connection there.
It ended up feeling like it was nothing but tribes and influencers bolstering themselves or people trying to market their product (dev advocates). Theres no motivation to have productive conversations, learn new things, or really get a lot of value out of it. On top of that you have extremists trying to make sure you don't the wrong opinion.
I guess I am an outlier in this, but I don't think I have a single "famous" person that I follow - maybe some bigger figures in a niche area, but the people that have the blue mark are not the draw for me.
But when I do search for them, it is convenient to see the blue mark to figure out what might be the account I am looking for.
I don't think it is convenient. These people have a website or verified profile on Google to already determine which social media profiles belong to them. All the blue checkmark will tell me in the future is these people are dumb enough to pay for snake oil.
> Way too much noise. I follow dev and engineering stuff
Now imagine the people you follow being deprioritized by the Twitter algorithm in favor of the LinkedIn-influencer types (you know they'll be first in line for the checkmarks)
And I agree with Stephen King. YouTube rewards content creators and provides a strong platform for creators to market themselves. Twitter provides a platform for brain farts and now they want to charge for a blue checkmark. I guess Musk believes if people are stupid enough to believe in his lies before that they'll be stupid enough to pay for a blue checkmark.
Wait until you see how they begin marketing the subscription.. it will be ridiculous. Might as well be trying to sell snake oil.
Look at LV 'hyperloop' [0], and people who paid upfront for FSD [1] and are issuing a class action lawsuit and re-think what you just said about 'might.' I think this isn't about Tesla or SpaceX or any specific company he is CEO of as they are all amazing feats of tech/engineering, it's about Elon's horrible PT Barnum type marketing that worked for a bit but has lost all of it's luster at this point.
anywhere or nowhere else. do you think tweeting is really an essential part of Stephen King's professional or personal life? he could just stop.
he's a famous author. he's got a website, a publisher with an advertising budget, and other social media channels. his audience will follow him. he can post on facebook, his mailing list, his own website, or none of the above.
For journalists it's not basically part of your job, it often literally is! Many media organisations require their reporters to maintain an active online professional presence on Twitter.
I once wanted to be a journalist in college. Lucky for me, I had a teacher who was a former newscaster for the local Fox news station teaching a class on just that. Long story short, she connected me with someone currently working as a journalist. His advice? Everyone is freelance now, only a rare lucky few are permanent staff writers today. You have to have a social media following, first thing to do is start a Twitter account and build a presence. He also heavily hinted that I should not enter the field unless I absolutely love it because it's getting to be an awful job. Just my experience.
Twitter's market position gives it plenty of power if they just figure out how to use it. If they gave free blue checks to government officials, tenured professors at accredited universities, and licensed medical practitioners, they could easily get away with forcing everyone else to pay. It's the standard nightclub trick: women get in free, men pay. People will pay to be in a group with the highly regarded people you gave free entry to.
> There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life.
Twitter also needs them so it’s a symbiotic relationship. In some cases I’d say Twitter needs them more than they need it. Like popular music celebrities, sport stars etc. So Twitter has to tread carefully not to antagonize such crowd pullers lest they migrate to a competitor social media.
That's a misinterpretation of what the blue tick mean. It's to protect the reader from impersonators. That it does help the authors to get followers is an almost unintended side effect.
If you charge for it, you are essentially inverting it purpose, and eventually what will happen is that readers will no longer have that protection, since authors might not pay for it.
Given that, Twitter becomes a less secure place for readers and, if people are smart [1] they will leave it in favor of networks where they can at least trust that what they read came from who they think wrote it.
1: people usually aren't, so I wouldn't be surprised if only a small percentage of people give up on Twitter after this. Still, that's what should happen.
I wont be paying. I only paid for blue to get rid of the spaces button in the app. I really only use Twitter as a way to complain and vent into a void. I know no one else cares what I say and I'm fine with that.
Twitter should not be editorally curating people through verification, making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change, as long as it's not necessary for participation. Brands, celebrities, those in the public eye could benefit from this. Needs to be implemented with care and ideally with a branding change so as not to confuse users as the semantics change.
The bad:
$8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported user. There's no excuse for "half the ads", it should be none at all. See: every streaming service. (Edit: ok some streaming services have ads, but for most online content - video, journalism, etc, if you subscribe there are no ads, it's just nickle-and-diming users to give them a bunch of ads, particularly when the marginal cost for Twitter Blue is essentially zero).
The ugly:
Paying $8 to get your voice heard by more people biases towards those with means rather than those contributing to the conversation. At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter, at worst this is ripe for abuse.
The people willing to pay, the heavy users, are also the people most engaged and posting content on the platform. Content that twitter needs for less heavy users to consume, bringing in eyeballs for advertisers.
Continuing to show ads to paying content creators is double-dipping.
I'd expect those two to intersect for sure, but I imagine there are plenty of people with enough disposable cash that enjoy twitter but contribute very little. Or maybe I am just an extreme outlier :)
I doubt $8 will be the only option. I’d bet $1000 that there will be a $16 (or whatever the ROI bar is) tier to be completely ad free.
$8 entry fee seems reasonable from a pyscological perspective. It sounds like the modern version of $9.99, since 3 numbers is taboo on the Twitter style internet and 8 sounds better than 9
They _should_ have the corp version. Corp accounts (@corp_name) should be like $1000/year or something like that (probably could charge $10,000 and more). Nike, Coke, Dell, Disney, etc.
You know — that is a genuinely good idea. It's easily the best monetization idea for Twitter I've heard, especially amidst the last decade of nonsense about "brand advertising" and "blue checkmarks."
Just one thing — add a couple more zeros. $100k/yr is not unreasonable for an enterprise offering here. They could introduce all kinds of B2B features for companies that want to use Twitter as a support forum (or, given Twitter's popularity, are forced into using it as a support forum).
Off the top of my head — things like rolling up different sub-accounts under one main corporate account, formalizing the ability for multiple support staff to work one account (and charge per seat!), having deeper integration with Zendesk and other ticketing systems, extracting metrics and showing dashboards for how support (and sentiment) is doing, introducing some AI/ML to help companies match Twitter accounts of their customers to internal customer IDs, enabling ML-powered DMing of targeted offers, introducing chatbots that can be trained to field support queries over DM, etc, etc.
Anyway, it's a really good idea. Maybe you should've bought Twitter.
Basically a tier for global brands that manage multiple regional accounts and need top level support. Which I'm sure already exists informally like all B2B SaaS sites that have listed monthly fees where big accounts are handled personally.
But more to your point I think there should be a paid bracket below that tier of global mega corps which is formalized and public. At least for transparency and marketing reasons.
That's a good point, but while I don't have any data, I've heard anecdotally that for services that implement paid user tiers with no advertising, they always make much more from paid users than ads, on the order of 5-10x. While there is a distribution on how much ads users are worth, it's not enough to overcome that difference _at scale_. There are a small number of users who are worth $$$$, but they're a small amount of absolute revenue because there are so few.
You're making the same point that you're replying to. The juiciest users pay, so the non-paying users are the penny pinchers that convert way less on ads, so the ad revenue is obviously very low compared to the revenue from the paid users.
Similar to how people self selected into iOS and android and to this day its way more effective to advertise to less price sensitive iOS users than Android users with cheap phones, though the effect was even larger in the early days.
Similar to how the CTR of ads on msn.com or live.com was once way higher than everywhere else because anyone who was fooled in to using those default start pages was probably more easily fooled in all aspects.
> Paying $8 [...] At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter
Really? That seems completely contrary to my experience. In every online community I've seen, a higher barrier to entry has always been positively correlated with the quality of the conversation.
Not saying there won't be downsides to this, but I very much doubt a lower quality of conversation will be one of them.
But it's not a higher barrier to entry – you can read and respond freely. It's a higher barrier to having a good experience, which I can't think of many successful examples of to be honest.
You can already filter out non-verified mentions and replies. Presumably that's not going away, and will be used by far more people after this change. It very much is a barrier to entry.
But the verified mention is no longer a verified mention. It’s a paid mention.
And the people most likely to pay to ensure that their responses are seen broadly are narcissists and people who want to sell you stuff like their latest get rich quick scheme, newsletter
Subscription, etc.
Actual verified users will dwindle in comparisons and the value of filtering out non “verified” responses will plummet.
Sure, but I hope as mainly a reader of Twitter this change comes along with a box I can check that says 'only show Tweets from people I follow and those who are verified'. Overnight, most of my bot issues are fixed. And, any people I don't want to hear from again are easily blocked.
Yup. I'm gonna keep drumming this up: most markets today are supplier-driven. The "barrier to having a good experience" gets higher, and the experience gets worse, and there's shit all you can do about it, because you're only able to choose out of what's on the market, and the market isn't serving lower barrier / better experience options it did a month, year or decade ago.
> and the market isn't serving lower barrier / better experience options it did a month, year or decade ago.
That's irrelevant, and very often false. But the options offered by the market at any given time are generally better at higher price points, which is, oddly, exactly what the commenter upthread was outraged by.
> It's a higher barrier to having a good experience, which I can't think of many successful examples of to be honest.
The way I read the poster is that they think being asked to pay more will create worse experience, which is implied to be stupid. Except it isn't, it's literally what's happening in every market all the time. Getting people to pay more for worse product is entirely normal, and the way it usually works is by removing the option to keep paying the same amount for the product they currently enjoy.
>> It's a higher barrier to having a good experience, which I can't think of many successful examples of to be honest.
> The way I read the poster is that they think being asked to pay more will create worse experience
That is something they say, but the quote you pulled isn't related to it. You were looking for this one:
>> At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter
But they never bother to justify that.
> which is implied to be stupid.
The quote you pulled is stupid. Nothing is more common than successful examples of placing a higher barrier in front of the good experience than there is in front of the bad experience.
I never justified it because that quote is nowhere in my comment.
Regardless, it’s not as “stupid” as you claim. How many social networks have added a premium tier for non commercial users, while degrading the quality of the free tier and been successful?
Closest I can think of are dating apps, which have a unique driver behind them that Twitter doesn’t have.
Some users (US users, or those willing to pay $8/mo for Twitter) are generating multiple times the average revenue per user. People in poorer countries are generating less than the average revenue per user.
On Facebook, for instance, US users bring in 5x the worldwide average revenue per user.
That is why it's only a reduction in ads. This deal reduces their revenue per user if they went ad free for those users.
>making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change
Where does he say there will be any verification around ID? Twitter needs to make sure that I can't just name my account @WhiteHouseCommunications and pay $8 to get a blue checkmark. The whole point of the blue checkmark was to personally review those accounts to make sure they are who they say they are. Is Twitter still going to put in this manual effort for a greater base of verified users especially after they seemingly plan to downsize staff?
Yeah, that strikes me as the real problem with this plan. Setting aside all the criticisms that can be made of how Twitter has handled verification (and "de-verification") in the past, the point of being verified was to signal "Twitter, the company, has a high degree of confidence that this account is who or what they claim to be," not to signal "Twitter, the company, is getting eight bucks a month from whoever this person is".
The conflating of an authentically derived status ("This person is real") with a paid form of status both defeats the purpose of the first, and is somewhat telling about a particular mindset.
That isn't how verification currently works and I can't imagine that is how Twitter would want it to work in the future. People change their display name all the time on Twitter and can even change their username. Plus Facebook has already shown that real name policies are hard and can cause user pushback and that was with a community that already is more lined up with our real life identities. Pseudonymous accounts are a huge part of Twitter.
Plenty of streaming services have ad-supported versions that are in this price range (e.g. Hulu, HBO Max). I don't disagree that having ads at all on Twitter Blue is bad, but I'm not sure the comparison with streaming services works.
But every streaming service* has to pay for content, either license or create - on Twitter, the users generate the content. In my mind the costs to acquire content are much lower for twitter. They have other technological challenges, some similar, some dissimilar to video streamers, but content wise, Twitter doesn't pay for anything.
* Youtube premium has a mix of user content and licenced content but doesn't have ads (other than live reads which don't count here)
I dont think twitter is anywhere near Netflix or even youtube premium in terms of what it provides. And I am saying it as someone who do actually uses twitter (unlike half of HN who claims to never use it).
> See: every streaming service. (Edit: ok some streaming services have ads, but for most online content - video, journalism, etc, if you subscribe there are no ads, it's just nickle-and-diming users to give them a bunch of ads, particularly when the marginal cost for Twitter Blue is essentially zero).
Even after your edit, this isn't true. NYTimes includes ads in their paid subscription products. AFAIK, most premium news and editorial still includes ads. It's not nearly as many or as intrusive as the free pubs like NYPost, but there's still ads even though I'm paying $20/mo for NYTimes
"biases towards those with means rather than those contributing to the conversation"
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. If you are a user who actively contributes to the conversation and get's value out of being in that conversation, then it's likely you derive enough value to pay $8. The difference however is that now your contribution is more likely to be seen. You might even engage more now.
If you aren't that user, then maybe you don't derive enough value from conversation because you are mostly a consumption user. So you continue as you do today, consuming and occasionally replying to tweets but hardly ever having your response seen or acknowledged.
> I'm not sure this is a bad thing. If you are a user who actively contributes to the conversation and get's value out of being in that conversation, then it's likely you derive enough value to pay $8. The difference however is that now your contribution is more likely to be seen. You might even engage more now.
I disagree. Diverse input results in better conversations – less of an echo chamber, less black and white thinking, more visibility for other viewpoints, more empathy.
There is diversity among people who want to spend $8/mo on Twitter, but there is far more by definition among all Twitter users. Plus you're likely to discriminate against already marginalised groups in most regions, as marginalised groups (whatever the categorisation) tend to have less disposable income.
>I disagree. Diverse input results in better conversations – less of an echo chamber, less black and white thinking, more visibility for other viewpoints, more empathy.
But how many different people are necessary to give the diversity of thought on a particular topic? I bet it is not many, certainly fewer than 100, maybe 50, or on some topics even just 20.
I totally disagree. If you actually contribute to a conversation (which means saying something which is considered relevant by the people taking part in it - not just saying something random) people will reply to you or share your views or just add a like (or platform equivalent), thus making your voice heard.
On the other hand, paying to boost your tweet regardless of its actual value is going to be a great tool for spammers, troll or people who really care more about saying something than they care about its utility to the conversation. This will definitely drive down quality (and I'm ready to bet that browser extensions to just block out anything from paid users will start popping up).
Nah. Basically, who will loose are topical experts who tweeted about what they knew well about. Layers tweeting about law, developers tweeting about frameworks, academics tweeting about crypto, viruses, history. These wont pay and will be less visible.
These topical experts as you put it, make more than $8/month today from their engaged audiences. What Twitter should do is build better engagement tools for them and then monetize that at much more than $8/month.
You think Stephen King, who is worth $500m, is going to drop Twitter for $96/year. That tweet itself was him doing a good job of using that platform (twitter) and his audience to get some free exposure.
Lol, no they don't. They are not rich and they live on fixed or unrelated salaries.
Stephen King is not subject matter expert. He is popular writer. He is also quite atypical in that he is so popular, then he really don't end twitter engagement all that much. I don't know whether he will ultimately pay, but he actually don't have to.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about value, it's about means. $8/month could mean a lot or mean very little to your finances. That doesn't mean the person that can afford it is any more valuable to the conversation.
But the people who would pay $8 dollars, regardless of finances, derive enough value from being bluechecked in the first place. Paying the money would fulfill would fulfill a higher rung of their hierarchy of needs than it would for most others.
That'll immediately remove a lot of useful contributors, including journalists in developing countries, people working on interesting things in niche areas, and so many others.
Every network analysis of Twitter shows that the majority of people are not all engaging just with the blue checks or the most popular accounts. There's a huge long tail that keeps most users on the platform.
Please do realize that $8 is something completely different for a Norwegian than a Bangladeshi. For one it's the cost of a beer, for the other, the wages of days work.
So if I put my location on twitter to Burundi, then request a blue checkmark, I'd get it for $0.80/month? Or would they have a team of people verifying that I'm from the country I say I am? Oh, wait.
Point being: this whole thing was terribly poorly thought out, a lot of details left uncovered, in a niche where exactly those details are of crucial importance.
My guess is that the $8/mo user pool is a target demo for advertisers who like people who like subscriptions. And there can be a premium charge for targeting the $8 burger
The key difference is that streaming services purchase valuable content and resell it. There is obvious demand and the market clearly exists.
Twitter provides little in the way of mass entertainment, unless you enjoy watching people argue with trolls in an algorithmically-created drama. The content is not created by twitter. There is no obvious market demand; the vast majority of people on the planet wouldn't bother using twitter even if it was free.
excellent point - I should use the active present tense. That is: "most people alive today don't bother with twitter, despite the fact that it's free."
Is it "free" in other meanings of the word - free of charge, free speech, free expression, freedom of religion, freedom to lie, freedom to intimidate? Time will tell.
I do wonder whether their days are numbered though. I can see it going one of two ways – full ban of all third party clients, or a far more open API. Musk is so unpredictable, both would appear to fit his viewpoints on these things.
I'd also say that $8 a month is a great price to astroturf for a month. Also why is the idea of Twitter monthly even sensible? Who plans their Twitter identity as a power user month to month? Why is it not just $100 a year?
Will they actually be doing ID verification? Binance is one of the investors, so it might just be "if you can pay $8 you can be whoever you want, at least for a while".
Crypto people are generally not in favor of providing your government ID for things. "Pay $8 in crypto and also give us your identification documents" will not be popular.
You do in fact need to prove your identity if you want to trade on binance. (KYC requirement.) So I don't see why they would have a problem with making people prove their identity for a bluecheck.
Yeah, there were ads in Newspapers and Magazines too that you paid money.
There is an entire generation of entitled people who grew up in 0% VC-funded businesses who are accustomed to getting great products for free who have to adjust to the reality of cost of capital.
> Yeah, there were ads in Newspapers and Magazines too that you paid money.
The publishers of those paid for the content, paid for editing, paid for the physical medium, paid for physical distribution.
Twitter is distributing short pieces of text, some images and video on a medium that is famously cheaper than everything that came before it, while not paying anything to the authors and has no editors.
There's nothing good. When everyone can buy a checkmark, it becomes nothing.
The next step is "only allow replies from blue checkmarks"
both are bad ideas, and solely because of musk's obsession with bots. Without a mob to prop up people with retweets, twitter will be useless. You cant have the good parts without the ugly parts
Everyone can’t buy a checkmark. Bots will be almost impossible to scale at $8/mo, which means if you deprioritize or hide content from bots without the check, Twitter has a realistic shot at eliminating the bot problem.
Bots are probably a very big problem for a small subset of Twitter users, like Musk himself, who is positively swarmed with them. But the median Twitter user is unlikely to care about this problem to the tune of several dollars a month. I get a crypto spam message about once every other day. I wouldn't pay anything to take care of that problem, because it's just not big enough to care about.
I think it's more likely that the real goal of this "Twitter Blue" proposal is to start getting users to pay for bling. Which could work! It certainly works in gaming communities.
Certainly, services for current blue-checks can't be a big part of the plan here, because of:
(1) The Stephen King problem, which is the (correct) observation that people like King are adding far more value to Twitter than they extract from it, and are reasonably not inclined to ante anything up to Musk.
(2) There aren't enough of them to make a dent in Twitter's cash flows.
If you took away the publicity angle (which Elon Musk can't take away but we can hypothetically), Stephen King's social media professionals might pay $800/month and not even tell him if that's what helped accomplish their goals.
checkmarks mean prestige, exclusivity, and validation. public figures and journalists love prestige, they live for it. twitter just removed one thing that made it attractive to them. being able to buy it means it s useless for anything other than removing spam
that s a very odd way to remove spam . and personally i dont see twitter bots because i dont go searching for them. Musk is completely obsessed with the wrong problem
checkmarks ALSO mean you are who you say you are. making them a feature of Twitter Blue (note: one feature of Twitter Blue) eliminates any status that might have been conferred in the past, yes, but it also goes a long way to sorting legitimate from fake users.
They are who you say you are - assuming you can do proper verification of individual identity and affiliation, authorization to represent a business or brand, etc. for some portion of that first $8 payment.
> When everyone can buy a checkmark, it becomes nothing
Where does it say everyone can buy a checkmark without verification? I read this as everyone can be verified, which is a good thing. And, it will go a long way to killing off the bots.
I assume a small fraction would pay $8/mo for Twitter. Limiting who can reply seems like a useful feature - I think this already exists for "only people I follow".
Virtually all streaming services still have ads at the paid tier: sponsored content in YouTube videos, product placement everywhere, athletes that are living billboards.
Netflix has ad-tier coming for $7/month. HBO Max costs like $16/month. I get ads for Hulu, but that costs only $.99/month on Black Friday deal. I'm paying $80/year for Disney, and I think Apple is still charging only $5/month. So....I don't know, $8 doesn't feel that ridiculously out of line priced.
Those companies all spend money to create and/or license content. Twitter seems to want users to pay $8/mo and continue to see ads for the privilege of creating the content that brings users to Twitter?
Yes? It's actually better for Twitter because they can get pocket most of the money.
Companies aren't voluntarily charging barely enough to cover costs - they're being forced to do it by competition. Normally, they'll charge you as much as they can get away with.
It would be news if Twitter, or anyone else for that matter, decided to voluntarily charge less for the sake of fairness to the users.
That's not it. Twitter is used for marketing by many (esp businesses but also individuals) so they will pay to better market themselves. The same way that LinkedIn charges money even thought they don't create anything besides the platform.
Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"?
How do I know what half should be? We've all been there: "it feels like YouTube has cranked the ads way up lately..." Will "half" just become "full" when "full" gets doubled next year?
I'd love for it to literally be "half ads" - whereas Twitter Plebeian gets a full add, Twitter Bluesbros only see the top half of the ad.
Could result in amusing ads where the top half is aimed at the richies and the bottom half has "stick it to the man" discounts that only poors would see.
Actually, user segmentation and giving discounts to poor people only on the same ad is absolutely brilliant, it’s elon-muskesque style of brilliance. It’s everything together: “Stick it to the man”, the rich can’t really complain, it’s correct i terms of user segmentation, and it’s a good joke too.
In other words, it is that it's going to be very difficult for users to intuitively understand what "half ads" means and why they should pay for it.
It's a completely nonsensical compromise. Musk's product ideas for Twitter seems to assume that what everyone wants is for Twitter to be more complex, with more knobs to fiddle with.
There's a simple way to make this legible to the user: instead of slashing ad frequency, eliminate half of ad surface. I.e. if there are N places on the page where ads are being served, turn off half of them for the paying users. This will be an obvious difference, and remain so even as the ad intensity/frequency increases.
but there aren't N places on the page where ads are shown, there's one place: in the feed, at an unspecified frequency as you scroll. twitter doesn't have any ad surfaces to eliminate.
Half of ads is strictly more valuable than all of them. Whether or not it's worth $8 is another question, but people still forget it's all a supplier-driven market: there is, and is not going to be, an option to pay $8 and get no ads. You choose out of what's being made available.
> But if it's only 10% less annoying, there's very little incentive to buy.
Right. But that $8 doesn't only buy you halving the ad load, but also all the other things like better reach and the "I'm a paying user, I'm better than you non-paying ones" checkmark. I mean, if it works on GitHub...
> And adblock is an option sitting in the wings.
Yes, but! Most people use Twitter through the app, and blocking ads there isn't as simple as having your tech-savvy friend install uBlock Origin in your browser. Adblocking in apps is, even for techies, something between extremely sophisticated and downright impossible.
Google used to have that one thing that said "pay us and we will make some of the ads on the Internet go away." You paid Google, and then Google eliminated ads on their websites but also ads on any website that used Google to provide their ads, and Google paid those websites as if they had shown those ads. It was a really nice idea, but it had the downside of only affecting ads on a random (from the user's perspective) subset of the Internet. Also had the downside that if you're the sort of person willing to pay to make ads go away, you're probably also a happy ad block user.
Thought the same thing. How do you prove top me as the user that I'm seeing "half as many ads" now that I'm paying $8? No ads is easy. They are there or they aren't.
I'd considering paying Twitter $8/month if it was no ads. Or, you know, I just keep using Tweetbot for $10/year and there's zero ads there and a straight reverse chronological timeline to boot.
Yeah the only way this could work is if the ads were replaced with a banner that says "thanks for paying", so you can actually see how many ads were removed. Which is a better experience than seeing an ad but worse than an ad blocker.
> Thought the same thing. How do you prove top me as the user that I'm seeing "half as many ads" now that I'm paying $8? No ads is easy. They are there or they aren't.
They'll just double-up ads for non-paying users in the current ad slots on the feed.
You will be shown no ads from the hours of 8pm-8am, a bunch during your busiest times, or some such.
In any case, how are people going to verify on their end they're getting what they paid for? Maybe in 10 years they'll have a class action resulting in everyone getting a dollar back.
It's pretty well-known for traditional television broadcasts, right? Shows are edited and even scripted specifically to provide the right amount of slots for ads.
It's much harder to measure television ad impressions than digital ad impressions.
Publishers charge for digital ad impressions by the 1000. It's easy to measure because usually they receive an HTTP GET request indicating the ad has been served.
For TV that uses traditional broadcasts you have to sample and scale. This is what Nielsen and other ACR companies do.
(and on top of that, most of the organic content is now locked in time-limited stories, with a good chunk of them being reposts of TikTok influencers out there to definitely sell you something)
> Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"?
Broadcast television and radio have always done this. How could they do anything else?
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
From a user perspective it's messy and confusing. What does "half as many" even mean? The experience is only different in degree, not in kind. There's less value, both real and perceived, in such a position.
It's hard to imagine that the conversation started from "half as many." My hunch is that it started as "no ads" and somehow backed down to "half" for one reason or another.
A couple reasons I can imagine are:
- They could've justified No Ads at the rumored $20 price point. Cut the price in half? Add half the ads back.
- They want to make room for a $20 SKU later and need to reserve some features for it, which could include getting rid of all ads.
- They want to anchor at "half" so that "No Ads" sounds even better if they change their minds down the line.
Why do you have that hunch? Do you presume good will? My hunch says, what if the conversation started as "how do we make users believe there will be less ads"?
Burning Twitter to the ground seems quite counterproductive, given the debt that was assumed for the sale. Misguided sure, but bad faith? I generally tend to assume that most people do things in good faith.
Because I am not a heavy enough Twitter user for this to affect me at all, so I'm just curious to see if Musk's gamble works. He's gambling that the network effect is as important for Verified users as it is for non-Verified users, which is not a bet most other creator-based social media sites have made. Judging by the number/temperature of comments you've made about this topic over the last two days, I think you're a lot more emotionally invested in this topic than I am. I'm just here with popcorn.
I'm not a twitter user either, I'm not sure what that has to do with viewing Musk's actions as either being good or bad faith. That seems like a limiting and bizarre way to view things. Similarly, I didn't accuse you of being inappropriately emotionally invested... I'm more fascinated that people see someone doing something wildly illogical and then say to themselves, "well it's Musk, he must have his reasons"... yeah, I'm sure he has his reasons. That doesn't mean they are good and I have no idea why anyone would assume so given how all of this transpired.
> Similarly, I didn't accuse you of being inappropriately emotionally invested...
Sorry I think I read something that wasn't there, apologies. My bad for being jumpy.
> I'm more fascinated that people see someone doing something wildly illogical and then say to themselves, "well it's Musk, he must have his reasons"... yeah, I'm sure he has his reasons. That doesn't mean they are good and I have no idea why anyone would assume so given how all of this transpired.
For me it's curiosity. Twitter always seems like the struggling social media. Unable to really make a revenue despite it's disproportionate influence in developed nation discourse. At this point, I consider Musk to be a loose canon and I would not do business with him unless costs appropriately reflected risks.
All good. I definitely agree regarding Twitter and I would also not want to do business with Musk. Hence my incredulousness with the thought of any generosity, intellectual or otherwise, being thrown his way.
I'm likely to pay for it at that price. For reference, I have a bit more than 14K followers on Twitter.
Why? Two reasons.
1) Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes like outrage being more visible than high-quality content. I’m in favor of alternative revenue streams, although they have to provide value, and removing ads doesn't count as providing value.
2) My Twitter account is part of my consulting business. Eight dollars a month isn't much to pay if it improves my visibility or perceived legitimacy. I'd be willing to try it for a year and see how it works out.
FWIW, I wouldn't have been willing to try it at $20/mo.
> Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes
> Eight dollars a month isn't much to pay if it improves my visibility
What you're describing in that second quote is advertising. You are paying for additional reach, in this case you'd get those additional impressions via "priority" in replies, mentions & search. What they've done is dressed up advertising as a membership feature because it'll make people like you more likely to advertise.
Although you’re technically correct, I think there’s a qualitative difference here. Traditional advertising is priced on number of impressions. As a result, publishers are incentivized to juice engagement numbers. Practically speaking, that means outrage-generating content and similar garbage.
This sort of “advertising” is a class system, with one class of users getting some sort of visibility bump over a second class of users. The incentives are aligned with making sure the verified content is perceived to be high quality, so that being verified is a status symbol.
You could argue that a system with literal second-class citizens is worse than the current one, and you might be right, but I’m interested to see how it turns out. Nothing is perfect—everything has tradeoffs—and the current engagement-driven approach is a dumpster fire.
I’m an advertiser and I think you understate how ad platforms incentivize quality content (via quality scores that affect price) and overstate how this twitter blue proposal would do so.
Also you greatly simplify how current advertising works. It’s not anywhere as simple as you describe.
If you’re evaluating value, it’s helpful to think about it in those crude terms. If you’re likely to get, say, 4-5 new followers a month from the increased impressions then I think this is good value as an ad product. Part of your point, not the main one admittedly, was grappling with whether to sign up, aka the value here.
I understand you were mostly making an incentives point and there I think we just disagree.
In terms of value, I think it's going to be more about avoiding anti-value—specifically, I expect that accounts lacking the checkmark will be seen as spam, scams, or bit players.
Here's what I expect to happen:
1) First, Twitter introduces paid verification. They cut back on their content moderation efforts on unverified accounts, but they exercise more control of spam and scams on verified accounts, including permabans (which are easier to enforce, due to better knowledge of the people behind the accounts—a credit card number, at the very least).
2) Next, they introduce an option to hide all non-verified tweets, other than from people you follow. People will use it because non-verified tweets have a much higher proportion of spam and scams.
3) At this point, they've successfully price discriminated between professional content creators (such as myself) and consumers / casual creators. I expect additional price discrimination to follow, such as charging for API access in order to target people using tools such as HootSuite to manage large fanbases.
All of this is predicated on people adopting #1, which is why it's important for Musk to find the right price point. It looks like he's just spraying out ideas, but I think he's doing price research.
This is all speculation about what they could announce -- even most of the items in (1). You could always re-evaluate if these things come to pass. Once this initial plan rolls out, whether the check itself continues to hold value once it's open to anybody with $$$ depends on how users in the network use it. That's why I prefer to think in terms of the specific reach/advertising question.
But we'll see! My own speculation is that they lean more into trying to convince ordinary users (or content creators like you) to get more into the advertising game to replace some brands that may leave. Think of dating apps and features like Super Likes, Boosts, etc. Tinder and others figured out how to get money out of regular folks without a traditional ads interface. If I were them, I'd hire folks from Match Group.
Frankly, I'd rather see an ad for a random content creator than for some of the weird brands that advertise to me. Right now the top "Who to follow" for me is Lamps Plus, "the nation's largest lighting retailer." As you could imagine, I'm not interested. Instead, they could give everyone a free 30-min account boost and give their premium Blue members four or five more a month.
Oh, it's absolutely speculation. I won't be paying a dime until I think the value is there. Although I'm willing to speculate a bit... it's only a hundred bucks.
Getting ordinary users into advertising is their old game. My middling popular tweets all have a "Boost" button I can click. I've clicked it a few times, but they're looking for bigger campaigns than I have appetite for... $50/day, minimum two days, reach of only about 2,000 people each day. I'm not willing to throw away $100 on a two-day campaign that's very unlikely to move the needle in any meaningful way.
But, obviously, I am willing to throw away $100 to try a status symbol for a year... but only if it actually is a status symbol. The difference is the longevity. Nobody makes the decision to hire me after two days; they make the decision after seeing my content and name for months and years. Four thousand people seeing my name once is basically worthless to me. Fourteen thousand followers have a better chance of seeing my name for a year is quite likely to be worth it.
(2) should be what you get in return. Pricing should be what customers care about, not what Twitter cares about.
If you're going to be a luxury product then all of your prices and/or offering has to be luxury or exclusive.
Disincentiving follower counts by how much VIP accounts costs doesn't make much sense. Unless you have some high end super VIP bracket that caps at 100-500k or whatever.
Elon's idea of rewarding creators as a byproduct of checkmarks sounds better than arbitrarily gatekeeping the checkmark system through some VIP criteria (like follower counts or public influence).
Everyone is a creator by default, creators should be rewarded after a certain level of contribution - always - but that's not the role of checkmarks (or the base level one at least).
1) Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam
2) Ability to post long video & audio
3) Half as many ads
I also expect the following:
4) Increase in perceived legitimacy
#1 and #4 are valuable to me. #2 I don't care about at all, because my long-form content goes on my blog and YouTube. #3 is 'meh'--it'll be nice to have fewer ads, but my brain glazes right past them anyway.
Model X is one of the best selling electric cars in the US and has very large margin for Tesla. It made a lot of news and an differentiates it from other vehicles in the class. I'm not sure I would consider it a failure.
> Model X is one of the best selling electric cars in the US
No, that car is essentially a failure and I'm amazed Tesla hasn't completely cut it from production.
It sold 1,316 units in the US September. They were selling almost 4,000 in September of '18. Even if you wanted to go by year, you're talking about 26,000 sold in the entire US in 2020 (it's best year and I'm ignoring '21 since there was a factory shut down)[1].
It's just not a good vehicle, doesn't sell well, and is utterly unusable if you live anywhere with rain or snow.
Its a luxury car, Audi is selling less e-Trons then Tesla is selling Model X in the US. The Model X this year sold almost as many vehicles as Ford Mach-E while costing 2x as much. If you compare the Model X to other cars in that price class the Model X is doing fine.
And of course they did a major revamp completely changing the architecture and have to deliver the car from 1 factory to whole world. The Model S had priority at first and the Model X was only slowly added to production again.
If you think Model X is a failure you don't understand the car industry. A car with that kind of margin is well worth doing even if it peaks at 40-50k a year globally.
> and is utterly unusable if you live anywhere with rain or snow
I live in cold Switzerland and a family in my house with 3 little children has one of them. The car is always parked outside. They seem really happy with it and this was never mentioned as an issue.
"Cold" Switzerland? Hasn't been the case in years. Bielersee used to freeze over dozens of metres for weeks, it hasn't happened for at least five years if not height.
In terms of places that are even colder then Switzerland not many people live. And you can't just compare the Bielersee, there are these things called mountains where people go up to ski and it does get quite cold.
i've lived in cold places where i've worried about breaking the handle off trying to get into my car. usually in the early spring when the warm sun can melt snow, but it has time to freeze as well.
I replied to OP but the question was pointed to a broader audience. Many on HN have _very_ negative feelings for Elon.
He's a pretty crazy guy, but I can think of few people/companies who are doing things that could have as big of an impact as Tesla, Starlink, and SpaceX.
I understand how you could have doubts with Tesla, but that how could those feelings not dissolve when seeing those reusable boosters land on their own? How many other organizations could do such a thing?
Considering they used "shower thoughts" to devalue the idea before factoring in Elons incredible track record (by company/capitalist metrics, no personal judgement required), I feel that you are being very generous towards OP.
Do you not consider SpaceX, Starlink, or Tesla to be successful? I don't mean profitable; I mean something that is pushing humanity forward?
I know that Tesla has a lot of negative press due to autopilot (and rightly so), but they are still a leader in both self-driving and electric vehicles.
If these companies push humanity forward? Honestly, I'm a bit on the fence about that. Tesla was disruptive in a sense that it made car manufacturers massively accelerate their EV plans. But do I see any continued impact? Not really.
I know that there are _plenty_ of other electric car manufacturers, and electric cars would eventually become popular, but Tesla making it happen _n_ years faster is an overwhelmingly good thing.
There's also a lot of potential (depending on who you ask) for autopilot, although I think it was a mistake to switch from lidar to pure computer vision. Time will tell.
It's reconciled that these people have elon derangement syndrome and insist that they know his business better than he does despite never having done anything like it before in their lives
Are government subsidies bad? Why? Isn't Elon doing exactly what the government is intending which is to promote the development of technologies that are beneficial but not profitable/popular?
Hasn't this approach been proven successful with the current push towards solar and electric cars?
The article even says:
> The payoff for the public would come in the form of major pollution reductions, but only if solar panels and electric cars break through as viable mass-market products. For now, both remain niche products for mostly well-heeled customers.
Neither of these products are as niche today as they were in 2015 (when the article was written).
But, claiming that SpaceX, Tesla, or Musk personally were uniquely competitive, successful, or disruptive while they had a buffer of 5bn USD in the back pocket is misleading.
Having a boatload of cash does not guarantee success. Elon positioned himself well to compete in areas that would receive those subsidies, and then used that money to create rocketships and electric cars.
I'm sure you can find _plenty_ of examples of people spending billions less effectively, e.g. the city of Boston spending $22 billion on a tunnel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
I'm not saying he's a genius or unprecedented, just that he is successful, and that his success was not guaranteed.
I'd argue in spite of its doors. A long-range EV in the most popular segment, a full decade before a single competitor? That thing could have had a single door on the front, like the BMW Isetta, and it still would have sold like mad.
It is pulled out of his butt, the F150 sells 3/4 of a million a year (just the f150!) and makes on the low end a gross profit of $10k per sold. The model x sold about 7.5k cars in 2021, way down from the 20-30k it was selling each year.
OK let's say it sold $30k, and Tesla made a profit of $100k (more than the car sells for) for each car.
That's still less than 50% of the F150 yearly profit. LOL.
Comparing it to the F150 is idiotic. That's the most sold car in the US and in a different segment.
Compare it to other comparable cars in the same segment and it looks pretty damn good.
Lower volume high margin cars are really worth it for companies and Ford wishes it had an EV in that classed that sold have as well. The Model X sells in numbers not unlike Mach E while having double the price.
>most profitable and iconic cars in the modern era.
That's what the parent said. Not "in the EV market segment", not "looks pretty damn good".
I agree it's a silly comparison to make normally, but it's a perfectly apt reply to someone stating something so obviously out-of-touch, like the Model X being the most profitable car in the modern era.
By number of sales it's a wash between it and the S. Which are both low volume, high margin, luxury vehicles. Their high volume vehicles, the 3 and the Y drastically out-sell them naturally.
However the X and the S have very high margins in all configurations so they bring in an outsized amount of profit given their share of sales.
That said the margins on the Model 3/Y are nothing to snuff at and are superior to any other mass market vehicle.
He has been planning to put out a "hey who would pay $20 for a blue check" tweet followed by an immediate capitulation to "ok what about $8?" when a big name mocks the idea - that was the plan? That is ... not a good plan.
> And yet his companies are some of the most difficult to get a job at. Interesting.
It’s more difficult to get a tech job at FBI/CIA than Google. Does that make the US government a more desirable place to work?
As an aside, top talent definitely does NOT work at Elon’s companies. Top talent knows that “a good company mission” does not pay for rent, mortgage, or daycare.
> As an aside, top talent definitely does NOT work at Elon’s companies.
This is just not true. There's tons of exceptional engineers working at various of Elon's companies. Would you really claim that SpaceX doesn't have world-class engineers?
The price 100% was $20/mo as previously reported by journalists until Twitter dunked on it, and Elon's interpretation of the backlash is "the price is too high" and not "any price makes no sense at all."
You joke, but after reading some texts from Musk and his social circle [1], I find it plausible that that is how some of these business decisions get made.
This is probably fine though, it is the Elon way of doing business. Make fast decisions and try and whole heap of things. He then gets criticised for not delivering on the majority of them but still comes out ahead of orgs that take 6 months to make the decision in the first place.
Doesn't seem like too bad a method to me. Apart from in situations where you have a ton of data (e.g. Amazon) most product prices are pulled out of someone's arse anyway.
It's such... odd behavior. For sure Stephen King who has a net worth of $500 million dollars does not mean "the price is too high".
If Elon is successful, even I will read the business school case study on it, because it flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems and... well just about everything. The only way this works is if Elon's internal processes are way different from his public persona.
One of the things I admire about Elon (which is saying a lot...) is that for whatever reason, he's ready to bet the farm over and over. Whether he's some genius tactician or an impulsive moron, he just bought Twitter and is poised to drastically alter it.
"flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems" indeed!
Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day, "you know what, !@#$ it. We're done managing this complex system. Let's assume Russia doesn't have or won't use nukes and change our entire doctrine overnight. Get ready to deploy everything."
There's a real possibility Elon buys Twitter for billions and runs it straight into the ground because he does not understand complex systems. Or maybe he gambles and is lucky. Or maybe he really does _get it_ and this is all in some absolutely bizarre way, calculated.
I don't quite think it is luck - but a weird second thing.
Musk has a reality distortion field. I think he is a bloviating jerk but I know a lot of really really smart and dedicated engineers in software and in more traditional fields like mech-e and aerospace who would rather work for Musk than any other person and are willing to take pay cuts to work for him. This means he really can surround himself with very skilled people who can distill his "fuck it, we are doing FOO" commands into real plans.
What this tells me is not that Musk is a visionary but that a lot of shitty visions are nevertheless achievable if you've got enough smart people around you.
The distortion field has been significantly fading over the past couple years. And it might be gone entirely soon enough depending on how poorly the Twitter acquisition turns out to be.
Tesla is making record profits right now and SpaceX is achieving things no other space company has come close to. Twitter is basically a vanity project.
Mission, and there are a lot of smart people in the world. Also, some people identify with him because he acts completely the same as That One Guy in the university who had studied programming before getting to the CS classes.
I think that a lot of people also don't have to directly work with him, and there are a lot of assholes running companies. That being said, Musk's behavior personally turned me off from all of his companies' products, despite maybe 5 years ago thinking "if I ever buy a car, it'll be a Tesla"
Like a certain real gungho-ness and actual knowledge that then turns into their whole personality. Assuming they actually know everything the world has to offer because they figured a bunch of stuff out on their own in this one domain in the past.
Someone who ends up getting something done, but in the most chaotic manner possible and with loads of unforced errors because they are not absorbing information from their peers.
Yeah but I feel like "work on twitter" is way less of a .... shall we say noble/socially fulfilling job. I'd value working on sending people to mars (not to live, just to do a walk on it), it'd make me part of something historic. One day people would write books and make documentaries about the work done to make it happen, and even if I weren't featured for the entire rest of my life if I could tell people "I worked on the software for the Mars shuttle" or whatever and have them go "Oh cool!". Hell, even before it succeeds I think it'd have social capital with the right crowd: pushing boundaries to put someone on mars is a cool job....
Twitter on the other hand... "Oh I work at twitter doing software". That's.... nowhere near as exciting or epic a thing to tell people that you do.
So he might have a harder time finding smart people willing to work for less than market rates at twitter compared to finding them for SpaceX and Tesla
> Imagine a new form of news and communication that solves all of our social woes, allows people to be informed, and have constructive discourse.
I did imagine that happening once - I imagined the internet would lead to that. The state of things now is very different from what the me of 15 years ago imagined, in part because of things like twitter in fact. I now believe that social woes have significant parts that aren't just misunderstandings they are big problems that can't be solved only through dialogue. Further many of the misunderstandings are actually deliberate misrepresentations - how many people who are pro-choice have you seen making the incredibly bad faith argument that pro-lifers just want to control/punish women? (Note I am pro-choice myself, but that particular argument is a really shitty obviously untrue argument and I see it constantly and it really gives me the shits).
> I'm sure Elon will have a mission statement that will appeal to some people.
This I do agree with, but I think the pool of people that are willing to work crazy hours at sub-standard pay is smaller when the work is making whatever Musk's improved version of twitter looks like than it is for putting someone on mars or making electric cars mainstream.
I don't think the communication problems are inherent to the internet but I'm sympathetic to your greater point.
I think the gamification of communication on the Internet is one of the worst inventions, feeding into a lot of very negative neural architecture. Encourages people to seek quick validation from there like-minded peers, and encourages a sense of superiority people can only get from knocking down strawman. This is exacerbated by brief and content without any Nuance or resemblance to reality. In a lot of ways, Twitter incorporates the worst aspects of this. Reddit is arguably worse in terms of gamification, but at least it doesn't have a 144 character limit and tools to curate your consumption.
I don't think the problems are inherent to the internet... sadly I think they are inherent to human beings.
Twitter by design exacerbates a lot of these problems though IMO. Character limits, the way replies work and things are displayed such as to make any particularly active comment section practically impossible to follow, etc
EDIT: I do actually genuinely hope that Twitter dies, but I am scared that is a monkey paw where whatever the next thing happens to be it ends up being worse
Twitter is a social media platform, that space is never going to have the kind of social cache novel space exploration does. It doesn't matter how amazing of a communication app or social media platform it is, as a job it is less epic than working on getting a guy to mars - this is my documentary argument from earlier.
Elon offers people a chance to operate at a true 100% on a thing that matters. Next to that, work-life balance pales. And comp? Comp follows company glory. Tesla engineers are rich, man.
I don't understand Elon either, but I'm certain that he's not an impulsive moron who doesn't understand complex system, or that he's financing all this with his dad's emerald mine money.
For me, there is enough track record to prove he has some very unique business skills, and often succeeds by doing things that conventionally looks crazy.
That said, Elon's Twitter may well be a failure regardless. Pretty sure it won't be boring though :)
The emerald mine claim comes from statements made by Errol Musk (Elon's father) who described it as a part share in an Zambian mine which resulted in a total lifetime revenues in the order of a few hundred thousand dollars. None of what Errol has said has been corroborated by anyone. No independent sources exist. It's also worth noting that Zambia is not a conflict gem country and an emerald mine in Zambia would not be morally problematic absent any specific evidence.
(And regardless of any of the above, I've never been particularly enamoured of criticism of a person because of who their parents are or what their parents did. Blaming Elon for being the son of white people in South Africa is kinda gross, actually.)
"Who payed for those computers in the 90s that Musk had access to?"
Its like yeah ok, he wasn't found in a dumbster during a civil war. Is that the level now, where nobody can get any credit because they were not born into abject poverty?
That just basically means that 99% of people who achieve anything don't deserve credit for anything.
Its basically materialist logic taken to an absurd degree.
Or those takes where it’s argued that because his companies have many hundreds of employees, it’s literally impossible for Elon to have contributed anything of value whatsoever.
Or even more hilariously, that Elon is some kind of marketing genius. Seriously, the guy is the opposite of a smooth communicator, and leans heavily into his autistic sense of humour. Yet apparently the only reason anyone ever bought a Tesla is because they were suckered in by a slick sales pitch.
Agreed. Though it does seem that Elon's family were quite well socially connected and that at least some of his early success in raising funds comes from that.
For instance, his connection to Roelof Botha, who in turn leveraged the connections made by his father when he was spending a lot of time in the US as South Africa's last apartheid-era foreign minister.
Def. won't be boring. Really we only get to see probably less than half of what he's planning. If the other half is more strategic, then he'll do fine, if the other half mirrors his public image, then I can't see it working.
Matt Levine has an interesting take on this [0], basically that nothing in that Musk claims of their behaviour meets the specification of "cause" in their employment contracts, and further that the golden parachutes are a good thing in that they prevent the C-suite from being focused on their continuing salary:
"The basic problem with Musk’s efforts to walk away from these severance agreements — beyond the lack of actual arguments — is that if he can stiff these executives then no golden parachute is binding. The point of a golden parachute is that a CEO with a golden parachute will sell his company to a buyer whom he doesn’t like, if that’s what is best for shareholders. If the buyer can stiff the CEO on the parachute payments because they don’t like each other, then no buyer will ever pay severance, and no CEO will ever trust it."
"And then Elon Musk showed up for his first day of work as Twitter’s chief executive officer — technically its Chief Twit — and said “hey, do you have any other contracts I could violate?”
Oh, this is going to be a fun read.
In response to your quote, I guess he did it as revenge for making him go through with it.
I really don’t want to live in a world in which so much depends on impulsive individuals. Your example sounds like a nightmare. That’s no way to make decisions.
If you read the stories of many "successful" CEOs (I'm thinking Jobs here, but there are others) the decisions they'd make often would come out as quite impulsive.
If you dig significantly you might find that they're not as impulsive as they seem, that the person was actually considering many aspects but playing their cards close until cut-off time.
This is true, and so far Elon is doing exactly the thing everyone says you can’t do with a social network. If he succeeds, it will completely change the space. Also interesting change of strategy during an economic downturn.
But I do think one difference at least from where I’m sitting, is usually the response is, that’s crazy, but if it works you’ll be rich!
I’m not even really clear on what the “if it works” is in this situation, I guess if he proves that people are willing to pay $8 per month for a social network?
Yeah. It does sound like a nightmare. And I'm glad that, for now at least, those who get to make the decisions are not as impulsive as countless people are online about the matter.
And when it comes to a $44 billon purchase, it sounds like a nightmare to affect it so impulsively.
At least, unlike the nuclear fallout, it's not my money, I guess.
It's easy to be impulsive and make risky decisions when those decisions aren't actually risky for you. He's the richest person in the world. Even if he made a terrible decision to "bet the farm" and lost 99.5% of his wealth, he'd still be a billionaire and in the top 0.00005% of net worth in the world.
> Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day
No, I definitely won't forgive you your 'analogy', because it's sneaking in a highly irresponsible argument for military escalation into a completely unrelated discussion.
Let me help you out: the point of the analogy _is_ to underline how highly irresponsible Elon’s approach is.
I think one could criticize that the analogy hyperbole, but I’m quite amused at the pearl clutching that somehow I’m trying to push for nuclear annihilation. Saying the words three times in a mirror doesn’t make it happen.
He’s saying the price is bullshit, not that he can’t afford it. To him, it offers basically no value. While him being on Twitter does offer Twitter value.
He’s probably right, although it doesn’t generalize to most celebrities who do have a vested interest in paying to promote themselves.
And if Twitter’s user experience degrades to the point where King can’t Tweet effectively without a blue checkmark, then the platform is deeply screwed.
And what will he do about the hundreds of "RealStephenKing" "OfficialStephenKing" "StephenKingTwitter" accounts that will spring up and start scamming people and linking them to fake websites? How much will that cost Stephen King?
> Twitter offers him value, or he wouldn't be on it
I mean yes, but that value might be so low as to not be worth paying for. Not even for the monetary cost, but for the effort involved in setting up the payment (entering card details, etc) and then checking your bill is what you expect for the rest of time. That tiny amount of extra effort might make twitter not worth it alone for some people, even without the financial cost.
And even that yes it does offer value I'd qualify in that the value might ultimately on reflection be considered to be ultimately a loss on net. For example a heroin addict gets value out of heroin, but on balance the value they get (a fleeting pleasure) often isn't worth the damage done to their lives, but you could say "well it obviously offers value or they wouldn't be taking it". Note that I'm not claiming twitter is addictive or damaging like heroin, just trying to point out that "must have value because they do it" isn't really a solid argument a lot of the time
When Oprah is seen dining at a restaurant, the restaurant gets more value from the PR than Oprah gets from the meal. That does not lead to the conclusion that she should go open a restaurant.
Some blue checks need Twitter (mid-level youtubers, for instance). Some don't (Stephen King, for instance). In either case, Twitter needs the blue checks because they are, to a large degree, the reason non-blue-checks visit and engage with Twitter.
I can see someone like Stephen King being annoyed at having to pay anything when his presence is probably helping Twitter quite a bit to begin with.
Why does he care? Seems like that's worse for Twitter than it is for him.
[EDIT] My point is, from King's perspective, this likely looks like "you're here and making $X over what you would if you just relied on your fans to repost all your stuff on here for you, we're making $Y more than we otherwise would because you're here, plus we've given you this blue-check thing to solve a problem we have, but now $Y isn't enough and we're going to make you pay money to keep participating in this program that exists to solve a problem for us."
You can see how, unless $X is pretty big, someone who's already rich might say, "well fine, fuck you too" over such a thing.
I'm struggling to understand how that would not be true. Nobody follows a Twitter link to see what Joe Blow posted about anything. They follow them to see what someone they've heard of posted. People create accounts to follow blue checks, or to try to network with them. I get that there are several market segments for Twitter but ~all of them are pretty dependent on blue checks to drive eyeballs to the site and to keep people coming back, as far as I can tell. If people just want a group chat with other nobodies, Whatsapp exists.
Thing is, the "blue checks" aren't all Stephen King level famous. If you're doing much notable at all, and using the platform, you've probably got a blue check. I do not, for the record—I'm not sure I even have an account?—but I see an awful lot of them on fairly niche but interesting & active personal accounts. Take them out and the best content goes back to being "I'm a Twitter Shitter!" kinds of stuff, like in the very early days—and the novelty for that is long gone.
If these posters stay but let their blue checks lapse, we go back to having an impersonation problem, which is mostly a problem for Twitter, which they may want to solve. Perhaps for accounts that are likely to be impersonated they could introduce some kind of free verification system....
For King and many other blue checks it's a status symbol. A way for the Lord to distinguish himself from the peasants.
King (aptly named) would be happier if it was a Veblen good that cost $100,000/mo, which he could afford, but the peasants can't.
Elon is mocking King and his status symbol by saying "fine, how about $8?", which from the King's perspective, is worse than $20 because even more peasants will have it. The Blue Check is easier to get than a Netflix subscription.
I think you're misreading how much an elderly ultra-famous and quite rich author gives a shit about his "status" on some stupid website like Twitter.
I think he was insulted at the idea of having to pay anything to be verified on the platform, when both his presence and his being verified are helpful to twitter and make twitter money, even if they do also drive some book sales for him. I took it as his saying that he'd respond to such an insult (being asked to pay) by simply leaving, because Twitter and whatever little extra money it's making him don't really matter much to him.
I doubt he's alone in that thinking. Though sure, some celebs, most or all brands (that's who they should be soaking with monthly charges), and the media will stick around until/unless the platform enters clear decline and a viable alternative emerges.
Yeesh, what is with the Twitter/Musk fanboy crowd and journalists and blue checks. It's such an unhinged and nonsensical hatred. Reeks of being jealous.
Completely wrongheaded. If anything, twitter should be paying anonymous users. Bluechecks are the ones who use twitter to build their personal brand, sell books, etc..
Yes I do know who Steven King is. Even famous authors need to spend a lot of money on advertising when they publish a new book, and twitter certainly helps here.
Also, HN has a rule against asking people whether they've read the article. Asking people whether they know who some famous person is, is obnoxious in the same way.
Saying Steven King, one of the most successful authors in the world, needs Twitter to market his books is a such an insane take that it warrants asking if you have any idea what you're talking about imo
Depends on the type of subs one frequents. Niche ones like StableDiffusion are super active with very in-depth discussion and tutorials being written. I rarely see that much commitment even for any Twitter thread
I don't think its that. I think it is literal to the effect of, twitter wouldn't have such a huge crowd to serve ads to without people like King who have tons of followers coming to the platform to get updates. An example, I don't have a twitter account, but I will surf Hector Martin's twitter for updates on Asahi Linux development. If it wasn't for Hector Martin's content, twitter would never be requested by my browser.
So it is essentially, charge the people who bring the users to twitter.
It's remarkable how quickly so many of those defending Musk are emphasising the 'lords' and 'peasants' language after he used that terminology in a tweet.
It's not original, it's not adding to the discussion, and it just sounds like sycophancy.
Elon completely miss the point in this exchange, which is that Twitter needs people like Stephen King far more than people like Stephen King need Twitter. Why should Stephen King care about how Twitter pays it's bills?
The entire point of the blue check is that Twitter has an impersonation problem, what happens when some fraction of users find it worth paying $8 to impersonate a celebrity?
This threat is interesting. I wonder what the minimum number is of top Twitter accounts that would have to leave for the platform to lose an unrecoverable amount of its daily impressions.
For example, out of the top 100 twitter accounts (https://socialblade.com/twitter/top/100), almost all are musicians, sports figures, politicians or news outlets.
If the top 5 musicians and the top 5 sports figures got together and started posting content exclusively on a new platform, I wonder if it would be enough to cause a gravitational shift.
The critical thing for the platform is that if I want to find the Twitter account for {celebrity foo} I can do so with a high degree of confidence that it will be real.
I think the loss of trust from consumers is the bigger risk, successful impersonations are relatively high profile and people don't like being tricked.
I think it's bimodal. Either Twitter is worth like 100$+ per month if you're a journalist/brand, or it's less than 0, and in Stephen King's case he's correct that Twitter should probably be paying him.
It would be fun to try and mediate the discussions to try and convince which of the big ego'd celebrities/journalists/politicians are of value to twitter and twitter should pay, vs which are a sink and they should pay twitter. Hey monetezation plan! I would pay good money to watch that reality TV show.
My gut instinct is that the right price for verification is something like $1000 as a one-time fee. Lots of people who are active Twitter users will find that fee useful at some point in their life (as a business marketing expense), and Twitter will likely extract a lot more from them by charging $1000 once rather than $8/month.
I think it should just be 3x the cost of their verification process, and something that disappears and needs to be re-done if you edit your name/bio/handle.
Exactly. Who's hurt more if it's hard to tell who the real celebrities are on Twitter? Whose press is worse when a celebrity is impersonated by some asshole on Twitter—Twitter's, or the celebrity's? Maybe initially the celebrity, but I'm gonna say it's Twitter in the medium-term. Who's gonna be hurt by "Twitter has an impersonation/fraud problem" headlines?
Whatever else the blue checks are, they're also a solution to a problem for Twitter, and those blue-checks and their activity are a huge part of why everyone else engages with the platform. If they make people pay, they better hope the adoption rate is incredibly high among existing blue checks (who cares about the unknowns who pony up for it, in addition) or they're gonna be in for a bad time.
Real celebrities will likely end up getting the check for free under any plan. Like it or not, that's how celebrity works.
The people who won't get it for free (who have blue checks currently) are entry-level journalists with a few hundred followers and cryptobros. Both of those classes of people should have to pay.
A lot of hustlebros and cryptobros do pay for checkmarks, they just don't pay Twitter.
I can imagine the exchange between Stephen King and his agent:
> "Stephen, I'm trying to market your books, but the publishers aren't seeing any engagement on Twitter".
> "Oh I left because I don't want to pay $20 / month to someone I disagree with politically."
> "Have you been hitting the bottle again?"
End of conversation. The value most of these celebrities get vastly exceeds $20 / month. The Twitter-celebrity relationship is symbiotic, nor parasitic.
I think you're overestimating the value of Twitter to Stephen King - who has been famous far longer than Twitter has been around. Taking a dig at his past alcoholism was a bit of a cheap shot, especially since he's been sober for decades by now
Imagine making pricing decisions for a 40 billion dollar business on a fucking whim based on feedback from a famous author. I guess this is in character, given that Musk likes to price things with meme numbers already.
He's owned Twitter for a few days. He threw out $20 and then adjusted it down to $8, seemingly based on feedback. Did he already know that $8 was the appropriate amount? Was there already some internal analysis done that he is just piggy-backing on? It certainly seems like Musk is making big changes literally moments after arriving on scene.
The messages shared as part of the trial don't show a particularly rigorous or deep level of thought regarding what to do with Twitter once he acquired it.
One would hope that still took place, but the haphazard approach so far doesn't provide much confidence that it did.
Perhaps he actually did - I think in part he's just playing it straight as an outsider, openly talking about the emperor being naked. That is, a lot of the serious business is just bullshit LARP people do, and if Musk can openly mock it and make money on the meme value of it all? That's a well-earned entertainer salary.
I guess it is possible he floated the $20 knowing someone very-famous would object and he could counter—either misreading the room badly, or else as a deliberate insult—with $8, which was what he wanted all along.
5d chess and all that.
Or he's impulsive and tweets dumb shit basically all the time. It might just be that.
if you only proof the price was $20 is because "journalists" reported it as so then I question your ability to critical think and judge facts because "journalists" report false things every day all day
there is little to no evidence it was ever really $20, and even less evidence that Elon's mind was changed by Stephen King of all people... Who care what Stephen King thinks?
This "5d chess" stuff is approaching the level of faith that qanon followers have - nothing is ever wrong, everything is always going according to The Plan, when it deviates it's because The Plan has changed and you weren't informed, Hillary was arrested and sent to gitmo but unfortunately she was cloned, etc, etc.
Look, he's spitballing ideas and playing it a little fast and loose. It may pay off, it might not - it looks a little stupid to some of us on account of how much he's paid for the company, but it shouldn't really surprise anyone and he doesn't need anyone making excuses for him.
It is not 5d chess, nor it is making excuses for him. It is a matter of critical thinking and evidence based research
I do not count reporting based on anonymous sources as evidence of anything, Elon never said, and no official at Twitter ever said the price as going to be $20, so I have no evidence to believe outside of Rumor from sources that have been showed to be negatively biased on the subject and widely inaccurate on the subject, so why should I trust their $20 figure?
I trust traditional news sources less than I do the government today, for which I would trust a Cartel bass more than the government.
> Elon never said, and no official at Twitter ever said the price as going to be $20
Except that he did. In the tweet he made just before he said it would be $8. If you discard the tweets where he said it would be $20 and then $8 - then yes your statement holds. But we shouldn't, because those are the tweets where he said those things.
Blue checkmarks are not just about verification and extra features. They’re a status symbol. They mean you are cool and notable enough to deserve one according the shadowy and mysterious Twitter checkmark committee. If they become a commodity that anyone with a little money can buy, they lose a big part of their appeal to the average person.
You hit the nail on the head in your post. The mysterious Twitter checkmark committee that got to gatekeep who could be in their group. Then people (probably the committee itself) started pushing the idea that blue check marks are more reliable and trustworthy.
I am not okay with a random group of people being able to decide whether or not someone is trustworthy. I prefer the checkmark to mean this person pays x dollars versus this person has been deemed worthy of a secret group of people at a company that has massive bias issues.
i actually think checkmarks was twitter's great strength. it made them look like a medium with ideology and editorialization, which attracted a lot of ideologically committed people. Twitter used the checkmark to gatekeep twitterers and as a weapon. they ridiculously "unverified" people (as if those people lost their identity or sth). It was all about signaling. Now it's just something you can buy
They still are a strength, if you search for a public person by name the blue checkmark still works very well. But if it's commodity where scammers can buy them then the strength is gone.
It’s not a trust mark, it’s an authentication mark: this person is who they say they are. It really is Stephen King. Your grandmother doesn’t need an authentication mark because you can call her up and ask “Hey, granny, did you really tweet that?” Nothing to do with actual trust, other than that the famous name really is famous name.
I initially thought this too, but then I remembered: a lot of people on social media care very much about how many followers they get, how many likes they get, etc. Under the new plan, you will get priority in replies, mentions, and search. I think that will have a lot of value for people addicted to likes.
The checkmarks won't be a status symbol anymore, but the masses will want their tweets prioritized.
Not OP. But definitely yes. I feel that person is maybe important and if they are talking about lets say tech/vidya I lookup their names on google to find out more about them. They are definitely a status symbol and like a seal of approval that the person is well known in whatever field they are in.
> They mean you are cool and notable enough to deserve one according the shadowy and mysterious Twitter checkmark committee
That's the exact problem with the blue checkmarks. I've seen plenty of complete loons with that mark on Twitter spewing utter racist or bigoted garbage.
At least now the criteria of receiving the blue mark of coolness are getting clear and the same for everyone.
>they lose a big part of their appeal to the average person.
However, there is a lag time between when the status-conferring benefits end and the semantics of the blue check mark in the minds of users catches up. They can potentially make a lot of money in that lag time and bootstrap a new valuable semantics around the verified label.
It depends. There are so many terrible posters with blue checkmarks that I almost consider it a red flag. Most of my favorite twitter profiles are unverified.
I mean so is the Github "pro" badge. You don't need it if all you're using are free features. And yet a lot of people buy it to showcase support or have that "cool" badge. If the same happens for twitter then good for them no? They get more funding to develop cool shit.
Do people really do that on github?
Im curious where you have noticed it or similar behaviour. I know the GitHub stars being a status symbol for dinner but never noticed badge idea.
Yeah, but the way this played out and was promoted, it wont say "cool". The badge being cool requires certain kind of PR and this does not seem to me to be it. In github case, pro badge means you support resource many many developers user for free and is super useful. In case of twitter, it is unclear what it means, really. That you want to yell louder I guess?
It is status symbol, because twitter nurtured it as a status symbol. You could not get it, unless their commission decided you are notable enough. The impossibility to get it and the social approval that comes with it are what made that status symbol.
True, I’m wondering how this will change now that you can just buy it. It might become this “if you don’t have it you might be a spam account” or smthg
The blue check mark was supposed to be a service for those consuming Twitter, so that they can have a bit more security by knowing that there's a higher chance to be following the person or thing they were intending to follow; it was not a service for those having the blue check mark.
That's why I don't understand why they want to charge for it.
Maybe a better thing would be to charge per-1000-followers (or per-10000 or bigger brackets) starting at a given threshold, as long as the account is used commercially, where being a star or influencer also counts as commercial use. But maybe even this is a bad idea, but in my eyes a bit better than charging for the blue check mark.
The function of the previous blue check mark is still going to be available for free, as a label under the name (similar to what government affiliated personnel currently have). So there is nothing to lose if you don't want to subscribe to Twitter Blue. You will still be verified.
I don't really grasp the value proposition here. I can have "Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam", but is that valuable to me or to my audience? If I'm a regular no-name user, do I care if I'm lost in replies and search? And if I'm the Steven Kings of the world, that other users want to see content from, does it do more harm to me or to Twitter if my posts are hidden because I'm not paying $8 a month?
It feels like I'm being asked to pay $8 to solve a problem that belongs to Twitter (too many bots), not a problem that belongs to me.
For people like Steven King, if he posts something on Facebook his fans will re-post it on Twitter, and vice-versa.
If too many things trend on other platforms, but not on Twitter, people will leave Twitter because it is not keeping up.
The blue checkmark started as a way to verify high profile accounts to make it more difficult to impersonate them. Twitter made a huge mistake opening this up way too broadly and failed to course correct. Now Elon wants to turn this into a free-for-all and scamming on Twitter will be easier than ever, with the low low price of $8.
When asked about this potential problem, Elon actually replied "That already happens very frequently".
He has no plans to solve this problem. He accepts it as the cost of doing business. He sees no problem with this. There's nothing to solve.
I think I saw somewhere where he commented that Twitter wouldn't be able to survive on advertisers alone. Well that's because advertisers are likely to flee.
Forget about the idea of it becoming a "free speech" hellscape. It's going to become a scammer's paradise.
His lackadaisical attitude shows he really doesn't care about making Twitter better. It's now an expensive toy that he owns. And that's how it always was going to be.
I would pay $10 a month for Twitter Black - it would block everyone with Twitter Blue and you get to interact with the dregs, the most controversial figures of all of Twitter, based on most reports/blocks/flags, etc. (minus the bots, crypto stuff).
That's the real town square. Let me sleep in the gutter!
And soon after is blocked and you're asked for a phone number. Tried making an account with email few times, followed few profiles, made a reply, and always ended up in a verify with phone number wall.
My understanding was that value of verification was, well, verification that you were, in fact, that person [0]. I wonder if this property will be maintained.
Otherwise, impersonators can pay to get the blue check. In the long term, maybe this is fine, but in the short term every Twitter user is going to have to adjust from the old meaning of the blue check (user $foo is actually person $foo) to the new meaning (user $foo pays $8/mo).
Increasing costs for spammers is one of the few effective ways you can combat spammers.
As one of the former heads of product at Twitter said they wanted to add multiple types of badges. You have a badge for verified identities, you have a badge for people who want to remain anonymous but pay to participate so they can provide a hint they're not spammer, and you provide a badge for notable personalities.
Seems pretty weird to me. I read an article that the top 5% of users are responsible for 90% of tweets and most of the profit. Said 5% have been leaving the platform for the last few months.
Now there's a $8/Month incentive for the top users to leave ... seems backwards. They should be paying the top users to stay so the 95% has something to read.
Imagine if youtube creators had to pay instead of be paid.
In the thread linked to by this post, Musk says that they will pay part of the monthly fee to content creators on Twitter. If true, in-demand creators will likely earn far more than they pay.
Instead of conversation about how Elon would use twitter to undermine democracy, civil discourse, whatever, everyone is talking about what’s a fair price to pay him to undermine democracy, civil discourse, whatever.
I mean, yeah. But also, democracy and civil discourse are more endangered outside of twitter then inside of it. If twitter becomes bad enough, it will be next 4chan or whatever.
However, politicians lying and gloating after basically yet another domestic terrorist attacks, politicians trying to make it harder for opposition to vote will stay.
Verification is more of a benefit to Twitter than to verified users. At least for mega celebs. I am verified because years ago I knew someone who worked at Twitter. I wouldn't pay a penny for it though.
I wanted to check how much it costs in Czechia adjusted for purchasing power and quickly learned you cannot actually buy it from here. Oh well.
> We’ve launched Twitter Blue in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In these regions, Twitter Blue is available for in-app purchase on Twitter for iOS and Android, or on twitter.com through our payment partner Stripe.
Obviously the copy on all marketing pages about Blue is not updated yet, but I bet it soon will be as Musk was said to give a very short deadline to implement changes for engineers
What is this going to solve? Blue checkmarks was intended to find the real public person instead of thousand scammers. If it now means that you have paid for account, then what is the point?
This is not going to help their finances either. Someone [1] did a calculation:
"If one in five current blue ticks paid $20 a month that would raise just under $15 million a year for Twitter… Twitter’s current revenues (mostly from ads) are $5 billion a year. Musk’s apparent plan would generate about 30 hours’ worth of annual revenue."
Why assume that only current checkmark holders would pay? I'm sure there are many more who wish they had a checkmark who would pay. Overall, I have no idea if it's a winning strategy, but I think this analysis undersells the potential.
Having some experience with Steam games and cheaters, I can predict based on these tweets that one thing that will happen is spammers will find a way to buy check mark subscriptions through the country with the cheapest price.
My goodness the weight people put behind the verification check mark sounds absolutely insane as a person who is not at all invested in Twitter. As an outsider, this sounds like the only way to combat scammers on the platform, assuming non-paying viewers have an easy way to only see content from paying users.
Maybe I'm missing something but wouldn't the paid-for check mark also mean that a given account can be more specifically targeted, thus increasing the potential ad revenue to Twitter?
Here is what the next big aspiring social media company should put on their website.
"$COMPANY_NAME is currently free to use. Unfortunately, we do have employees and computers to pay for to keep things running. When we hit 1 billion users, we intend to start charging all our users a very small fee: 1 hour of minimum wage in whatever country you live in for an entire year's access. For example if you live in the UK, this means you'd only pay £9.50 for the entire year. If you live in Portugal, you'd only pay €4.38 for the year. Your first year will always be free to see if $COMPANY_NAME is right for you.
Your IP address currently shows you're from $COUNTRY_NAME. This means a year's access for you would be $COUNTRY_MINIMUM_WAGE. This fee will only ever increase if your government increases the minimum wage of your country and will always stay pegged to that rate.
This means that, regardless of where you live in the world or how much you earn, access to $COMPANY_NAME only requires, at most, a single hour of your time each year to continue using. This allows us to keep the platform free from ads, tracking, and from wasting money on useless VR products nobody wants. Help us build a better, fairer future for everyone: not just shareholders."
I really just think that this would mean people don't use the service. The internet has shown again and again that people will do practically anything to avoid paying for digital goods.
I don't know, I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that if we want to avoid the mess we're in now, we've got to start paying for things.
Once you've hit 1 billion users, at that point you've pretty much become an institution. You've never marketed it as being free forever so everyone knows the score so they're more prepared. Sure some people will leave but I think the majority would stay unless there was some seriously good competition. I think most minimum wage workers will see one hour of work out of an entire year as reasonable, it's a lot less than most other tech subscriptions. And to anyone earning above minimum wage it's begins to become practically nothing. There would be moaning for sure, but compared to other utilities it's an absolute bargain.
I think social media needs to start being seen as a boring utility which it really is rather than the never ending frothy hype machine of myspace/facebook/instagram/snapchat/tiktok/future platform which only really serves the VCs and investors who earn money. I think there's a lot of people out there who don't want to have to keep on learning new platforms endlessly, they just want something that everyone they know is on, that works well, is simple, and that doesn't track them or bombard them with ads. I think this is part of the reason why LinkedIn has been so successful in that it is quite boring and doesn't change much.
In a way there should be the frothy hype machine apps for the youth and then the one boring adult platform for when you grow up and stop being an idiot and don't mind hanging out with your parents again. Facebook kind of was this platform, but then most people abandoned it other than the elderly (e.g the completely tech illiterate) because of how manipulative it got.
The other alternative, which I think a lot of people would hate but might actually solve the problem, would be for Apple to finally give it a shot and release something. They're already a heavily moderated walled garden and verification could easily be proven through Apple Wallet. They could easily plug things into the existing apps, e.g an instagram photo feed in the photos app, facebook style groups in the messages app, profile page integration into the contacts app etc. Maybe one new standalone "Community" app which has two tabs: an "everything" feed from all your contacts and then a Discover tab for popular posts nearby in your town. A focus on your actual family, friends and community rather than videos of randos dancing a million miles away that add nothing to your life. I think they may end up with some regulatory heat on them if they succeeded though; they would end up being extraordinarily powerful.
> I don't know, I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that if we want to avoid the mess we're in now, we've got to start paying for things.
I've spent the majority of my working life so far on the minimum wage and I only relatively recently escaped. I would have been open to paying for a service back then if it was only one hour's wage a year. If it's one hour's wage every month like Musk is proposing then no: I wouldn't have been.
In my experience, poor people are not adverse to paying things, they are just being priced out by poor salaries and greedy shareholders. These services don't need to grow and change. Every company does not have to be a trillion dollar rocket ship of growth. Hacker News has been the same for years. Just offer me a basic, functioning service and a small fee for the upkeep. Anything else only serves shareholders rather than actual users.
He starts off with "Power to the people", but this is just "power to the people with money"(which is the status quo). If you don't have $8/mo disposable income to spend on a vanity feature, then what you have to say will be overshadowed by the people who do.
He did say it will be scaled by PPP by region, which is interesting. Curious to see how that will play out, if taken literally I should be paying like $3 USD which seems fine to me but is still out of reach of most of my country for logistic reasons rather than outright money reasons.
As much as I don't like Musk, I think there is a good proposition for the YouTube-model of paying for an ad-free experience. However, aside that YouTube is a place with much better content, YouTube costs ~$5/monthly and is actually ad-free instead of half ad-free. How one can think this is a good idea is beyond me
I've had Twitter Blue lite for years: I use an adblocker, and I manually block every single advertisement that sneaks through by blocking the advertise's entire Twitter account. The end result is that my feed is nearly entirely organic, followed content.
Why would I pay $8/month for a materially worse experience?
I don't care much about Twitter, I didn't like the way the platform was policed, I didn't like the sheer amount of bots and for sure I didn't like the limit on text messages.
But it seems reasonable for an app having payd and free tiers, with the free tiers being add supported.
Somehow the app has to pay bills and staff.
If I'll find Twitter of any use at some point in time, I will pay $8 if that will yield some benefits over free tier.
Some people can't afford to pay or don't want to, which is why there is also a free tier. It isn't like Musk forces everyone to pay, but if you derive some value from Twitter it is normal to pay.
I guess some people hate Musk and they are going to great lengths to justify their hate coming with puerile reasons about why Twitter suddenly became 'bad' and predicting it a quick death.
And? what does that have to do with poor people? The entire economy is run on charging money. Are you saying “Kellogg is telling poor people to starve for charging for cereal!” Or is there something special about twitter for you to complain about? Why are poor people entitled to free twitter? They’re not entitled to free cars or free smartphones or free Netflix or free WhatsApp business accounts or free Fastmail or free UPS or free TV Ads are they?
So two things about this: (1) Twitter verification was started as a way to dodge lawsuits about people registering fake Twitter accounts.[1] Verified Twitter was a way to ensure you couldn't register yourself as "realLocalPolitician" and be mistaken in a way which made Twitter liable.
So turning it into a paid-for service puts Twitter in a weird spot, where they can probably be sued again about this because "verified only if you pay" is alternatively interpretable as a shakedown racket - and Twitter knowingly allowing people to misrepresent their identity to defame people makes Twitter liable again.
But (2): this just isn't worth any money to anyone. There just aren't that many people for whom Twitter-verified is a worthwhile expense. Word-of-mouth verifies accounts easily, and once everyone knows @nyTimes is the New York Times official account or whatever, then its entirely unlike something like TLS where the process provides an active component in validating or securing the content or link. Optimistically this is worth like USD$30 million a year to Twitter...out of about USD$5.5 billion of year-over-year revenues. Or about 47 hours of revenue.
Only disabling half of the ads makes sense from a business point of view. Most likely, the users who are the best audience for an ad (in the sense that they have spare money and might purchase an advertised product) are the ones that would actually spend money disable ads.
There will probably be a new advertisement segment for users of Twitter blue. Companies will be able to advertise specifically to users willing to pay to disable ads aka more likely to have disposable income. Premium ads for the high spenders.
I guess I'll go on record and say I think this is a great idea. There's too many journalists who just spew hot takes all day - at least make them pay for the privilege
one of the main touted draws of twitter is it's suppose to be the "public square of the internet". you not liking what someone posts shouldn't really curtail that (minus them being a private company and what not)
power to the people... for only 8 dollars a month!
is anyone sick of this salesman shtick? it's even more egregious when used as some form of crusade for the people.
let's be clear here, the 8 dollars a month is the motivation. He doesn't give two-shits about any moral sense of right or wrong or the well-being people that used the service.
he'd be more respectable/relatable if he had said "It's 8 bucks a month because I need to pay back the loans."
If I'm not mistaken, a few years ago, the basic social network (facebook & Co) was valuated on this ad basis: one user = $10.
The same logic for twitter gives $45B/400M users = ~$110/user.
99% of those users are useless but 1% are not.
In my view, Twitter is a propaganda machine with its 1% influencers/journalists/prophets that overflow world media and their billions of viewers/consumers/voters.
Personally, I see it as a win-win. If it fails and Twitter dies, then Twitter is dead.
If it succeeds, then the containment mechanism of Twitter is intensified even more, due to twitter-users feeling the need to "get the most" out of their reoccurring monthly bill, in effect leaving the remaining fun outskirts of the internet unmolested by comparison.
Can someone explain what the deal with twitter verification is (I know what it is) and why everybody is so upset about that it's going to be a premium feature?
Asking as someone who doesn't care about social media at all, and has never used Facebook or Twitter, except for clicking the occasional link to some tweet.
Twitter verification is meant for people with sufficient notoriety (say, elected officials, artists/actors, leaders in their field) to prevent impersonation and fraud.
So, if I get rickrolled on twitter, I can tell whether it was a post by the real Rick Astley or by some impersonator.
Or for another more topical example, the tag #TrumpIsDead is currently trending on Twitter. If I click on that for more information, the verified check might tell me who has notoriety as a journalist or which accounts represent official news organizations, vs who is trying to further promote a false meme (in protest for Elon forbidding content moderation in the lead-up to the US elections)
General question, There is so much toxicity in Twitter (even on Linkedin) and very little sane conversation (May be not just twitter, many social networks in general). For example recently saw someone post with POTUS on some ground breaking work on Immunotherapy for cancer (this was their 8 year research), replies and comments were outright bad to vulgar (did he smell your hair! went one). Mind you this was not a 4th grader but senior staff, well educated MBA's.
Has social media become a frustration venting outlet? Pretty sure one would come out of the browsing experience exhausted! Who would use this for 8 USD a month!
P.S. not on any social network except for messaging apps (once a day with notifications off)
Not sure I get it. May be it is cultural, but the flamewars after that was borderline spam and personal. Here was someone who was talking of 8 years of their work and the approval for next stage trials showing promise and we had "unrelated" (for lack of a better word) discussion and comments.
This is interesting. I have increasingly looked at Twitter as a business tool. This will push me further in that direction. It will make less sense to just hop on and drop hot takes without any purpose. I think I like it.
That said, this doesn't really say "Global Town Hall".
yup. If you're going down the route of twitter as a civilizational platform starting to sell premium citizenship rather than the original "verify every real human being" certainly seems odd.
Does someone have a better sense of economics of charging $8/Month ?
At best assuming approximately the 420,000 [see Ref.1] folks currently on twitter will pay $8/Month - which gives about $40 Million in *annual* revenue.
Will the economics work if the advertisers stay out ?
Also, why charge in the first place if the number is too low ( < $40 Million).
In a certain sense it feels like it's the right direction. But if you are essentially paying 8$/month how can you justify still displaying ads?
I guess what I am trying to say is that for 8$ every month you should be getting more than just a status symbol (which possibily not that many people care about anyway) and be stuck with ads.
Also, if Twitter is serious about creating a revenue stream for creators it should focus on creating valuable experiences for users that incentivize loyalty to the creators and not hand out verification status (which would become insignificant anyway if everyone has it).
It's not just a status symbol, it also boosts your posts. If I had to guess, the people likely to pay for this are power users in wealthy countries, aka the highest value users an ad platform has. Seems unlikely that they're monetized at less than $8 a month.
> Musk wants to start charging people to have a little blue check mark next to their names on Twitter. I wrote yesterday about reports that the price will be $19.99 per month, but that seems not to be a final decision, and other numbers have been suggested. Also last night Musk was personally negotiating the price with Stephen King. “$20 a month to keep my blue check?” tweeted King. “[No], they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.” Musk replied: “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” I absolutely love that, in between his busy schedule of reading printouts of 50 pages of code per Twitter employee to decide who to fire, Musk is personally going to negotiate commercial terms with each of Twitter’s hundreds of thousands of verified users. I have a blue check, I’m gonna tweet “I’ll pay $7.69” and see what he says.
King made a comment about price, and Musk made a (relatively) good reply - by asking "How about $8?" he's framed it as a value proposition and now you have to either say "nothing, Twitter is worthless" or you have to come back with a dollar amount. It's a good framing move.
An obvious solution could be revenue-share similar to how YouTube does - post a viral tweet that generates $x in ad revenue for Twitter, receive some percentage of that. Make it available only to blues who pay and ... (Musk if you use this send me car or a rocket :P )
At 280 characters that sort of thing would create the worst incentives possible on a platform with already terrible incentives.
Sure seems like Musk will be selling the desiccated corpse of Twitter to Verizon within a decade. On the bright side for him, he'll never have to pay tax again after writing it off.
So there will be a separate indicator for famous personalities according to this thread. This makes a lot more sense then.
The verification badge will only be used to know whether someone is human verified against an ID. And the other indicator will tell whether they’re a celebrity.
This way we will still have a way to know whether it’s a celebrity, and it will also solve the bot problem.
When Twitter Elite? Only for 100$ a month your replies will have priority over Twitter Blue users and then Twitter Whale - contact us for pricing, you will have priority over Twitter Elite users, then me and my friends millionaires can all buy Twitter Whale and Elite, before you get to see replies from a common person (the ones that can't pay) you will already lose your attention anyway, so we the wealthy will shape the reality.
They keep solving weird problems in weird ways. My $0.02 ->
They should have:
1. Created a new “VIP status symbol” icon (diamond?) for people who care / need / want the prestige (charge for it or don't) - I'd almost fork the existing checks over to it for simplicity.
2. Kept blue check for actual identity verification (this is a real human).
3. Added features people care about (editing / etc…) to Blue and charge for them.
Tying the verification to features is...just odd. #sigh
I have zero doubt that EM will bring Twitter to a better place. I mean, this is the platform where basic image upload was broken for 10+ years. How can that not be the top task in the backlog? I can answer that right away. Tech people focus on tech.
I think cost might be a problem with Blue. I mean, I collect domain names for fun. I don't think Twitter can provide the right tools to guard against false blue account claims.
That's not the point. The publicly stated reason for this whole saga was Elon was claiming Twitter was suppressing free speech and wanted to make it free again. This play goes against all that.
I hope this means I can use a disposable prepaid card and not give a phone number during signup.
They were using phone numbers for antispam; hopefully $8 will serve the same purpose.
Twitter’s had employees that sold user PII to murderous foreign governments. It is not safe to have PII associated with a sufficiently controversial Twitter account. Maybe they can accept crypto payments for this during signup.
Elon should not couple revenue generation with identity verification. Their should be a "Twitter Green" that lets users link a credit card to charge a one-time $1 fee. Twitter blue should allow power-users to customize their feed algorithm and be $20 per month.
I think changing the verification badge into something actually useful instead of a status symbol is a good thing. If there is a great exodus of Twitter influencers and it starts to affect traffic, then twitter can just add some kind of notability mark to high profile accounts.
Edit: They already plan to add a tag for public figures.
Both. It is sort of an “honesty bond” that Twitter knows your details in return you get a status mark. Of course the bar is quite high these days for recourse.
Yeah this is reasonable. For those who want or need it $100/yr is affordable but more than most would pay just to have it but don't need it. Off course it's mostly a mechanism to strengthen the bottom line but if it's value for money then go ahead.
Outside the vanity group, the only people likely to pay for this are the people who have somebody else paying for it - a corporate or government employer - or who can write it off personally as a cost of business.
While nice to think that every comment I make to a tweet is read by the original tweeter, at the end of the day I honestly am not heartbroken if they do not.
And I most definitely do not reply to tweets with the idea that others will be so amazed by my brilliance that they follow me. Is that really a thing?
He's just rearranging deck chairs on the fail whale. There is no way the investors are going to make back their money. Just sell it to Microsoft or take it public again, take the write down, and try to find something that you can fix.
What if, instead of a flat fee, blue checks were charged based on their number of followers or the level of engagement with their followers (how ever you'd quantify that)?
This would align the value and goals for both Twitter and blue checks.
To be honest, this sounds more like a child's revenge of taking his ball and going home.
It really wouldn't even be worth it either, because Musk is worshipped on Twitter and Reddit and nowhere else. He isn't Trump, he can't mobilize half a country to love him unquestioningly. This is the only place where his childish taunts about turning Twitter HQ into a homeless shelter will find an audience.
I don't get it. Charging for a blue check mark was not his main goal. It was to boot out all bots. Is that still the case? Is he saying that once the bots are eliminated, we are allowed to stay anonymous still?
1. Charge $8/mon and a bunch of people will pay
2. Fire a bunch of engineers
3. Twitter looks way better on paper
4. Flip the company in 18 months when rates go down and market is better esp tech
The result of this is that all users of consequence on Twitter are forced to reevaluate the value they receive from the platform. I imagine a lot of them will use the moment to abandon ship.
My suspicion is that the name on the payment method will be the verification, eg f you use a credit card named John Smith, your 'full name' will be uneditable and reflect that.
Income from those that post, from those than read, and from adverts? This is a scam, comparable or superior than academic editorials. I predict it will last less than 5 years.
Elon's vision seems not very different from the one any private equity firm doing a LBO would have: Maximize revenue and cut costs however you can to pay down debt.
This is an incentive for bad actors, which makes Twitter a worse platform. I suspect the blue checkmark will become a signifier of a scam account if this goes forward.
I stopped twitter during my long covid, and now I do not miss it. I just enter to post updates and keep some followers. I lost sense of why more could be needed!
Is the bot spam a problem to any average Twitter user like Elon claims, or just him (one of the most followed account in the app) and maybe couple others?
This might be my ignorance of macroeconomics speaking, but doesn’t the Purchasing Power Parity reference imply that the price should be the same worldwide?
The blue checks wanted to abolish billionaires, in the name of equality.
The billionaire will end up abolishing the blue checks, in the name of equality.
roughly speaking: blue checks are about status and tech billionaires about startups. It's old money vs new money.
Old money wanted to kill new money.
New money is wiping out the status of old money.
The blue check actually arose as an anti- impersonation tool. Twitter was forced to implement it after complaints.
But people who are impersonated tend to be "important". So it became a status symbol. Especially for writers.
The one form of equality a journalist will always resist is the idea that everyone is now equal to a journalist.
But that's what universal verification does.
Everyone who needs one can pay for a blue check.
Bots get taxed. Twitter makes money.
Establishment journos hardest hit.
It's more like the peasants will get a useless blue checkmark and the Lords will get a tag, which eventually will have the same meaning as the checkmark today. Everything stays the same but everyone pays.
"There will be a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians"
lmao such a populist move then. Make it sound like what was before a privilege for the few now is in reach for the working man, but actually there is now another type of privilege that it is unreachable unless you're a Very Important Person.
All the Musk fans, happy to see their messiah disrupt an institution, played like an absolute fiddle. This is hilarious.
> If one in five current blue ticks paid $20 a month that would raise just under $15 million a year for Twitter…Twitter’s current revenues (mostly from ads) are $5 billion a year. Musk’s apparent plan would generate about 30 hours’ worth of annual revenue.
> Absolutely no one should pay $8 or $20 a month to support Elton Murk's latest scam. Asking low-income Twitter users to pay $92 a year so their tweets don't get hidden and deprioritized alongside bots is not giving "power to the people."
The 2nd comment above pretty much debunks that IMO. If you're paying money and given more visibility to your comments vs. non-paying users, this does the exact opposite.
If one in five current blue ticks paid $20 a month that would raise just under $15 million a year for Twitter
Until suddenly there are yellow checkmarks available for $100/month, and red checkmarks available for $500/month, and enterprise-only green checkmarks for $5,000/month.
What percentage of "current" blue ticks convert is not material since the TAM is about to become every Twitter user.
And the offering is not just about verification, but other Blue features. Personally I have no interest in a blue check, but I'd happily pay $8/month to remove ads (unfortunately only half the ads will be removed in this iteration).
not that i think this is some brilliant revenue strategy but it does not strike me as a good take to automatically assume that the current blue check mark base is a strict superset of who will pay $8/month
> Musk has dumped $13bn of debt onto Twitter's company account, increasing the interest repayments from $51m to $1bn a year. Its entire gross income is c. $700m a year. Its net income is negative & it doesn't receive gov. subsidies that kept similarly loss-making Telsa alive
It’s fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media profile flag. I don’t think anyone cares except those same billionaires/VCs and journalists who both write this drivel (one of the links is on a16zcrypto.com which I guess is the ideological enemy base of “establishment journos”). Will anyone else be left on Twitter when their private war is done?
> It’s fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media profile flag. I don’t think anyone cares except those same billionaires/VCs and journalists (...)
Would you say the same about GitHub stars? There's no end of people obsessing about those, completely oblivious to the fact that they're first and foremost bookmarks, and do not confer any particular sentiment for a starred repository. And yet, they're a popularity contest.
Journalists and VCs care about this because enough users care about this that it can be used to print money.
Weird, I've never heard of people obsessing over GitHub stars. I guess if you're not actively contributing to open source projects, it's not something you care about.
You're seeing it more on HN because there's a huge (IMO growing) overlap between HN commenters and Twitter users. The comments on Big Tech articles look identical to entire slices of Twitter. Some of the talking heads on HN who comment a lot also have moderately large Twitter followings.
Despite being in tech and working adjacent to Big Tech, in my circles only HN and Twitter users are this up in arms about Twitter. They seem to be more concerned about this than even friends of mine who work at Twitter (who are more peeved by the current instability in the company than anything going on with the product.)
It's fun popcorn on HN right now but if this continues it'll get pretty tiring IMO.
Funny, I was just listening to Naval Ravikant talking about it being better to seek wealth than status, because the latter is a zero-sum game. hard to unsee that dynamic once it's pointed out.
Don't humans generally value relative wealth, which would also make it a zero sum game?
E.g., someone in poverty today isn't particularly comforted by knowing they have luxuries that former kings didn't have, like plumbing, because well-being is tied to relative scales
I considered that before posting, but what made me ultimately disagree is that well-being is not objective. It is very often completely subjective.
Consider that fact that at one point in the past you probably thought what you have now would make you happy. And maybe for a short time you were. But invariably that feeling of well-being wanes. You can say your new car is objectively better than your old one, yet after having it a few years it feels exactly like the previous vehicle from the standpoint about how much it contributes to your well-being. If well-being were an objective fact, you'd still feel happier with the new car. Most of the time, we have an innate ability to shift the goalposts, which keeps us continuously striving. To that extent, well-being is all subjective. I'm sure people in 200 years will wonder how we ever got along with our miserable existence without the creature comforts they take for granted.
>You can say your new car is objectively better than your old one, yet after having it a few years it feels exactly like the previous vehicle from the standpoint about how much it contributes to your well-being.
I agree with your point on human psychology, but survivorship bias is relevant here.
One way in which my new car is objectively better is that it has better safety features, which makes me less likely to die in a crash. My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.
The correlation is not perfect, but lots of creature comforts actively make us live longer. In addition to the comfort of pooping indoors, indoor plumbing also makes it easier to wash your hands with warm water afterward, harder to trip and fall on the trip to the outhouse, both of which make you live longer. The people who die don't get to psychologically adjust to their premature deaths.
I'm not sure this is the best application of a survivorship bias. I believe the point holds even when survivability is not a factor.
>My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.
Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function. Yet when we study psychological well-being, we see the opposite trend except at the very, very end of life when well-being dips. If your assumption were true, wouldn't well-being be expected to continually drop across one's life? (Unless, I suppose, the other assumption is that we bolster that through more consumption.)
I think this is change in how you initially framed the problem. If "better" can be objectively measured and "better" correlates to happiness, then I wouldn't expect it to normalize at all. The fact that it does change implies that subjective well-being doesn't actually hinge on how objectively better something is.
>Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function.
No, sorry, that was not my intent at all. My point was to get you out of thinking of well-being as a purely psychological phenomenon.
Dead people have no well-being at all. Many advances improve our well-being in an objective sense by keeping more of us alive longer. This is not a psychological effect.
And there is definitely survivorship bias. When you survey people about their psychological state, you only survey the ones who aren't too dead to respond.
>And there is definitely survivorship bias. When you survey people about their psychological state, you only survey the ones who aren't too dead to respond
What is the correlation to outcomes? Are you saying a negative outlook correlates to higher survivability so we are primed to view everything through a more negative lens?
That makes sense from an evolutionary psychology point of view, but doesn’t explain why we the well being wanes rather than just stays low from the onset.
A person in poverty in a high-income welfare state does not have a great live, but they are still comforted by the fact that they are not in danger of dying of starvation.
This is very astute, but I can't help wonder why people worry so much about their status on the bird website. Actually doing/making things in real life is pretty much guaranteed to have a much higher return in multiple dimensions (incl. status) than pretending like what happens there matters.
It doesn't have to be either/or: make something cool, throw out a link to it, repeat.
Except famous people now get a verified tag, rendering most of what you said moot. This is a bad idea, it will fail, and Musk will make like he never said it. If you don’t think so, just imagine yourself paying Facebook for a checkmark and see if that feels right.
1. Musk signed a binding agreement to buy Twitter.
2. And then he got cold feet when he decided he didn't like the deal he made and he spent six months desperately trying to not buy Twitter.
3. And then he finally understood that he would lose the court case and that he had to live up to the contract and so he bought Twitter at the originally agreed price.
4. And now Musk wants Twitter users to pay for his poor business decision and fund him out of his debt.
More mental gymnastics... I'm not even sure what point is being made by this move, other than devaluing the blue check to the point of meaninglessness. It's not even "utilitarian": if leveling the playing field was Musk's interest, he would have eliminated the blue check altogether.
There is no mechanism for anti-impersonation if all it takes to get a blue check is payment. Bot farms can also pay money for blue checks...
Almost everything is irrelevant to a hostile nation state, because by its very nature it can outspend your security if it cares badly enough. In the immortal words of James Mickens[0], "If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT."
Raising the costs has a general effect of cutting out people who do not care enough to pay - be it individuals, companies, or governments.
I think the expensive part comes mostly from the part that it is hard to make anonymous payment. Sending money is kind of a verification (unless dogecoin is accepted ;) ).
I still have no clue why bots would care to have it though, since there is obviously a very high percentage of people who don't.
I think this would do the complete opposite. Create two tiers of of users: Lords with the money to spend $8/month on getting a blue tick next to their name, and the peasants who don't cough up.
I can't wait to be disregarded just as a spam bot because I thought it's an embarrassing waste of money.
Can't it actually be the opposite? Like, sure I could pay $8/no (a coffee plus croissant) but it signals that I care so much about being heard on twitter that I'm willing to PAY for it... Only losers do so, so blue checkmarks a are that.
The old money (journalists of mainstream newspapers) can leave and take all the audiences with them. Their audience is there for the narrative and ideology, not because they are fond of Twitter.
Twitter does not have a "native" audience, because it claims to be a platform. If they engaged deeper with content producers (like substack does) they might have. It's a solely megaphone, hence useless without a voice behind them.
Old money reigns supreme because the "new" voices are not independent. They go on twitter so they can graduate to mainstream media (or to onlyfans)
> Old money reigns supreme because the "new" voices are not independent
Are you implying there are no legitimate discussions between non-checkmarked users today on Twitter? That there is only a leader(check-marked users) and follower dynamic?
twitter is propped up by the mainstream media, not the other way around. if mainstream journalists leave, twitter will be tumblr. for new twitterers, twitter is not a platform to stay on, but a bridge to graduate to somwhere else or build your audience and move it elsewhere (a book, podcast, youtube, articles in mainstream newspapers etc).
For example, one can say that Joe rogan used to have a 'home' on youtube, now on spotify. Who has a permanent home on twitter?
> It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money.
If 1% of twitter accounts pay then that is $400M/yr which is a decent chunk of revenue for twitter. It is absolutely about making money.
All the government and official accounts along with CEOs, actors and other public personas will be almost forced to pay up. The existing blue check marks who don't pay up will probably be made up for 10x by wannabe youtube personalities that pay for it.
The "blue check establishment journos" are also almost all upper middle class liberals, there's not much of a morality story here other than PMCs and capitalists having a squabble.
I wonder how big the exodus from Twitter has been-- (seems noteworthy from what I've seen)-- and whether it will be covered by journalists? They seem to have already decided that Twitter = news, ignoring the fact that most people don't use Twitter at all.
If (say) 5% of people leave Twitter, will journalists notice? Of course not, they'll just keep pretending like "people on twitter" == "people".
There is no exodus. People are slaves to impulse and comfort and if you don’t understand that on a fundamental psychological level then why are you commenting on the topic in the first place?
I don't grok what you're even attempting to say here. If I don't understand people are slaves to impulse and comfort, why am I commenting on twitter? Just, what?
That said, I killed my twitter accounts on elonday, and saw a dozen accounts' worth of coworkers do the same in just a random slack thread. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't have a ton to do with elon, it was just a good time to say goodbye to a service that I've failed to find utility in over the past dozen years or so, just like the vast majority of America, and, indeed, the world.
I think if someone can't afford $8 for Twitter Blue, they should probably get off of Twitter and find more ways to make money. There is plenty of work all around.
There are plenty of hard-working people who wouldn't want to budget $8/month for something nonessential like a social media app. There's no need to disparage them.
I already have it. It's due to the account being of a fairly big online thing I built circa 2008. That no longer exists. A blue checkmark was only given to people with impersonation problems, if you proved that any media (newspaper, online blogs,etc) had published about you, making that noteworthy.
I have a blue checkmark, and twitter doesn't know who I am technically.
What I love most is that the new CEO of Twitter is front and center making a major product and pricing announcement to the entire customer base within 4 days of buying the company. That’s awesome execution, baby! Not to mention the best type of product marketing imaginable.
Interesting point! What may be an effective management style for running a company you own could be deleterious when running a country for which you are an elected official.
I wonder what percentage of comments are motivated by a previous perception of Elon. "Blue checkmarks for $8/month is a bad idea..." (because user dislikes Elon), or "This is Genius! He's already fixing twitter! (user is a fan).
I'm sure he will have plenty of shower thoughts between now and when any Twitter Blue changes go live.
The problem more is that I don't believe he has anyone he trusts inside Twitter to bounce ideas off of, or whom he values input/feedback from.
I honestly don't believe he knows the technical challenges of the service, only having perception as an external user. And I don't think he really sees value in understanding how Twitter currently operates, seeing how he waived all his rights to due diligence when he made his original bid.
That’s a reasonable price. There is a need for some people to be verified to avoid impersonation. The vast majority of us do not need to be verified. Also, just because a person is verified does not mean they are credible, regardless of what their job is.
Indeed that is an approach that would work but would people trust Twitter with that data just to give you a checkmark? Or even bother trying to find their ID / passport? Feels super high-friction and questionable from a privacy perspective for such a minor product.
To be honest I think Twitter is better without any check marks. I remember reading somewhere that check marks were awarded to some user based on their connections to certain employees at Twitter.
The good news is that this should definitely reduce the volume of bot / troll accounts, by making it prohibitively expensive to run. That will mean a reduction of disinformation on aggregate - as what other purpose would there be to run a bot network?
The bad news is that it recreates the lords vs servants dynamic that Musk is claiming to want to get rid of. $8 is not much for everyone reading on HN, but guess what, we are very much the in the globally privileged 1%. He later adds something about purchasing power equivalent, but localised pricing suddenly makes this into a much bigger technical challenge
But with spending money, you can theoretically have more information on the buyer which you can use to help identify and fight spammers/bots & their networks. For example, you can limit one twitter account per credit card or registered user (identified via payment method). If they are found to be spammers, you just kill the account and ban the payment account(s). They can still obviously work around this, but the cost and difficulty for the spammer increases.
I don't know how the financial transactions & stuff work in the background, but the point is that you have more information and more options.
You couldn't previously buy a checkmark, now you can. This opens new methods of attacking the network.
This move perhaps limits spam as practiced today, but the attacks that will happen once the network changes will be different in ways that are difficult to predict.
I think high value spam (ie scams that involve impersonating a high profile user) will find the lowest price country and get verified there. Lower value spam will continue to operate as they have been, and the replies to most tweets will still be dominated by non-Blue users. And unless Twitter manages to get a large number of people to pay for Blue quickly, that means the spam still at or very close to the top.
I like this change, for it is radical. It's very hard to predict the outcome of it, so I'm above all interested in it as a social experiment.
For quite a few "check marks" it will feel as a massive downgrade. Not only are they no longer special, they even have to start paying to be less special.
Yet for many, they have nowhere to go. Their current status (followers) is often unique to Twitter and not easily replicated elsewhere. Many came to power by years of unhinged "hot takes", the check-mark, and algorithmic boosting. This tactic doesn't really work on any other social network, not by posting small and ridiculous pieces of text.
Some dare to even flip it and claim they should not be paying, they should get paid, for they are "creators". I consider that to be quite generous. Sure enough they generate activity/traffic, but that's not the same thing as creating.
Now, that's a creator. Tweeting "Biden sucks" creates outrage, but is not a creation. Stephen King is a creator as a novel writer, but his tweets specifically are not creations of any value on their own.
The way I draw this line is simple: can the creation stand on its own and widely be perceived as having value? For the video I linked to, clearly yes. For a tweet, when you disassociate it from who said it...nah.
With "value", I mean value to us. Clearly a rage tweet generating a lot of traffic and ad impressions has value to Twitter, but in my book that doesn't make you a creator that needs to get paid.
Musk has hinted though that he wants to onboard long form content and native video, so that could change things.
Finally, other than this leveling of status, I hope obscene algorithmic boosting is also looked at. One is often puzzled to see a random idiot having hundreds of thousands followers whilst producing nothing but mediocre garbage. The ultimate example has to be this:
It's funny how quickly the conversation has jumped from "Twitter will be a bastion of free speech" to "$8/mo is a fair price to pay for prioritizing your speech over others". Power to the people indeed.
License and taxes extra. May not be available in Hawaii and Alaska. Freedom is a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc. Some users experience nausea and vomiting, shingles, anxiety, and social destruction.
Verified users are already boosted in replies and search. That's been the case for many years. The only change is that since verification will require payment, boosting will require that same payment. It's a complete non-story.
The difference of course being that what used to be a painstaking verification process is now bypassed by anyone with $8/mo to spare, if they choose to do so.
It is in fact not a non-story, since obviously this changes everything about how "verified" users should be considered in your feed (as nothing more than pay-to-play, where before there was at least a facade of curation).
Since you're disputing my comment and not the parent, I take it you agree that making people pay for verification is somehow "anti free speech", while promoting verified users when it was an opaque process was not? The comment I'm responding to is incoherent, in addition to being flamebait.
how is that prioritizing your speech over others? There's a million ways to do it, and if you're a big boy you're probably throwing the big bucks. 8/mo is indeed not that much.
Take a look at Linkedin, they make tonnes of revenue from premium features. The problem is that Twitter suddenly deciding that it's going to create a brand new revenue stream by charging for features that don't exist is about as sane a strategy as me deciding I'm going to start developing gills before my next swimming lesson.
Linkedin has the CVs -- the content i ve seen there is laughable. Twitter can be compared to Wordpress, in which people invest time in making an online presence and following. But it seems easy for them to leave twitter and take their audience too - and many people do it with substack etc. I think introducing payments will change the dynamics of their crowd, which is basically a mob.
The thing with LinkedIn is that I could see paying for it, because you could make a connection with actual monetary value (The ability to get a job at a higher salary).
Seems like the payment is the opposite of what it should be. Twitter is collecting data on me and selling it to other businesses. They should be paying ME.
Twitter is worth paying for when you leave a not addictive session on the app in better condition than you arrived. What if Elon M. unlocks access for Twitter to China at $8 a month?
You're still the fucking product even if you pay for it. They're not going to track you any less. They'll just show you fewer overt ads. But now every spammer will get "priority speech" so the end effect is you'll see the same or more actual ads.
Elon on Twitter recently has reminded me of the headache I got from Trump on Twitter. Non stop. Every day. I know it’s my choice, but I’m worn out by it.
It makes sense. It’s ridiculous to have to subscribe to individual news websites when there are so many; an intermediary that did deals with publishers wouldn’t be a bad idea.
I don't know which people you're referring to or why you are comparing a company that the Americans tax payers propped up for years to a social media website like Twitter.
Agreed! I don’t know anything about business, but the company will surely implode in the coming days. It’s as if Musk and co. put zero though into this.
I really wish twitter didn't exist. The utility I see in it is limited. For example, I don't have an account, but I do view tweets from time to time. The tweets I generally view are related to some real time event I'm interested in (ie news). I find the fact that even then, there is usually an endless stream of mostly banal, vapid responses to be very off putting.
Not only do I find the content vastly uninteresting, the way the content on twitter is reported by mainstream media is exhausting. I could really care less about the stream of conscious tweeting of celebrities and politicians. It's not "news worthy" in my estimation.
But clearly a lot of people find it useful, I am completely mystified how this could be.
Maybe Twitter just isn't for you, that's fine. Why go so far as to wish it doesn't exist? I don't like football but don't want to take it away from its fans -- even though it consumes so much time, money, and attention.
To share another perspective, as a gamedev I'll miss Twitter. I doubt there will ever be as many creative people sharing their works in one place again. Things will get siloed and harder to find. Today, it's pretty cool to sign in and see amazing, inspiring work-in-progress. Reddit doesn't come close in my experience.
I follow scientists, mathematicians, authors, comic creators, comedians and so forth. I stay away from politics for the most part (I'm not American so they mostly don't apply to me anyway). I do follow some military analysts re Ukraine.
It was interesting to read and I'm not sure how I'd have seen her thoughts otherwise, unless she makes one of her YouTube videos about it.
I'm not trying to say Twitter is the greatest or even that you should join, just that Twitter has a lot of interesting people posting stuff that has nothing to do with politics or celebrity culture and some of us find it valuable.
My friend was in a doctoral program and everyone in it spent ALL DAY on Twitter. It almost became a coordination platform for them, and I get the distinct impression that the field largely homologized from it.
So I guess it's kind of neat in one regard, but I think people might underrate how powerfully it rounds away distinct viewpoints or novel findings.
I find Twitter good. Many interesting people and ideas, that I'd never would've come upon on my own probably. I find the short message format forces people to really distill their idea. The SNR on my TL seems fairly high imho.
It looks like I'm using it exactly the opposite of your "real time event" mode. I follow people that are not journalists and don't comment on people nor events. Strictly ideas. There are other media much better suited to covering people and events and in real-time.
Not having an account - don't see how that can work. In incognito - which I presume is similar to me not having an account - I get to see only a single page with few messages, nothing more. And ofc not possible to follow accounts and thus shape the TL.
I never subscribe to trends, themes, areas of interest and similar devices used by Twitter to guess what tweets I'd like to see. Twitter is hopeless there (as is the rest of social media). Just "show me what the account I selected to follow posted" is plenty good. I can't divine why Twitter does not do that only, why the extra complications wrt what messages I see on my TL. It's not like it can't show me enough adverts while showing only messages from accounts I follow.
Aside: I'm mystified how one goes from "don't like it" to "should not exist". Why, what's wrong with "live and let live"?
> But clearly a lot of people find it useful, I am completely mystified how this could be.
Because it's internet boredom distilled into its purest form.
And it's popular with journalists because now they don't even have to leave their house to ask the "man on the street" questions, they can just read twitter and regurgitate what they saw and be done with it. More and more articles are just Twitter posts reformatted, and once you start noticing it it gets painfully obvious how much there is.
LinkedIn has also taken this cue and also regurgitates LinkedIn posts on its trending topics equivalent. I like the topics, I don't think the sourcing on the "hot takes from the LinkedIn crowd" works very well but I guess it gets the clicks.
It's very frustrating too how it feels like it has become a black hole for journalists. Instead of actually doing reporting, it seems most spend all day on Twitter and just regurgitate the same few talking points as everyone else.
You anchor people high with leaking outlandish (incorrect) pricing, that way when you officially announce the (always intended) pricing - it seems like a deal.
My replies to Tweets aren't even in the always-dead bin at the bottom. The bin where you have to click to "Show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content".
Literally it has penis pics, OnlyFans referrals, and an occasional sliver of humanity which has me question what they did to be flagged as always dead. But not my replies.
My replies only appear on my profile under the Tweets and replies tab.
In some cases, I would rather be in the click for more 'penis bin' than be shadowbanned.
People should Tweet directly at the person instead of hogging the reply space with OT insults.
But other people use Twitter in different ways. If you mostly use it as a social network between your friends you might not care because they’ll presumably see your tweets because they follow you rather than because they found them in search or whatever.
If you’re using Twitter as a forum for discussions about some topic of your interest, maybe you’ll end up feeling crowded out in replies by people with the check. But if you’re at risk of being crowded out then maybe Twitter isn’t working so well as a forum. And I think that if eg A follows B and B retweets you, A should see your tweet whether or not you have a check. Maybe that isn’t so true with the non-chronological feed. If people in the community follow you then, depending on the dynamics, your opinions could still be spread via retweet rather than getting lucky in your position in the replies, no?
If you’re some reply guy, maybe your tweets should be downranked but then if you’re serious about it then I guess you’ll pay.