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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: typos
But for personal data collectors and advertisers, the largest size is the only one that fits. Quantity not quality. Audience. Reach.
basic is free
oh you can pay to have your nft shown
then additional packages for people that want to use social media managers
that deal with impersonation
etc
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.
Adverse selection. The people willing to pay to remove ads are probably your most profitable users to show ads to.
Continuing to show ads to paying content creators is double-dipping.
> 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.
I don't think so. Twitter's ARPU from advertising in Q2 2022 was around $4.50. ARPU from advertising in the US was more than $14.
Users likely to subscribe at $8/month (power users in western countries) are more valuable than average for advertising.
No ads for $8/month would probably be a very bad idea.
Q2 revenue: $1.18 billion
Q2 revenue per monetizable user: $4.96
Revenue per user if they're paying $8 a month is $24 per quarter (there's 3 months in a quarter!)
That's definitely more than the profitability of the average user. If I got the numbers wrong then please show me how.
he is full of bad ideas and will bring twitter down with most of them
though I like the idea of bringing vine back.
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?
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.
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.
* 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)
My thinking was based on YouTube Premium, Apple TV, Netflix (currently), 4oD, Disney+, etc.
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
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 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.
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).
Who will pay will be grifters and ideologues.
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.
$0 - you barely get heard
$8 - you kind of get heard
$88 - you really get heard
$888 - everybody thinks the exact same thing as you do and you can manipulate portions of the population (lol)
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.
"wouldn't bother" should be "don't bother".
For the world, around 290 million [1], with an internet population of around 4 billion [2], that's around 7%.
Things are a bit better for the us, with 41.5 million active users [1], assuming they're all over 18 (209 million), that's about 20% of US population.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/10/25/twit...
2. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=number+...
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.
Than an average user. But if you are a power user, you have just sent a valuable marketing signal.
> Paying $8 to get your voice heard by more people biases towards those with means
Strong disagree. Twitter currently only exists as a bullhorn for already famous people, or a few lucky early adopters.
Not if you curate it at all.
My two Twitter accounts are dominated by...my fellow academics on one of them, and niche hobbyists on the other.
I'd assume the $8 high-rollers can still retweet and amplify the poors.
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
Every time I see a post it's just followed up by 100 meme gifs, not discussion.
[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/netflix-ad-supported-tier-price...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Broadcast television and radio have always done this. How could they do anything else?
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.
> 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.
This is why the Model X has those silly doors.
And yet his companies are some of the most difficult to get a job at. Interesting.
This pricing clarification is most likely due to Stephen King's complaint: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
> We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?
"I was going to charge $20, but then Stephen King told me it was too much."
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
If Elon is successful, even I will read the business school case study on it, because it flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems and... well just about everything. The only way this works is if Elon's internal processes are way different from his public persona.
"flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems" indeed!
Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day, "you know what, !@#$ 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.
He’s probably right, although it doesn’t generalize to most celebrities who do have a vested interest in paying to promote themselves.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"If you're not paying for the product, you're the product."
Though to truly resolve this, they need 0 ads, not 50% fewer.
If the celebrities leave, Twitter dies.
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?
More likely it was always going to be $8
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.
The checkmarks won't be a status symbol anymore, but the masses will want their tweets prioritized.
Is that what you think when you see a blue check?
this is basically how it operated before, except with political bias
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.
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.
I expect more changes are ahead that might address these concerns.
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.
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.
As you point out, the answer is "all of the relevant ones, with very little effort on his part"
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.
That's the real town square. Let me sleep in the gutter!
No politician nor public servant nor government department should be able to use it under those circumstances.
They really need silent accounts, that cannot tweet and are completely anonymous.
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).
[0] - "The blue Verified badge in Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic" - https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
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.
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.
Isn't that essentially what demonetization is, just without the predictability of a regular monthly bill?
Granted, it's not a perfect 1:1, I just wanted to find an excuse to snipe at YouTube.
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.
However, politicians lying and gloating after basically yet another domestic terrorist attacks, politicians trying to make it harder for opposition to vote will stay.
> 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.
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 $5 billion a year. Musk’s apparent plan would generate about 30 hours’ worth of annual revenue."
"$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."
- Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam
- Ability to post long video & audio
- Half as many ads
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.
This makes it available to anyone who is able to get a Netflix subscription.
It goes from a status symbol to a commodity. The Lords will hate it because it makes it available to the peasants.
Why would I pay $8/month for a materially worse experience?
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.
“Are you poor? Then, shut up”
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.
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ton...
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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)
That said, this doesn't really say "Global Town Hall".
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 ( < $40 Million).
Source : [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/28633/verified-users-on-twitt...
I guess what I am trying to say is that for 8$ 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).
Probably this will increase SNR of twitter to some degree, we'll have to see!
> 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.
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 )
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I bet they can sell this twice. Once here and once to advertisers that want to advertise to the more exclusive crowd
Edit: They already plan to add a tag for public figures.
Should be: $1.99 for every user with optional $7.99 upgrade to validated ID/Blue checkmark. No ads. Way fewer bots.
Focus completely on functional/feature engineering and dismantle advertising system.
Branch out into VOIP/Email services. Total communications platform instead of "social media" should be his direction.
If it does, $8/mo for a blue check and reply priority seems like a pretty good deal for all those people impersonating Elon musk to run crypto scams
However, the existing Twitter Blue is still being listed as $5/mo.
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?
This would align the value and goals for both Twitter and blue checks.
Would it have made any financial sense? Of course not. Would it have been the ultimate post-modern, trollish, liberating move imaginable? Absolutely.
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.
Up to 1000 followers = free tier
1000 - 100,000 followers = $8/month
100,000+ followers = Call us
Edit: The fact that Truth Social was bankrolled to the tune of millions of dollars should illustrate the value of being able to tweet to the masses.
Just killed the spammers and bots.
This is less about making huge profits and more about making it not worth it to pay money to spam and get banned.
It's a tough engineering problem but surely someone could solve it ...
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
Charging for the blue check moves it from a status symbol to a utilitarian one.
It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money.
https://twitter.com/naval/status/1587523978456748033
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.
Further reading
1) @sriramk on social networks as games: https://a16zcrypto.com/social-network-status-traps-web2-lear...
2) @eugenewei on status as a service: https://eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
"There will be a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587527711228149765?s=46...
https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/1587381512500125699
> 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.
https://twitter.com/ashtonpittman/status/1587509202401927168
> 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."
There is no mystery here. It went like this:
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.
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...
I guess I don't get this 5-D chess the masters of the universe are playing. From my plebian plane it looks like a monkey flinging poop at a wall.
I can't wait to be disregarded just as a spam bot because I thought it's an embarrassing waste of money.
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)
So it becomes worthless to the ones who want it as a status symbol. Why pay if you aren't something special afterwards?
At $8/month, that's patently not true. Why should verification be anything other than a pay-once deal, if it has to be paid for at all?
Who needs one that cannot afford $8/month? Does anyone really need it?
> Why should verification be anything other than a pay-once deal, if it has to be paid for at all?
It is not just verification though. Verification is just part of the subscription.
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.
Crypto scammers make so much that paying $8 is pocket change if it means having scam tweets be more visible.
If (say) 5% of people leave Twitter, will journalists notice? Of course not, they'll just keep pretending like "people on twitter" == "people".
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.
Identify with a document issued in country x...? You pay the price adjusted for that country, regardless of your IP geolocation.
Like paying to watch ads on television.
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
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.
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.
On Youtube, you can find videos of incredible production value. Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saWNMPL5ygk
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:
No, I have nothing against that newspaper nor do I find them idiots. That account has over 50m followers yet near-zero engagement.
Now you can experience FreedomTM for only $8/mo.
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.
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).
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.
Just a product with slightly less disposable income.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434502/twitter-blue-ad-...
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.
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.
Because it pollutes other more "reliable" sources of information.
Today, for example, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder posted a series of tweets criticising this article: https://phys.org/news/2022-10-bell-theorem-quantum-genuinely...
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.
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.
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"?
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.
This is Elon tactics 101.
You anchor people high with leaking outlandish (incorrect) pricing, that way when you officially announce the (always intended) pricing - it seems like a deal.
I have an alternative suggestion. How about I don't pay Twitter one red cent and continue to block their ads?
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.
edits: wording
