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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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)?
>> 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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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)
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
(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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Readit News
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.
There is a very big difference between Twitter and YouTube, and it's obvious once you know it.
Look at the most popular people on twitter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitte...
All celebrities outside of twitter.
Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT...
Almost all made famous by YouTube.
Twitter has no real "content creators", YouTube does.
“ $20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
https://twitter.com/stephenking/status/1587042605627490304?s...
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
> 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.
As Stephen King rightly pointed out: Twitter should be paying him - not the other way around (IHO). Anyway, this is going to be interesting.
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.
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?
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.
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.
But a far larger number of people think they are or aspire to be influencers, and they're going to want the badge too.
I think it's only Onlyfans that can get away with such a business model.
Twitter on the other hand is just text. Anyone can write tweets.
Not anyone can post YouTube videos.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists
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.
If this is part of what blue checks were designed to solve, they're solving the wrong problem. Fix search and content quality / spam instead.
Wait until you see how they begin marketing the subscription.. it will be ridiculous. Might as well be trying to sell snake oil.
(Genuine question, not rhetorical)
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.
Dead Comment
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)
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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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
They'll just double-up ads for non-paying users in the current ad slots on the feed.
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 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.
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.
By most accounts the additional tools they provide in terms of filtering aren't that valuable.
In Musk's proposal basically a slightly better Twitter Blue.
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This is why the Model X has those silly doors.
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.
[1] https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-model-x-sales-figures-us...
The doors are an interesting example since they always seemed strictly worse than the traditional design, unlike the rest of the car.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
Looks-wise, it's basically indistinguishable from a Model 3 (which are everywhere), so hardly iconic in any way.
When compared to cars like the F150 that bring in literally billions of dollars in profit a year?
Are you sure?
Oh, you're going to say you weren't counting trucks ;) Mercedes, BMW, Lexus still blow Tesla out of the water with their lineup.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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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.