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...
All the Musk fans, happy to see their messiah disrupt an institution, played like an absolute fiddle. This is hilarious.
The king is dead, long live the king!
Or just a person likely to be impersonated for various scams or other social attacks? How does anyone see a blue check as anything other than that?
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."
This proposed subscription prioritizes content based on who can/decides to pay $8 a month.
How exactly is this leveling the playing field?
Until suddenly there are yellow checkmarks available for $100/month, and red checkmarks available for $500/month, and enterprise-only green checkmarks for $5,000/month.
And the offering is not just about verification, but other Blue features. Personally I have no interest in a blue check, but I'd happily pay $8/month to remove ads (unfortunately only half the ads will be removed in this iteration).
https://twitter.com/CMacCaba/status/1585914462951047168
> Musk has dumped $13bn of debt onto Twitter's company account, increasing the interest repayments from $51m to $1bn a year. Its entire gross income is c. $700m a year. Its net income is negative & it doesn't receive gov. subsidies that kept similarly loss-making Telsa alive
A longer thread informative thread here too: https://twitter.com/aidanpobrien/status/1587450510549852160
I'm curious how many low-income Twitter users now have a blue-check.
Would you say the same about GitHub stars? There's no end of people obsessing about those, completely oblivious to the fact that they're first and foremost bookmarks, and do not confer any particular sentiment for a starred repository. And yet, they're a popularity contest.
Journalists and VCs care about this because enough users care about this that it can be used to print money.
Despite being in tech and working adjacent to Big Tech, in my circles only HN and Twitter users are this up in arms about Twitter. They seem to be more concerned about this than even friends of mine who work at Twitter (who are more peeved by the current instability in the company than anything going on with the product.)
It's fun popcorn on HN right now but if this continues it'll get pretty tiring IMO.
E.g., someone in poverty today isn't particularly comforted by knowing they have luxuries that former kings didn't have, like plumbing, because well-being is tied to relative scales
It is objectively better to not have to go out in the cold to take a shit at night, even if you're "poor".
It doesn't have to be either/or: make something cool, throw out a link to it, repeat.
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 still have no clue why bots would care to have it though, since there is obviously a very high percentage of people who don't.
I 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)
Are you implying there are no legitimate discussions between non-checkmarked users today on Twitter? That there is only a leader(check-marked users) and follower dynamic?
twitter is propped up by the mainstream media, not the other way around. if mainstream journalists leave, twitter will be tumblr. for new twitterers, twitter is not a platform to stay on, but a bridge to graduate to somwhere else or build your audience and move it elsewhere (a book, podcast, youtube, articles in mainstream newspapers etc).
For example, one can say that Joe rogan used to have a 'home' on youtube, now on spotify. Who has a permanent home on twitter?
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.
A lot of freelance writers, in my experience.
> It is not just verification though. Verification is just part of the subscription.
That's a fair point, but why not make verification free (or a one-off payment) and remove it from the subscription feature package?
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.
