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.
As a centralized platform, Twitter creates more value for those who follow than those who broadcast. Because the broadcasters are primarily known for something other than the "content" they create on the platform, they would find their audience anywhere. Followers, on the other hand, can conveniently follow many people on the same platform. Regardless of whether they are interested in global celebrities, local politicians, or professionals in a specific subfield, they can often find those people on Twitter.
Blogs used to be popular among many of the groups you can now find on Twitter. I guess Twitter replaced them, because the short message format forces you to focus on the essentials. Creating a new post is much faster, and you will reach many more people, because reading the post is not a significant time investment.
Twitter was born out of the short "status updates" fad at the time, on both Myspace and eventually Facebook.
Those were born out of MSN Messenger and other IM programs at the time that had customizable social profiles of sorts - including an updatable Status that was shown as a subtitle in your contacts' respective friends lists.
I remember the general sentiment of Twitter when it started was that the short character count (120 characters or whatever it started with) was a fun novelty, nothing more. It wasn't seen as a "social network".
Twitter gets its name in part from the saying "A little birdie told me ..." intersected with the fact that your phone twitches (vibrates) when you receive an update. It mimicked the other popular app names at the time that often omitted a vowel, such as 'flickr'. The original site was thus called twttr.com. The whole point was to be short, concise, non-serious communication. "Yo" tried to take this to the extreme several years later and ultimately failed (or pivoted, not sure which).
When Twitter started gaining traction, it was clear that more involved discourse was nearly impossible with the shorter character count, thus the limit was bumped up to what it is now (240 or 280 or something). The initial response was, understandably, negative. People predicted at the time that this would devolve the platform into another battlegrounds for shouting matches and arguing just as Facebook had. In hindsight, they were mostly correct.
Threads were also added to improve cohesion within lengthy conversations, and those features alone are now what form the core of Twitter's major feature set.
It's worth noting that Twitter hasn't changed much, which is pretty widely regarded as a feature in itself and can earn long term retention even with on-the-fence users (see: Steam).
However, this is mostly just my recollection of events.
Twitter is the middle-man.
Absolutely true, but it doesn't PRESENT itself that way. It PURPORTS to be an egalitarian platform. The truth is that the specific way Twitter's network effects work, you simply don't matter unless you're a celeb (either in Hollywood, or in some particular niche) or a journo. Celebrities I can understand. I don't know why Twitter is so bent around journalists, but it is, and it's obvious. To me, it goes back to the insinuation that the platform has been specifically engineered to influence national public opinion, but I suppose it might be just a "lucky" side effect. In any case, just being a random person on the platform can sometimes be pretty frustrating, because all the engagement is eaten up by people with hundreds of thousands of followers.
> Almost all made famous by YouTube.
I looked the top 50 in that list and maybe ~5 of them are what you describe. The rest are big music labels, TV channels, artists and other such independently popular figures, not very different from Twitter.
I agree with the observation that Twitter is for people who are already famous, especially those made famous by US media. YouTube seems to at least allow for creators to build their own following and more importantly: Make money off their work.
Great trolling.
While I think that Musk’s plan is going to backfire, it is worth noting that he tries to address this in a narrow respect, in that paid users under the new plan would be able to distribute longer video/audio content with tweets.
It’s how I found my tribe and became part of a small specialist community 14 years ago
I don’t understand the logic. They can be both well known outside of Twitter and create content. Sure, that is not their source of income, but it is harder to monetise a Twitter account, so that’s more or less by design. From the point of view of random people there is not really any functional difference.
In my eyes YT is no social network, even though many claim it is.
The comment section, where the discussion and interaction takes place, is like SMS is to WhatsApp, in the sense that it has no surface to enrich dialogue. For example, you can't add images in replies to a comment, comments can't be embedded in websites.
I don't see how they can expand to a multimedia platform, which is what Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are. They're just a video platform and lack everything else which could move it towards a multimedia platform.
“ $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...
"Only on Twitter can we watch a man worth $200 billion negotiate with a man worth $500 million about saving $12 a month"
They never do. Musk may or may not charge his $20, but King will pay it if he does, he's bluffing.
Meanwhile, platform dying cause people left is something that happened many times already. Usually they don't leave with one bang and they won't here. It happens over months slowly.
"This will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587505731611262976
So I guess they are actually planning to pay Stephen King after all, if he stays Twitter Blue. (Presumably his share of the money would be more than $8/month.)
How they distribute the money will be key. Would it be based on generic follower counts & likes & engagement - which will surely drive massive waves of spambot activity - or will each user's $8/month be distributed to the accounts they follow, almost Patreon or Flattr style? That might actually be interesting.
...why?
As someone who doesn't use Twitter, remarks like this have left me very confused. Clearly these people found Twitter valuable before. Does not having the checkmark make it less valuable? Is there an alternative service that provides similar value?
The blue checkmark is a service. Now they want money to continue that service. If you don't want it, don't pay for it. Leaving over concerns about Elon's vision for the platform makes sense, but I really don't get leaving over the checkmark subscription.
Because the content on Twitter is generated by a relatively small number of users. A lot never tweet, quote tweet or retweet but it goes beyond that number once you weight it by audience. A small number of people have a large amount of reach and thus are responsible for a good chunk of the content.
That content is why the users are on Twitter and it is those users who are advertised to that pay for Twitter to exist. That's what Stephen King means.
Now you can turn this around and say that those power users are only there because the audience is and that they get value for being there but platforms need users and users follow creators more than the platform as a general rule.
> ...why?
Steven King is currently worth ~500MM USD. That money solely came from selling his words. So, we know they have a great deal of market value.
That's why.
And Musk's answer was to offer $8/m
King wasn't talking about paying anything
Realistically.. is it worth more than 4$ a month? Probably not. Why would you pay 8 for that?
Stephen King will quit Twitter just as credibly as Jay-z “retired” from rapping.... like Elon Musk gives a shit about convincing a person worth $500M+ that $20 vs $8/m is too much to ask.
It's like charging actors to act, or charging writers to write.
Without people like King, twitter has no chance of surviving long-term. It does nothing special. It was simply in the right place at the right time.
He's just butt hurt because the VIP room and symbol is being opened to the proles. Now any schlub with $8 can have the once exclusive symbol.
He's right: Twitter should be paying him. That's not true of all blue-checks, but it's true of many of the most popular of them.
And as a consequence, it is not worth the $8. King's analysis is correct.
And even if they tweet something worthwhile it’s usually followed by 98% garbage replies with “LOL you’re so stupid” so I’m not wasting my time sifting through that trash heap.
It is useful for events with people on the ground to share info - the story of the guy in Pakistan tweeting about helicopters when Bin Laden was killed was pretty amazing to be honest.
But those types of writers tend to die out after the event.
[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.
Arguably also Netflix, Roblox and free-to-play mobile games run on this sort of scheme as well.
> I think it’s only Onlyfans that can get away with such a business model.
OnlyFans is not (by far) the only site that has a business model of “consumers purchase from producers and the site rakes in a share from that”, nor even the only one (again, by far) with that model where what is purchased is digital content.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/25/23423510/spotify-total-s...
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.
