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.
Some of those get some reward from it in terms of added publicity, others in terms of building out their network, but a bunch even do it anonymously and seem to get no real world financial benefit from it other than sharing what they're working on and having discussions with other people interested in the same things.
Musk seems to fundamentally misunderstand not only how and why regular people use Twitter, but also how popular but non-celebrity people use it. He only sees it through his own lens, which is as a marketing tool, a way to move markets, and a place to shitpost freely. His changes make sense in that context only.
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)?
Blue checks should never be pay to play. They weren't designed that way. The problem is the ambiguity of the blue check leads to arbitrage that it seems all parties are interested in cashing in on. If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. Elon's backtracking about price parity just illuminates the capitalist nature of the entire thing. Charge what we can, not what we should.
We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.
25% of US Adults produce 97% of tweets on Twitter. 75% of Twitter users don't post a single tweet per month. 42% of Twitter users that produce < 20 tweets / month find civility issues with the platform, and only 27% of them feel politically engaged. Twitter has nothing to do with "humanity as a whole". It's obvious that the group that uses Twitter is niche yet highly engaged. Matters relating to Twitter's "social and intellectual needs" are only relevant to highly engaged Twitter users.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/1-the-views-... for all the stats
And those areas don't proportionally don't matter to Twitter. Even so, the very next tweet by Musk, in reply to the linked one, says:
> Price adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity
So that addresses this complaint.
> If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. (...) We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.
Since when is Twitter our "modern Greek forum"?
Just until a few days ago, being critical of Musk was strongly correlated with the belief that social media companies are private entities, free to do as they wish (and in particular ban whoever they want). It's ironic how fast things change :).
