[HN Gopher] Elon's first big move: pay to remain verified on Twi...
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Elon's first big move: pay to remain verified on Twitter
Author : firstSpeaker
Score : 20 points
Date : 2022-10-30 21:14 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.platformer.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.platformer.news)
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| "Twitter is strongly considering making its users pay to remain
| verified on the service, Platformer has learned. If the project
| makes forward, users would have to subscribe to Twitter Blue at
| $4.99 a month or lose their badges.
|
| Executives at the newly Elon Musk-owned company have spent the
| weekend discussing the move and making plans related to the
| project, according to two people familiar with the matter."
| knodi wrote:
| $4.99 monthly seems quite high for something that was free.
| tfsh wrote:
| a 4.99 monthly expense for accounts have who'm are likely to
| be world leaders, public figures, large organisations and the
| odd charity/public good insitute is not a steap price.
|
| Statistically, of course it's a large increase. However from
| a business perspective I do not think so. A quick search
| indicates there are 294,000 accounts, and at 4.99 a month
| that would yield Twitter $1,467,060 a month, which is hardly
| anything. Especially as I imagine ~10-15% of those accounts
| will decide to forgo the badge, either in protest or because
| they just don't care.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I've bought many social media accounts before, this is way
| more efficient and less disaster prone than paying for
| likes/followers, as you won't get bots. You'll get a
| professionally curated and grown account with the level of
| engagement to your choosing, with the audience geared towards
| the brand/theme of the account's content.
|
| What people don't realize is that each individual account is
| like purchasing a business. There are way too many
| similarities to think of it any differently.
|
| When you buy an account, you get all the DMs which often
| include a _whole network_ of traders, promoters, service
| providers, negotiations, trade lines. Typically you also get
| the email address and password used to create the account,
| which has even more of this.
|
| You are mostly getting ROI pretty quickly by doing a few
| promos really quickly. Its actually based on a multiple of
| getting ROI.
|
| Purchasing an account is a fairly low trust environment,
| fraught with scams. Most social media Terms of Service
| actually exacerbate this, by mostly banning the concept of
| buying/selling an account. Since this happens, the platform
| should actually be facilitating these transactions and there
| is _a lot_ of value to extract. Escrow services charge 30%
| right now, but a network of trusted traders is better and
| more valuable.
|
| With that said, $4.99/mo for the tip of the iceberg of the
| value of these accounts is extremely underpriced. Tolerable
| overhead costs are in the thousands if we are being honest.
| This should be its own separate tier than just "Twitter
| Blue", as it will price out too many people to operate at
| scale, but this is definitely a model that is neglected by
| social media platforms right now.
| qull wrote:
| It wasn't exactly free, but a crony system from what I can
| tell. Honestly feels way too cheap at 5$ for what it is and
| the unjustified weight it carries.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| I believe that Lithuania has an electronic ID system
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_identity_card#As_e
| l...
|
| that's been working. I think we're behind the curve here;
| it should be easy to very strongly verify my identiry to
| any online business I choose to do that with; without
| government taking the lead, every damn company is going to
| be expensively reinventing that wheel.
| tttttt5ts wrote:
| Most companies shouldn't need this information. I don't
| give my id to most businesses I visit in person. The
| ability for online services to "verify" me does not need
| to be easy and it doesn't need to be cheap otherwise it
| will just be abused.
| adamckay wrote:
| But if you're out in public and you start shouting
| harmful, hateful or abusive messages there can be real-
| world consequences.
|
| On Twitter you can be the most vile person possible with
| absolutely no fear as you're entirely anonymous.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| But bots can't walk into most businesses in person. My
| point is that I don't want to hear from an account that
| isn't at least verified to be set up by a verified
| specific human being.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Twitter's blue checkmark isn't just authentication. The
| reason anyone cares about it is that it means "I'm a
| somebody".
| Nomentatus wrote:
| I understand, but unless via a crony system, it's hard to
| do that kind of IDing without expense. However, I would
| like to see a not-someboy-but-a-verified-specific-human-
| not-bot account designation, too.
| anecdotal1 wrote:
| I'll pay $5 to be verified and then hopefully have an
| option to filter out every account that isn't verified
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Indeed. As Hubert Humphrey said: "Everyone has a right to
| speak, but nobody has the right to be heard."
|
| Okay I'm wrong. The correct quote is: "The right to be
| heard does not automatically include the right to be
| taken seriously." -- Hubert H. Humphrey
|
| Maybe if he'd lived into the internet age, he'd have gone
| with my quote. There ain't time to hear everybody on the
| net, or Twitter.
| Comevius wrote:
| Those verified active users are the lifeblood of the platform,
| but there can't be that many of them to justify rolling
| unnecessary obstacles in front of them.
| bequanna wrote:
| Not really an obstacle to tweeting.
|
| It's nothing other than making people pay for a status symbol.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Hopefully not. At 5$ I would hope they would actually check
| the account marked as verified is actually the individual/etc
| that they claim to be ...
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Those verified active users are the lifeblood of the
| platform, but there can't be that many of them to justify
| rolling unnecessary obstacles in front of them.
|
| They bring money to Twitter how exactly? That whole "verified"
| scheme was always a joke, given who gets to be verified or
| unverified. Either it's about real identities or it's a
| worthless ideology approval badge.
| nequo wrote:
| > They bring money to Twitter how exactly?
|
| They draw an audience to the platform and they tweet things
| that journalists want to write about which is free
| advertising for Twitter that draws more of an audience.
| stevage wrote:
| Charging celebrities $5 a month doesn't seem like a great way to
| make a lot of revenue.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Yeah that's dumb. Better sell twitter yellow as a lower form of
| twitter blue
| everfrustrated wrote:
| I would happily use Twitter in a mode that meant I only saw
| content and replies from verified humans and nobody else.
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