[HN Gopher] Twitter Blue for $8/Month
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter Blue for $8/Month
Author : BryanBeshore
Score : 240 points
Date : 2022-11-01 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| danpalmer wrote:
| The good:
|
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| 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
| matwood wrote:
| > 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.
| jmathai wrote:
| 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".
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| checkmarks mean prestige, exclusivity, and validation.
| public figures and journalists love prestige, they live for
| it. twitter just removed one thing that made it attractive
| to them. being able to buy it means it s useless for
| anything other than removing spam
|
| that s a very odd way to remove spam . and personally i
| dont see twitter bots because i dont go searching for them.
| Musk is completely obsessed with the wrong problem
| carbine wrote:
| checkmarks ALSO mean you are who you say you are. making
| them a feature of Twitter Blue (note: _one_ feature of
| Twitter Blue) eliminates any status that might have been
| conferred in the past, yes, but it also goes a long way
| to sorting legitimate from fake users.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| >making verification only about ID and being a real person is a
| broadly good change [and continued desire to pay $8 a month]
| michaelmior wrote:
| > See: every streaming service.
|
| 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.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| 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)
| danpalmer wrote:
| Fair enough. Neither are available in the UK.
|
| My thinking was based on YouTube Premium, Apple TV, Netflix
| (currently), 4oD, Disney+, etc.
| watwut wrote:
| I dont think twitter is anywhere near Netflix or even
| youtube premium in terms of what it provides. And I am
| saying it as someone who do actually uses twitter (unlike
| half of HN who claims to never use it).
| [deleted]
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| 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".
| cinntaile wrote:
| I don't get the link. Why would Binance be in favour of
| impersonating others for $8/month?
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| Crypto people are generally not in favor of providing your
| government ID for things. "Pay $8 in crypto and also give
| us your identification documents" will not be popular.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| You do in fact need to prove your identity if you want to
| trade on binance. (KYC requirement.) So I don't see why
| they would have a problem with making people prove their
| identity for a bluecheck.
| matwood wrote:
| Last I checked, Binance does KYC.
| mattr47 wrote:
| Many streaming services have ads in their lowest tier now.
| Paramount is the first I can think of.
| taude wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.ign.com/articles/netflix-ad-supported-tier-
| price...
| bydo wrote:
| 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?
| lupire wrote:
| Brands don't post to be nice. They are posting ads for
| their business.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yes? It's actually better for Twitter because they can get
| pocket most of the money.
|
| Companies aren't voluntarily charging barely enough to
| cover costs - they're being forced to do it by competition.
| Normally, they'll charge you as much as they can get away
| with.
|
| It would be news if Twitter, or anyone else for that
| matter, decided to voluntarily charge less for the sake of
| fairness to the users.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Apparently Twitter needs 20000 employees to let those users
| create the content; they need to get paid!
| xemdetia wrote:
| 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?
| dboreham wrote:
| It probably is.
| perrygeo wrote:
| > See: every streaming service
|
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| >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?
| empressplay wrote:
| They don't need to, your 'full' name is just locked to
| whatever's on your payment method. Problem solved.
| adrr wrote:
| That's cool. I can set the bill name and address of my visa
| gift cards for online purchases. Sure hope they do this for
| $8/m.
| Fomite wrote:
| This.
|
| 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.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| 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".
| fossuser wrote:
| I was really hoping for no ads! Huge bummer on that front.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Just use an unofficial Twitter client!
|
| 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.
| fossuser wrote:
| I've tried multiple times and they're just bad imo.
| cmelbye wrote:
| > $8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported
| user.
|
| 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.
| codemac wrote:
| Exactly, thank you. I was going to say - $8/mo per US user
| would be a failing ad business.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| YouTube is 13EUR for ad-free and they're actually hosting
| videos (High bandwidth) AND share over 50% of this with the
| content creators.
|
| $8 is a lot - relatively speaking.
| [deleted]
| tonetheman wrote:
| paying 8 dollars for a checkmark is also a bad idea...
| putting trump back on twitter is also a huge bad idea...
|
| he is full of bad ideas and will bring twitter down with most
| of them
|
| though I like the idea of bringing vine back.
| mosdl wrote:
| half the ads, not no ads.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Twitter Q2 average daily monetizable users: 237.8 million
|
| 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.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| > Paying $8 to get your voice heard by more people biases
| towards those with means rather than those contributing to the
| conversation
|
| I'd assume the $8 high-rollers can still retweet and amplify
| the poors.
| legitster wrote:
| > $8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported
| user.
|
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| I mean, being too online, at home, in sweats, doesn't make me
| a big spender.
| Fomite wrote:
| "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.
| watwut wrote:
| I dont think early adopters mattered for years already.
| costcofries wrote:
| "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.
| wsatb wrote:
| 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.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| But the people who would pay $8 dollars, regardless of
| finances, derive enough value from being bluechecked in the
| first place. Paying the money would fulfill would fulfill a
| higher rung of their hierarchy of needs than it would for
| most others.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
|
| Who will pay will be grifters and ideologues.
| frollo wrote:
| 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).
| danpalmer wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Diverse input results in better conversations
|
| But how many different people are necessary to give the
| diversity of thought on a particular topic? I bet it is not
| many, certainly fewer than 100, maybe 50, or on some topics
| even just 20.
| christkv wrote:
| If anything Twitter has shown that the current model is
| just mob rule
| [deleted]
| DeRock wrote:
| > $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.
|
| Adverse selection. The people willing to pay to remove ads are
| probably your most profitable users to show ads to.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| vasco wrote:
| You're making the same point that you're replying to. The
| juiciest users pay, so the non-paying users are the penny
| pinchers that convert way less on ads, so the ad revenue is
| obviously very low compared to the revenue from the paid
| users.
|
| Similar to how people self selected into iOS and android
| and to this day its way more effective to advertise to less
| price sensitive iOS users than Android users with cheap
| phones, though the effect was even larger in the early
| days.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| 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.
| nightski wrote:
| I'd expect those two to intersect for sure, but I imagine
| there are plenty of people with enough disposable cash that
| enjoy twitter but contribute very little. Or maybe I am
| just an extreme outlier :)
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Agree with most of this, but:
|
| > 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.
| drawfloat wrote:
| 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.
| concinds wrote:
| > respond freely
|
| You can already filter out non-verified mentions and
| replies. Presumably that's not going away, and will be used
| by far more people after this change. It very much is a
| barrier to entry.
| joegahona wrote:
| > You can already filter out non-verified mentions and
| replies.
|
| How?
| rysertio wrote:
| I guess we'd need a couple of more ublock filters.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| But the verified mention is no longer a verified mention.
| It's a paid mention.
|
| And the people most likely to pay to ensure that their
| responses are seen broadly are narcissists and people who
| want to sell you stuff like their latest get rich quick
| scheme, newsletter Subscription, etc.
|
| Actual verified users will dwindle in comparisons and the
| value of filtering out non "verified" responses will
| plummet.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Every commercial product and service is an example of that.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yup. I'm gonna keep drumming this up: most markets today
| are supplier-driven. The "barrier to having a good
| experience" gets higher, and the experience gets worse,
| and there's shit all you can do about it, because you're
| only able to choose out of what's on the market, and the
| market isn't serving lower barrier / better experience
| options it did a month, year or decade ago.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > and the market isn't serving lower barrier / better
| experience options it did a month, year or decade ago.
|
| That's irrelevant, and very often false. But the options
| offered by the market at any given time are generally
| better at higher price points, which is, oddly, exactly
| what the commenter upthread was outraged by.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| They wrote:
|
| > _It 's a higher barrier to having a good experience,
| which I can't think of many successful examples of to be
| honest._
|
| The way I read the poster is that they think being asked
| to pay more will create worse experience, which is
| implied to be stupid. Except it isn't, it's literally
| what's happening in every market all the time. Getting
| people to pay more for worse product is entirely normal,
| and the way it usually works is by removing the option to
| keep paying the same amount for the product they
| currently enjoy.
| matwood wrote:
| > you can read and respond freely
|
| Sure, but I hope as mainly a reader of Twitter this change
| comes along with a box I can check that says 'only show
| Tweets from people I follow and those who are verified'.
| Overnight, most of my bot issues are fixed. And, any people
| I don't want to hear from again are easily blocked.
| [deleted]
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| morsch wrote:
| Virtually all streaming services still have ads at the paid
| tier: sponsored content in YouTube videos, product placement
| everywhere, athletes that are living billboards.
| type-r wrote:
| SponsorBlock is key for YouTube
| celestialcheese wrote:
| > 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
| lupire wrote:
| "Half" ads is extremely common. Disney and Netflix are doing
| it, and even if you don't have platform ads, the content embeds
| ads.
| deltree7 wrote:
| 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.
| SahAssar wrote:
| > Yeah, there were ads in Newspapers and Magazines too that
| you paid money.
|
| The publishers of those paid for the content, paid for
| editing, paid for the physical medium, paid for physical
| distribution.
|
| Twitter is distributing short pieces of text, some images
| and video on a medium that is famously cheaper than
| everything that came before it, while not paying anything
| to the authors and has no editors.
| anarticle wrote:
| I thought they would go for Something Awful style forum
| registration, $5 to join, and if you're banned, $5 to join again.
|
| Probably this will increase SNR of twitter to some degree, we'll
| have to see!
| Imnimo wrote:
| I don't really grasp the value proposition here. I can have
| "Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to
| defeat spam/scam", but is that valuable to me or to my audience?
| If I'm a regular no-name user, do I care if I'm lost in replies
| and search? And if I'm the Steven Kings of the world, that other
| users want to see content from, does it do more harm to me or to
| Twitter if my posts are hidden because I'm not paying $8 a month?
|
| It feels like I'm being asked to pay $8 to solve a problem that
| belongs to Twitter (too many bots), not a problem that belongs to
| me.
| mymythisisthis wrote:
| For people like Steven King, if he posts something on Facebook
| his fans will re-post it on Twitter, and vice-versa. If too
| many things trend on other platforms, but not on Twitter,
| people will leave Twitter because it is not keeping up.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| "Half as many ads" fascinates me deeply.
|
| 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?
| ftio wrote:
| I think he wanted to say "No Ads" but didn't have enough data
| to commit to that yet, so he's anchoring on "half as many."
| Let's see how it shakes out.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Why do you think that?
| ftio wrote:
| From a user perspective it's messy and confusing. What does
| "half as many" even mean? The experience is only different
| in degree, not in kind. There's less value, both real and
| perceived, in such a position.
|
| It's hard to imagine that the conversation started from
| "half as many." My hunch is that it started as "no ads" and
| somehow backed down to "half" for one reason or another.
|
| A couple reasons I can imagine are: - They could've
| justified No Ads at the rumored $20 price point. Cut the
| price in half? Add half the ads back. - They want to make
| room for a $20 SKU later and need to reserve some features
| for it, which could include getting rid of all ads. - They
| want to anchor at "half" so that "No Ads" sounds even
| better if they change their minds down the line.
|
| Or some combination of all those.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Why do you have that hunch? Do you presume good will? My
| hunch says, what if the conversation started as "how do
| we make users believe there will be less ads"?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Should one presume bad faith here?
| freejazz wrote:
| Why would you presume good faith here?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Burning Twitter to the ground seems quite
| counterproductive, given the debt that was assumed for
| the sale. Misguided sure, but bad faith? I generally tend
| to assume that most people do things in good faith.
| freejazz wrote:
| It's business, good faith isn't really the issue... this
| isn't your neighbor asking for some eggs....
|
| >"Burning Twitter to the ground seems quite
| counterproductive"
|
| Good faith or not, it doesn't mean someone can't be
| misguided. which is why I asked, who cares about their
| faith??
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Because I am not a heavy enough Twitter user for this to
| affect me at all, so I'm just curious to see if Musk's
| gamble works. He's gambling that the network effect is as
| important for Verified users as it is for non-Verified
| users, which is not a bet most other creator-based social
| media sites have made. Judging by the number/temperature
| of comments you've made about this topic over the last
| two days, I think you're a lot more emotionally invested
| in this topic than I am. I'm just here with popcorn.
| freejazz wrote:
| I'm not a twitter user either, I'm not sure what that has
| to do with viewing Musk's actions as either being good or
| bad faith. That seems like a limiting and bizarre way to
| view things. Similarly, I didn't accuse you of being
| inappropriately emotionally invested... I'm more
| fascinated that people see someone doing something wildly
| illogical and then say to themselves, "well it's Musk, he
| must have his reasons"... yeah, I'm sure he has his
| reasons. That doesn't mean they are good and I have no
| idea why anyone would assume so given how all of this
| transpired.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Similarly, I didn't accuse you of being inappropriately
| emotionally invested...
|
| Sorry I think I read something that wasn't there,
| apologies. My bad for being jumpy.
|
| > I'm more fascinated that people see someone doing
| something wildly illogical and then say to themselves,
| "well it's Musk, he must have his reasons"... yeah, I'm
| sure he has his reasons. That doesn't mean they are good
| and I have no idea why anyone would assume so given how
| all of this transpired.
|
| For me it's curiosity. Twitter always seems like the
| struggling social media. Unable to really make a revenue
| despite it's disproportionate influence in developed
| nation discourse. At this point, I consider Musk to be a
| loose canon and I would not do business with him unless
| costs appropriately reflected risks.
| freejazz wrote:
| Because Musk fanboys have a deep drive to provide rational
| explanations for the myriad of idiotic things he states
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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.
| RobAtticus wrote:
| It's pretty much on a steady climb upwards though. So a show
| today probably has more ads per half hour than one 10 years
| ago, 20 years ago, etc.
| mateo411 wrote:
| 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.
| weberer wrote:
| Yeah, that's why I don't watch TV any more.
| alligatorplum wrote:
| On the Android Twitter app, I get an ad every 4 tweets on my
| timeline. So "half as many ads" would make it an ad every 8
| tweets.
| linuxftw wrote:
| 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.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Oh man, that's genius. Like a radio station that plays
| fifteen minutes uninterrupted at the top of each hour.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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?
| lupire wrote:
| They announce this is to users as part of the offering. But
| of course it's measurable.
| baby wrote:
| It's easy really. You start a counter, whenever it's above zero
| you stop displaying ads until the counter goes back to 0.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| That's silly and hilarious and now I want to see it happen.
| eastbound wrote:
| 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.
| praisewhitey wrote:
| On the instagram feed every fifth post is a sponsored post
| Waterluvian wrote:
| (and on top of that, every third post isn't sponsored but is
| still selling something)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| (and on top of _that_ , most of the organic content is now
| locked in time-limited stories, with a good chunk of them
| being reposts of TikTok influencers out there to definitely
| sell you something)
| james_pm wrote:
| Every other "Story" is an ad lately.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| 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.
| type-r wrote:
| Google Contributor
| jjfoooo6 wrote:
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Clearly not. It would be a touch screen control. Knobs are
| too simple.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Because every engineer knows that 99% of the customer base of
| their products are fellow engineers.
| lupire wrote:
| "half" means less annoying. It's not complicated for users.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It doesn't mean "less annoying" in a meaningful way when
| the baseline can change drastically and without warning.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes and be just as anoying. I'm not sure that anyone would
| see a value of just seeing half the amount of ads on a
| page.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Half of ads is strictly more valuable than all of them.
| Whether or not it's worth $8 is another question, but
| people _still_ forget it 's all a supplier-driven market:
| there is, and is not going to be, an option to pay $8 and
| get no ads. You choose out of what's being made
| available.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Strictly more valuable, sure. But if it's only 10% less
| annoying, there's very little incentive to buy. And
| adblock is an option sitting in the wings.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _But if it 's only 10% less annoying, there's very
| little incentive to buy._
|
| Right. But that $8 doesn't only buy you halving the ad
| load, but also all the other things like better reach and
| the "I'm a paying user, I'm better than you non-paying
| ones" checkmark. I mean, if it works on GitHub...
|
| > _And adblock is an option sitting in the wings._
|
| Yes, but! Most people use Twitter through _the app_ , and
| blocking ads there isn't as simple as having your tech-
| savvy friend install uBlock Origin in your browser.
| Adblocking in apps is, even for techies, something
| between extremely sophisticated and downright impossible.
| james_pm wrote:
| 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.
| modeless wrote:
| 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.
| alberth wrote:
| $20 vs $8
|
| This is Elon tactics 101.
|
| You anchor people high with leaking outlandish (incorrect)
| pricing, that way when you officially announce the (always
| intended) pricing - it seems like a deal.
| Havoc wrote:
| >half as many ads
|
| I bet they can sell this twice. Once here and once to advertisers
| that want to advertise to the more exclusive crowd
| __derek__ wrote:
| Weird. I thought they removed the sign-up gate, but it blocks me
| from reading the whole thread.
| chatterhead wrote:
| This is off.
|
| Should be: $1.99 for every user with optional $7.99 upgrade to
| validated ID/Blue checkmark. No ads. Way fewer bots.
|
| Focus completely on functional/feature engineering and dismantle
| advertising system.
|
| Branch out into VOIP/Email services. Total communications
| platform instead of "social media" should be his direction.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| They make much more than $2/user from ads. Since it's already
| not profitable I don't see how it's going to work
| chatterhead wrote:
| The cost to acquire each of those users is more than $2/user
| because the cost of their advertising infrastructure.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Good riddance, the previous system was painfully toxic.
| dgudkov wrote:
| I'd like an option to see only tweets/replies from Twitter Blue
| holders.
| Timja wrote:
| I never would have given Twitter my real identity. I always made
| sure to not reveal it to them. By not using my real email, not
| giving them my phone number etc.
|
| And now they offer me to _pay_ for it?
|
| I guess this would mean I would have to pay _and_ have to give
| them more information about my identity?
|
| That is an even better ploy than having people pay to test and
| train self driving cars.
| rconti wrote:
| I wonder how big the exodus from Twitter has been-- (seems
| noteworthy from what I've seen)-- and whether it will be covered
| by journalists? They seem to have already decided that Twitter =
| news, ignoring the fact that most people don't use Twitter at
| all.
|
| If (say) 5% of people leave Twitter, will journalists notice? Of
| course not, they'll just keep pretending like "people on twitter"
| == "people".
| skilled wrote:
| There is no exodus. People are slaves to impulse and comfort
| and if you don't understand that on a fundamental psychological
| level then why are you commenting on the topic in the first
| place?
| caldarons wrote:
| In a certain sense it feels like it's the right direction. But if
| you are essentially paying 8$/month how can you justify still
| displaying ads?
|
| I guess what I am trying to say is that for 8$ every month you
| should be getting more than just a status symbol (which possibily
| not that many people care about anyway) and be stuck with ads.
|
| Also, if Twitter is serious about creating a revenue stream for
| creators it should focus on creating valuable experiences for
| users that incentivize loyalty to the creators and not hand out
| verification status (which would become insignificant anyway if
| everyone has it).
| colinmhayes wrote:
| It's not just a status symbol, it also boosts your posts. If I
| had to guess, the people likely to pay for this are power users
| in wealthy countries, aka the highest value users an ad
| platform has. Seems unlikely that they're monetized at less
| than $8 a month.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| All this malarkey reminds me why I would rather read HN than
| twitter.
| supernova87a wrote:
| How do you declare what country you're in to get the pricing you
| "deserve"?
| fullshark wrote:
| Elon's vision seems not very different from the one any private
| equity firm doing a LBO would have: Maximize revenue and cut
| costs however you can to pay down debt.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| > 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| Oh, you mean like the articles in the newspapers that they
| regularly publish? What exactly do you think a journalist
| does, just post on Twitter?
| carbine wrote:
| how's that going for them
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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)?
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting
| the fact that $8/mo is a _ton_ of money in some areas,
| prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such
| journalists, users etc.
|
| 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.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > 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
| soulofmischief wrote:
| This is normal for a community. These statistics
| naturally fall in line with the Pareto Principle, and the
| concept of the vital few. [0]
|
| > Twitter has nothing to do with "humanity as a whole".
| It's obvious that the group that uses Twitter is niche
| yet highly engaged.
|
| You are confusing posting on Twitter with using it. The
| vast majority are lurkers who still consume information
| and then regurgitate that information in real life on
| other platforms. The statistics you provided don't paint
| an accurate picture of the "usefulness" of Twitter in
| modern public discourse.
|
| Do you have a better popular example of a modern day
| forum?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Each and every one of these arguments seem to be
| forgetting the fact that $8 /mo is a ton of money in some
| areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of
| such journalists, users etc._
|
| 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 :).
| freejazz wrote:
| Conventional journalists don't get paid more based upon the
| number of views their articles get
| enumjorge wrote:
| To your point here's a tweet from Stephen King that was making
| the rounds where he protests the idea that he should be paying
| Twitter instead of the reverse:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| 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.
| drstewart wrote:
| How much profit does YouTube make?
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Might as well be trying to sell snake oil.
|
| Look at LV 'hyperloop' [0], and people who paid upfront for
| FSD [1] and are issuing a class action lawsuit and re-think
| what you just said about 'might.' I think this isn't about
| Tesla or SpaceX or any specific company he is CEO of as
| they are all amazing feats of tech/engineering, it's about
| Elon's horrible PT Barnum type marketing that worked for a
| bit but has lost all of it's luster at this point.
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040 1:
| jhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040
| oska wrote:
| Where does Stephen King go if he's not on twitter ?
|
| (Genuine question, not rhetorical)
| tommica wrote:
| 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.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| 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.
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| I don't follow famous people. Way too much noise. I follow
| dev and engineering stuff.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| s_ting765 wrote:
| > So you want to instead do the exact opposite - ask the
| consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.
|
| I think it's only Onlyfans that can get away with such a
| business model.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Twitch, Patreon etc. etc.
|
| Arguably also Netflix, Roblox and free-to-play mobile games
| run on this sort of scheme as well.
| NationOfJoe wrote:
| also i guess YouTube is that as well, Consumers pay with
| attention to ad's, YouTube red, Channel members, super
| chat.
| paxys wrote:
| Onlyfans may be an extreme example of it, but all such
| successful platforms - YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch
| and the rest - are paying their popular users _a lot_ of
| money to stay there.
| jonas21 wrote:
| It may be true that only a very small percentage of Twitter
| users are actually creators and influencers.
|
| But a far larger number of people think they are or aspire to
| be influencers, and they're going to want the badge too.
| arkades wrote:
| Stephen King's tweet on that topic, to summarize:
|
| " $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.
| ..
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| He is bluffing.
| slimebot80 wrote:
| Totally right.
|
| And Musk's answer was to offer $8/m
|
| King wasn't talking about paying _anything_
| koonsolo wrote:
| > In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook.
|
| 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.
| causality0 wrote:
| Yeah, if you got famous exclusively on Twitter it's because
| you're a demagogue, not a content creator.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Can you name the MrBeast or PewDiePie of twitter?
| threatofrain wrote:
| There's not enough "room" to produce interesting content
| _solely_ on Twitter vs YouTube -- you have to hiccup out
| your value in segmented tweet threads. Thus if Twitter does
| provide value to followers it is in referencing _outside_
| material. Elon is supposedly directing Twitter engineers to
| go full-steam on reviving Vine so we 'll see if that can
| turn things around.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| The vine crowd has long moved to Tiktok; even IG and YT
| couldn't steal mindshare from them. Vine has no chance,
| given that they're starting with a 6yr old product
| paxys wrote:
| > Then look at YouTube:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-
| subscribed_YouT...
|
| > 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.
| koonsolo wrote:
| PewDiePie, MrBeast, Kids Diana Show, Like Nastya, Vlad
| and Niki in top 10.
|
| Great trolling.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| If you're famous, you'll almost certainly have a twitter
| account, although there are obviously exceptions. The same
| just doesn't seem to go for YouTube. Creating content on YT
| is a _lot_ more time-consuming than creating it on Twitter,
| of course.
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| pyfork wrote:
| I actually get a lot of unique ML information and news from
| Twitter.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| The "content" here is just tweets. It may not be "content"
| in the way you are imagining, but it's still true that
| almost all twitter users are using the site to view tweets
| from a small number of people (call them content creators
| or influencers if you like) with large numbers of
| followers.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Sure, but that small number of people are already famous
| outside of twitter. YouTube and TikTok creates new
| celebrities, twitter doesn't.
| ABeeSea wrote:
| I'd argue this isn't true in sports journalism. A news
| tweet from Woj, Schefter, Rappoport, or Shams has far
| more reach than the same content in a random ESPN article
| or sportscenter segment. Without twitter, a whole world
| of addicted sports fans would have no idea who those guys
| are.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I guess it depends on what kind of content you're looking
| for. One account I follow tweets what amounts to live
| reviews of video games (often obscure) with video clips and
| images. I think that's just as 'proper' as anything I've
| seen on pinterest or tiktok.
| initplus wrote:
| 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.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> 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."
| davidcbc wrote:
| If the barrier to a checkmark is $8 then all the scammers are
| going to have checkmarks too
| mjfl wrote:
| and now we have more of a paper trail to stop them
| neaden wrote:
| The most common scam I see on Twitter is imposter
| accounts replying to a real person with a link to some
| crypto scam. Right now you can usually immediately tell
| it's a different person since the reply doesn't have a
| check mark, this system seems like it will make it easier
| since the scammer can just get a checkmark.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Yes because most scammers provide their real information
| when scamming
| Finnucane wrote:
| The power of Stephen King.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| That's a reasonable price. There is a need for some people to be
| verified to avoid impersonation. The vast majority of us do not
| need to be verified. Also, just because a person is verified does
| not mean they are credible, regardless of what their job is.
| rideontime wrote:
| His first tweet doesn't seem to relate to the rest. What does the
| checkmark have to do with Blue?
| eatonphil wrote:
| Yeah I'm confused. Twitter Blue is a separate service that
| anyone already could buy for $5/mo I think. Maybe he's merging
| them together.
|
| However, the existing Twitter Blue is still being listed as
| $5/mo.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| Pretty sure he's replacing the notability-based verification
| system with "pay $8/mo to get a checkmark".
| birdyrooster wrote:
| He's trying to do what Facebook couldn't and charging people
| for it.
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| What if, instead of a flat fee, blue checks were charged based on
| their number of followers or the level of engagement with their
| followers (how ever you'd quantify that)?
|
| This would align the value and goals for both Twitter and blue
| checks.
| bjourne wrote:
| Any free software projects working on a distributed Musk-free
| Twitter replacement? We could really use one RN.
| ljw1001 wrote:
| I think this worked well.
|
| Instead of conversation about how Elon would use twitter to
| undermine democracy, civil discourse, whatever, everyone is
| talking about what's a fair price to pay him to undermine
| democracy, civil discourse, whatever.
| watwut wrote:
| I mean, yeah. But also, democracy and civil discourse are more
| endangered outside of twitter then inside of it. If twitter
| becomes bad enough, it will be next 4chan or whatever.
|
| However, politicians lying and gloating after basically yet
| another domestic terrorist attacks, politicians trying to make
| it harder for opposition to vote will stay.
| atYevP wrote:
| They keep solving weird problems in weird ways. My $0.02 ->
|
| They should have:
|
| 1. Created a new "VIP status symbol" icon (diamond?) for people
| who care / need / want the prestige (charge for it or don't) -
| I'd almost fork the existing checks over to it for simplicity.
|
| 2. Kept blue check for actual identity verification (this is a
| real human).
|
| 3. Added features people care about (editing / etc...) to Blue
| and charge for them.
|
| Tying the verification to features is...just odd. #sigh
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Bluechecks are the ones actually addicted to twitter, it makes
| sense to put a paywall in front of them, not create a different
| layer.
| rcarr wrote:
| Here is what the next big aspiring social media company should
| put on their website.
|
| "$COMPANY_NAME is currently free to use. Unfortunately, we do
| have employees and computers to pay for to keep things running.
| When we hit 1 billion users, we intend to start charging all our
| users a very small fee: 1 hour of minimum wage in whatever
| country you live in for an entire year's access. For example if
| you live in the UK, this means you'd only pay PS9.50 for the
| entire year. If you live in Portugal, you'd only pay EUR4.38 for
| the year. Your first year will always be free to see if
| $COMPANY_NAME is right for you.
|
| Your IP address currently shows you're from $COUNTRY_NAME. This
| means a year's access for you would be $COUNTRY_MINIMUM_WAGE.
| This fee will only ever increase if your government increases the
| minimum wage of your country and will always stay pegged to that
| rate.
|
| This means that, regardless of where you live in the world or how
| much you earn, access to $COMPANY_NAME only requires, at most, a
| single hour of your time each year to continue using. This allows
| us to keep the platform free from ads, tracking, and from wasting
| money on useless VR products nobody wants. Help us build a
| better, fairer future for everyone: not just shareholders."
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I really just think that this would mean people don't use the
| service. The internet has shown again and again that people
| will do practically anything to avoid paying for digital goods.
| randomopining wrote:
| Elon's Vision:
|
| 1. Charge $8/mon and a bunch of people will pay 2. Fire a bunch
| of engineers 3. Twitter looks way better on paper 4. Flip the
| company in 18 months when rates go down and market is better esp
| tech
| memish wrote:
| A lot of people aren't groking what this means, even on tech and
| startup savvy HN. Naval and Balaji said it well:
|
| 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
|
| https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1587545600064507904
| suoduandao2 wrote:
| Funny, I was just listening to Naval Ravikant talking about it
| being better to seek wealth than status, because the latter is
| a zero-sum game. hard to unsee that dynamic once it's pointed
| out.
| lupire wrote:
| After subsistence, wealth doesn't provide value except as a
| way to buy status.
| lhnz wrote:
| Not really true. You can buy better versions of products
| and services.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| This is very astute, but I can't help wonder why people worry
| so much about their status on the bird website. Actually
| doing/making things in real life is pretty much guaranteed to
| have a much higher return in multiple dimensions (incl.
| status) than pretending like what happens there matters.
|
| It doesn't have to be either/or: make something cool, throw
| out a link to it, repeat.
| lupire wrote:
| The only reason things matter is because they lead to
| status. Skipping the matter is an efficient solution to
| gaining status.
| bumby wrote:
| Don't humans generally value relative wealth, which would
| also make it a zero sum game?
|
| 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
| ianferrel wrote:
| They may not _feel_ good about their creature comforts, but
| indoor plumbing is an objective luxury to a great extent.
|
| It is objectively better to not have to go out in the cold
| to take a shit at night, even if you're "poor".
| Georgelemental wrote:
| A person in poverty in a high-income welfare state does not
| have a great live, but they are still comforted by the fact
| that they are not in danger of dying of starvation.
| seydor wrote:
| i m not really seeing it.
|
| 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)
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| > Old money reigns supreme because the "new" voices are not
| independent
|
| 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?
| seydor wrote:
| not talking about checkmarks
|
| 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?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think this would do the complete opposite. Create two tiers
| of of users: Lords with the money to spend $8/month on getting
| a blue tick next to their name, and the peasants who don't
| cough up.
|
| I can't wait to be disregarded just as a spam bot because I
| thought it's an embarrassing waste of money.
| zzleeper wrote:
| Can't it actually be the opposite? Like, sure I could pay
| $8/no (a coffee plus croissant) but it signals that I care so
| much about being heard on twitter that I'm willing to PAY for
| it... Only losers do so, so blue checkmarks a are that.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think it would do both tbh.
| [deleted]
| LastTrain wrote:
| Except famous people now get a verified tag, rendering most of
| what you said moot. This is a bad idea, it will fail, and Musk
| will make like he never said it. If you don't think so, just
| imagine yourself paying Facebook for a checkmark and see if
| that feels right.
| paxys wrote:
| "This new thing is surely all about me" - tech billionaires
| uoaei wrote:
| More mental gymnastics... I'm not even sure what point is being
| made by this move, other than devaluing the blue check to the
| point of meaninglessness. It's not even "utilitarian": if
| leveling the playing field was Musk's interest, he would have
| eliminated the blue check altogether.
|
| 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...
| muststopmyths wrote:
| mental gymnastics is being too kind. You've summarized quite
| succinctly the effect of this change.
|
| 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.
| ericd wrote:
| It substantially changes the economics of bots - cheap for a
| person, expensive for a person running 10,000 bots that want
| to appear legitimate.
| uoaei wrote:
| So you've limited the success of bot farms only to the set
| of state actors. Yay, such a great improvement...
| ericd wrote:
| Well yeah, that actually is. Most spammers aren't
| government backed.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Expensive for a _person_ running 10,000 bots, irrelevant to
| a hostile nation doing the same.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Almost everything is irrelevant to a hostile nation
| state, because by its very nature it can outspend your
| security if it cares badly enough. In the immortal words
| of James Mickens[0], "If your adversary is the Mossad,
| YOU'RE GONNA DIE AND THERE'S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO
| ABOUT IT."
|
| Raising the costs has a general effect of cutting out
| people who do not care enough to pay - be it individuals,
| companies, or governments.
|
| ----
|
| [0] - https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mick
| ens.pdf
| comboy wrote:
| I think the expensive part comes mostly from the part that
| it is hard to make anonymous payment. Sending money is kind
| of a verification (unless dogecoin is accepted ;) ).
|
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| >Bots get taxed.
|
| Crypto scammers make so much that paying $8 is pocket change if
| it means having scam tweets be more visible.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions
| about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media
| profile flag. I don't think anyone cares except those same
| billionaires/VCs and journalists who both write this drivel
| (one of the links is on a16zcrypto.com which I guess is the
| ideological enemy base of "establishment journos"). Will anyone
| else be left on Twitter when their private war is done?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It's fascinating to glimpse these endless mental
| contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a
| social media profile flag. I don't think anyone cares except
| those same billionaires /VCs and journalists (...)_
|
| 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.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Weird, I've never heard of people obsessing over GitHub
| stars. I guess if you're not actively contributing to open
| source projects, it's not something you care about.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33309969 for a
| recent thread on this.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| You're seeing it more on HN because there's a huge (IMO
| growing) overlap between HN commenters and Twitter users. The
| comments on Big Tech articles look identical to entire slices
| of Twitter. Some of the talking heads on HN who comment a lot
| also have moderately large Twitter followings.
|
| 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.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > Everyone who needs one can pay for a blue check.
|
| 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?
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > At $8/month, that's patently not true.
|
| 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.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > Who needs one that cannot afford $8/month? Does anyone
| really need it?
|
| 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?
| lupire wrote:
| What happens if you freelance write without a blue check?
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| A bad actor can impersonate you and damage your
| reputation, commit scams in your name, etc.
| [deleted]
| croes wrote:
| >Charging for the blue check moves it from a status symbol to a
| utilitarian one
|
| So it becomes worthless to the ones who want it as a status
| symbol. Why pay if you aren't something special afterwards?
| weinzierl wrote:
| It's more like the peasants will get a useless blue checkmark
| and the Lords will get a tag, which eventually will have the
| same meaning as the checkmark today. Everything stays the same
| but everyone pays.
|
| _" 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...
| sph wrote:
| lmao such a populist move then. Make it sound like what was
| before a privilege for the few now is in reach for the
| working man, but actually there is now another type of
| privilege that it is unreachable unless you're a Very
| Important Person.
|
| 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!
| nrb wrote:
| > Very Important Person
|
| 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?
| skybrian wrote:
| I expect it will still be a free-to-play game, with some
| upsells for whales. Gotta keep follower counts up.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > It elicits shrieks because it's more about leveling the
| playing field than making money.
|
| 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.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Some better takes on this from what I've seen:
|
| 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."
| reaperducer wrote:
| _If one in five current blue ticks paid $20 a month that
| would raise just under $15 million a year for Twitter_
|
| 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.
| memish wrote:
| "It elicits shrieks because it's more about leveling the
| playing field than making money."
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| Twitter is currently free.
|
| This proposed subscription prioritizes content based on who
| can/decides to pay $8 a month.
|
| How exactly is this leveling the playing field?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It levels a few people and covers the rest of the field
| with potholes.
| LastTrain wrote:
| You already said that. Leveling the playfield would be
| having no distinguishing marks at all.
| mscarborough wrote:
| Reposting your comment doesn't make it any more true.
| rideontime wrote:
| How does adding a new subscription feature and changing
| verification checkmarks to "secondary tags" level the
| playing field?
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587527711228149765
| bdougherty wrote:
| Because previously you had to be blessed to get a
| bluecheck, now you just have to pay. Way more people have
| the means to pay than were blessed.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| The 2nd comment above pretty much debunks that IMO. If
| you're paying money and given more visibility to your
| comments vs. non-paying users, this does the exact
| opposite.
| type-r wrote:
| not that i think this is some brilliant revenue strategy but
| it does not strike me as a good take to automatically assume
| that the current blue check mark base is a strict superset of
| who will pay $8/month
| mmahemoff wrote:
| What percentage of "current" blue ticks convert is not
| material since the TAM is about to become every Twitter user.
|
| 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 $8/month to remove ads (unfortunately
| only half the ads will be removed in this iteration).
| paganel wrote:
| > Asking low-income Twitter users to
|
| I'm curious how many low-income Twitter users now have a
| blue-check.
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _A lot of people aren 't groking what this means_
|
| There is no mystery here. It went like this:
|
| 1. Musk signed a binding agreement to buy Twitter.
|
| 2. And then he got cold feet when he decided he didn't like the
| deal he made and he spent six months desperately trying to not
| buy Twitter.
|
| 3. And then he finally understood that he would lose the court
| case and that he had to live up to the contract and so he
| bought Twitter at the originally agreed price.
|
| 4. And now Musk wants Twitter users to pay for his poor
| business decision and fund him out of his debt.
| lupire wrote:
| What's missing is how capricious monetization ideas get us
| from 4 to solvency.
| lossolo wrote:
| When Twitter Elite? Only for 100$ a month your replies will have
| priority over Twitter Blue users and then Twitter Whale - contact
| us for pricing, you will have priority over Twitter Elite users,
| then me and my friends millionaires can all buy Twitter Whale and
| Elite, before you get to see replies from a common person (the
| ones that can't pay) you will already lose your attention anyway,
| so we the wealthy will shape the reality.
| [deleted]
| MKais wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, a few years ago, the basic social network
| (facebook & Co) was valuated on this ad basis: one user = $10.
|
| The same logic for twitter gives $45B/400M users = ~$110/user.
|
| 99% of those users are useless but 1% are not.
|
| In my view, Twitter is a propaganda machine with its 1%
| influencers/journalists/prophets that overflow world media and
| their billions of viewers/consumers/voters.
| rongopo wrote:
| I stopped twitter during my long covid, and now I do not miss it.
| I just enter to post updates and keep some followers. I lost
| sense of why more could be needed!
| eric_b wrote:
| I guess I'll go on record and say I think this is a great idea.
| There's too many journalists who just spew hot takes all day - at
| least make them pay for the privilege
| ausbah wrote:
| one of the main touted draws of twitter is it's suppose to be
| the "public square of the internet". you not liking what
| someone posts shouldn't really curtail that (minus them being a
| private company and what not)
| thorum wrote:
| 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.
| apeace wrote:
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| At the moment I think it's kind of embarrassing to see
| someone edit a tweet, because it means they've been paying
| for Twitter Blue.
| [deleted]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This is day 5 of the Elon/Sink era.
|
| I expect more changes are ahead that might address these
| concerns.
| rmsaksida wrote:
| 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.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| > 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.
|
| this is basically how it operated before, except with political
| bias
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >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.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| No average person cares about having a blue-tick; you have to
| several standard deviations away from the mean to care already.
| baby wrote:
| 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.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| 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?
| baby wrote:
| That's the bet. I'm willing to bet that they'll make good money
| from it, which is all that matters from twitter's pov.
| criddell wrote:
| > They're a status symbol. They mean you are cool and notable
|
| Is that what _you_ think when you see a blue check?
| koonsolo wrote:
| Maybe they lose the appeal as you say. But on the other hand,
| maybe everyone now wants to avoid not having it.
| keneda7 wrote:
| 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.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| Trustworthiness has never been part of the equation, what the
| heck are you talking about???
| seydor wrote:
| 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
| throwaway04923 wrote:
| They still are a strength, if you search for a public
| person by name the blue checkmark still works very well.
| But if it's commodity where scammers can buy them then the
| strength is gone.
| moistly wrote:
| 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.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| > 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.
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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."
|
| 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?
| jjfoooo6 wrote:
| 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 $8 to impersonate a celebrity?
| memish wrote:
| Why does any price make no sense?
|
| "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product."
|
| Though to truly resolve this, they need 0 ads, not 50% fewer.
| mikkergp wrote:
| I think it's bimodal. Either Twitter is worth like 100$+ 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.
| geodel wrote:
| Yeah, I guess, he should disappear right now and negotiate
| a deal before coming back to Twitter.
| mikkergp wrote:
| It would be fun to try and mediate the discussions to try
| and convince which of the big ego'd
| celebrities/journalists/politicians are of value to
| twitter and twitter should pay, vs which are a sink and
| they should pay twitter. Hey monetezation plan! I would
| pay good money to watch that reality TV show.
| [deleted]
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Plus it doesn't mean they won't also sell your data to third
| parties - there's more to your digital presence than just
| selling you ads.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| "Elon, what made you decide on $8?"
|
| "I was going to charge $20, but then Stephen King told me it
| was too much."
| carbine wrote:
| or they were anchoring the price at $20 so $8 feels like a
| deal. not rocket science. :P
| enumjorge wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/el
| on-...
| IshKebab wrote:
| Doesn't seem like too bad a method to me. Apart from in
| situations where you have a _ton_ of data (e.g. Amazon)
| most product prices are pulled out of someone 's arse
| anyway.
| robryan wrote:
| This is probably fine though, it is the Elon way of doing
| business. Make fast decisions and try and whole heap of
| things. He then gets criticised for not delivering on the
| majority of them but still comes out ahead of orgs that
| take 6 months to make the decision in the first place.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| If any number is going to be shit on may as well pick one
| that has a fun story
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I cannot ever imagine spending $1000 for a blue check mark on
| Twitter.
| rchaud wrote:
| Influencers and hustlebros will pay that, celebrities won't.
|
| If the celebrities leave, Twitter dies.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Exactly. Who's hurt more if it's hard to tell who the real
| celebrities are on Twitter? Whose press is worse when a
| celebrity is impersonated by some asshole on Twitter--
| Twitter's, or the celebrity's? Maybe initially the
| celebrity, but I'm gonna say it's Twitter in the medium-
| term. Who's gonna be hurt by "Twitter has an
| impersonation/fraud problem" headlines?
|
| Whatever else the blue checks are, they're also a solution
| to a problem _for Twitter_ , and those blue-checks and
| their activity are a huge part of why everyone else engages
| with the platform. If they make people pay, they better
| hope the adoption rate is incredibly high _among existing
| blue checks_ (who cares about the unknowns who pony up for
| it, in addition) or they 're gonna be in for a bad time.
| ncallaway wrote:
| 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.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| 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.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I don't think he did do that. Stephen King made it clear he
| wouldn't pay any price on principle.
| memish wrote:
| Imagine thinking he made the decision based on that.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I guess it _is_ possible he floated the $20 knowing someone
| very-famous would object and he could counter--either
| misreading the room badly, or else as a deliberate insult--
| with $8, which was what he wanted all along.
|
| 5d chess and all that.
|
| Or he's impulsive and tweets dumb shit basically all the
| time. It might just be that.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Perhaps he actually did - I think in part he's just playing
| it straight as an outsider, openly talking about the
| emperor being naked. That is, a lot of the serious business
| is just bullshit LARP people do, and if Musk can openly
| mock it _and_ make money on the meme value of it all? That
| 's a well-earned entertainer salary.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| He's owned Twitter for a few days. He threw out $20 and
| then adjusted it down to $8, seemingly based on feedback.
| Did he already know that $8 was the appropriate amount? Was
| there already some internal analysis done that he is just
| piggy-backing on? It certainly _seems_ like Musk is making
| big changes literally moments after arriving on scene.
| carbine wrote:
| yes great point, without a doubt he put together $44B and
| never once thought about what he would do once he
| acquired it.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| 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?
|
| More likely it was always going to be $8
| mikkergp wrote:
| 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.
| memish wrote:
| 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.
| ssully wrote:
| I don't think you could have misread this interaction more
| than you already have.
| memish wrote:
| I can see how you think that if you're not familiar with
| how blue checks are awarded and what they mean to the
| nobility class of Twitter.
| ssully wrote:
| I am very aware of that.
|
| I think you're not familiar with a King as a person or an
| author based on your comment.
|
| Finally, you thinking Musk was mocking is also wrong. He
| was using Kings viral tweet as a jump off point for the
| tweet this HN post is based off of.
| rodgerd wrote:
| "The nobility class".
|
| What an absolute clownish take.
| Fomite wrote:
| But very possibly the type of clownish take Musk is
| trying to monitize by charging for access to it.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I think you're misreading how much an elderly ultra-
| famous and quite rich author gives a shit about his
| "status" on some stupid website like Twitter.
|
| I think he was insulted at the idea of having to pay
| anything to be verified on the platform, when both his
| presence and his being verified are _helpful_ to twitter
| and make twitter money, even if they do also drive some
| book sales for him. I took it as his saying that he 'd
| respond to such an insult (being asked to pay) by simply
| leaving, because Twitter and whatever little extra money
| it's making him don't really matter much to him.
|
| I doubt he's alone in that thinking. Though sure, some
| celebs, most or all brands ( _that 's_ who they should be
| soaking with monthly charges), and the media will stick
| around until/unless the platform enters clear decline and
| a viable alternative emerges.
| freejazz wrote:
| Yeesh, what is with the Twitter/Musk fanboy crowd and
| journalists and blue checks. It's such an unhinged and
| nonsensical hatred. Reeks of being jealous.
| [deleted]
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I don't think its that. I think it is literal to the effect
| of, twitter wouldn't have such a huge crowd to serve ads to
| without people like King who have tons of followers coming
| to the platform to get updates. An example, I don't have a
| twitter account, but I will surf Hector Martin's twitter
| for updates on Asahi Linux development. If it wasn't for
| Hector Martin's content, twitter would never be requested
| by my browser.
|
| So it is essentially, charge the people who bring the users
| to twitter.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| But Hector Martin doesn't have a bluecheck:
| https://twitter.com/marcan42
| criddell wrote:
| King responds saying Twitter should be paying him. I think
| that makes a lot of sense.
| memish wrote:
| It will be both. Pay to verify, get paid for creating
| content.
|
| "This will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward
| content creators"
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587505731611262976
| schleck8 wrote:
| What kind of content is being created on Twitter that
| warrants being paid? Reddit works flawlessly without that
| in longer form
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Reddit the same site that deletes tons of comments and
| bans subreddits?
| lupire wrote:
| Flawless has never been a word to describe Reddit.
| mikkergp wrote:
| agreed, it seems like Twitter is fundamentally about
| broadcasting content made somewhere else, not making
| content.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Points of view that Elon likes, I imagine. Especially
| ones that can't get revenue elsewhere for peddling pro-
| virus points of view, for example.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Completely wrongheaded. If anything, twitter should be
| paying anonymous users. Bluechecks are the ones who use
| twitter to build their personal brand, sell books, etc..
| freejazz wrote:
| Do you not know who Steven King is? It's certainly easier
| to google him than to come up with a take like this in
| response.
| fundad wrote:
| I would love to pay to donate content to the site acquired by
| a guy to promote his other properties.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| conductr wrote:
| You don't think $8-20/month of book sales are generated by
| King's twitter presence?
| lamontcg wrote:
| He can still tweet without a blue checkmark and people
| will still know who he is.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Correct, which is odd that Elon responded to him, "How
| about 8?"
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I might be wrong but I read that as a veiled insult. i.e.
| "Are you such a povvo that you can't afford $20?"
| mikkergp wrote:
| If it is an insult it seems very defensive, and feels
| like he gave Stephen King the upper hand.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Twitter offers him value, or he wouldn't be on it.
| Personally, I think they could charge $50/mo and most blue
| checks would pay it.
|
| I think Elon has the right idea, you gotta dip their toes
| in the water, then jack up the price later.
| ssully wrote:
| Of course it offers him value, but Stephen King being on
| the platform is more valuable to Twitter than it is for
| King.
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder if that's actually true - if it is, King should
| go make his own Twitter-like thing.
| brookst wrote:
| I don't think it works that way?
|
| When Oprah is seen dining at a restaurant, the restaurant
| gets more value from the PR than Oprah gets from the
| meal. That does not lead to the conclusion that she
| should go open a restaurant.
| ssully wrote:
| I think King is better served by continuing to write and
| live his life.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| > Twitter needs the blue checks because they are, to a
| large degree, the reason non-blue-checks visit and engage
| with Twitter.
|
| That may have been true at one time, but I'm not so sure it
| is any more.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I'm struggling to understand how that would _not_ be
| true. Nobody follows a Twitter link to see what Joe Blow
| posted about _anything_. They follow them to see what
| someone they 've heard of posted. People create accounts
| to follow blue checks, or to try to network with them. I
| get that there are several market segments for Twitter
| but ~all of them are pretty dependent on blue checks to
| drive eyeballs to the site and to keep people coming
| back, as far as I can tell. If people just want a group
| chat with other nobodies, Whatsapp exists.
|
| Thing is, the "blue checks" aren't all Stephen King level
| famous. If you're doing much notable at all, and using
| the platform, you've probably got a blue check. I do not,
| for the record--I'm not sure I even have an account?--but
| I see an awful lot of them on _fairly niche_ but
| interesting & active personal accounts. Take them out
| and the best content goes back to being "I'm a Twitter
| Shitter!" kinds of stuff, like in the very early days--
| and the novelty for that is long gone.
|
| If these posters stay but let their blue checks lapse, we
| go back to having an impersonation problem, which is
| mostly a problem _for Twitter_ , which they may want to
| solve. Perhaps for accounts that are likely to be
| impersonated they could introduce some kind of free
| verification system....
| lupire wrote:
| Stephen King needs a blue check because Twitter is terrible
| at deleting imposter accounts.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Why does he care? Seems like that's worse for Twitter
| than it is for him.
|
| [EDIT] My point is, from King's perspective, this likely
| looks like "you're here and making $X over what you would
| if you just relied on your fans to repost all your stuff
| on here for you, we're making $Y more than we otherwise
| would because you're here, plus we've given you this
| blue-check thing to solve a problem _we have_ , but now
| $Y isn't enough and we're going to make you pay money to
| keep participating in this program that exists to solve a
| problem for _us_. "
|
| You can see how, unless $X is pretty big, someone who's
| already rich might say, "well fine, fuck you too" over
| such a thing.
| [deleted]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| One of the things I admire about Elon (which is saying a
| lot...) is that for whatever reason, he's ready to bet the
| farm over and over. Whether he's some genius tactician or an
| impulsive moron, he just bought Twitter and is poised to
| drastically alter it.
|
| "flies in the face of everything I understand about complex
| systems" indeed!
|
| Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if
| NATO just said one day, "you know what, !@#$ 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.
| dieortin wrote:
| I really don't want to live in a world in which so much
| depends on impulsive individuals. Your example sounds like
| a nightmare. That's no way to make decisions.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sure, but impulses among individuals like Putin, Biden
| and Xi Jinping have _much_ bigger impact.
| reverius42 wrote:
| And that's why it's so important for world leaders to not
| act (or appear to act) impulsively! You might say the
| same is true for business leaders.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yeah. It does sound like a nightmare. And I'm glad that,
| for now at least, those who get to make the decisions are
| not as impulsive as countless people are online about the
| matter.
|
| And when it comes to a $44 billon purchase, it sounds
| like a nightmare to affect it so impulsively.
|
| At least, unlike the nuclear fallout, it's not my money,
| I guess.
| dboreham wrote:
| But that's the world we all live in, and have for
| thousands of years.
| bombcar wrote:
| If you read the stories of many "successful" CEOs (I'm
| thinking Jobs here, but there are others) the decisions
| they'd make often would come out as quite impulsive.
|
| If you dig significantly you might find that they're not
| as impulsive as they seem, that the person was actually
| considering many aspects but playing their cards close
| until cut-off time.
| mikkergp wrote:
| This is true, and so far Elon is doing exactly the thing
| everyone says you can't do with a social network. If he
| succeeds, it will completely change the space. Also
| interesting change of strategy during an economic
| downturn.
|
| But I do think one difference at least from where I'm
| sitting, is usually the response is, that's crazy, but if
| it works you'll be rich!
|
| I'm not even really clear on what the "if it works" is in
| this situation, I guess if he proves that people are
| willing to pay $8 per month for a social network?
| mikkergp wrote:
| Speaking of impulsive, I didn't realize he fired the top
| exists for-cause blowing up their golden parachutes:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/elon-musk-fired-
| twi...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| That'll be a fun half-decade of lawsuits...
| mikkergp wrote:
| One thing he seems to have estimated is the motivations
| of other wealthy folk he tries to take (or deny) money
| from.
| thombat wrote:
| Matt Levine has an interesting take on this [0],
| basically that nothing in that Musk claims of their
| behaviour meets the specification of "cause" in their
| employment contracts, and further that the golden
| parachutes are a good thing in that they prevent the
| C-suite from being focused on their continuing salary:
|
| "The basic problem with Musk's efforts to walk away from
| these severance agreements -- beyond the lack of actual
| arguments -- is that if he can stiff these executives
| then no golden parachute is binding. The point of a
| golden parachute is that a CEO with a golden parachute
| will sell his company to a buyer whom he doesn't like, if
| that's what is best for shareholders. If the buyer can
| stiff the CEO on the parachute payments because they
| don't like each other, then no buyer will ever pay
| severance, and no CEO will ever trust it."
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221031165639/https://ww
| w.bloom...
| mikkergp wrote:
| "And then Elon Musk showed up for his first day of work
| as Twitter's chief executive officer -- technically its
| Chief Twit -- and said "hey, do you have any other
| contracts I could violate?"
|
| Oh, this is going to be a fun read.
|
| In response to your quote, I guess he did it as revenge
| for making him go through with it.
| oska wrote:
| No, I definitely won't forgive you your 'analogy', because
| it's sneaking in a highly irresponsible argument for
| military escalation into a completely unrelated discussion.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I don't quite think it is luck - but a weird second thing.
|
| Musk has a reality distortion field. I think he is a
| bloviating jerk but I know a lot of really really smart and
| dedicated engineers in software and in more traditional
| fields like mech-e and aerospace who would rather work for
| Musk than any other person and are willing to take pay cuts
| to work for him. This means he really can surround himself
| with very skilled people who can distill his "fuck it, we
| are doing FOO" commands into real plans.
|
| What this tells me is not that Musk is a visionary but that
| a lot of shitty visions are nevertheless achievable if
| you've got enough smart people around you.
| [deleted]
| carbine wrote:
| this is such a cynical take
| pkaye wrote:
| So why is he able to get smart people around him? Its not
| like he pays them a lot or offer a good work/life balance
| in their job.
| robryan wrote:
| Sells them on the mission. Things like a colony on Mars
| and full self driving are pretty compelling goals for
| some people.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Elon offers people a chance to operate at a true 100% on
| a thing that matters. Next to that, work-life balance
| pales. And comp? Comp follows company glory. Tesla
| engineers are rich, man.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I don't understand Elon either, but I'm _certain_ that he
| 's not an impulsive moron who doesn't understand complex
| system, or that he's financing all this with his dad's
| emerald mine money.
|
| For me, there is enough track record to prove he has some
| very unique business skills, and often succeeds by doing
| things that conventionally looks crazy.
|
| That said, Elon's Twitter may well be a failure regardless.
| Pretty sure it won't be boring though :)
| mikkergp wrote:
| Def. won't be boring. Really we only get to see probably
| less than half of what he's planning. If the other half
| is more strategic, then he'll do fine, if the other half
| mirrors his public image, then I can't see it working.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I'm getting a chuckle thinking about Elon as ThePirateBay and
| Stephen King as the MPAA.
| croes wrote:
| Since when does ThePirateBay demand a fee and the MPAA says
| it's too high?
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Exactly. That's why its so ridiculous.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| I don't think the price is what bugs him so much as the
| newly-diminished elite status of the blue check.
| muttantt wrote:
| No, he just anchored everyone at $20 so that $8 comes across as
| affordable. Business 101.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I've had Twitter Blue lite for years: I use an adblocker, and I
| manually block every single advertisement that sneaks through by
| blocking the advertise's entire Twitter account. The end result
| is that my feed is nearly entirely organic, followed content.
|
| Why would I pay $8/month for a materially worse experience?
| nothatscool wrote:
| I think changing the verification badge into something actually
| useful instead of a status symbol is a good thing. If there is a
| great exodus of Twitter influencers and it starts to affect
| traffic, then twitter can just add some kind of notability mark
| to high profile accounts.
|
| Edit: They already plan to add a tag for public figures.
| bentt wrote:
| This is interesting. I have increasingly looked at Twitter as a
| business tool. This will push me further in that direction. It
| will make less sense to just hop on and drop hot takes without
| any purpose. I think I like it.
|
| That said, this doesn't really say "Global Town Hall".
| Barrin92 wrote:
| yup. If you're going down the route of twitter as a
| civilizational platform starting to sell premium citizenship
| rather than the original "verify every real human being"
| certainly seems odd.
| rongopo wrote:
| Income from those that post, from those than read, and from
| adverts? This is a scam, comparable or superior than academic
| editorials. I predict it will last less than 5 years.
| sneak wrote:
| I hope this means I can use a disposable prepaid card and not
| give a phone number during signup.
|
| They were using phone numbers for antispam; hopefully $8 will
| serve the same purpose.
|
| Twitter's had employees that sold user PII to murderous foreign
| governments. It is not safe to have PII associated with a
| sufficiently controversial Twitter account. Maybe they can accept
| crypto payments for this during signup.
| anon115 wrote:
| mass decision design discussion for a big business and design
| decision.
| wnevets wrote:
| Twitter is gonna crash and burn way sooner than I though.
| throwingrocks wrote:
| Agreed! I don't know anything about business, but the company
| will surely implode in the coming days. It's as if Musk and co.
| put zero though into this.
| memish wrote:
| That's what people said about Tesla.
| LightG wrote:
| Except ... they do. Often.
| wnevets wrote:
| I don't know which people you're referring to or why you are
| comparing a company that the Americans tax payers propped up
| for years to a social media website like Twitter.
| notatoad wrote:
| I'm confused. Does $8 get you a blue check or no?
|
| If it does, $8/mo for a blue check and reply priority seems like
| a pretty good deal for all those people impersonating Elon musk
| to run crypto scams
| franciscop wrote:
| I believe it's implicit $8 for the blue check verification
| process, and if successful you get the blue check.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I have zero doubt that EM will bring Twitter to a better place. I
| mean, this is the platform where basic image upload was broken
| for 10+ years. How can that not be the top task in the backlog? I
| can answer that right away. Tech people focus on tech.
|
| I think cost might be a problem with Blue. I mean, I collect
| domain names for fun. I don't think Twitter can provide the right
| tools to guard against false blue account claims.
| throwaway04923 wrote:
| What is this going to solve? Blue checkmarks was intended to find
| the real public person instead of thousand scammers. If it now
| means that you have paid for account, then what is the point?
|
| This is not going to help their finances either. Someone [1] did
| a calculation:
|
| "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/jamesrbuk/status/1587381512500125699
| bambax wrote:
| Matt Levine:
|
| > _Musk wants to start charging people to have a little blue
| check mark next to their names on Twitter. I wrote yesterday
| about reports that the price will be $19.99 per month, but that
| seems not to be a final decision, and other numbers have been
| suggested. Also last night Musk was personally negotiating the
| price with Stephen King. "$20 a month to keep my blue check?"
| tweeted King. "[No], they should pay me. If that gets instituted,
| I'm gone like Enron." Musk replied: "We need to pay the bills
| somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about
| $8?" I absolutely love that, in between his busy schedule of
| reading printouts of 50 pages of code per Twitter employee to
| decide who to fire, Musk is personally going to negotiate
| commercial terms with each of Twitter's hundreds of thousands of
| verified users. I have a blue check, I'm gonna tweet "I'll pay
| $7.69" and see what he says._
| bombcar wrote:
| King made a comment about price, and Musk made a (relatively)
| good reply - by asking "How about $8?" he's framed it as a
| value proposition and now you have to either say "nothing,
| Twitter is worthless" or you have to come back with a dollar
| amount. It's a good framing move.
|
| An obvious solution could be revenue-share similar to how
| YouTube does - post a viral tweet that generates $x in ad
| revenue for Twitter, receive some percentage of that. Make it
| available only to blues who pay and ... (Musk if you use this
| send me car or a rocket :P )
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| With $8 each, you and your friends can pool your money, rent a
| server run whatever you want. Fuck twitter.
| serf wrote:
| power to the people... for only 8 dollars a month!
|
| is anyone sick of this salesman shtick? it's even more egregious
| when used as some form of crusade for the people.
|
| let's be clear here, the 8 dollars a month is the motivation. He
| doesn't give two-shits about any moral sense of right or wrong or
| the well-being people that used the service.
|
| he'd be more respectable/relatable if he had said "It's 8 bucks a
| month because I need to pay back the loans."
| jiripospisil wrote:
| I wanted to check how much it costs in Czechia adjusted for
| purchasing power and quickly learned you cannot actually buy it
| from here. Oh well.
|
| > We've launched Twitter Blue in the US, Canada, Australia, and
| New Zealand. In these regions, Twitter Blue is available for in-
| app purchase on Twitter for iOS and Android, or on twitter.com
| through our payment partner Stripe.
| aantix wrote:
| I don't see where you can subscribe - interested in seeing the
| flow.
| seydor wrote:
| Why do people think that twitter is worth paying for?
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Take a look at Linkedin, they make tonnes of revenue from
| premium features. The problem is that Twitter suddenly deciding
| that it's going to create a brand new revenue stream by
| charging for features that don't exist is about as sane a
| strategy as me deciding I'm going to start developing gills
| before my next swimming lesson.
| seydor wrote:
| Linkedin has the CVs -- the content i ve seen there is
| laughable. Twitter can be compared to Wordpress, in which
| people invest time in making an online presence and
| following. But it seems easy for them to leave twitter and
| take their audience too - and many people do it with substack
| etc. I think introducing payments will change the dynamics of
| their crowd, which is basically a mob.
| mikkergp wrote:
| The thing with LinkedIn is that I could see paying for it,
| because you could make a connection with actual monetary
| value (The ability to get a job at a higher salary).
| abudabi123 wrote:
| Twitter is worth paying for when you leave a not addictive
| session on the app in better condition than you arrived. What
| if Elon M. unlocks access for Twitter to China at $8 a month?
| n65463f23_4 wrote:
| people are actually freaking out that they might lose their
| blue checkmarks
| blibble wrote:
| more like they're freaking out they'll lose the status from
| having something not everyone can buy
| memish wrote:
| If you're not paying for it, you're the product.
| Goronmon wrote:
| And if you're paying for it, you're still the product.
|
| Just a product with slightly less disposable income.
| giantrobot wrote:
| You're still the fucking product even if you pay for it.
| They're not going to track you any less. They'll just show
| you fewer _overt_ ads. But now every spammer will get
| "priority speech" so the end effect is you'll see the same or
| more actual ads.
| beebmam wrote:
| Seems like the payment is the opposite of what it should be.
| Twitter is collecting data on me and selling it to other
| businesses. They should be paying ME.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| people pay for dopamine hits every day just cause it's not
| yours doesn't mean no one likes it
| smittywerben wrote:
| Sometimes my Tweets aren't even in the always-dead bin. In some
| cases, I would rather be in the penis bin than have shadowbanned
| Tweets.
|
| People should Tweet directly at the person instead of wasting my
| (VALUABLE) reply space with OT insults.
|
| I already pay $5 for nothing at Twitter. I'm happy paying $3 more
| for a feature I'll actually use.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| The good news is that this should definitely reduce the volume of
| bot / troll accounts, by making it prohibitively expensive to
| run. That will mean a reduction of disinformation on aggregate -
| as what other purpose would there be to run a bot network?
|
| The bad news is that it recreates the lords vs servants dynamic
| that Musk is claiming to want to get rid of. $8 is not much for
| everyone reading on HN, but guess what, we are very much the in
| the globally privileged 1%. He later adds something about
| purchasing power equivalent, but localised pricing suddenly makes
| this into a much bigger technical challenge
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| $8 won't necessarily price out spam accounts. As a counter
| example, on Tinder there are many fake/spam accounts with
| premium membership.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| not all of them, no, but as _any_ cost increases the friction
| of doing it, so less will be done.
| Yoofie wrote:
| But with spending money, you can theoretically have more
| information on the buyer which you can use to help identify
| and fight spammers/bots & their networks. For example, you
| can limit one twitter account per credit card or registered
| user (identified via payment method). If they are found to be
| spammers, you just kill the account and ban the payment
| account(s). They can still obviously work around this, but
| the cost and difficulty for the spammer increases.
|
| I don't know how the financial transactions & stuff work in
| the background, but the point is that you have more
| information and more options.
| ljw1001 wrote:
| Unlimited conspiracy theories and Russian trolls - free
| matrix_overload wrote:
| Your own bullshit detection skills and the habit to
| verify/cross-reference all incoming information - priceless.
| tlhunter wrote:
| Only disabling half of the ads makes sense from a business point
| of view. Most likely, the users who are the best audience for an
| ad (in the sense that they have spare money and might purchase an
| advertised product) are the ones that would actually spend money
| disable ads.
|
| There will probably be a new advertisement segment for users of
| Twitter blue. Companies will be able to advertise specifically to
| users willing to pay to disable ads aka more likely to have
| disposable income. Premium ads for the high spenders.
| kylecazar wrote:
| Twitter Blue is an existing, separate service from the verified
| checkmark.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| It would have been great if, after taking Twitter private, Musk
| just immediately shut it down.
|
| Would it have made any financial sense? Of course not. Would it
| have been the ultimate post-modern, trollish, liberating move
| imaginable? Absolutely.
| rchaud wrote:
| To be honest, this sounds more like a child's revenge of taking
| his ball and going home.
|
| It really wouldn't even be worth it either, because Musk is
| worshipped on Twitter and Reddit and nowhere else. He isn't
| Trump, he can't mobilize half a country to love him
| unquestioningly. This is the only place where his childish
| taunts about turning Twitter HQ into a homeless shelter will
| find an audience.
| rsync wrote:
| How much can I pay for the ability to follow a twitter link and
| easily see who is replying to whom and where I am in the
| discussion thread ?
|
| It's a tough engineering problem but surely _someone_ could solve
| it ...
| MopMop wrote:
| Freedom of Speech is not free if you have to pay a monthly fee to
| express your opinion. We can already see them lining up to part
| with their salaries.
| dgudkov wrote:
| There are lots of places where you can express your opinion
| absolutely free of charge. For instance, HN ;)
| memish wrote:
| You don't have to. It'll still be free for anons.
| ruminator1 wrote:
| verified users get priority in replies, mentions and search.
| Anons will be buried.
| arctics wrote:
| Before: F2P, every voice matters (you decide who is who) After:
| P2P, some voices matter more (we will decide who is who for you)
| tough wrote:
| What if I already have the checkmark and cant afford to pay? Will
| they take it away?
| muttantt wrote:
| I think if someone can't afford $8 for Twitter Blue, they
| should probably get off of Twitter and find more ways to make
| money. There is plenty of work all around.
| dorkwood wrote:
| To me it's more that I'm unwilling to take on any more
| subscriptions. They all seem small in isolation, but they
| accumulate into a meaningful sum.
| apeace wrote:
| There are plenty of hard-working people who wouldn't want to
| budget $8/month for something nonessential like a social
| media app. There's no need to disparage them.
| cypress66 wrote:
| Then don't get something nonessential such as the blue
| checkmark. You can still use Twitter.
| tough wrote:
| I already have it. It's due to the account being of a
| fairly big online thing I built circa 2008. That no
| longer exists. A blue checkmark was only given to people
| with impersonation problems, if you proved that any media
| (newspaper, online blogs,etc) had published about you,
| making that noteworthy.
|
| I have a blue checkmark, and twitter doesn't know who I
| am technically.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| Why stop at open-sourcing "the algorithm" when you can open-
| source the business model too?
| paxys wrote:
| It's funny how quickly the conversation has jumped from "Twitter
| will be a bastion of free speech" to "$8/mo is a fair price to
| pay for prioritizing your speech over others". Power to the
| people indeed.
| happytiger wrote:
| FreedomTM by Twitter
|
| Now you can experience FreedomTM for _only_ $8 /mo.
|
| _License and taxes extra. May not be available in Hawaii and
| Alaska. Freedom is a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc. Some
| users experience nausea and vomiting, shingles, anxiety, and
| social destruction._
| concinds wrote:
| Verified users are already boosted in replies and search.
| That's been the case for many years. The only change is that
| since verification will require payment, boosting will require
| that same payment. It's a complete non-story.
| uoaei wrote:
| The difference of course being that what used to be a
| painstaking verification process is now bypassed by anyone
| with $8/mo to spare, if they choose to do so.
|
| It is in fact not a non-story, since obviously this changes
| everything about how "verified" users should be considered in
| your feed (as nothing more than pay-to-play, where before
| there was at least a facade of curation).
| concinds wrote:
| Since you're disputing my comment and not the parent, I
| take it you agree that making people pay for verification
| is somehow "anti free speech", while promoting verified
| users when it was an opaque process was not? The comment
| I'm responding to is incoherent, in addition to being
| flamebait.
| tfsh wrote:
| How's it a non-story if you now just need to pay to boost
| your replies and search presence?
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| "free as in speech, not as in beer"
| baby wrote:
| > for prioritizing your speech over others
|
| how is that prioritizing your speech over others? There's a
| million ways to do it, and if you're a big boy you're probably
| throwing the big bucks. 8/mo is indeed not that much.
| elorant wrote:
| What's so special about the verification icon? Does it provide
| any merits?
| baby wrote:
| clout
| pkulak wrote:
| Elon is the PM from hell. Has some shower thought and starts
| throwing tickets on everyone's board 45 minutes later.
|
| This is why the Model X has those silly doors.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| My goodness the weight people put behind the verification check
| mark sounds absolutely insane as a person who is not at all
| invested in Twitter. As an outsider, this sounds like the only
| way to combat scammers on the platform, assuming non-paying
| viewers have an easy way to only see content from paying users.
| schmichael wrote:
| Your own mastodon instance is $6/mo: https://masto.host/pricing/
| hnarayanan wrote:
| For a network with 5 active users!
| schmichael wrote:
| Sure but you can federate with whomever you please. So $6
| gets you 5 local accounts, but you can still follow anyone in
| the fediverse.
| entropicgravity wrote:
| Yeah this is reasonable. For those who want or need it $100/yr is
| affordable but more than most would pay just to have it but don't
| need it. Off course it's mostly a mechanism to strengthen the
| bottom line but if it's value for money then go ahead.
| jxdxbx wrote:
| Verification is more of a benefit to Twitter than to verified
| users. At least for mega celebs. I am verified because years ago
| I knew someone who worked at Twitter. I wouldn't pay a penny for
| it though.
| empressplay wrote:
| My suspicion is that the name on the payment method will be the
| verification, eg f you use a credit card named John Smith, your
| 'full name' will be uneditable and reflect that.
| sliken wrote:
| Seems pretty weird to me. I read an article that the top 5% of
| users are responsible for 90% of tweets and most of the profit.
| Said 5% have been leaving the platform for the last few months.
|
| Now there's a $8/Month incentive for the top users to leave ...
| seems backwards. They should be paying the top users to stay so
| the 95% has something to read.
|
| Imagine if youtube creators had to pay instead of be paid.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| >Imagine if youtube creators had to pay instead of be paid.
|
| Isn't that essentially what demonetization is, just without the
| predictability of a regular monthly bill?
|
| Granted, it's not a perfect 1:1, I just wanted to find an
| excuse to snipe at YouTube.
| BryanBeshore wrote:
| You will also get:
|
| - Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to
| defeat spam/scam
|
| - Ability to post long video & audio
|
| - Half as many ads
| joenathanone wrote:
| >- Priority in replies, mentions & search
|
| He starts off with "Power to the people", but this is just
| "power to the people with money"(which is the status quo). If
| you don't have $8/mo disposable income to spend on a vanity
| feature, then what you have to say will be overshadowed by the
| people who do.
| memish wrote:
| The status quo is that you need to be a Lord to get the blue
| check.
|
| This makes it available to anyone who is able to get a
| Netflix subscription.
|
| It goes from a status symbol to a commodity. The Lords will
| _hate_ it because it makes it available to the peasants.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Not in my experience. I follow plenty of blue tick accounts
| that aren't lords, merely notable within a niche.
| nisegami wrote:
| He did say it will be scaled by PPP by region, which is
| interesting. Curious to see how that will play out, if taken
| literally I should be paying like $3 USD which seems fine to
| me but is still out of reach of most of my country for
| logistic reasons rather than outright money reasons.
| aniforprez wrote:
| That part of the thread pretty much proved that he hasn't
| thought out this whole scheme at all. He's spitballing in
| public on twitter
| rodgerd wrote:
| "You get as much speech as you want to pay for" is probably
| the single least surprising take from the VC elite.
| tedunangst wrote:
| So now it's pay to spam?
| Maxburn wrote:
| ONLY half the ads!!
| moepstar wrote:
| ...but you gotta be grateful for it! (or else...)
| Yizahi wrote:
| Only half a billion ads instead of a billion. Also
| conveniently not mentioning any metrics, ad size, length,
| persistence etc.
| trh0awayman wrote:
| I would pay $10 a month for Twitter Black - it would block
| everyone with Twitter Blue and you get to interact with the
| dregs, the most controversial figures of all of Twitter, based on
| most reports/blocks/flags, etc. (minus the bots, crypto stuff).
|
| That's the real town square. Let me sleep in the gutter!
| chihuahua wrote:
| You're in luck - that's what Parler is, and it's free!
| __tmk__ wrote:
| Most of that will be crypto spam though...
| thebeastie wrote:
| Bypass paywalls would be kind of a big deal imo. It could
| eventually shape how we use the internet and move away from ad
| based revenue.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| This was definitely the part that stood out to me, but it
| really relies on the deals they can strike.
| thebeastie wrote:
| It makes sense. It's ridiculous to have to subscribe to
| individual news websites when there are so many; an
| intermediary that did deals with publishers wouldn't be a bad
| idea.
| KIFulgore wrote:
| If Elon can get enough publishers on board I'd gladly pay
| more than $8/mo. Maybe offer a tiered system. Or better
| yet, choose-your-own.
|
| $8/mo: Choose 2
|
| $12/mo: Choose 4
|
| $15/mo: Choose 6
|
| etc.
|
| Then people vote with their dollars which sources are
| important to them.
|
| Simplicity would be challenging. It wouldn't work if it
| devolves into something resembling tiered Cable TV
| packages.
| fckgw wrote:
| It's been a feature for a long time. For some reason it was
| removed today and now Elon has "reintroduced" it as a new
| feature?
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434502/twitter-blue-ad-...
| tough wrote:
| Smart. Now he can charge for something that was already
| shipped and get the credit lol
| type-r wrote:
| interesting approach to have it be PPP adjusted. i wonder how
| they'll prevent people from high income countries faking they're
| in a lower income one.
| lapcat wrote:
| On iOS, Apple will of course demand $2.40 of that $8.
| hendersoon wrote:
| "Half as many ads"? They want us to pay and still show ads?
|
| I have an alternative suggestion. How about I don't pay Twitter
| one red cent and continue to block their ads?
| rnxrx wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something but wouldn't the paid-for check mark
| also mean that a given account can be more specifically targeted,
| thus increasing the potential ad revenue to Twitter?
| paxys wrote:
| Which is exactly why people on this plan will still be shown
| ads.
| mypastself wrote:
| This might be my ignorance of macroeconomics speaking, but
| doesn't the Purchasing Power Parity reference imply that the
| price should be the same worldwide?
| [deleted]
| marktangotango wrote:
| I really wish twitter didn't exist. The utility I see in it is
| limited. For example, I don't have an account, but I do view
| tweets from time to time. The tweets I generally view are related
| to some real time event I'm interested in (ie news). I find the
| fact that even then, there is usually an endless stream of mostly
| banal, vapid responses to be very off putting.
|
| Not only do I find the content vastly uninteresting, the way the
| content on twitter is reported by mainstream media is exhausting.
| I could really care less about the stream of conscious tweeting
| of celebrities and politicians. It's not "news worthy" in my
| estimation.
|
| But clearly a lot of people find it useful, I am completely
| mystified how this could be.
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| All you really need is RSS
| ljosifov wrote:
| I find Twitter good. Many interesting people and ideas, that
| I'd never would've come upon on my own probably. I find the
| short message format forces people to really distill their
| idea. The SNR on my TL seems fairly high imho.
|
| It looks like I'm using it exactly the opposite of your "real
| time event" mode. I follow people that are not journalists and
| don't comment on people nor events. Strictly ideas. There are
| other media much better suited to covering people and events
| and in real-time.
|
| Not having an account - don't see how that can work. In
| incognito - which I presume is similar to me not having an
| account - I get to see only a single page with few messages,
| nothing more. And ofc not possible to follow accounts and thus
| shape the TL.
|
| I never subscribe to trends, themes, areas of interest and
| similar devices used by Twitter to guess what tweets I'd like
| to see. Twitter is hopeless there (as is the rest of social
| media). Just "show me what the account I selected to follow
| posted" is plenty good. I can't divine why Twitter does not do
| that only, why the extra complications wrt what messages I see
| on my TL. It's not like it can't show me enough adverts while
| showing only messages from accounts I follow.
|
| Aside: I'm mystified how one goes from "don't like it" to
| "should not exist". Why, what's wrong with "live and let live"?
| aschearer wrote:
| Maybe Twitter just isn't for you, that's fine. Why go so far as
| to wish it doesn't exist? I don't like football but don't want
| to take it away from its fans -- even though it consumes so
| much time, money, and attention.
|
| To share another perspective, as a gamedev I'll miss Twitter. I
| doubt there will ever be as many creative people sharing their
| works in one place again. Things will get siloed and harder to
| find. Today, it's pretty cool to sign in and see amazing,
| inspiring work-in-progress. Reddit doesn't come close in my
| experience.
| bombcar wrote:
| > But clearly a lot of people find it useful, I am completely
| mystified how this could be.
|
| Because it's internet boredom distilled into its purest form.
|
| And it's popular with journalists because now they don't even
| have to leave their house to ask the "man on the street"
| questions, they can just read twitter and regurgitate what they
| saw and be done with it. More and more articles are just
| Twitter posts reformatted, and once you start noticing it it
| gets painfully obvious how much there is.
| neon_electro wrote:
| LinkedIn has also taken this cue and also regurgitates
| LinkedIn posts on its trending topics equivalent. I like the
| topics, I don't think the sourcing on the "hot takes from the
| LinkedIn crowd" works very well but I guess it gets the
| clicks.
| cgh wrote:
| I follow scientists, mathematicians, authors, comic creators,
| comedians and so forth. I stay away from politics for the most
| part (I'm not American so they mostly don't apply to me
| anyway). I do follow some military analysts re Ukraine.
|
| Today, for example, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder posted a
| series of tweets criticising this article:
| https://phys.org/news/2022-10-bell-theorem-quantum-genuinely...
|
| It was interesting to read and I'm not sure how I'd have seen
| her thoughts otherwise, unless she makes one of her YouTube
| videos about it.
|
| I'm not trying to say Twitter is the greatest or even that you
| should join, just that Twitter has a lot of interesting people
| posting stuff that has nothing to do with politics or celebrity
| culture and some of us find it valuable.
| legitster wrote:
| My friend was in a doctoral program and everyone in it spent
| ALL DAY on Twitter. It almost became a coordination platform
| for them, and I get the distinct impression that the field
| largely homologized from it.
|
| So I guess it's kind of neat in one regard, but I think
| people might underrate how powerfully it rounds away distinct
| viewpoints or novel findings.
| legitster wrote:
| It's very frustrating too how it feels like it has become a
| black hole for journalists. Instead of actually doing
| reporting, it seems most spend all day on Twitter and just
| regurgitate the same few talking points as everyone else.
| tyrust wrote:
| My understanding was that value of verification was, well,
| verification that you were, in fact, that person [0]. I wonder if
| this property will be maintained.
|
| Otherwise, impersonators can pay to get the blue check. In the
| long term, maybe this is fine, but in the short term every
| Twitter user is going to have to adjust from the old meaning of
| the blue check (user $foo is actually person $foo) to the new
| meaning (user $foo pays $8/mo).
|
| [0] - "The blue Verified badge in Twitter lets people know that
| an account of public interest is authentic" -
| https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
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