Have you ever thought for a second that you can’t trust the media? Or trust the word of a disgruntled employee who’s just trying to give a black eye to the employer who is about to let him/her go? It pretty funny watching the posts coming across this and other platforms thinking the world is ending because Elon comes out and says he’s going to make twitter balanced instead blatantly left leaning.
Because everyone gets harassed on the internet, and your one anecdotal experience does not mean that Twitter as a whole does not have a left leaning political bias.
Considering it can cost thousand of dollars or time, such as sending documents, to verify accounts, this is a good deal , assuming it actually confers a blue checkmark and consequent privileges
I don't know whether they keep checking. I signed up then backed out wanting to let enough time pass to judge which such companies were legit legit. I'm pretty sure they insisted on two factor identification.
In my opinion it's dangerous to make verification too easy. Right now verification means, approximately, "this is somebody". Make verification too easy and it becomes "this person pays for Twitter" which is probably the opposite of what you want. I would say - keep verification as exclusive as it is, or slightly less, and charge for it is optimal.
"This is who they say they are" has been pretty reliably implemented in a ton of contexts, can largely be automated, and isn't really novel in any way.
Twitter's blue checkmark is more "this person is notable", which is a different thing and maybe valuable, although I think makes the blue checkmark probably a constant source of frustration for twitter.
Somebody may already have the same name as a celebrity, or think it's worth changing their legal name. It seems to be already possible to have multiple verified accounts with the same name, e.g., https://twitter.com/thejohnsmith and https://twitter.com/Harryslaststand are both verified as "John Smith".
> Considering it can cost thousand of dollars or time, such as sending documents, to verify accounts, this is a good deal
This almost certainly involves a massive streamlining (and reduction in rigor) of verification. Most identification verification processes online don’t take thousands of dollars of time, and the whole point is to take “verification” from a thing for a very narrow elite to a thing for a (Musk hopes) very wide paying audience. Musk has been clear since very early that he wants to convert Twitter to a mostly-paid social network by merging Blue and verification, making the former more attractive to support a higher price and the latter far more widespread.
Software deadlines of a week or so? Elon really doesn't knows thing about software management. What a tool - have fun attracting some real pieces of work.
I'd like to see the missive and exactly what it says. Most journalists have to work at speed and are sloppy as hell, as we've already seen several times in this case. I don't doubt that he wants to instill some urgency. Getting a page up with the higher fee and the new requirements will happen faster than whatever the final authentification scheme is.
But we know Elon plans to slim staff down a lot; that this is a true change in management. Given that, it's not too surprising to see him draw some lines with ugly consequences on the wrong side of them since he's already said, in effect, that he doesn't need most of these engineers for the product he's planning.
Twitter is not a healthy product or work culture from what I can gather; and large changes in personnel, or the demise of companies, are the only ways we know to genuinely change lousy cultures at companies. Just sending a memo doesn't do it. The economy as a whole is harsh; not always as sudden, but often still more harsh. That's because killing companies is the only reliable way we have of changing company culture. It's capitalism's secret sauce.
it seems like you are expending a lot of effort looking for reasons he isnt just basically a bad / clueless boss in this case. its much more likely he is just blowing it.
This author uses passive voice and doesn’t say what their source is. The engineers “were told” that they would be fired if they missed the deadline. Who told them that? Who even were the engineers? How does the author know this?
The verge is notorious for bad reporting that gets worse surrounding anything charged in the immediate zeitgeist... i don't trust their reporting at all, when it comes to musk's twitter takeover.
I own a 2022 Tesla and it can barely even do lane-keeping for a few hundred yards without jerking the wheel around, requiring "intervention" (aka manual driving), randomly braking for non-existent things and many other problems.
FSD is barely alpha-level software. It's silly to even call it beta at this point. Oh and $15k for it? Don't waste your money.
So much, so he developed almost single-handedly the first no-fail level 5 autonomous self-driving car...oh wait, that was just a 'Marketing slogan', my bad.
Musk hasn't built shit, he just uses his diamond mine money to invest in people who do the work for him, he exploits people, nothing more.
Unrelated- but I think Elon is going the way of Trump and Kanye to being cancelled or his businesses being doomed. All the goodwill he had as the underdog at Tesla, he's throwing away with his "I'm better than you, I'm here to save you, Nothing I say will hurt me cos I'm invincible and people love me" complex.
My first take was to agree with you. But after a bit of thought I'm not so sure. I've been talking to friends and neighbors, and there is a lot of anger building of late about [inflation, crime, government handling of Covid, media aligned with government] that makes me think more people will be supporting alternate voices because the entrenched power is so disliked. Like literally any alternate voice will stand out, even with stumbles and flaws.
I don’t doubt those feelings are sincere. But I will note that there is already an alternative media ecosystem dedicated to amplifying and enhancing exactly those issues.
For example: someone will be a lot more concerned about crime if they’re getting steady messaging reinforcing the message that crime is out of control.
Disagree, there are so many people who don't care about the media outrage machine that went from Trump to Musk and now to Kanye. It's all very political.
> Now employees are fearing that layoffs will begin before November 1st, when a significant percentage of them are set to receive stock grants paid out in cash at $54.20 a share. Shortly after this story was published, Musk tweeted “This is false” in response to a tweet featuring another story claiming that the layoffs would happen before that date.
Side question, but real question -- how do stock grants in a non-publicly traded company work, who can you sell them to how to turn them into monetary value?
A related question I have is, what happened to everyone who held stock at the moment it was taken private? For large shareholders, ok, you can make a deal with them. But if I'm an employee or even just a random guy who keeps, say, $30k or $300k worth of Twitter stock, what happened to those people and their stock? Was it forcefully exchanged for cash in their Robinhood or Fidelity accounts? How does that even work?
The deadline thing sounds awful at first but to be honest given that features at Twitter seemed to have no SRIs, commitments or goals, it seems it's pushing on that direction
Might as well have just fired them. There’s no way a feature like that can get released in most companies on that timeline, even without the scale issues.
I mean... something can always get released. I would imagine few people who don't get fired on Nov 7th are going to be around in another two months anyway though, who wants to work under such treatment in a job market like this? (Unless you're hoping for some kind of vesting of something I guess?)
People who have drunk the musk Kool aid, so to speak.
It’s a dick move by it is also an excellent way to filter out employees who have any semblance of work life balance or don’t think that Musk shits diamonds.
What? Even in a bloated, red-tape bureaucratic hellhole, that's maybe a few engineer-weeks at absolute most. Wire up a payment processor, plug into whatever api sets the blue checkmark, have some expiration logic, done.
There's doing the work, and then it's a new build to test and twitter has multiple targets (app and website), there'll be at least one round of testing involved, which isn't quick, and if a defect is found it'll very quickly blow out in time.
Not even that. They already have Twitter Blue, a premium service that's 3 bucks a month. So they already have payments, they already have subscriptions and membership periods. They literally just need another plan tier added.
Not even that, the article says that the plan is to just repurpose Twitter Blue, not add another tier.
>The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge.
That sounds more difficult to me. You need to create a pipeline to migrate all existing users to your new pricing model, and you need to create all the messaging around that in all different languages. Seems it would be easier if it was just a new feature with a clean slate.
This is spoken by someone that's never had to work in a global environment.
Like payment stuff and subscriptions is a nightmare when you have to deal with legal issues across the world. This is without going into needing to actually scope out the work, figure out how to integrate the changes safely, test them, roll them out and more. Plus it's disruptive to whatever work engineers were already doing to suddenly tell them 'do this thing NOW or you're fired'.
I really start to wonder how many people have actually worked as professional engineers.
The executive sponsor and their focus groups, product managers and their review committees, finance and their budgetary approvals, HR and their headcount approvals, the project managers and their technical working groups and sizing estimates, dev, UX, legal, test, deployment, DEI, customer advocacy, competitive analysis, etc all have to have representatives to develop a plan and sign off on it, meetings have to be scheduled, documents have to be created, approvals have to be stamped.
If you've ever worked in a true bureaucratic hellhole, you can understand how a few engineer-weeks turns into a 3 year 20 million dollar that can't be killed because too many "important" people would get egg on their face so it eventually gets rolled out, promotions and handshakes all around, and then it gets scrapped 2 weeks later because it is so terrible and nobody speaks of it again.
When there's top executive will to drive things ahead and to cut short bureaucracy, all those that you listed - though common - become moot. Especially when someone as driven as Elon is leading the fray. It's not like the changes will be as slow as with Tesla, where you have serious safety and regulatory issues to deal with.
I'm a twitter "heavy user" - logging in daily and tweeting > 4x per week. Users like me make up 10% of users, but 90% of tweets.
I've been a heavy user X 15 years and I'm still not a blue check. I perceive no benefit in being verified and I doubt being verified would have/will change my experience as a user.
If they verified me for FREE I wouldn't care. $20/month to be verified on a site controlled by a maniac in the process of making the product unusable? No way.
After 3 days of Musk's ownership I'm already half-way out. As soon as these paid options are rolled out I will gladly be gone from the platform forever.
I’m not really read up on it, but I think Bluesky and Twitter are not really operating in the same space, and certainly not in the same way. Bluesky is building a protocol and selling a hosting platform. I started thinking about that model years ago, making a social protocol makes sense and it’s time for a Mastodon for the masses.
Twitter has built an incredibly resilient and scalable real-time message delivery over all IPN, email, and cell endpoints the world has to offer, and world class search, data, and ad stack. It used to make news when Twitter when down. It still does, and it set a record in July of being down for 45 mins. It doesn’t break at 1 billion messages/day. I forgot what the fail whale looks like.
If Bluesky the protocol rocks but the open source hosting sucks, Bluesky the business will do great. I’m sure their team can build a magnificent stack. I worry the business will be greedy, but the protocol will be widely adopted and centrally governed.
Connect with anyone on any service that's using the AT Protocol.
Algorithmic choice
Control how you see the world through an open market of algorithms.
Portable accounts
Change hosts without losing your content, your follows, or your identity
Twitter is crippled with debt and bursting with defectors. Bluesky or anyone else who wants to win the future needs to handle mass migration, user engagement, scaling issues, support, and needs to be able to do so quickly.
I love the idea of a marketplace for algorithms, and I think there will be a new class of moderation filters as a service. Perhaps there is a community baseline, and tools to make your own, but mostly people will pay to eliminate noise and curate their experience.
Just replied to your latest tweet with alternative I'm building (https://sqwok.im). It's a slight twist where each post includes a live public chatroom instead of the reply model Twitter uses. Slightly different experience geared for fluid conversation.
Same here. 2.5k followers, probably tweet 4x per day. I do not give a shit about being verified. I have never so much as investigated what it would take to get verified. If I had >1M followers I suspect that I would also not give a shit.
Maybe if I were a brand? But... idk. I guess our company account could get verified, not sure I'd bother.
For very large companies it seems like it's in Twitter's interest to have them verified, less so for the company. ex: fake "Coinbase" accounts are all over Twitter telling you to send them a dm to reset their account or whatever, it's in Twitter's interest to reduce that content on their platform. Making it harder to differentiate "real Coinbase" vs "fake Coinbase" seems like it will only increase their problems.
Similarly, everything I have seen from Musk so far has made me consider alternatives. In fact I wonder if the time for Twitter has passed for me. It was excellent for growing my career initially but at this point I'm more likely to network elsewhere, more likely to ask for tech help elsewhere, etc.
Agree on the utility for corporations of having an "official" account to guard against impersonators. But if Twitter becomes a ghost town it probably won't even matter if you're verified or not.
Verification isn’t/wasn’t (supposed to be) about how often you used the platform.
It was so journalists and celebrities and such could be identified and you could tell if you were intersecting with the genuine article or a fake account impersonating them.
90 days to sign up before people lose their check mark. So 90 days until the clones come out.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with the MASSIVE amount of debt Twitter is now in and desperately needing money. Or getting back at all the journalists (a huge chunk of verified users) who Musk seems to hate.
3 days. It took 3 days to make a colossally stupid official policy change.
Also? Who comes up with a feature and gives the programmers a very short deadline with a threat to fire them if they can’t make it? That’s horribly cruel.
I have really enjoyed Twitter. But based on some basic numbers I’ve seen, it wouldn’t surprise me if nothing Elon might do can save Twitter. It just seems doomed in the next few years purely from debt.
He may slow it down a bit. He could easily accelerate it. Companies that far in debt just don’t survive.
He seems almost certain to accelerate it - Twitter is estimated to now owe over $1 billion per year in debt service payments due to the leveraged buyout: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-12/musk-s-tw.... If true they'll almost immediately be in a severe struggle to not fall into default.
> Who comes up with a feature and gives the programmers a very short deadline with a threat to fire them if they can’t make it? That’s horribly cruel.
This has to be a pretext to turn a layoff into a firing with cause, right? 7 days is absolutely ridiculous for something like this, even though they already have some (most?) of the plumbing laid via Twitter Blue.
Also, tomorrow is a non-governmental holiday in the US -- Halloween. I'd imagine quite a few employees with kids are taking time off, so this is also begging for a discrimination lawsuit -- CA law bars discrimination based on an employee's role as a caregiver of a child.
Because last I checked, official policy wasn’t determined by media outlets quoting anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation, who may or may not have their own axes to grind.
My belief is that under Musk being verified will have a significant impact on your experience as a user. In other words, I think we're heading to a regime where you get verified or you're forced off. No Twitter for free users.
A number of Twitter users have been correctly pointing out that anyone who pays $20/mo for a blue checkmark is more opening themselves to being shamefully dunked on than anything else.
>A number of Twitter users have been correctly pointing out that anyone who pays $20/mo is more opening themselves to being dunked on than anything else.
It is really a thing for personal and commercial brands. You don't need it, evidently. Considering it's intended to prevent impersonation, making it a paid feature isn't an awesome idea unless there still is a documentation verification step.
he's counting that people like you won't leave, because the platform obviously matters to you and you already consider yourself invested. But now you have to kinda justify paying $20 ... probably by monetizing your audience or something. Going from $0 to $1 is a huge change for almost any social media following.
Seems to me he did it to avoid what would come out in the lawsuit.
What was so bad he was desperate enough to take on a $44B boondoggle of a purchase (he’s a bad fit, it wasn’t worth near that) to keep off the official record.
There were reports that he had deleted Signal messages, which could have led to significant sanctions if the deletions were made after discovery requests had been made.
One the one hand, it seems like a bad deal because people do that for free all the time.
On the other hand, $44 billion is nothing to the extremely wealthy. Money stops having any real value well before you have a net worth in the billions.
I disagree on your second point: $44B is a huge amount of money, even to Musk. If Twitter goes down, it likely drags down Tesla (or at least Musk's position as CEO) and his other companies as well.
$20 a month... rofl
I grouch about $5 a month for a static IP, not a chance on earth I, or anyone I know would pay $20 a month to twitter for anything they could provide. (and that $20 a month will be USD.. so it'll be like $28 a month for Australians)
not a chance.. if they billed me a few cents per tweet maybe (if they threw in no adverts).
"Elon Musk (and his consortium of much smaller investors) now owns Twitter. We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened."
Even with the hiring freezes across Silicon Valley, good engineers will right now be trying to leave Twitter in droves.
The stress of all this will have an additive effect, and make a salary cut more bearable if they have to change jobs.
Instagram has about 20,000 employees. Twitter has about 7,500. How many of those can it lose before advertisers start leaving in droves? At that point, whatever monetisation strategy Musk comes up with will be too little too late.
What's to say there isn't just as many, equally capable people looking for a job there? They'll be fine. Most people are going no where and those that leave will be replaced immediately.
Hiring new engineers while the CEO is busy boiling some of its engineers alive is notoriously difficult.
Plus, interviewing takes engineering time, since you need existing engineers to conduct those interviews. Engineers who are being asked to "show their work" won't want to take time away to interview their replacements.
Many people will peace out if their job makes them feel stressed and insecure. They have options and remote work makes it even easier to both interview (on Twitter's time) and switch to a new job (the world is your oyster and job changing friction is minimal).
> and those that leave will be replaced immediately.
Twitter is gonna have a hard time differentiating itself as a job now. Why work for Elon who treats people like this? Maybe that one somewhat niche political/ideological faction in software will be more likely. Lifestyle devs (most of them)? Nah - there's 10 chiller options out there.
I don't think there's enough true believers out there to sustain even normal dev turnover of 1-3y. Maybe Elon will have to pay even more money on salaries to stand a chance. Or he'll give up since he seems a little Dunning-Kruger on this venture as SV CEO.
Elon might not understand software business in the modern age. Unlike Tesla or SpaceX, there is little unique tech to serve as a moat.
The companies rely on engineers on staff to keep the lights on. And crucially, they have 1000 other options who will pay as well without any relocation - unlike a specialist in rocket science or other hard engineering.
The assumption you're making is that all of 7,500 of those staff are worthwhile staff who are worthy of being hired. I doubt it.
If the indication is true that Twitter is carrying a lot of deadweight, then Elon's purge is going to make Twitter a very lean and profitable tech company, not unlike Netflix.
I think you'll find the most capable engineers at Twitter will be the first to leave, not the deadweight. These people will be able to get a job anywhere, or start a company, and they're not going to sit around and be screamed at by a capricious dictator who doesn't know anything about how long things actually take (and if Elon did, he wouldn't be promising FSD "real soon now" every year)
If I was working at Twitter and Elon strolled in and said "Ship this (non-emergency fix) in one week or you're fired", I'd tender my resignation immediately. First, it's ridiculous. Second, we already know he wants to get rid of 1/3 to 2/3rds of the company, so there's no guarantee if you pull 80-hr weeks, weekend all-nighters, that you won't get fired anyway. And honestly, a CEO expecting people to regularly pull crazy hours like that is a red flag.
The part about the deadline really enrages me. I think about all the people in society who have intense and demanding jobs and demanding quotas and schedules and compare that to the soft and lazy lives of FAANG developers. Why is it okay that an Amazon driver pees in a bottle to hit delivery quotas, but a Twitter developer making ten times as much can't be asked to launch a feature in a week? I don't know if this is good business, but I think anyone who complains about it should be fired.
I would also find this extremely invigorating from the software developer side. I've worked on products at Microsoft and Amazon that have literally gone years between releases and seen so many features endlessly delayed by needless discussion and planning. I would love to get the assignment "ship this in a week or you're fired." It's not like we're splitting the atom here, Twitter Blue, a paid for thing, already exists and the verification badge already exists. If you are a Twitter developer who can't hammer this square peg into that round hole in a week...
The answers is because software developers have leverage to improve their working conditions. The answer is to reduce exploitation in other industries not increase it for FAANG company staff...
I read this article and imagine myself being invigorated if I was working inside Twitter, a company finally emerging from a death spiral. Anecdotally, I’ve seen an increasing number of software developers that don’t care to innovate, learn, or have an impact— many people are completely focused on living a comfortable life and having their employer bend over backwards to support a hedonistic lifestyle. I personally don’t think this leads to happiness, but instead to wanting to run faster and faster on a treadmill with infinite speeds. Working hard, making things happen, struggling, are all very worthy ways of spending one’s time.
I think this is smart. The blue checkmark is in practice just a symbol of vanity. That you're a genuine somebody, worthy of extra verification. There are so many self-important people in life and on social media that think they are in a class above everybody else, I bet a large percentage of these not noteworthy but need to be verified people will happily pay for it.
>The blue checkmark is in practice just a symbol of vanity. That you're a genuine somebody, worthy of extra verification.
Absolutely. But if anyone who pays $20/month can get a blue checkmark, it is no longer the status symbol you describe and its appeal totally disappears.
>The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users
Sure sounds like they’re planning on giving blue checks to anyone willing to pay. It wouldn’t make financial sense otherwise; there are currently only around 300k verified users, so this would only generate a maximum of $6M/month in revenue.
If anyone can get a blue checkmark, verification can become way simpler. It turns from "is this person actually notable, and is the user behind this account actually this notable person" to "does the name on the ID provided by this user match their account name". It goes from a subjective process requiring manual review to one that can be automated with off the shelf tools (if you wanted to get really basic, "does the name verified on this person's credit card match their account name")
Good? Why are there people who think it should be a status symbol, to by recognized by twitter staff of all people as "noteworthy?" It's ridiculous and more than a little pathetic that people considered it a valid status symbol to begin with, and it should be dismantled as such. It's not called a "status symbol and we like this person mark" it's called "verified".
Depends a lot on which crowd you're in. I certainly use it negatively every time i bring it up, as do my friends. But to them it really is a status symbol.
I've definitely seen people devote their twitter stream for weeks at a time to advocating for getting a blue checkmark. Among certain crowds it is 100% a status symbol.
Not really great for the strategy of charging for it, if they think that the blue checkmark is going to be a valuable part of charging for Twitter. The second it's available to the general public, it loses 99% of its value and doesn't really do anything to serve it's purpose of making Twitter Blue / paid twitter more attractive.
Considering verified accounts are less than 1% of twitter, there is a lot more upside to average Joe paying $20/mo for it. Beyond status, it's a way for influencers to communicate they are the official accounts for their followers.
There is implicit lying by omission, in your favor, in these kinds of situations. You create value through scarcity but some won't know why the value is there, while others will take a long while to catch-on, giving you plenty of time to capitalize on the running-on-fumes value by lowering the scarcity.
And it depends on existing verified pages (you get verified by.. having two other verified social network accounts). If you can pay to get one of those, that's half of the job done for 20$.
Telegram Premium does not at all depend on your other social profiles, it’s $5/mo. Maybe they have a separate verification feature? (Edit: yep https://telegram.org/verify )
Pay for a different badge exists in LinkedIn. Most people do not wear it as a status symbol, and it doesnt get such treatment from non paying members. The current value of check mark is a proof of a person's influence vs the proposed one means I can spend $20 this month
If thousands quit working at Twitter cause of tight deadlines like this there's thousands to more of developers who are excited to work for Musk and for Musk's Twitter.
If he's going for creating the Internet's kitchen sink app.. that sounds exciting!
- Let me use Twitter to pay for parking in every city (right now I have to download tons of apps)
- Let me use it pay for other similar business transactions where there are of tons of apps you have to download to do X (paying for medical bills ...ugh so many portals)
- We need an Internet / public verification reputation system (not sure about paying $20 a month) as deepfakes are only going to get easier to use and more pervasive.
So for approximately the price of just two Something Awful dot com forums accounts per month, you too can opt into being a public figure? There's something to be said for being a private citizen, a consumer, in this wintry economic climate.
I still remember a Google interviewer where the guy jumped from being almost BDSMlike in the attention to detail he paid to my CV after I explained the CIA triad, then jumped to getting ornery when I pointed out my mind is weirdly visual, and I can remember the textbook - the very next page had a paragraph on nonrepudiation.
(That means we're getting out of this cycle of treating ambiguities during my resumé gap as chances for fishing expeditions -- I'm spending Halloween wandering around Appalachia in a Bernie shirt thanking people for putting their dogshit into a little bag.)
Rather than be at all deferential I should have said something to the effect of "You control the email service I registered as a child, it begins to make you people look like full on pedophiles if you keep someone this smart economically precarious long enough, stop being cute in these if you don't want civil unrest."
(I got kicked off Twitter for being too... partisan. I thought I made it clear -- call whoever you want? Just don't get mad if folks tell you "Oh, we knew about that. They sell mace at the sporting goods store. You were warned your ideas suck LOLbertarian."
If this story is true (don't take any stories about Twitter at face value without named, verifiable sources), then it's likely it's about more than just verification. It'll be Twitter Prime or some such, and it will come with a host of benefits.
Actually, given what we've seen with Tesla, it will come with a host of promised benefits, which will be delivered over a randomish period of time, but which you will pay for as if they existed all along.
> told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of
> November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired
Why the heavy-handed cartoon villain boss thing though? Is this effectively another way to cut people?
Changing the subscription price is presumably technically doable on short notice. But merging it with expanded verification for any and all who want it? Is that a one-week sprint to develop, test, and put in production?
I think it may be a way to convince people to quit, thus not needing to pay severance? If some new manager came in and told me "implement this by November 7th or you're fired" I'd wait until the 7th to get fired or just quit if they didn't fire me.
I have a blue tick on Twitter but there is no way in hell I'm paying $20 per month for it. I live in India and $240 per year is a fair chunk of money for people in many parts of Asia. It costs more than my software subscriptions. Only rich celebs will keep it. I guess Musk just doesn't care about the lower income countries out there.
Is what a priority? Keeping our blue ticks? Well, the purpose of the blue tick was originally to show that the person was someone of note and not a random anon user or impersonator, and to authenticate that. They had specific criteria to meet.
Journalists from lower income countries, for instance, are still journalists, but they don't usually make enough money to pay $240 per year to justify keeping that badge. You may not think it necessary. That's fine.
Is Twitter Blue priced according to region currently? Perhaps the $20 is just the USD price and not the worldwide price? Though then I guess you leave it more open to fraud if it's cheaper elsewhere and you can get the blue tick by signing up cheap on a VPN.
As far as I know, Twitter Blue is not available in my region. The page says "We’ve launched Twitter Blue in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand."
Clicking the "Try Twitter Blue" link on their site just redirects me to my home page.
Journalists, especially political ones, gets impersonators. Usually with intention to harm you and your reputation. That is why, so that impersonator does not have blue check.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadWell I hope the meme that elon is some kind of benevolent and inspiring leader is truly dead and buried.
"Blatantly left leaning" is a joke. My trans friends wouldn't receive constant drive by harassment if that were the case.
If I worked at Twitter, I'd be trying to organize a union.
First demand: No one gets fired when Musk takes one too many bong hits.
Second demand: 99% of profits go to employee bonuses moving forward + 3x salary cap for execs.
Third demand: Employees get to vote on the new "diverse viewpoints" censorship board membership.
Payment connects you to a payment identity.
Ban payment identities that fraudulently pretend to be someone else on their name and profile.
Twitter's blue checkmark is more "this person is notable", which is a different thing and maybe valuable, although I think makes the blue checkmark probably a constant source of frustration for twitter.
$ is the price, doesn't mean you clear the requirements.
Do you have the necessary documentation to prove this identity? Aren't you concerned with violating federal laws?
Do they not already?
How can a cow get human ID ?
This almost certainly involves a massive streamlining (and reduction in rigor) of verification. Most identification verification processes online don’t take thousands of dollars of time, and the whole point is to take “verification” from a thing for a very narrow elite to a thing for a (Musk hopes) very wide paying audience. Musk has been clear since very early that he wants to convert Twitter to a mostly-paid social network by merging Blue and verification, making the former more attractive to support a higher price and the latter far more widespread.
Twitter is not a healthy product or work culture from what I can gather; and large changes in personnel, or the demise of companies, are the only ways we know to genuinely change lousy cultures at companies. Just sending a memo doesn't do it. The economy as a whole is harsh; not always as sudden, but often still more harsh. That's because killing companies is the only reliable way we have of changing company culture. It's capitalism's secret sauce.
FSD is barely alpha-level software. It's silly to even call it beta at this point. Oh and $15k for it? Don't waste your money.
Twitter wedged under a sideways parked semi trailer in 3.. 2..
it's the story of our time
or not - you're just some guy (like him)
so weird how engineers think some people are significant.
i don't and never have
Musk hasn't built shit, he just uses his diamond mine money to invest in people who do the work for him, he exploits people, nothing more.
For example: someone will be a lot more concerned about crime if they’re getting steady messaging reinforcing the message that crime is out of control.
Side question, but real question -- how do stock grants in a non-publicly traded company work, who can you sell them to how to turn them into monetary value?
New grants/options/whatever are at the whims of the company.
It’s a dick move by it is also an excellent way to filter out employees who have any semblance of work life balance or don’t think that Musk shits diamonds.
>The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge.
Like payment stuff and subscriptions is a nightmare when you have to deal with legal issues across the world. This is without going into needing to actually scope out the work, figure out how to integrate the changes safely, test them, roll them out and more. Plus it's disruptive to whatever work engineers were already doing to suddenly tell them 'do this thing NOW or you're fired'.
I really start to wonder how many people have actually worked as professional engineers.
The executive sponsor and their focus groups, product managers and their review committees, finance and their budgetary approvals, HR and their headcount approvals, the project managers and their technical working groups and sizing estimates, dev, UX, legal, test, deployment, DEI, customer advocacy, competitive analysis, etc all have to have representatives to develop a plan and sign off on it, meetings have to be scheduled, documents have to be created, approvals have to be stamped.
If you've ever worked in a true bureaucratic hellhole, you can understand how a few engineer-weeks turns into a 3 year 20 million dollar that can't be killed because too many "important" people would get egg on their face so it eventually gets rolled out, promotions and handshakes all around, and then it gets scrapped 2 weeks later because it is so terrible and nobody speaks of it again.
It's not about doable or not, it's about employee leadership.
I doubt that threats like these lead to high quality code.
I've been a heavy user X 15 years and I'm still not a blue check. I perceive no benefit in being verified and I doubt being verified would have/will change my experience as a user.
If they verified me for FREE I wouldn't care. $20/month to be verified on a site controlled by a maniac in the process of making the product unusable? No way.
After 3 days of Musk's ownership I'm already half-way out. As soon as these paid options are rolled out I will gladly be gone from the platform forever.
Tribel looks like another option that many people have been talking about.
Lately, I've been spending more time on Reddit.
Another option is to replacement Twitter with ... nothing.
Food for thought.
Twitter has built an incredibly resilient and scalable real-time message delivery over all IPN, email, and cell endpoints the world has to offer, and world class search, data, and ad stack. It used to make news when Twitter when down. It still does, and it set a record in July of being down for 45 mins. It doesn’t break at 1 billion messages/day. I forgot what the fail whale looks like.
If Bluesky the protocol rocks but the open source hosting sucks, Bluesky the business will do great. I’m sure their team can build a magnificent stack. I worry the business will be greedy, but the protocol will be widely adopted and centrally governed.
From their site https://atproto.com/:
Federated social
Connect with anyone on any service that's using the AT Protocol.
Algorithmic choice
Control how you see the world through an open market of algorithms.
Portable accounts
Change hosts without losing your content, your follows, or your identity
Twitter is crippled with debt and bursting with defectors. Bluesky or anyone else who wants to win the future needs to handle mass migration, user engagement, scaling issues, support, and needs to be able to do so quickly.
I love the idea of a marketplace for algorithms, and I think there will be a new class of moderation filters as a service. Perhaps there is a community baseline, and tools to make your own, but mostly people will pay to eliminate noise and curate their experience.
What makes you say that?
Maybe if I were a brand? But... idk. I guess our company account could get verified, not sure I'd bother.
For very large companies it seems like it's in Twitter's interest to have them verified, less so for the company. ex: fake "Coinbase" accounts are all over Twitter telling you to send them a dm to reset their account or whatever, it's in Twitter's interest to reduce that content on their platform. Making it harder to differentiate "real Coinbase" vs "fake Coinbase" seems like it will only increase their problems.
Similarly, everything I have seen from Musk so far has made me consider alternatives. In fact I wonder if the time for Twitter has passed for me. It was excellent for growing my career initially but at this point I'm more likely to network elsewhere, more likely to ask for tech help elsewhere, etc.
It was so journalists and celebrities and such could be identified and you could tell if you were intersecting with the genuine article or a fake account impersonating them.
90 days to sign up before people lose their check mark. So 90 days until the clones come out.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with the MASSIVE amount of debt Twitter is now in and desperately needing money. Or getting back at all the journalists (a huge chunk of verified users) who Musk seems to hate.
3 days. It took 3 days to make a colossally stupid official policy change.
Also? Who comes up with a feature and gives the programmers a very short deadline with a threat to fire them if they can’t make it? That’s horribly cruel.
Oh right. Musk.
The irony is that even if every current Verified user paid in, it'd still not do much for Twitter's debt.
He may slow it down a bit. He could easily accelerate it. Companies that far in debt just don’t survive.
This has to be a pretext to turn a layoff into a firing with cause, right? 7 days is absolutely ridiculous for something like this, even though they already have some (most?) of the plumbing laid via Twitter Blue.
Also, tomorrow is a non-governmental holiday in the US -- Halloween. I'd imagine quite a few employees with kids are taking time off, so this is also begging for a discrimination lawsuit -- CA law bars discrimination based on an employee's role as a caregiver of a child.
It wasn’t, but it is now.
> Also? Who comes up with a feature and gives the programmers a very short deadline with a threat to fire them if they can’t make it?
Someone who wants to do layoffs, but characterize them as firings for failure to meet performance expectations.
Can you point me to the official policy?
Because last I checked, official policy wasn’t determined by media outlets quoting anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation, who may or may not have their own axes to grind.
That says a lot about those Twitter users.
What was so bad he was desperate enough to take on a $44B boondoggle of a purchase (he’s a bad fit, it wasn’t worth near that) to keep off the official record.
What did he do??? What would be that bad?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/5/23389568/musk-twitter-sig...
On the other hand, $44 billion is nothing to the extremely wealthy. Money stops having any real value well before you have a net worth in the billions.
$44 billion is only like 25%. Even if he just lit the $44 billion on fire he would still be in like the top 100 richest humans to ever live.
https://www.smobserved.com/story/2022/10/31/opinion/the-awfu...
not a chance.. if they billed me a few cents per tweet maybe (if they threw in no adverts).
Pretty much sums up the usefulness of your comment.
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/28/elon-musk-twitter/
The stress of all this will have an additive effect, and make a salary cut more bearable if they have to change jobs.
Instagram has about 20,000 employees. Twitter has about 7,500. How many of those can it lose before advertisers start leaving in droves? At that point, whatever monetisation strategy Musk comes up with will be too little too late.
Plus, interviewing takes engineering time, since you need existing engineers to conduct those interviews. Engineers who are being asked to "show their work" won't want to take time away to interview their replacements.
But that's just your anecdote and has no actual affect on the time necessary to hire new software developers.
And the time it takes to hire has always been there; it isn't anything novel and certainly isn't stopping anybody from applying/hiring.
A "big valley tech" company? No. A big company? Yes. But you didn't explain why that mattered.
Many people will peace out if their job makes them feel stressed and insecure. They have options and remote work makes it even easier to both interview (on Twitter's time) and switch to a new job (the world is your oyster and job changing friction is minimal).
> and those that leave will be replaced immediately.
Twitter is gonna have a hard time differentiating itself as a job now. Why work for Elon who treats people like this? Maybe that one somewhat niche political/ideological faction in software will be more likely. Lifestyle devs (most of them)? Nah - there's 10 chiller options out there.
I don't think there's enough true believers out there to sustain even normal dev turnover of 1-3y. Maybe Elon will have to pay even more money on salaries to stand a chance. Or he'll give up since he seems a little Dunning-Kruger on this venture as SV CEO.
The companies rely on engineers on staff to keep the lights on. And crucially, they have 1000 other options who will pay as well without any relocation - unlike a specialist in rocket science or other hard engineering.
If the indication is true that Twitter is carrying a lot of deadweight, then Elon's purge is going to make Twitter a very lean and profitable tech company, not unlike Netflix.
If I was working at Twitter and Elon strolled in and said "Ship this (non-emergency fix) in one week or you're fired", I'd tender my resignation immediately. First, it's ridiculous. Second, we already know he wants to get rid of 1/3 to 2/3rds of the company, so there's no guarantee if you pull 80-hr weeks, weekend all-nighters, that you won't get fired anyway. And honestly, a CEO expecting people to regularly pull crazy hours like that is a red flag.
I would also find this extremely invigorating from the software developer side. I've worked on products at Microsoft and Amazon that have literally gone years between releases and seen so many features endlessly delayed by needless discussion and planning. I would love to get the assignment "ship this in a week or you're fired." It's not like we're splitting the atom here, Twitter Blue, a paid for thing, already exists and the verification badge already exists. If you are a Twitter developer who can't hammer this square peg into that round hole in a week...
Absolutely. But if anyone who pays $20/month can get a blue checkmark, it is no longer the status symbol you describe and its appeal totally disappears.
>The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users
Sure sounds like they’re planning on giving blue checks to anyone willing to pay. It wouldn’t make financial sense otherwise; there are currently only around 300k verified users, so this would only generate a maximum of $6M/month in revenue.
Not really great for the strategy of charging for it, if they think that the blue checkmark is going to be a valuable part of charging for Twitter. The second it's available to the general public, it loses 99% of its value and doesn't really do anything to serve it's purpose of making Twitter Blue / paid twitter more attractive.
https://telegram.org/blog/700-million-and-premium
I liked it was it was people, pretty anomalous Tweeting. That was an exciting time.
If he's going for creating the Internet's kitchen sink app.. that sounds exciting!
- Let me use Twitter to pay for parking in every city (right now I have to download tons of apps)
- Let me use it pay for other similar business transactions where there are of tons of apps you have to download to do X (paying for medical bills ...ugh so many portals)
- We need an Internet / public verification reputation system (not sure about paying $20 a month) as deepfakes are only going to get easier to use and more pervasive.
I still remember a Google interviewer where the guy jumped from being almost BDSMlike in the attention to detail he paid to my CV after I explained the CIA triad, then jumped to getting ornery when I pointed out my mind is weirdly visual, and I can remember the textbook - the very next page had a paragraph on nonrepudiation.
(That means we're getting out of this cycle of treating ambiguities during my resumé gap as chances for fishing expeditions -- I'm spending Halloween wandering around Appalachia in a Bernie shirt thanking people for putting their dogshit into a little bag.)
Rather than be at all deferential I should have said something to the effect of "You control the email service I registered as a child, it begins to make you people look like full on pedophiles if you keep someone this smart economically precarious long enough, stop being cute in these if you don't want civil unrest."
(I got kicked off Twitter for being too... partisan. I thought I made it clear -- call whoever you want? Just don't get mad if folks tell you "Oh, we knew about that. They sell mace at the sporting goods store. You were warned your ideas suck LOLbertarian."
Actually, given what we've seen with Tesla, it will come with a host of promised benefits, which will be delivered over a randomish period of time, but which you will pay for as if they existed all along.
Changing the subscription price is presumably technically doable on short notice. But merging it with expanded verification for any and all who want it? Is that a one-week sprint to develop, test, and put in production?
>Would you consider paying $20 monthly to get or retain a blue check?
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1586902284948148228
Is this really a priority for the lower income countries out there?
Journalists from lower income countries, for instance, are still journalists, but they don't usually make enough money to pay $240 per year to justify keeping that badge. You may not think it necessary. That's fine.