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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> Twitter offers him value, or he wouldn't be on it
I mean yes, but that value might be so low as to not be worth paying for. Not even for the monetary cost, but for the effort involved in setting up the payment (entering card details, etc) and then checking your bill is what you expect for the rest of time. That tiny amount of extra effort might make twitter not worth it alone for some people, even without the financial cost.
And even that yes it does offer value I'd qualify in that the value might ultimately on reflection be considered to be ultimately a loss on net. For example a heroin addict gets value out of heroin, but on balance the value they get (a fleeting pleasure) often isn't worth the damage done to their lives, but you could say "well it obviously offers value or they wouldn't be taking it". Note that I'm not claiming twitter is addictive or damaging like heroin, just trying to point out that "must have value because they do it" isn't really a solid argument a lot of the time
And what will he do about the hundreds of "RealStephenKing" "OfficialStephenKing" "StephenKingTwitter" accounts that will spring up and start scamming people and linking them to fake websites? How much will that cost Stephen King?
And if Twitter’s user experience degrades to the point where King can’t Tweet effectively without a blue checkmark, then the platform is deeply screwed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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.
The emerald mine claim comes from statements made by Errol Musk (Elon's father) who described it as a part share in an Zambian mine which resulted in a total lifetime revenues in the order of a few hundred thousand dollars. None of what Errol has said has been corroborated by anyone. No independent sources exist. It's also worth noting that Zambia is not a conflict gem country and an emerald mine in Zambia would not be morally problematic absent any specific evidence.
(And regardless of any of the above, I've never been particularly enamoured of criticism of a person because of who their parents are or what their parents did. Blaming Elon for being the son of white people in South Africa is kinda gross, actually.)
"Who payed for those computers in the 90s that Musk had access to?"
Its like yeah ok, he wasn't found in a dumbster during a civil war. Is that the level now, where nobody can get any credit because they were not born into abject poverty?
That just basically means that 99% of people who achieve anything don't deserve credit for anything.
Its basically materialist logic taken to an absurd degree.
Or those takes where it’s argued that because his companies have many hundreds of employees, it’s literally impossible for Elon to have contributed anything of value whatsoever.
Or even more hilariously, that Elon is some kind of marketing genius. Seriously, the guy is the opposite of a smooth communicator, and leans heavily into his autistic sense of humour. Yet apparently the only reason anyone ever bought a Tesla is because they were suckered in by a slick sales pitch.
Agreed. Though it does seem that Elon's family were quite well socially connected and that at least some of his early success in raising funds comes from that.
For instance, his connection to Roelof Botha, who in turn leveraged the connections made by his father when he was spending a lot of time in the US as South Africa's last apartheid-era foreign minister.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
Yeah but I feel like "work on twitter" is way less of a .... shall we say noble/socially fulfilling job. I'd value working on sending people to mars (not to live, just to do a walk on it), it'd make me part of something historic. One day people would write books and make documentaries about the work done to make it happen, and even if I weren't featured for the entire rest of my life if I could tell people "I worked on the software for the Mars shuttle" or whatever and have them go "Oh cool!". Hell, even before it succeeds I think it'd have social capital with the right crowd: pushing boundaries to put someone on mars is a cool job....
Twitter on the other hand... "Oh I work at twitter doing software". That's.... nowhere near as exciting or epic a thing to tell people that you do.
So he might have a harder time finding smart people willing to work for less than market rates at twitter compared to finding them for SpaceX and Tesla
> Imagine a new form of news and communication that solves all of our social woes, allows people to be informed, and have constructive discourse.
I did imagine that happening once - I imagined the internet would lead to that. The state of things now is very different from what the me of 15 years ago imagined, in part because of things like twitter in fact. I now believe that social woes have significant parts that aren't just misunderstandings they are big problems that can't be solved only through dialogue. Further many of the misunderstandings are actually deliberate misrepresentations - how many people who are pro-choice have you seen making the incredibly bad faith argument that pro-lifers just want to control/punish women? (Note I am pro-choice myself, but that particular argument is a really shitty obviously untrue argument and I see it constantly and it really gives me the shits).
> I'm sure Elon will have a mission statement that will appeal to some people.
This I do agree with, but I think the pool of people that are willing to work crazy hours at sub-standard pay is smaller when the work is making whatever Musk's improved version of twitter looks like than it is for putting someone on mars or making electric cars mainstream.
I don't think the communication problems are inherent to the internet but I'm sympathetic to your greater point.
I think the gamification of communication on the Internet is one of the worst inventions, feeding into a lot of very negative neural architecture. Encourages people to seek quick validation from there like-minded peers, and encourages a sense of superiority people can only get from knocking down strawman. This is exacerbated by brief and content without any Nuance or resemblance to reality. In a lot of ways, Twitter incorporates the worst aspects of this. Reddit is arguably worse in terms of gamification, but at least it doesn't have a 144 character limit and tools to curate your consumption.
I don't think the problems are inherent to the internet... sadly I think they are inherent to human beings.
Twitter by design exacerbates a lot of these problems though IMO. Character limits, the way replies work and things are displayed such as to make any particularly active comment section practically impossible to follow, etc
EDIT: I do actually genuinely hope that Twitter dies, but I am scared that is a monkey paw where whatever the next thing happens to be it ends up being worse
Twitter is a social media platform, that space is never going to have the kind of social cache novel space exploration does. It doesn't matter how amazing of a communication app or social media platform it is, as a job it is less epic than working on getting a guy to mars - this is my documentary argument from earlier.
Mission, and there are a lot of smart people in the world. Also, some people identify with him because he acts completely the same as That One Guy in the university who had studied programming before getting to the CS classes.
I think that a lot of people also don't have to directly work with him, and there are a lot of assholes running companies. That being said, Musk's behavior personally turned me off from all of his companies' products, despite maybe 5 years ago thinking "if I ever buy a car, it'll be a Tesla"
Like a certain real gungho-ness and actual knowledge that then turns into their whole personality. Assuming they actually know everything the world has to offer because they figured a bunch of stuff out on their own in this one domain in the past.
Someone who ends up getting something done, but in the most chaotic manner possible and with loads of unforced errors because they are not absorbing information from their peers.
The distortion field has been significantly fading over the past couple years. And it might be gone entirely soon enough depending on how poorly the Twitter acquisition turns out to be.
Tesla is making record profits right now and SpaceX is achieving things no other space company has come close to. Twitter is basically a vanity project.
> Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day
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.
Let me help you out: the point of the analogy _is_ to underline how highly irresponsible Elon’s approach is.
I think one could criticize that the analogy hyperbole, but I’m quite amused at the pearl clutching that somehow I’m trying to push for nuclear annihilation. Saying the words three times in a mirror doesn’t make it happen.
It's easy to be impulsive and make risky decisions when those decisions aren't actually risky for you. He's the richest person in the world. Even if he made a terrible decision to "bet the farm" and lost 99.5% of his wealth, he'd still be a billionaire and in the top 0.00005% of net worth in the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
Yes I do know who Steven King is. Even famous authors need to spend a lot of money on advertising when they publish a new book, and twitter certainly helps here.
Also, HN has a rule against asking people whether they've read the article. Asking people whether they know who some famous person is, is obnoxious in the same way.
Saying Steven King, one of the most successful authors in the world, needs Twitter to market his books is a such an insane take that it warrants asking if you have any idea what you're talking about imo
Depends on the type of subs one frequents. Niche ones like StableDiffusion are super active with very in-depth discussion and tutorials being written. I rarely see that much commitment even for any Twitter thread
It's remarkable how quickly so many of those defending Musk are emphasising the 'lords' and 'peasants' language after he used that terminology in a tweet.
It's not original, it's not adding to the discussion, and it just sounds like sycophancy.
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.
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 $X is pretty big, someone who's already rich might say, "well fine, fuck you too" over such a thing.
I'm struggling to understand how that would not be true. Nobody follows a Twitter link to see what Joe Blow posted about anything. They follow them to see what someone they've heard of posted. People create accounts to follow blue checks, or to try to network with them. I get that there are several market segments for Twitter but ~all of them are pretty dependent on blue checks to drive eyeballs to the site and to keep people coming back, as far as I can tell. If people just want a group chat with other nobodies, Whatsapp exists.
Thing is, the "blue checks" aren't all Stephen King level famous. If you're doing much notable at all, and using the platform, you've probably got a blue check. I do not, for the record—I'm not sure I even have an account?—but I see an awful lot of them on fairly niche but interesting & active personal accounts. Take them out and the best content goes back to being "I'm a Twitter Shitter!" kinds of stuff, like in the very early days—and the novelty for that is long gone.
If these posters stay but let their blue checks lapse, we go back to having an impersonation problem, which is mostly a problem for Twitter, which they may want to solve. Perhaps for accounts that are likely to be impersonated they could introduce some kind of free verification system....
I think it's bimodal. Either Twitter is worth like 100$+ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Real celebrities will likely end up getting the check for free under any plan. Like it or not, that's how celebrity works.
The people who won't get it for free (who have blue checks currently) are entry-level journalists with a few hundred followers and cryptobros. Both of those classes of people should have to pay.
A lot of hustlebros and cryptobros do pay for checkmarks, they just don't pay Twitter.
I can imagine the exchange between Stephen King and his agent:
> "Stephen, I'm trying to market your books, but the publishers aren't seeing any engagement on Twitter".
> "Oh I left because I don't want to pay $20 / month to someone I disagree with politically."
> "Have you been hitting the bottle again?"
End of conversation. The value most of these celebrities get vastly exceeds $20 / month. The Twitter-celebrity relationship is symbiotic, nor parasitic.
I think you're overestimating the value of Twitter to Stephen King - who has been famous far longer than Twitter has been around. Taking a dig at his past alcoholism was a bit of a cheap shot, especially since he's been sober for decades by now
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.
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.
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.
The messages shared as part of the trial don't show a particularly rigorous or deep level of thought regarding what to do with Twitter once he acquired it.
One would hope that still took place, but the haphazard approach so far doesn't provide much confidence that it did.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
This "5d chess" stuff is approaching the level of faith that qanon followers have - nothing is ever wrong, everything is always going according to The Plan, when it deviates it's because The Plan has changed and you weren't informed, Hillary was arrested and sent to gitmo but unfortunately she was cloned, etc, etc.
Look, he's spitballing ideas and playing it a little fast and loose. It may pay off, it might not - it looks a little stupid to some of us on account of how much he's paid for the company, but it shouldn't really surprise anyone and he doesn't need anyone making excuses for him.
It is not 5d chess, nor it is making excuses for him. It is a matter of critical thinking and evidence based research
I do not count reporting based on anonymous sources as evidence of anything, Elon never said, and no official at Twitter ever said the price as going to be $20, so I have no evidence to believe outside of Rumor from sources that have been showed to be negatively biased on the subject and widely inaccurate on the subject, so why should I trust their $20 figure?
I trust traditional news sources less than I do the government today, for which I would trust a Cartel bass more than the government.
> Elon never said, and no official at Twitter ever said the price as going to be $20
Except that he did. In the tweet he made just before he said it would be $8. If you discard the tweets where he said it would be $20 and then $8 - then yes your statement holds. But we shouldn't, because those are the tweets where he said those things.
This threat is interesting. I wonder what the minimum number is of top Twitter accounts that would have to leave for the platform to lose an unrecoverable amount of its daily impressions.
For example, out of the top 100 twitter accounts (https://socialblade.com/twitter/top/100), almost all are musicians, sports figures, politicians or news outlets.
If the top 5 musicians and the top 5 sports figures got together and started posting content exclusively on a new platform, I wonder if it would be enough to cause a gravitational shift.
The critical thing for the platform is that if I want to find the Twitter account for {celebrity foo} I can do so with a high degree of confidence that it will be real.
I think the loss of trust from consumers is the bigger risk, successful impersonations are relatively high profile and people don't like being tricked.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's not it. Twitter is used for marketing by many (esp businesses but also individuals) so they will pay to better market themselves. The same way that LinkedIn charges money even thought they don't create anything besides the platform.
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?
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
These topical experts as you put it, make more than $8/month today from their engaged audiences. What Twitter should do is build better engagement tools for them and then monetize that at much more than $8/month.
You think Stephen King, who is worth $500m, is going to drop Twitter for $96/year. That tweet itself was him doing a good job of using that platform (twitter) and his audience to get some free exposure.
Lol, no they don't. They are not rich and they live on fixed or unrelated salaries.
Stephen King is not subject matter expert. He is popular writer. He is also quite atypical in that he is so popular, then he really don't end twitter engagement all that much. I don't know whether he will ultimately pay, but he actually don't have to.
Please do realize that $8 is something completely different for a Norwegian than a Bangladeshi. For one it's the cost of a beer, for the other, the wages of days work.
So if I put my location on twitter to Burundi, then request a blue checkmark, I'd get it for $0.80/month? Or would they have a team of people verifying that I'm from the country I say I am? Oh, wait.
Point being: this whole thing was terribly poorly thought out, a lot of details left uncovered, in a niche where exactly those details are of crucial importance.
That'll immediately remove a lot of useful contributors, including journalists in developing countries, people working on interesting things in niche areas, and so many others.
Every network analysis of Twitter shows that the majority of people are not all engaging just with the blue checks or the most popular accounts. There's a huge long tail that keeps most users on the platform.
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.
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.
Similar to how the CTR of ads on msn.com or live.com was once way higher than everywhere else because anyone who was fooled in to using those default start pages was probably more easily fooled in all aspects.
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.
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 :)
I doubt $8 will be the only option. I’d bet $1000 that there will be a $16 (or whatever the ROI bar is) tier to be completely ad free.
$8 entry fee seems reasonable from a pyscological perspective. It sounds like the modern version of $9.99, since 3 numbers is taboo on the Twitter style internet and 8 sounds better than 9
They _should_ have the corp version. Corp accounts (@corp_name) should be like $1000/year or something like that (probably could charge $10,000 and more). Nike, Coke, Dell, Disney, etc.
Basically a tier for global brands that manage multiple regional accounts and need top level support. Which I'm sure already exists informally like all B2B SaaS sites that have listed monthly fees where big accounts are handled personally.
But more to your point I think there should be a paid bracket below that tier of global mega corps which is formalized and public. At least for transparency and marketing reasons.
You know — that is a genuinely good idea. It's easily the best monetization idea for Twitter I've heard, especially amidst the last decade of nonsense about "brand advertising" and "blue checkmarks."
Just one thing — add a couple more zeros. $100k/yr is not unreasonable for an enterprise offering here. They could introduce all kinds of B2B features for companies that want to use Twitter as a support forum (or, given Twitter's popularity, are forced into using it as a support forum).
Off the top of my head — things like rolling up different sub-accounts under one main corporate account, formalizing the ability for multiple support staff to work one account (and charge per seat!), having deeper integration with Zendesk and other ticketing systems, extracting metrics and showing dashboards for how support (and sentiment) is doing, introducing some AI/ML to help companies match Twitter accounts of their customers to internal customer IDs, enabling ML-powered DMing of targeted offers, introducing chatbots that can be trained to field support queries over DM, etc, etc.
Anyway, it's a really good idea. Maybe you should've bought Twitter.
>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?
That isn't how verification currently works and I can't imagine that is how Twitter would want it to work in the future. People change their display name all the time on Twitter and can even change their username. Plus Facebook has already shown that real name policies are hard and can cause user pushback and that was with a community that already is more lined up with our real life identities. Pseudonymous accounts are a huge part of Twitter.
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".
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.
Some users (US users, or those willing to pay $8/mo for Twitter) are generating multiple times the average revenue per user. People in poorer countries are generating less than the average revenue per user.
On Facebook, for instance, US users bring in 5x the worldwide average revenue per user.
That is why it's only a reduction in ads. This deal reduces their revenue per user if they went ad free for those users.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
>> 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
That is something they say, but the quote you pulled isn't related to it. You were looking for this one:
>> At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter
But they never bother to justify that.
> which is implied to be stupid.
The quote you pulled is stupid. Nothing is more common than successful examples of placing a higher barrier in front of the good experience than there is in front of the bad experience.
I never justified it because that quote is nowhere in my comment.
Regardless, it’s not as “stupid” as you claim. How many social networks have added a premium tier for non commercial users, while degrading the quality of the free tier and been successful?
Closest I can think of are dating apps, which have a unique driver behind them that Twitter doesn’t have.
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.
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.
excellent point - I should use the active present tense. That is: "most people alive today don't bother with twitter, despite the fact that it's free."
Is it "free" in other meanings of the word - free of charge, free speech, free expression, freedom of religion, freedom to lie, freedom to intimidate? Time will tell.
Virtually all streaming services still have ads at the paid tier: sponsored content in YouTube videos, product placement everywhere, athletes that are living billboards.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
They are who you say you are - assuming you can do proper verification of individual identity and affiliation, authorization to represent a business or brand, etc. for some portion of that first $8 payment.
Bots are probably a very big problem for a small subset of Twitter users, like Musk himself, who is positively swarmed with them. But the median Twitter user is unlikely to care about this problem to the tune of several dollars a month. I get a crypto spam message about once every other day. I wouldn't pay anything to take care of that problem, because it's just not big enough to care about.
I think it's more likely that the real goal of this "Twitter Blue" proposal is to start getting users to pay for bling. Which could work! It certainly works in gaming communities.
Certainly, services for current blue-checks can't be a big part of the plan here, because of:
(1) The Stephen King problem, which is the (correct) observation that people like King are adding far more value to Twitter than they extract from it, and are reasonably not inclined to ante anything up to Musk.
(2) There aren't enough of them to make a dent in Twitter's cash flows.
If you took away the publicity angle (which Elon Musk can't take away but we can hypothetically), Stephen King's social media professionals might pay $800/month and not even tell him if that's what helped accomplish their goals.
> 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.
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".
My guess is that the $8/mo user pool is a target demo for advertisers who like people who like subscriptions. And there can be a premium charge for targeting the $8 burger
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?
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.
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.
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.
(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)
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
All good. I definitely agree regarding Twitter and I would also not want to do business with Musk. Hence my incredulousness with the thought of any generosity, intellectual or otherwise, being thrown his way.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
but there aren't N places on the page where ads are shown, there's one place: in the feed, at an unspecified frequency as you scroll. twitter doesn't have any ad surfaces to eliminate.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
They'll just double-up ads for non-paying users in the current ad slots on the feed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
Not OP. But definitely yes. I feel that person is maybe important and if they are talking about lets say tech/vidya I lookup their names on google to find out more about them. They are definitely a status symbol and like a seal of approval that the person is well known in whatever field they are in.
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.
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?
It is status symbol, because twitter nurtured it as a status symbol. You could not get it, unless their commission decided you are notable enough. The impossibility to get it and the social approval that comes with it are what made that status symbol.
True, I’m wondering how this will change now that you can just buy it. It might become this “if you don’t have it you might be a spam account” or smthg
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
You couldn't previously buy a checkmark, now you can. This opens new methods of attacking the network.
This move perhaps limits spam as practiced today, but the attacks that will happen once the network changes will be different in ways that are difficult to predict.
I think high value spam (ie scams that involve impersonating a high profile user) will find the lowest price country and get verified there. Lower value spam will continue to operate as they have been, and the replies to most tweets will still be dominated by non-Blue users. And unless Twitter manages to get a large number of people to pay for Blue quickly, that means the spam still at or very close to the top.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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?
> 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.
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 )
At 280 characters that sort of thing would create the worst incentives possible on a platform with already terrible incentives.
Sure seems like Musk will be selling the desiccated corpse of Twitter to Verizon within a decade. On the bright side for him, he'll never have to pay tax again after writing it off.
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.
Obviously the copy on all marketing pages about Blue is not updated yet, but I bet it soon will be as Musk was said to give a very short deadline to implement changes for engineers
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).
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] thread- Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam
- Ability to post long video & audio
- Half as many ads
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.
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.
However, the existing Twitter Blue is still being listed as $5/mo.
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 $8?
If Elon is successful, even I will read the business school case study on it, because it flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems and... well just about everything. The only way this works is if Elon's internal processes are way different from his public persona.
He’s probably right, although it doesn’t generalize to most celebrities who do have a vested interest in paying to promote themselves.
I think Elon has the right idea, you gotta dip their toes in the water, then jack up the price later.
When Oprah is seen dining at a restaurant, the restaurant gets more value from the PR than Oprah gets from the meal. That does not lead to the conclusion that she should go open a restaurant.
I mean yes, but that value might be so low as to not be worth paying for. Not even for the monetary cost, but for the effort involved in setting up the payment (entering card details, etc) and then checking your bill is what you expect for the rest of time. That tiny amount of extra effort might make twitter not worth it alone for some people, even without the financial cost.
And even that yes it does offer value I'd qualify in that the value might ultimately on reflection be considered to be ultimately a loss on net. For example a heroin addict gets value out of heroin, but on balance the value they get (a fleeting pleasure) often isn't worth the damage done to their lives, but you could say "well it obviously offers value or they wouldn't be taking it". Note that I'm not claiming twitter is addictive or damaging like heroin, just trying to point out that "must have value because they do it" isn't really a solid argument a lot of the time
"flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems" indeed!
Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day, "you know what, !@#$ 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.
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
(And regardless of any of the above, I've never been particularly enamoured of criticism of a person because of who their parents are or what their parents did. Blaming Elon for being the son of white people in South Africa is kinda gross, actually.)
"Who payed for those computers in the 90s that Musk had access to?"
Its like yeah ok, he wasn't found in a dumbster during a civil war. Is that the level now, where nobody can get any credit because they were not born into abject poverty?
That just basically means that 99% of people who achieve anything don't deserve credit for anything.
Its basically materialist logic taken to an absurd degree.
Or even more hilariously, that Elon is some kind of marketing genius. Seriously, the guy is the opposite of a smooth communicator, and leans heavily into his autistic sense of humour. Yet apparently the only reason anyone ever bought a Tesla is because they were suckered in by a slick sales pitch.
For instance, his connection to Roelof Botha, who in turn leveraged the connections made by his father when he was spending a lot of time in the US as South Africa's last apartheid-era foreign minister.
https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/elon-musk-fired-twi...
"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://www.bloom...
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.
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.
Twitter on the other hand... "Oh I work at twitter doing software". That's.... nowhere near as exciting or epic a thing to tell people that you do.
So he might have a harder time finding smart people willing to work for less than market rates at twitter compared to finding them for SpaceX and Tesla
Imagine a new form of news and communication that solves all of our social woes, allows people to be informed, and have constructive discourse.
That would be world changing.
I'm not saying Twitter could ever be that. But maybe someone else could be convinced it is possible.
I did imagine that happening once - I imagined the internet would lead to that. The state of things now is very different from what the me of 15 years ago imagined, in part because of things like twitter in fact. I now believe that social woes have significant parts that aren't just misunderstandings they are big problems that can't be solved only through dialogue. Further many of the misunderstandings are actually deliberate misrepresentations - how many people who are pro-choice have you seen making the incredibly bad faith argument that pro-lifers just want to control/punish women? (Note I am pro-choice myself, but that particular argument is a really shitty obviously untrue argument and I see it constantly and it really gives me the shits).
> I'm sure Elon will have a mission statement that will appeal to some people. This I do agree with, but I think the pool of people that are willing to work crazy hours at sub-standard pay is smaller when the work is making whatever Musk's improved version of twitter looks like than it is for putting someone on mars or making electric cars mainstream.
I think the gamification of communication on the Internet is one of the worst inventions, feeding into a lot of very negative neural architecture. Encourages people to seek quick validation from there like-minded peers, and encourages a sense of superiority people can only get from knocking down strawman. This is exacerbated by brief and content without any Nuance or resemblance to reality. In a lot of ways, Twitter incorporates the worst aspects of this. Reddit is arguably worse in terms of gamification, but at least it doesn't have a 144 character limit and tools to curate your consumption.
Twitter by design exacerbates a lot of these problems though IMO. Character limits, the way replies work and things are displayed such as to make any particularly active comment section practically impossible to follow, etc
EDIT: I do actually genuinely hope that Twitter dies, but I am scared that is a monkey paw where whatever the next thing happens to be it ends up being worse
Twitter has been too complacent in the market of communication apps. By all reports, including from Elon himself, big changes are on the way.
I think that a lot of people also don't have to directly work with him, and there are a lot of assholes running companies. That being said, Musk's behavior personally turned me off from all of his companies' products, despite maybe 5 years ago thinking "if I ever buy a car, it'll be a Tesla"
I don't get this reference, how does a person like that act in uni?
Someone who ends up getting something done, but in the most chaotic manner possible and with loads of unforced errors because they are not absorbing information from their peers.
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.
I think one could criticize that the analogy hyperbole, but I’m quite amused at the pearl clutching that somehow I’m trying to push for nuclear annihilation. Saying the words three times in a mirror doesn’t make it happen.
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.
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.
What an absolute clownish take.
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.
So it is essentially, charge the people who bring the users to twitter.
Also, HN has a rule against asking people whether they've read the article. Asking people whether they know who some famous person is, is obnoxious in the same way.
"This will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587505731611262976
The entire point of these things were so that it was an indication that these people are who they say they are: experts and celebrities.
This absolute loon wants to charge the people who are the only reason that twitter even still exists.
It's not original, it's not adding to the discussion, and it just sounds like sycophancy.
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.
[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.
That may have been true at one time, but I'm not so sure it is any more.
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....
They do, though. The premise is simply wrong here.
"If you're not paying for the product, you're the product."
Though to truly resolve this, they need 0 ads, not 50% fewer.
You'd think the Elon, having a notable and active Twitter account, would realize how bad it is even with those measures in place.
If the celebrities leave, Twitter dies.
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.
The people who won't get it for free (who have blue checks currently) are entry-level journalists with a few hundred followers and cryptobros. Both of those classes of people should have to pay.
A lot of hustlebros and cryptobros do pay for checkmarks, they just don't pay Twitter.
> "Stephen, I'm trying to market your books, but the publishers aren't seeing any engagement on Twitter".
> "Oh I left because I don't want to pay $20 / month to someone I disagree with politically."
> "Have you been hitting the bottle again?"
End of conversation. The value most of these celebrities get vastly exceeds $20 / month. The Twitter-celebrity relationship is symbiotic, nor parasitic.
One would hope that still took place, but the haphazard approach so far doesn't provide much confidence that it did.
5d chess and all that.
Or he's impulsive and tweets dumb shit basically all the time. It might just be that.
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?
"I was going to charge $20, but then Stephen King told me it was too much."
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
He gets criticized for promising them, even selling them like in the case of vehicle autonomy, when there is no realistic timeline for delivery.
I mean, at least when Microsoft pitched vaporware on stage they didn't then take the money in advance.
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
Look, he's spitballing ideas and playing it a little fast and loose. It may pay off, it might not - it looks a little stupid to some of us on account of how much he's paid for the company, but it shouldn't really surprise anyone and he doesn't need anyone making excuses for him.
I do not count reporting based on anonymous sources as evidence of anything, Elon never said, and no official at Twitter ever said the price as going to be $20, so I have no evidence to believe outside of Rumor from sources that have been showed to be negatively biased on the subject and widely inaccurate on the subject, so why should I trust their $20 figure?
I trust traditional news sources less than I do the government today, for which I would trust a Cartel bass more than the government.
Except that he did. In the tweet he made just before he said it would be $8. If you discard the tweets where he said it would be $20 and then $8 - then yes your statement holds. But we shouldn't, because those are the tweets where he said those things.
For example, out of the top 100 twitter accounts (https://socialblade.com/twitter/top/100), almost all are musicians, sports figures, politicians or news outlets.
If the top 5 musicians and the top 5 sports figures got together and started posting content exclusively on a new platform, I wonder if it would be enough to cause a gravitational shift.
I think the loss of trust from consumers is the bigger risk, successful impersonations are relatively high profile and people don't like being tricked.
Just a product with slightly less disposable income.
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.
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.
* 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)
My thinking was based on YouTube Premium, Apple TV, Netflix (currently), 4oD, Disney+, etc.
[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/netflix-ad-supported-tier-price...
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.
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.
I'd assume the $8 high-rollers can still retweet and amplify the poors.
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.
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.
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.
Is this your experience with Twitter?
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).
Who will pay will be grifters and ideologues.
You think Stephen King, who is worth $500m, is going to drop Twitter for $96/year. That tweet itself was him doing a good job of using that platform (twitter) and his audience to get some free exposure.
Stephen King is not subject matter expert. He is popular writer. He is also quite atypical in that he is so popular, then he really don't end twitter engagement all that much. I don't know whether he will ultimately pay, but he actually don't have to.
Point being: this whole thing was terribly poorly thought out, a lot of details left uncovered, in a niche where exactly those details are of crucial importance.
Every network analysis of Twitter shows that the majority of people are not all engaging just with the blue checks or the most popular accounts. There's a huge long tail that keeps most users on the platform.
Adverse selection. The people willing to pay to remove ads are probably your most profitable users to show ads to.
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.
Continuing to show ads to paying content creators is double-dipping.
$8 entry fee seems reasonable from a pyscological perspective. It sounds like the modern version of $9.99, since 3 numbers is taboo on the Twitter style internet and 8 sounds better than 9
Basically a tier for global brands that manage multiple regional accounts and need top level support. Which I'm sure already exists informally like all B2B SaaS sites that have listed monthly fees where big accounts are handled personally.
But more to your point I think there should be a paid bracket below that tier of global mega corps which is formalized and public. At least for transparency and marketing reasons.
Just one thing — add a couple more zeros. $100k/yr is not unreasonable for an enterprise offering here. They could introduce all kinds of B2B features for companies that want to use Twitter as a support forum (or, given Twitter's popularity, are forced into using it as a support forum).
Off the top of my head — things like rolling up different sub-accounts under one main corporate account, formalizing the ability for multiple support staff to work one account (and charge per seat!), having deeper integration with Zendesk and other ticketing systems, extracting metrics and showing dashboards for how support (and sentiment) is doing, introducing some AI/ML to help companies match Twitter accounts of their customers to internal customer IDs, enabling ML-powered DMing of targeted offers, introducing chatbots that can be trained to field support queries over DM, etc, etc.
Anyway, it's a really good idea. Maybe you should've bought Twitter.
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?
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.
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.
$8 is a lot - relatively speaking.
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.
On Facebook, for instance, US users bring in 5x the worldwide average revenue per user.
That is why it's only a reduction in ads. This deal reduces their revenue per user if they went ad free for those users.
he is full of bad ideas and will bring twitter down with most of them
though I like the idea of bringing vine back.
> 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.
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.
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.
How?
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.
> 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.
>> 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
That is something they say, but the quote you pulled isn't related to it. You were looking for this one:
>> At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter
But they never bother to justify that.
> which is implied to be stupid.
The quote you pulled is stupid. Nothing is more common than successful examples of placing a higher barrier in front of the good experience than there is in front of the bad experience.
Regardless, it’s not as “stupid” as you claim. How many social networks have added a premium tier for non commercial users, while degrading the quality of the free tier and been successful?
Closest I can think of are dating apps, which have a unique driver behind them that Twitter doesn’t have.
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.
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.
"wouldn't bother" should be "don't bother".
For the world, around 290 million [1], with an internet population of around 4 billion [2], that's around 7%.
Things are a bit better for the us, with 41.5 million active users [1], assuming they're all over 18 (209 million), that's about 20% of US population.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/10/25/twit...
2. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=number+...
excellent point - I should use the active present tense. That is: "most people alive today don't bother with twitter, despite the fact that it's free."
Is it "free" in other meanings of the word - free of charge, free speech, free expression, freedom of religion, freedom to lie, freedom to intimidate? Time will tell.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
I think it's more likely that the real goal of this "Twitter Blue" proposal is to start getting users to pay for bling. Which could work! It certainly works in gaming communities.
Certainly, services for current blue-checks can't be a big part of the plan here, because of:
(1) The Stephen King problem, which is the (correct) observation that people like King are adding far more value to Twitter than they extract from it, and are reasonably not inclined to ante anything up to Musk.
(2) There aren't enough of them to make a dent in Twitter's cash flows.
Before you couldn't trust non-checkmarks. Now you can't trust any account.
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.
> 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
So, secondary tags are the new verification checkmarks and checkmarks are the new "Twitter+" status symbol.
$0 - you barely get heard
$8 - you kind of get heard
$88 - you really get heard
$888 - everybody thinks the exact same thing as you do and you can manipulate portions of the population (lol)
Every time I see a post it's just followed up by 100 meme gifs, not discussion.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>"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??
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.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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.
Broadcast television and radio have always done this. How could they do anything else?
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.
They'll just double-up ads for non-paying users in the current ad slots on the feed.
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.
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.
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.
Is that what you think when you see a blue check?
I expect more changes are ahead that might address these concerns.
this is basically how it operated before, except with political bias
The checkmarks won't be a status symbol anymore, but the masses will want their tweets prioritized.
That said, this doesn't really say "Global Town Hall".
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
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
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.
This move perhaps limits spam as practiced today, but the attacks that will happen once the network changes will be different in ways that are difficult to predict.
$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.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434502/twitter-blue-ad-...
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.
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.
Because it pollutes other more "reliable" sources of information.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
Why would I pay $8/month for a materially worse experience?
> 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.
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 )
Sure seems like Musk will be selling the desiccated corpse of Twitter to Verizon within a decade. On the bright side for him, he'll never have to pay tax again after writing it off.
> 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.
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...