5 ms·
I’m not sure a blue check is very important for engagement. I don’t have a blue check, and easily drive more engagement than many verified accounts I follow. An
by jdavis703 5y ago
I’m not sure a blue check is very important for engagement. I don’t have a blue check, and easily drive more engagement than many verified accounts I follow. And I’m not the only one.
- artfulhippo 5y agoAssuming that you "work on Twitter", ie, your career is in part built on Twitter, what do you think the value of a Blue Check is? I would bet it's worth more than $1000/yr to the average person in the "Twitter Middle Class" (someone using Twitter for work but not at mega scale). Even a single digit percentage point boost in engagement is worth a lot, or do you disagree?
- jdavis703 5y agoTwitter is worth about the same as say a Bloomberg News or WSJ subscription to me. Perhaps slightly more. That is to say I’d pay a few hundred bucks for it. But there’s no way I’m spending $1,000 a year on it if I can’t expense or write it off taxes (right now my usage is a mix of personal and non-personal, so it’s hard to correctly account for it).
- spacelamb 5y agoA lot of journalists are financially poor, or at least don't make much income from their jobs. $1000/yr is a lot of money for journalists, especially at local newspapers. Quite a few accounts I follow also don't have a Blue Check. If it started to cost money, I'm sure a lot of journalists would just choose not to be verified. The reason is that I'm not convinced that a Blue Check is tied to engagement with your Tweets, but rather the quality of your work outside Twitter.
- johannes1234321 5y agoAn issue is that for some it's not worth as much as for Twitter. If my local police department uses Twitter to send out notifications on a current event the blue check confirms authority. Without the mark one can't distinguish original from fake/parody within the platform, which hurts the platform. But there certainly is a demography who would pay well. Question is where to draw the line.
- riffic 5y agoBlue checks are an arbitrary decree from above that someone inside Twitter likes you. The whole thing is a sham.
- solarkraft 5y agoIt's even a badge of shame in some circles.
- paulcole 5y agoWhich circles is it a badge of shame in?
- jdavis703 5y agoThe folks who rage against the media and political establishment (blue checkmarks are basically granted automatically to journalists at traditional media outlets and to anyone running for office.)
- spacelamb 5y agoYes; among these political groups, "blue check" is a pejorative as belonging to the member of the "liberal elite" [0]. [0] https://theoutline.com/post/1323/verified-blue-checkmark-derogatory-insult-twitter https://theoutline.com/post/1323/verified-blue-checkmark-der...
- dymk 5y agoThis one
- ctdonath 5y agoBlue check used to mean "identity objectively verified", useful to confirm the twiterati using the name is the actual person/group others think they are. Then came the Great Bluecheck Purge, where anyone exhibiting opinions not preferred by Twitter management had their blue check revoked/denied - which in practice was applied generally to Republicans, who constitute about half the USA. (We're talking mainstream views, not just weirdos.) Ergo, anyone with a blue check is, by Twitter decree, not a Republican. For Republicans, blue check now amounts to a "badge of shame" indicating Twitter-approved opposition. Blue checks were changed from "identity confirmed" to "one of us, not them".
- aj7 5y agoOne or two people always ‘get’ my better tweets. That’s good enough for me.