5 ms·

Elon's first big move: pay to remain verified on Twitter

34 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

firstSpeaker 4y ago
"Twitter is strongly considering making its users pay to remain verified on the service, Platformer has learned. If the project makes forward, users would have to subscribe to Twitter Blue at $4.99 a month or lose their badges. Executives at the newly Elon Musk-owned company have spent the weekend discussing the move and making plans related to the project, according to two people familiar with the matter."
- knodi 4y ago
  $4.99 monthly seems quite high for something that was free.
  - qull 4y ago
    It wasn't exactly free, but a crony system from what I can tell. Honestly feels way too cheap at 5$ for what it is and the unjustified weight it carries.
    - anecdotal1 4y ago
      I'll pay $5 to be verified and then hopefully have an option to filter out every account that isn't verified
      - Nomentatus 4y ago
        Indeed. As Hubert Humphrey said: "Everyone has a right to speak, but nobody has the right to be heard." Okay I'm wrong. The correct quote is: “The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.” ― Hubert H. Humphrey Maybe if he'd lived into the internet age, he'd have gone with my quote. There ain't time to hear everybody on the net, or Twitter.
      - gonzo41 4y ago
        That option should be free though. The 90, 9, 1 rule applies strongly to twitter. Elon and team should try and milk the 1% for a lot of cash and make the experience pleasant for the 90% who just read it all.
        anecdotal1 4y ago
        Oh sure the filter should be free for everyone, why not. It just makes the verified accounts even more valuable
    - Nomentatus 4y ago
      I believe that Lithuania has an electronic ID system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_identity_card#As_electronic_signature_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_identity_card#As_el... that's been working. I think we're behind the curve here; it should be easy to very strongly verify my identiry to any online business I choose to do that with; without government taking the lead, every damn company is going to be expensively reinventing that wheel.
      - tttttt5ts 4y ago
        Most companies shouldn't need this information. I don't give my id to most businesses I visit in person. The ability for online services to "verify" me does not need to be easy and it doesn't need to be cheap otherwise it will just be abused.
        Nomentatus 4y ago
        But bots can't walk into most businesses in person. My point is that I don't want to hear from an account that isn't at least verified to be set up by a verified specific human being.
        tttttt5ts 4y ago
        And you should be able to filter to only accounts that are verified and pay $5/month. I think this is an issue with twitter and their product. "verification" is one possible solution. But, other product changes would probably work better. E.g., I rarely have such negative interactions on hacker news and they don't even require a CC or a phone.
        Nomentatus 4y ago
        Agreed, and I want to see more than one change and some experimentation, too.
        adamckay 4y ago
        But if you're out in public and you start shouting harmful, hateful or abusive messages there can be real-world consequences. On Twitter you can be the most vile person possible with absolutely no fear as you're entirely anonymous.
  - tfsh 4y ago
    a 4.99 monthly expense for accounts have who'm are likely to be world leaders, public figures, large organisations and the odd charity/public good insitute is not a steap price. Statistically, of course it's a large increase. However from a business perspective I do not think so. A quick search indicates there are 294,000 accounts, and at 4.99 a month that would yield Twitter $1,467,060 a month, which is hardly anything. Especially as I imagine ~10-15% of those accounts will decide to forgo the badge, either in protest or because they just don't care.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      If you're verified on Twitter and not getting $5 a month value out of it, what even are you really doing there?
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      At current numbers, yes, but a lot more people might want to be verified if Musk decides that the only qualifications are that you are who you say you are, and that you're willing to prove it to twitter.
    - watwut 4y ago
      Nah, they are mostly very minor public figures and that is stretching definition of public figure for most. Majority is nowhere near to anyone big or important.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    I've bought many social media accounts before, this is way more efficient and less disaster prone than paying for likes/followers, as you won't get bots. You'll get a professionally curated and grown account with the level of engagement to your choosing, with the audience geared towards the brand/theme of the account's content. What people don't realize is that each individual account is like purchasing a business. There are way too many similarities to think of it any differently. When you buy an account, you get all the DMs which often include a whole network of traders, promoters, service providers, negotiations, trade lines. Typically you also get the email address and password used to create the account, which has even more of this. You are mostly getting ROI pretty quickly by doing a few promos really quickly. Its actually based on a multiple of getting ROI. Purchasing an account is a fairly low trust environment, fraught with scams. Most social media Terms of Service actually exacerbate this, by mostly banning the concept of buying/selling an account. Since this happens, the platform should actually be facilitating these transactions and there is a lot of value to extract. Escrow services charge 30% right now, but a network of trusted traders is better and more valuable. With that said, $4.99/mo for the tip of the iceberg of the value of these accounts is extremely underpriced. Tolerable overhead costs are in the thousands if we are being honest. This should be its own separate tier than just "Twitter Blue", as it will price out too many people to operate at scale, but this is definitely a model that is neglected by social media platforms right now.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    To me it seems rather cheap. Specially for something that could not have gotten before without nepotism and corruption.
Comevius 4y ago
Those verified active users are the lifeblood of the platform, but there can't be that many of them to justify rolling unnecessary obstacles in front of them.
- bequanna 4y ago
  Not really an obstacle to tweeting. It’s nothing other than making people pay for a status symbol.
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    Hopefully not. At 5$ I would hope they would actually check the account marked as verified is actually the individual/etc that they claim to be ...
  - williamsmj 4y ago
    It’s a status symbol now. If it becomes a paid feature of privately owned Twitter then, whether they like it or not, it’s going to become a badge that says the owner supports an incredibly divisive specific person.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  > Those verified active users are the lifeblood of the platform, but there can't be that many of them to justify rolling unnecessary obstacles in front of them. They bring money to Twitter how exactly? That whole "verified" scheme was always a joke, given who gets to be verified or unverified. Either it's about real identities or it's a worthless ideology approval badge.
  - nequo 4y ago
    > They bring money to Twitter how exactly? They draw an audience to the platform and they tweet things that journalists want to write about which is free advertising for Twitter that draws more of an audience.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
rdtwo 4y ago
Yeah that’s dumb. Better sell twitter yellow as a lower form of twitter blue
everfrustrated 4y ago
I would happily use Twitter in a mode that meant I only saw content and replies from verified humans and nobody else.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  any Nitter server -> Find person you want -> RSS feed
  - dschuessler 4y ago
    For those who don't know: Nitter is an alternative self-hosted Twitter client. One public instance: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/ https://nitter.kavin.rocks/ Github repository: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
stevage 4y ago
Charging celebrities $5 a month doesn't seem like a great way to make a lot of revenue.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Make it scale with the number of subscribers? It would be abused of course, but isn't twitter already?
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    They need to charge the subscribers too.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
dang 4y ago
Two problems with this submission: (1) title is baity and misleading, and the subtitle immediately takes it back ("considers"). (2) it appears to be hardwalled (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989).
sn_master 4y ago
How'd that work with people from countries like Russia, Iran etc which have US sanctions?
gwnywg 4y ago
I'm not into whole 'Elon takes over Twitter' drama, and most likely I'm not their target audience. But for whatever it may matter, I stay away from any platform that tries to verify me, even if most of them manage to successfully track me... I guess this service may bring some value to 'famous people'..
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cheriot 4y ago
It's the verified users that make Twitter relevant. Pushing them away won't go well. There's a large number of people using Twitter professionally and all Elon comes up with is... pay for the check mark? The Twitter saga might be the thing that brings down his image as an entrepreneurial genius.
mcphage 4y ago
The subtitle is “Under pressure to generate revenue quickly…” so… under pressure from whom? I though Twitter was no longer publicly traded?
- belthesar 4y ago
  Probably the nearly 12 billion dollars in debt the company's in now post-acquisition.
midoridensha 4y ago
Hopefully they stick to this plan, but the price is much too low. In addition, they should require payment from regular users too. I really do hope they try to squeeze as much money out of their users as possible, and then some.
Ekaros 4y ago
This seems reasonable move. Let those who get most out of Twitter pay for it. Additionally maybe corporate users should be charged lot more. Depending on scale and reach.
- techdragon 4y ago
  Yeah, it might be slightly more valuable to IBM or FedEx than $20. But for me $20 is just slightly too much, I like twitter as an open first community, despite all its well established faults, I feel it’s less bad than all the others.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
Good. The bluecheck right now is a combination of moral approval, connections and importance. Verifying identity is a service, it costs money, it's reasonable to expect people to pay for it, and to provide it to anyone willing to pay for it.

34 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

"Twitter is strongly considering making its users pay to remain verified on the service, Platformer has learned. If the project makes forward, users would have to subscribe to Twitter Blue at $4.99 a month or lose their badges. Executives at the newly Elon Musk-owned company have spent the weekend discussing the move and making plans related to the project, according to two people familiar with the matter."

knodi 4y ago
$4.99 monthly seems quite high for something that was free.
- qull 4y ago
  It wasn't exactly free, but a crony system from what I can tell. Honestly feels way too cheap at 5$ for what it is and the unjustified weight it carries.
  - anecdotal1 4y ago
    I'll pay $5 to be verified and then hopefully have an option to filter out every account that isn't verified
    - Nomentatus 4y ago
      Indeed. As Hubert Humphrey said: "Everyone has a right to speak, but nobody has the right to be heard." Okay I'm wrong. The correct quote is: “The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.” ― Hubert H. Humphrey Maybe if he'd lived into the internet age, he'd have gone with my quote. There ain't time to hear everybody on the net, or Twitter.
    - gonzo41 4y ago
      That option should be free though. The 90, 9, 1 rule applies strongly to twitter. Elon and team should try and milk the 1% for a lot of cash and make the experience pleasant for the 90% who just read it all.
      - anecdotal1 4y ago
        Oh sure the filter should be free for everyone, why not. It just makes the verified accounts even more valuable
  - Nomentatus 4y ago
    I believe that Lithuania has an electronic ID system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_identity_card#As_electronic_signature_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_identity_card#As_el... that's been working. I think we're behind the curve here; it should be easy to very strongly verify my identiry to any online business I choose to do that with; without government taking the lead, every damn company is going to be expensively reinventing that wheel.
    - tttttt5ts 4y ago
      Most companies shouldn't need this information. I don't give my id to most businesses I visit in person. The ability for online services to "verify" me does not need to be easy and it doesn't need to be cheap otherwise it will just be abused.
      - Nomentatus 4y ago
        But bots can't walk into most businesses in person. My point is that I don't want to hear from an account that isn't at least verified to be set up by a verified specific human being.
        tttttt5ts 4y ago
        And you should be able to filter to only accounts that are verified and pay $5/month. I think this is an issue with twitter and their product. "verification" is one possible solution. But, other product changes would probably work better. E.g., I rarely have such negative interactions on hacker news and they don't even require a CC or a phone.
        Nomentatus 4y ago
        Agreed, and I want to see more than one change and some experimentation, too.
      - adamckay 4y ago
        But if you're out in public and you start shouting harmful, hateful or abusive messages there can be real-world consequences. On Twitter you can be the most vile person possible with absolutely no fear as you're entirely anonymous.
- tfsh 4y ago
  a 4.99 monthly expense for accounts have who'm are likely to be world leaders, public figures, large organisations and the odd charity/public good insitute is not a steap price. Statistically, of course it's a large increase. However from a business perspective I do not think so. A quick search indicates there are 294,000 accounts, and at 4.99 a month that would yield Twitter $1,467,060 a month, which is hardly anything. Especially as I imagine ~10-15% of those accounts will decide to forgo the badge, either in protest or because they just don't care.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    If you're verified on Twitter and not getting $5 a month value out of it, what even are you really doing there?
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    At current numbers, yes, but a lot more people might want to be verified if Musk decides that the only qualifications are that you are who you say you are, and that you're willing to prove it to twitter.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Nah, they are mostly very minor public figures and that is stretching definition of public figure for most. Majority is nowhere near to anyone big or important.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  I've bought many social media accounts before, this is way more efficient and less disaster prone than paying for likes/followers, as you won't get bots. You'll get a professionally curated and grown account with the level of engagement to your choosing, with the audience geared towards the brand/theme of the account's content. What people don't realize is that each individual account is like purchasing a business. There are way too many similarities to think of it any differently. When you buy an account, you get all the DMs which often include a whole network of traders, promoters, service providers, negotiations, trade lines. Typically you also get the email address and password used to create the account, which has even more of this. You are mostly getting ROI pretty quickly by doing a few promos really quickly. Its actually based on a multiple of getting ROI. Purchasing an account is a fairly low trust environment, fraught with scams. Most social media Terms of Service actually exacerbate this, by mostly banning the concept of buying/selling an account. Since this happens, the platform should actually be facilitating these transactions and there is a lot of value to extract. Escrow services charge 30% right now, but a network of trusted traders is better and more valuable. With that said, $4.99/mo for the tip of the iceberg of the value of these accounts is extremely underpriced. Tolerable overhead costs are in the thousands if we are being honest. This should be its own separate tier than just "Twitter Blue", as it will price out too many people to operate at scale, but this is definitely a model that is neglected by social media platforms right now.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  To me it seems rather cheap. Specially for something that could not have gotten before without nepotism and corruption.

Comevius 4y ago

Those verified active users are the lifeblood of the platform, but there can't be that many of them to justify rolling unnecessary obstacles in front of them.

bequanna 4y ago
Not really an obstacle to tweeting. It’s nothing other than making people pay for a status symbol.
- lesuorac 4y ago
  Hopefully not. At 5$ I would hope they would actually check the account marked as verified is actually the individual/etc that they claim to be ...
- williamsmj 4y ago
  It’s a status symbol now. If it becomes a paid feature of privately owned Twitter then, whether they like it or not, it’s going to become a badge that says the owner supports an incredibly divisive specific person.
throw_m239339 4y ago
> Those verified active users are the lifeblood of the platform, but there can't be that many of them to justify rolling unnecessary obstacles in front of them. They bring money to Twitter how exactly? That whole "verified" scheme was always a joke, given who gets to be verified or unverified. Either it's about real identities or it's a worthless ideology approval badge.
- nequo 4y ago
  > They bring money to Twitter how exactly? They draw an audience to the platform and they tweet things that journalists want to write about which is free advertising for Twitter that draws more of an audience.
CamperBob2 4y ago

rdtwo 4y ago

Yeah that’s dumb. Better sell twitter yellow as a lower form of twitter blue

everfrustrated 4y ago

I would happily use Twitter in a mode that meant I only saw content and replies from verified humans and nobody else.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
any Nitter server -> Find person you want -> RSS feed
- dschuessler 4y ago
  For those who don't know: Nitter is an alternative self-hosted Twitter client. One public instance: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/ https://nitter.kavin.rocks/ Github repository: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

stevage 4y ago

Charging celebrities $5 a month doesn't seem like a great way to make a lot of revenue.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
Make it scale with the number of subscribers? It would be abused of course, but isn't twitter already?
- midoridensha 4y ago
  They need to charge the subscribers too.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

dang 4y ago

Two problems with this submission: (1) title is baity and misleading, and the subtitle immediately takes it back ("considers"). (2) it appears to be hardwalled (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989).

sn_master 4y ago

How'd that work with people from countries like Russia, Iran etc which have US sanctions?

gwnywg 4y ago

I'm not into whole 'Elon takes over Twitter' drama, and most likely I'm not their target audience. But for whatever it may matter, I stay away from any platform that tries to verify me, even if most of them manage to successfully track me... I guess this service may bring some value to 'famous people'..

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

cheriot 4y ago

It's the verified users that make Twitter relevant. Pushing them away won't go well. There's a large number of people using Twitter professionally and all Elon comes up with is... pay for the check mark? The Twitter saga might be the thing that brings down his image as an entrepreneurial genius.

mcphage 4y ago

The subtitle is “Under pressure to generate revenue quickly…” so… under pressure from whom? I though Twitter was no longer publicly traded?

belthesar 4y ago
Probably the nearly 12 billion dollars in debt the company's in now post-acquisition.

midoridensha 4y ago

Hopefully they stick to this plan, but the price is much too low. In addition, they should require payment from regular users too. I really do hope they try to squeeze as much money out of their users as possible, and then some.

Ekaros 4y ago

This seems reasonable move. Let those who get most out of Twitter pay for it. Additionally maybe corporate users should be charged lot more. Depending on scale and reach.

techdragon 4y ago
Yeah, it might be slightly more valuable to IBM or FedEx than $20. But for me $20 is just slightly too much, I like twitter as an open first community, despite all its well established faults, I feel it’s less bad than all the others.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

Good. The bluecheck right now is a combination of moral approval, connections and importance. Verifying identity is a service, it costs money, it's reasonable to expect people to pay for it, and to provide it to anyone willing to pay for it.