116 ms·

Twitter Blue for $8/Month

• alberth 4y ago
  $20 vs $8 This is Elon tactics 101. You anchor people high with leaking outlandish (incorrect) pricing, that way when you officially announce the (always intended) pricing - it seems like a deal.
• yalogin 4y ago
  I don't get it. Charging for a blue check mark was not his main goal. It was to boot out all bots. Is that still the case? Is he saying that once the bots are eliminated, we are allowed to stay anonymous still?
• randomopining 4y ago
  Elon’s Vision: 1. Charge $8/mon and a bunch of people will pay 2. Fire a bunch of engineers 3. Twitter looks way better on paper 4. Flip the company in 18 months when rates go down and market is better esp tech
• mesozoic 4y ago
  I think they should charge people based on the number of followers they have. That's where value comes from and they should look to collect it.
• tmellon2 4y ago
  Does someone have a better sense of economics of charging $8/Month ? At best assuming approximately the 420,000 [see Ref.1] folks currently on twitter will pay $8/Month - which gives about $40 Million in *annual* revenue. Will the economics work if the advertisers stay out ? Also, why charge in the first place if the number is too low ( < $40 Million). Source : [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/28633/verified-users-on-twitter/ https://www.statista.com/chart/28633/verified-users-on-twitt...
• mikestaub 4y ago
  Elon should not couple revenue generation with identity verification. Their should be a "Twitter Green" that lets users link a credit card to charge a one-time $1 fee. Twitter blue should allow power-users to customize their feed algorithm and be $20 per month.
• abhaynayar 4y ago
  So there will be a separate indicator for famous personalities according to this thread. This makes a lot more sense then. The verification badge will only be used to know whether someone is human verified against an ID. And the other indicator will tell whether they’re a celebrity. This way we will still have a way to know whether it’s a celebrity, and it will also solve the bot problem.
• BryanBeshore 4y ago
  You will also get: - Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam - Ability to post long video & audio - Half as many ads
  • joenathanone 4y ago
    >- Priority in replies, mentions & search He starts off with "Power to the people", but this is just "power to the people with money"(which is the status quo). If you don't have $8/mo disposable income to spend on a vanity feature, then what you have to say will be overshadowed by the people who do.
    • memish 4y ago
      The status quo is that you need to be a Lord to get the blue check. This makes it available to anyone who is able to get a Netflix subscription. It goes from a status symbol to a commodity. The Lords will hate it because it makes it available to the peasants.
      • oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
        Not in my experience. I follow plenty of blue tick accounts that aren't lords, merely notable within a niche.
    • nisegami 4y ago
      He did say it will be scaled by PPP by region, which is interesting. Curious to see how that will play out, if taken literally I should be paying like $3 USD which seems fine to me but is still out of reach of most of my country for logistic reasons rather than outright money reasons.
      • aniforprez 4y ago
        That part of the thread pretty much proved that he hasn't thought out this whole scheme at all. He's spitballing in public on twitter
• Finnucane 4y ago
  The power of Stephen King.
• rideontime 4y ago
  His first tweet doesn't seem to relate to the rest. What does the checkmark have to do with Blue?
  • MallocVoidstar 4y ago
    Pretty sure he's replacing the notability-based verification system with "pay $8/mo to get a checkmark".
    • birdyrooster 4y ago
      He’s trying to do what Facebook couldn’t and charging people for it.
  • eatonphil 4y ago
    Yeah I'm confused. Twitter Blue is a separate service that anyone already could buy for $5/mo I think. Maybe he's merging them together. However, the existing Twitter Blue is still being listed as $5/mo.
• minimaxir 4y ago
  The price 100% was $20/mo as previously reported by journalists until Twitter dunked on it, and Elon's interpretation of the backlash is "the price is too high" and not "any price makes no sense at all." This pricing clarification is most likely due to Stephen King's complaint: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 > We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    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.
    • oneoff786 4y ago
      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.
      • mikkergp 4y ago
        Correct, which is odd that Elon responded to him, "How about 8?"
        • smackeyacky 4y ago
          I might be wrong but I read that as a veiled insult. i.e. "Are you such a povvo that you can't afford $20?"
          • 4y ago
• seydor 4y ago
  Why do people think that twitter is worth paying for?
  • foolfoolz 4y ago
    people pay for dopamine hits every day just cause it’s not yours doesn’t mean no one likes it
  • abudabi123 4y ago
    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?
  • SilverBirch 4y ago
    Take a look at Linkedin, they make tonnes of revenue from premium features. The problem is that Twitter suddenly deciding that it's going to create a brand new revenue stream by charging for features that don't exist is about as sane a strategy as me deciding I'm going to start developing gills before my next swimming lesson.
    • seydor 4y ago
      Linkedin has the CVs -- the content i ve seen there is laughable. Twitter can be compared to Wordpress, in which people invest time in making an online presence and following. But it seems easy for them to leave twitter and take their audience too - and many people do it with substack etc. I think introducing payments will change the dynamics of their crowd, which is basically a mob.
    • mikkergp 4y ago
      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).
  • beebmam 4y ago
    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.
• __derek__ 4y ago
  Weird. I thought they removed the sign-up gate, but it blocks me from reading the whole thread.
• danpalmer 4y ago
  The good: Twitter should not be editorally curating people through verification, making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change, as long as it's not necessary for participation. Brands, celebrities, those in the public eye could benefit from this. Needs to be implemented with care and ideally with a branding change so as not to confuse users as the semantics change. The bad: $8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported user. There's no excuse for "half the ads", it should be none at all. See: every streaming service. (Edit: ok some streaming services have ads, but for most online content - video, journalism, etc, if you subscribe there are no ads, it's just nickle-and-diming users to give them a bunch of ads, particularly when the marginal cost for Twitter Blue is essentially zero). The ugly: Paying $8 to get your voice heard by more people biases towards those with means rather than those contributing to the conversation. At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter, at worst this is ripe for abuse.
  • morsch 4y ago
    Virtually all streaming services still have ads at the paid tier: sponsored content in YouTube videos, product placement everywhere, athletes that are living billboards.
    • type-r 4y ago
      SponsorBlock is key for YouTube
      • boogies 4y ago
        Much as Nitter / LibRedirect are essential for Twitter
  • ribosometronome 4y ago
    >making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change [and continued desire to pay $8 a month]
  • michaelmior 4y ago
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  "Half as many ads" fascinates me deeply. Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"? How do I know what half should be? We've all been there: "it feels like YouTube has cranked the ads way up lately..." Will "half" just become "full" when "full" gets doubled next year?
  • tshaddox 4y ago
    It's pretty well-known for traditional television broadcasts, right? Shows are edited and even scripted specifically to provide the right amount of slots for ads.
    • RobAtticus 4y ago
      It's pretty much on a steady climb upwards though. So a show today probably has more ads per half hour than one 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc.
      • pram 4y ago
        They’re also 300% louder than whatever you’re watching.
    • mateo411 4y ago
      It's much harder to measure television ad impressions than digital ad impressions. Publishers charge for digital ad impressions by the 1000. It's easy to measure because usually they receive an HTTP GET request indicating the ad has been served. For TV that uses traditional broadcasts you have to sample and scale. This is what Nielsen and other ACR companies do.
    • weberer 4y ago
      Yeah, that's why I don't watch TV any more.
  • linuxftw 4y ago
    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.
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  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.
• thorum 4y ago
  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.
  • NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    No average person cares about having a blue-tick; you have to several standard deviations away from the mean to care already.
  • keneda7 4y ago
    You hit the nail on the head in your post. The mysterious Twitter checkmark committee that got to gatekeep who could be in their group. Then people (probably the committee itself) started pushing the idea that blue check marks are more reliable and trustworthy. I am not okay with a random group of people being able to decide whether or not someone is trustworthy. I prefer the checkmark to mean this person pays x dollars versus this person has been deemed worthy of a secret group of people at a company that has massive bias issues.
    • matai_kolila 4y ago
      Trustworthiness has never been part of the equation, what the heck are you talking about???
    • moistly 4y ago
      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.
    • seydor 4y ago
      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
• bentt 4y ago
  This is interesting. I have increasingly looked at Twitter as a business tool. This will push me further in that direction. It will make less sense to just hop on and drop hot takes without any purpose. I think I like it. That said, this doesn't really say "Global Town Hall".
  • Barrin92 4y ago
    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.
• notatoad 4y ago
  I’m confused. Does $8 get you a blue check or no? If it does, $8/mo for a blue check and reply priority seems like a pretty good deal for all those people impersonating Elon musk to run crypto scams
  • franciscop 4y ago
    I believe it's implicit $8 for the blue check verification process, and if successful you get the blue check.
• hunglee2 4y ago
  The good news is that this should definitely reduce the volume of bot / troll accounts, by making it prohibitively expensive to run. That will mean a reduction of disinformation on aggregate - as what other purpose would there be to run a bot network? The bad news is that it recreates the lords vs servants dynamic that Musk is claiming to want to get rid of. $8 is not much for everyone reading on HN, but guess what, we are very much the in the globally privileged 1%. He later adds something about purchasing power equivalent, but localised pricing suddenly makes this into a much bigger technical challenge
  • jjfoooo4 4y ago
    $8 won’t necessarily price out spam accounts. As a counter example, on Tinder there are many fake/spam accounts with premium membership.
    • hunglee2 4y ago
      not all of them, no, but as any cost increases the friction of doing it, so less will be done.
    • Yoofie 4y ago
      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.
      • jjfoooo5 4y ago
        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.
• jxdxbx 4y ago
  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.
  • chadlavi 4y ago
    Tweet it at Musk, maybe he'll reduce the price to $0.01
• thebeastie 4y ago
  Bypass paywalls would be kind of a big deal imo. It could eventually shape how we use the internet and move away from ad based revenue.
  • ch4s3 4y ago
    This was definitely the part that stood out to me, but it really relies on the deals they can strike.
    • thebeastie 4y ago
      It makes sense. It’s ridiculous to have to subscribe to individual news websites when there are so many; an intermediary that did deals with publishers wouldn’t be a bad idea.
      • KIFulgore 4y ago
        If Elon can get enough publishers on board I'd gladly pay more than $8/mo. Maybe offer a tiered system. Or better yet, choose-your-own. $8/mo: Choose 2 $12/mo: Choose 4 $15/mo: Choose 6 etc. Then people vote with their dollars which sources are important to them. Simplicity would be challenging. It wouldn't work if it devolves into something resembling tiered Cable TV packages.
  • fckgw 4y ago
    It's been a feature for a long time. For some reason it was removed today and now Elon has "reintroduced" it as a new feature? https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434502/twitter-blue-ad-free-articles-discontinued-feature https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434502/twitter-blue-ad-...
    • tough 4y ago
      Smart. Now he can charge for something that was already shipped and get the credit lol
• mypastself 4y ago
  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?
• marktangotango 4y ago
  I really wish twitter didn't exist. The utility I see in it is limited. For example, I don't have an account, but I do view tweets from time to time. The tweets I generally view are related to some real time event I'm interested in (ie news). I find the fact that even then, there is usually an endless stream of mostly banal, vapid responses to be very off putting. Not only do I find the content vastly uninteresting, the way the content on twitter is reported by mainstream media is exhausting. I could really care less about the stream of conscious tweeting of celebrities and politicians. It's not "news worthy" in my estimation. But clearly a lot of people find it useful, I am completely mystified how this could be.
  • thebigspacefuck 4y ago
    All you really need is RSS
  • aschearer 4y ago
    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.
    • marktangotango 4y ago
      > Why go so far as to wish it doesn't exist? Because it pollutes other more "reliable" sources of information.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    > 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.
• supernova87a 4y ago
  How do you declare what country you're in to get the pricing you "deserve"?
• woodruffw 4y ago
  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?
• bambax 4y ago
  Matt Levine: > Musk wants to start charging people to have a little blue check mark next to their names on Twitter. I wrote yesterday about reports that the price will be $19.99 per month, but that seems not to be a final decision, and other numbers have been suggested. Also last night Musk was personally negotiating the price with Stephen King. “$20 a month to keep my blue check?” tweeted King. “[No], they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.” Musk replied: “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” I absolutely love that, in between his busy schedule of reading printouts of 50 pages of code per Twitter employee to decide who to fire, Musk is personally going to negotiate commercial terms with each of Twitter’s hundreds of thousands of verified users. I have a blue check, I’m gonna tweet “I’ll pay $7.69” and see what he says.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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 )
    • KerrAvon 4y ago
      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.
• frankjr 4y ago
  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.
  • sdfhbdf 4y ago
    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
• aantix 4y ago
  I don't see where you can subscribe - interested in seeing the flow.
• tyrust 4y ago
  My understanding was that value of verification was, well, verification that you were, in fact, that person [0]. I wonder if this property will be maintained. Otherwise, impersonators can pay to get the blue check. In the long term, maybe this is fine, but in the short term every Twitter user is going to have to adjust from the old meaning of the blue check (user $foo is actually person $foo) to the new meaning (user $foo pays $8/mo). [0] - "The blue Verified badge in Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic" - https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ljw1001 4y ago
  Unlimited conspiracy theories and Russian trolls - free
  • matrix_overload 4y ago
    Your own bullshit detection skills and the habit to verify/cross-reference all incoming information - priceless.
• trh0awayman 4y ago
  I would pay $10 a month for Twitter Black - it would block everyone with Twitter Blue and you get to interact with the dregs, the most controversial figures of all of Twitter, based on most reports/blocks/flags, etc. (minus the bots, crypto stuff). That's the real town square. Let me sleep in the gutter!
  • __tmk__ 4y ago
    Most of that will be crypto spam though...
  • chihuahua 4y ago
    You're in luck - that's what Parler is, and it's free!
  • didip 4y ago
    4chan doesn’t exist anymore?
• ljw1001 4y ago
  I think this worked well. Instead of conversation about how Elon would use twitter to undermine democracy, civil discourse, whatever, everyone is talking about what’s a fair price to pay him to undermine democracy, civil discourse, whatever.
  • watwut 4y ago
    I mean, yeah. But also, democracy and civil discourse are more endangered outside of twitter then inside of it. If twitter becomes bad enough, it will be next 4chan or whatever. However, politicians lying and gloating after basically yet another domestic terrorist attacks, politicians trying to make it harder for opposition to vote will stay.
• MopMop 4y ago
  Freedom of Speech is not free if you have to pay a monthly fee to express your opinion. We can already see them lining up to part with their salaries.
  • dgudkov 4y ago
    There are lots of places where you can express your opinion absolutely free of charge. For instance, HN ;)
    • Loocid 4y ago
      That's not the point. The publicly stated reason for this whole saga was Elon was claiming Twitter was suppressing free speech and wanted to make it free again. This play goes against all that.
      • oblio 4y ago
        And Musk lied, like he's been lying for decades.
  • memish 4y ago
    You don't have to. It'll still be free for anons.
    • ruminator1 4y ago
      verified users get priority in replies, mentions and search. Anons will be buried.
• Imnimo 4y ago
  I don't really grasp the value proposition here. I can have "Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam", but is that valuable to me or to my audience? If I'm a regular no-name user, do I care if I'm lost in replies and search? And if I'm the Steven Kings of the world, that other users want to see content from, does it do more harm to me or to Twitter if my posts are hidden because I'm not paying $8 a month? It feels like I'm being asked to pay $8 to solve a problem that belongs to Twitter (too many bots), not a problem that belongs to me.
  • mymythisisthis 4y ago
    For people like Steven King, if he posts something on Facebook his fans will re-post it on Twitter, and vice-versa. If too many things trend on other platforms, but not on Twitter, people will leave Twitter because it is not keeping up.
    • jjfoooo5 4y ago
      It's a great point. There have been several replies ITT along the lines of, "if Twitter goes away, what platform will Stephen King post his content?" As you point out, the answer is "all of the relevant ones, with very little effort on his part"
• dgudkov 4y ago
  I'd like an option to see only tweets/replies from Twitter Blue holders.
• rcarr 4y ago
  Here is what the next big aspiring social media company should put on their website. "$COMPANY_NAME is currently free to use. Unfortunately, we do have employees and computers to pay for to keep things running. When we hit 1 billion users, we intend to start charging all our users a very small fee: 1 hour of minimum wage in whatever country you live in for an entire year's access. For example if you live in the UK, this means you'd only pay £9.50 for the entire year. If you live in Portugal, you'd only pay €4.38 for the year. Your first year will always be free to see if $COMPANY_NAME is right for you. Your IP address currently shows you're from $COUNTRY_NAME. This means a year's access for you would be $COUNTRY_MINIMUM_WAGE. This fee will only ever increase if your government increases the minimum wage of your country and will always stay pegged to that rate. This means that, regardless of where you live in the world or how much you earn, access to $COMPANY_NAME only requires, at most, a single hour of your time each year to continue using. This allows us to keep the platform free from ads, tracking, and from wasting money on useless VR products nobody wants. Help us build a better, fairer future for everyone: not just shareholders."
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    I really just think that this would mean people don't use the service. The internet has shown again and again that people will do practically anything to avoid paying for digital goods.
    • rcarr 4y ago
      I don't know, I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that if we want to avoid the mess we're in now, we've got to start paying for things. Once you've hit 1 billion users, at that point you've pretty much become an institution. You've never marketed it as being free forever so everyone knows the score so they're more prepared. Sure some people will leave but I think the majority would stay unless there was some seriously good competition. I think most minimum wage workers will see one hour of work out of an entire year as reasonable, it's a lot less than most other tech subscriptions. And to anyone earning above minimum wage it's begins to become practically nothing. There would be moaning for sure, but compared to other utilities it's an absolute bargain. I think social media needs to start being seen as a boring utility which it really is rather than the never ending frothy hype machine of myspace/facebook/instagram/snapchat/tiktok/future platform which only really serves the VCs and investors who earn money. I think there's a lot of people out there who don't want to have to keep on learning new platforms endlessly, they just want something that everyone they know is on, that works well, is simple, and that doesn't track them or bombard them with ads. I think this is part of the reason why LinkedIn has been so successful in that it is quite boring and doesn't change much. In a way there should be the frothy hype machine apps for the youth and then the one boring adult platform for when you grow up and stop being an idiot and don't mind hanging out with your parents again. Facebook kind of was this platform, but then most people abandoned it other than the elderly (e.g the completely tech illiterate) because of how manipulative it got. The other alternative, which I think a lot of people would hate but might actually solve the problem, would be for Apple to finally give it a shot and release something. They're already a heavily moderated walled garden and verification could easily be proven through Apple Wallet. They could easily plug things into the existing apps, e.g an instagram photo feed in the photos app, facebook style groups in the messages app, profile page integration into the contacts app etc. Maybe one new standalone "Community" app which has two tabs: an "everything" feed from all your contacts and then a Discover tab for popular posts nearby in your town. A focus on your actual family, friends and community rather than videos of randos dancing a million miles away that add nothing to your life. I think they may end up with some regulatory heat on them if they succeeded though; they would end up being extraordinarily powerful.
• hendersoon 4y ago
  "Half as many ads"? They want us to pay and still show ads? I have an alternative suggestion. How about I don't pay Twitter one red cent and continue to block their ads?
• rnxrx 4y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something but wouldn't the paid-for check mark also mean that a given account can be more specifically targeted, thus increasing the potential ad revenue to Twitter?
  • paxys 4y ago
    Which is exactly why people on this plan will still be shown ads.
• wnevets 4y ago
  Twitter is gonna crash and burn way sooner than I though.
  • memish 4y ago
    That's what people said about Tesla.
    • wnevets 4y ago
      I don't know which people you're referring to or why you are comparing a company that the Americans tax payers propped up for years to a social media website like Twitter.
    • LightG 4y ago
      Except ... they do. Often.
  • throwingrocks 4y ago
    Agreed! I don’t know anything about business, but the company will surely implode in the coming days. It’s as if Musk and co. put zero though into this.
• booleandilemma 4y ago
  It would have been great if, after taking Twitter private, Musk just immediately shut it down. Would it have made any financial sense? Of course not. Would it have been the ultimate post-modern, trollish, liberating move imaginable? Absolutely.
  • rchaud 4y ago
    To be honest, this sounds more like a child's revenge of taking his ball and going home. It really wouldn't even be worth it either, because Musk is worshipped on Twitter and Reddit and nowhere else. He isn't Trump, he can't mobilize half a country to love him unquestioningly. This is the only place where his childish taunts about turning Twitter HQ into a homeless shelter will find an audience.
• tough 4y ago
  What if I already have the checkmark and cant afford to pay? Will they take it away?
  • muttantt 4y ago
    I think if someone can't afford $8 for Twitter Blue, they should probably get off of Twitter and find more ways to make money. There is plenty of work all around.
    • apeace 4y ago
      There are plenty of hard-working people who wouldn't want to budget $8/month for something nonessential like a social media app. There's no need to disparage them.
      • cypress66 4y ago
        Then don't get something nonessential such as the blue checkmark. You can still use Twitter.
        • tough 4y ago
          I already have it. It's due to the account being of a fairly big online thing I built circa 2008. That no longer exists. A blue checkmark was only given to people with impersonation problems, if you proved that any media (newspaper, online blogs,etc) had published about you, making that noteworthy. I have a blue checkmark, and twitter doesn't know who I am technically.
    • dorkwood 4y ago
      To me it's more that I'm unwilling to take on any more subscriptions. They all seem small in isolation, but they accumulate into a meaningful sum.
• paxys 4y ago
  It's funny how quickly the conversation has jumped from "Twitter will be a bastion of free speech" to "$8/mo is a fair price to pay for prioritizing your speech over others". Power to the people indeed.
  • happytiger 4y ago
    FreedomTM by Twitter Now you can experience FreedomTM for only $8/mo. License and taxes extra. May not be available in Hawaii and Alaska. Freedom is a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc. Some users experience nausea and vomiting, shingles, anxiety, and social destruction.
  • concinds 4y ago
    Verified users are already boosted in replies and search. That's been the case for many years. The only change is that since verification will require payment, boosting will require that same payment. It's a complete non-story.
    • uoaei 4y ago
      The difference of course being that what used to be a painstaking verification process is now bypassed by anyone with $8/mo to spare, if they choose to do so. It is in fact not a non-story, since obviously this changes everything about how "verified" users should be considered in your feed (as nothing more than pay-to-play, where before there was at least a facade of curation).
      • concinds 4y ago
        Since you're disputing my comment and not the parent, I take it you agree that making people pay for verification is somehow "anti free speech", while promoting verified users when it was an opaque process was not? The comment I'm responding to is incoherent, in addition to being flamebait.
    • tfsh 4y ago
      How's it a non-story if you now just need to pay to boost your replies and search presence?
• elorant 4y ago
  What's so special about the verification icon? Does it provide any merits?
  • baby 4y ago
    clout
• caldarons 4y ago
  In a certain sense it feels like it's the right direction. But if you are essentially paying 8$/month how can you justify still displaying ads? I guess what I am trying to say is that for 8$ every month you should be getting more than just a status symbol (which possibily not that many people care about anyway) and be stuck with ads. Also, if Twitter is serious about creating a revenue stream for creators it should focus on creating valuable experiences for users that incentivize loyalty to the creators and not hand out verification status (which would become insignificant anyway if everyone has it).
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    It's not just a status symbol, it also boosts your posts. If I had to guess, the people likely to pay for this are power users in wealthy countries, aka the highest value users an ad platform has. Seems unlikely that they're monetized at less than $8 a month.
• memish 4y ago
  A lot of people aren't groking what this means, even on tech and startup savvy HN. Naval and Balaji said it well: Charging for the blue check moves it from a status symbol to a utilitarian one. It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money. https://twitter.com/naval/status/1587523978456748033 https://twitter.com/naval/status/1587523978456748033 The blue checks wanted to abolish billionaires, in the name of equality. The billionaire will end up abolishing the blue checks, in the name of equality. roughly speaking: blue checks are about status and tech billionaires about startups. It's old money vs new money. Old money wanted to kill new money. New money is wiping out the status of old money. The blue check actually arose as an anti- impersonation tool. Twitter was forced to implement it after complaints. But people who are impersonated tend to be "important". So it became a status symbol. Especially for writers. The one form of equality a journalist will always resist is the idea that everyone is now equal to a journalist. But that's what universal verification does. Everyone who needs one can pay for a blue check. Bots get taxed. Twitter makes money. Establishment journos hardest hit. Further reading 1) @sriramk on social networks as games: https://a16zcrypto.com/social-network-status-traps-web2-learnings/ https://a16zcrypto.com/social-network-status-traps-web2-lear... 2) @eugenewei on status as a service: https://eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service https://eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1587545600064507904 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1587545600064507904
  • paxys 4y ago
    "This new thing is surely all about me" – tech billionaires
  • uoaei 4y ago
    More mental gymnastics... I'm not even sure what point is being made by this move, other than devaluing the blue check to the point of meaninglessness. It's not even "utilitarian": if leveling the playing field was Musk's interest, he would have eliminated the blue check altogether. There is no mechanism for anti-impersonation if all it takes to get a blue check is payment. Bot farms can also pay money for blue checks...
    • 4y ago
• anarticle 4y ago
  I thought they would go for Something Awful style forum registration, $5 to join, and if you're banned, $5 to join again. Probably this will increase SNR of twitter to some degree, we'll have to see!
• chatterhead 4y ago
  This is off. Should be: $1.99 for every user with optional $7.99 upgrade to validated ID/Blue checkmark. No ads. Way fewer bots. Focus completely on functional/feature engineering and dismantle advertising system. Branch out into VOIP/Email services. Total communications platform instead of "social media" should be his direction.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    They make much more than $2/user from ads. Since it’s already not profitable I don’t see how it’s going to work
    • chatterhead 4y ago
      The cost to acquire each of those users is more than $2/user because the cost of their advertising infrastructure.
  • intrasight 4y ago
    I think that's a good plan. It should cut down on non-human spam.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  With $8 each, you and your friends can pool your money, rent a server run whatever you want. Fuck twitter.
• schmichael 4y ago
  Your own mastodon instance is $6/mo: https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
  • hnarayanan 4y ago
    For a network with 5 active users!
    • schmichael 4y ago
      Sure but you can federate with whomever you please. So $6 gets you 5 local accounts, but you can still follow anyone in the fediverse.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• fullshark 4y ago
  Elon's vision seems not very different from the one any private equity firm doing a LBO would have: Maximize revenue and cut costs however you can to pay down debt.
• dan-robertson 4y ago
  The dynamics on Twitter are quite weird. There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life. If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is basically part of your job so maybe you should have to pay a bit more just like the customer of some business software ($100 pa seems pretty cheap there). Indeed maybe media publications should be paying for the blue checks for their staff. But on the other hand, these people are going to represent a large part of the draw of Twitter and so maybe Twitter should be paying them instead. But other people use Twitter in different ways. If you mostly use it as a social network between your friends you might not care because they’ll presumably see your tweets because they follow you rather than because they found them in search or whatever. If you’re using Twitter as a forum for discussions about some topic of your interest, maybe you’ll end up feeling crowded out in replies by people with the check. But if you’re at risk of being crowded out then maybe Twitter isn’t working so well as a forum. And I think that if eg A follows B and B retweets you, A should see your tweet whether or not you have a check. Maybe that isn’t so true with the non-chronological feed. If people in the community follow you then, depending on the dynamics, your opinions could still be spread via retweet rather than getting lucky in your position in the replies, no? If you’re some reply guy, maybe your tweets should be downranked but then if you’re serious about it then I guess you’ll pay.
  • dawnerd 4y ago
    I wont be paying. I only paid for blue to get rid of the spaces button in the app. I really only use Twitter as a way to complain and vent into a void. I know no one else cares what I say and I'm fine with that.
  • tommica 4y ago
    I guess I am an outlier in this, but I don't think I have a single "famous" person that I follow - maybe some bigger figures in a niche area, but the people that have the blue mark are not the draw for me. But when I do search for them, it is convenient to see the blue mark to figure out what might be the account I am looking for.
    • dangerboysteve 4y ago
• bjourne 4y ago
  Any free software projects working on a distributed Musk-free Twitter replacement? We could really use one RN.
• atYevP 4y ago
  They keep solving weird problems in weird ways. My $0.02 -> They should have: 1. Created a new “VIP status symbol” icon (diamond?) for people who care / need / want the prestige (charge for it or don't) - I'd almost fork the existing checks over to it for simplicity. 2. Kept blue check for actual identity verification (this is a real human). 3. Added features people care about (editing / etc…) to Blue and charge for them. Tying the verification to features is...just odd. #sigh
  • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    Bluechecks are the ones actually addicted to twitter, it makes sense to put a paywall in front of them, not create a different layer.
• sneak 4y ago
  I hope this means I can use a disposable prepaid card and not give a phone number during signup. They were using phone numbers for antispam; hopefully $8 will serve the same purpose. Twitter’s had employees that sold user PII to murderous foreign governments. It is not safe to have PII associated with a sufficiently controversial Twitter account. Maybe they can accept crypto payments for this during signup.
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  I have zero doubt that EM will bring Twitter to a better place. I mean, this is the platform where basic image upload was broken for 10+ years. How can that not be the top task in the backlog? I can answer that right away. Tech people focus on tech. I think cost might be a problem with Blue. I mean, I collect domain names for fun. I don't think Twitter can provide the right tools to guard against false blue account claims.
• entropicgravity 4y ago
  Yeah this is reasonable. For those who want or need it $100/yr is affordable but more than most would pay just to have it but don't need it. Off course it's mostly a mechanism to strengthen the bottom line but if it's value for money then go ahead.
  • beezle 4y ago
    Outside the vanity group, the only people likely to pay for this are the people who have somebody else paying for it - a corporate or government employer - or who can write it off personally as a cost of business. While nice to think that every comment I make to a tweet is read by the original tweeter, at the end of the day I honestly am not heartbroken if they do not. And I most definitely do not reply to tweets with the idea that others will be so amazed by my brilliance that they follow me. Is that really a thing?
• type-r 4y ago
  interesting approach to have it be PPP adjusted. i wonder how they'll prevent people from high income countries faking they're in a lower income one.
  • mvdwoord 4y ago
    I assume it would be possible via the identity check/payment processor? Identify with a document issued in country x...? You pay the price adjusted for that country, regardless of your IP geolocation.
    • type-r 4y ago
      Indeed that is an approach that would work but would people trust Twitter with that data just to give you a checkmark? Or even bother trying to find their ID / passport? Feels super high-friction and questionable from a privacy perspective for such a minor product.
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Good riddance, the previous system was painfully toxic.
• rconti 4y ago
  I wonder how big the exodus from Twitter has been-- (seems noteworthy from what I've seen)-- and whether it will be covered by journalists? They seem to have already decided that Twitter = news, ignoring the fact that most people don't use Twitter at all. If (say) 5% of people leave Twitter, will journalists notice? Of course not, they'll just keep pretending like "people on twitter" == "people".
  • skilled 4y ago
    There is no exodus. People are slaves to impulse and comfort and if you don’t understand that on a fundamental psychological level then why are you commenting on the topic in the first place?
    • rconti 4y ago
      I don't grok what you're even attempting to say here. If I don't understand people are slaves to impulse and comfort, why am I commenting on twitter? Just, what? That said, I killed my twitter accounts on elonday, and saw a dozen accounts' worth of coworkers do the same in just a random slack thread. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't have a ton to do with elon, it was just a good time to say goodbye to a service that I've failed to find utility in over the past dozen years or so, just like the vast majority of America, and, indeed, the world.
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  All this malarkey reminds me why I would rather read HN than twitter.
• PaulWaldman 4y ago
  What if, instead of a flat fee, blue checks were charged based on their number of followers or the level of engagement with their followers (how ever you'd quantify that)? This would align the value and goals for both Twitter and blue checks.
• eric_b 4y ago
  I guess I'll go on record and say I think this is a great idea. There's too many journalists who just spew hot takes all day - at least make them pay for the privilege
  • ausbah 4y ago
    one of the main touted draws of twitter is it's suppose to be the "public square of the internet". you not liking what someone posts shouldn't really curtail that (minus them being a private company and what not)
• arctics 4y ago
  Before: F2P, every voice matters (you decide who is who) After: P2P, some voices matter more (we will decide who is who for you)
• kylecazar 4y ago
  Twitter Blue is an existing, separate service from the verified checkmark.
• rsync 4y ago
  How much can I pay for the ability to follow a twitter link and easily see who is replying to whom and where I am in the discussion thread ? It's a tough engineering problem but surely someone could solve it ...
• plaidfuji 4y ago
  Why stop at open-sourcing “the algorithm” when you can open-source the business model too?
• empressplay 4y ago
  My suspicion is that the name on the payment method will be the verification, eg f you use a credit card named John Smith, your 'full name' will be uneditable and reflect that.
• lapcat 4y ago
  On iOS, Apple will of course demand $2.40 of that $8.
• lossolo 4y ago
  When Twitter Elite? Only for 100$ a month your replies will have priority over Twitter Blue users and then Twitter Whale - contact us for pricing, you will have priority over Twitter Elite users, then me and my friends millionaires can all buy Twitter Whale and Elite, before you get to see replies from a common person (the ones that can't pay) you will already lose your attention anyway, so we the wealthy will shape the reality.
• MKais 4y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, a few years ago, the basic social network (facebook & Co) was valuated on this ad basis: one user = $10. The same logic for twitter gives $45B/400M users = ~$110/user. 99% of those users are useless but 1% are not. In my view, Twitter is a propaganda machine with its 1% influencers/journalists/prophets that overflow world media and their billions of viewers/consumers/voters.
• nothatscool 4y ago
  I think changing the verification badge into something actually useful instead of a status symbol is a good thing. If there is a great exodus of Twitter influencers and it starts to affect traffic, then twitter can just add some kind of notability mark to high profile accounts. Edit: They already plan to add a tag for public figures.
• anon115 4y ago
  mass decision design discussion for a big business and design decision.
• throwaway04923 4y ago
  What is this going to solve? Blue checkmarks was intended to find the real public person instead of thousand scammers. If it now means that you have paid for account, then what is the point? This is not going to help their finances either. Someone [1] did a calculation: "If one in five current blue ticks paid $20 a month that would raise just under $15 million a year for Twitter… Twitter’s current revenues (mostly from ads) are $5 billion a year. Musk’s apparent plan would generate about 30 hours’ worth of annual revenue." https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/1587381512500125699 https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/1587381512500125699
  • bagels 4y ago
    Why assume that only current checkmark holders would pay? I'm sure there are many more who wish they had a checkmark who would pay. Overall, I have no idea if it's a winning strategy, but I think this analysis undersells the potential.
    • ulfw 4y ago
      Then they could have just gotten verified if they're so eager to have a blue check box. I think your analysis oversells the potential.
• serf 4y ago
  power to the people... for only 8 dollars a month! is anyone sick of this salesman shtick? it's even more egregious when used as some form of crusade for the people. let's be clear here, the 8 dollars a month is the motivation. He doesn't give two-shits about any moral sense of right or wrong or the well-being people that used the service. he'd be more respectable/relatable if he had said "It's 8 bucks a month because I need to pay back the loans."
• tlhunter 4y ago
  Only disabling half of the ads makes sense from a business point of view. Most likely, the users who are the best audience for an ad (in the sense that they have spare money and might purchase an advertised product) are the ones that would actually spend money disable ads. There will probably be a new advertisement segment for users of Twitter blue. Companies will be able to advertise specifically to users willing to pay to disable ads aka more likely to have disposable income. Premium ads for the high spenders.
• pkulak 4y ago
  Elon is the PM from hell. Has some shower thought and starts throwing tickets on everyone's board 45 minutes later. This is why the Model X has those silly doors.
  • pie420 4y ago
    The model X is also probably one of the most profitable and iconic cars in the modern era.
    • shitloadofbooks 4y ago
      Do you have any evidence for "most profitable" at all? Looks-wise, it's basically indistinguishable from a Model 3 (which are everywhere), so hardly iconic in any way.
      • roflyear 4y ago
        It is pulled out of his butt, the F150 sells 3/4 of a million a year (just the f150!) and makes on the low end a gross profit of $10k per sold. The model x sold about 7.5k cars in 2021, way down from the 20-30k it was selling each year. OK let's say it sold $30k, and Tesla made a profit of $100k (more than the car sells for) for each car. That's still less than 50% of the F150 yearly profit. LOL.
        • panick21_ 4y ago
          Comparing it to the F150 is idiotic. That's the most sold car in the US and in a different segment. Compare it to other comparable cars in the same segment and it looks pretty damn good. Lower volume high margin cars are really worth it for companies and Ford wishes it had an EV in that classed that sold have as well. The Model X sells in numbers not unlike Mach E while having double the price.
          • ziddoap 4y ago
            >most profitable and iconic cars in the modern era. That's what the parent said. Not "in the EV market segment", not "looks pretty damn good". I agree it's a silly comparison to make normally, but it's a perfectly apt reply to someone stating something so obviously out-of-touch, like the Model X being the most profitable car in the modern era.
• corytheboyd 4y ago
  My goodness the weight people put behind the verification check mark sounds absolutely insane as a person who is not at all invested in Twitter. As an outsider, this sounds like the only way to combat scammers on the platform, assuming non-paying viewers have an easy way to only see content from paying users.
  • ethanbond 4y ago
    Well some people don’t like e.g. stalkers or governments being able to impersonate them to destroy their reputations.
• sliken 4y ago
  Seems pretty weird to me. I read an article that the top 5% of users are responsible for 90% of tweets and most of the profit. Said 5% have been leaving the platform for the last few months. Now there's a $8/Month incentive for the top users to leave ... seems backwards. They should be paying the top users to stay so the 95% has something to read. Imagine if youtube creators had to pay instead of be paid.
  • registeredcorn 4y ago
    >Imagine if youtube creators had to pay instead of be paid. Isn't that essentially what demonetization is, just without the predictability of a regular monthly bill? Granted, it's not a perfect 1:1, I just wanted to find an excuse to snipe at YouTube.
  • boole1854 4y ago
    In the thread linked to by this post, Musk says that they will pay part of the monthly fee to content creators on Twitter. If true, in-demand creators will likely earn far more than they pay.
• Havoc 4y ago
  >half as many ads I bet they can sell this twice. Once here and once to advertisers that want to advertise to the more exclusive crowd
  • bagels 4y ago
    That's a really good point, these are more valuable advertising targets.
• rongopo 4y ago
  I stopped twitter during my long covid, and now I do not miss it. I just enter to post updates and keep some followers. I lost sense of why more could be needed!
• rongopo 4y ago
  Income from those that post, from those than read, and from adverts? This is a scam, comparable or superior than academic editorials. I predict it will last less than 5 years.
• smittywerben 4y ago
  My replies to Tweets aren't even in the always-dead bin at the bottom. The bin where you have to click to "Show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content". Literally it has penis pics, OnlyFans referrals, and an occasional sliver of humanity which has me question what they did to be flagged as always dead. But not my replies. My replies only appear on my profile under the Tweets and replies tab. In some cases, I would rather be in the click for more 'penis bin' than be shadowbanned. People should Tweet directly at the person instead of hogging the reply space with OT insults. edits: wording
• nemo44x 4y ago
  Makes sense, if you want to read it’s free. If you want to post, then pay a bit and be verified. Just killed the spammers and bots. This is less about making huge profits and more about making it not worth it to pay money to spam and get banned.
• registeredcorn 4y ago
  Personally, I see it as a win-win. If it fails and Twitter dies, then Twitter is dead. If it succeeds, then the containment mechanism of Twitter is intensified even more, due to twitter-users feeling the need to "get the most" out of their reoccurring monthly bill, in effect leaving the remaining fun outskirts of the internet unmolested by comparison.
• NomDePlum 4y ago
  Q. How much would you pay to continue to use and post on Twitter? A. (-_Q)
• tqi 4y ago
  Is the blue checkmark supposed to help/protect the person tweeting or the people consuming the tweets?
  • sangnoir 4y ago
    Neither - it's supposed to help Twitter's profitability.
  • atian 4y ago
    Both. It is sort of an “honesty bond” that Twitter knows your details in return you get a status mark. Of course the bar is quite high these days for recourse.
• tppiotrowski 4y ago
  Twitter should have SaaS pricing: Up to 1000 followers = free tier 1000 - 100,000 followers = $8/month 100,000+ followers = Call us Edit: The fact that Truth Social was bankrolled to the tune of millions of dollars should illustrate the value of being able to tweet to the masses.
• jdlshore 4y ago
  I'm likely to pay for it at that price. For reference, I have a bit more than 14K followers on Twitter. Why? Two reasons. 1) Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes like outrage being more visible than high-quality content. I’m in favor of alternative revenue streams, although they have to provide value, and removing ads doesn't count as providing value. 2) My Twitter account is part of my consulting business. Eight dollars a month isn't much to pay if it improves my visibility or perceived legitimacy. I'd be willing to try it for a year and see how it works out. FWIW, I wouldn't have been willing to try it at $20/mo.
  • dheera 4y ago
    What does a blue check get you anyway that you can't just have with a blue check emoji?
    • _djo_ 4y ago
      Currently? Protection against impersonation is the key benefit for most who have it. By most accounts the additional tools they provide in terms of filtering aren't that valuable. In Musk's proposal basically a slightly better Twitter Blue.
    • jdlshore 4y ago
      From the linked thread: 1) Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam 2) Ability to post long video & audio 3) Half as many ads I also expect the following: 4) Increase in perceived legitimacy #1 and #4 are valuable to me. #2 I don't care about at all, because my long-form content goes on my blog and YouTube. #3 is 'meh'--it'll be nice to have fewer ads, but my brain glazes right past them anyway.
      • lawgimenez 4y ago
        And fancy custom iOS icons for sure.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• fleddr 4y ago
  I like this change, for it is radical. It's very hard to predict the outcome of it, so I'm above all interested in it as a social experiment. For quite a few "check marks" it will feel as a massive downgrade. Not only are they no longer special, they even have to start paying to be less special. Yet for many, they have nowhere to go. Their current status (followers) is often unique to Twitter and not easily replicated elsewhere. Many came to power by years of unhinged "hot takes", the check-mark, and algorithmic boosting. This tactic doesn't really work on any other social network, not by posting small and ridiculous pieces of text. Some dare to even flip it and claim they should not be paying, they should get paid, for they are "creators". I consider that to be quite generous. Sure enough they generate activity/traffic, but that's not the same thing as creating. On Youtube, you can find videos of incredible production value. Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saWNMPL5ygk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saWNMPL5ygk Now, that's a creator. Tweeting "Biden sucks" creates outrage, but is not a creation. Stephen King is a creator as a novel writer, but his tweets specifically are not creations of any value on their own. The way I draw this line is simple: can the creation stand on its own and widely be perceived as having value? For the video I linked to, clearly yes. For a tweet, when you disassociate it from who said it...nah. With "value", I mean value to us. Clearly a rage tweet generating a lot of traffic and ad impressions has value to Twitter, but in my book that doesn't make you a creator that needs to get paid. Musk has hinted though that he wants to onboard long form content and native video, so that could change things. Finally, other than this leveling of status, I hope obscene algorithmic boosting is also looked at. One is often puzzled to see a random idiot having hundreds of thousands followers whilst producing nothing but mediocre garbage. The ultimate example has to be this: https://twitter.com/nytimes https://twitter.com/nytimes No, I have nothing against that newspaper nor do I find them idiots. That account has over 50m followers yet near-zero engagement.
• Invictus0 4y ago
  The result of this is that all users of consequence on Twitter are forced to reevaluate the value they receive from the platform. I imagine a lot of them will use the moment to abandon ship.
• harry8 4y ago
  Twitter now blocks you from reading a timeline unless you have an account and are logged in for which they require a current phone number. No politician nor public servant nor government department should be able to use it under those circumstances. They really need silent accounts, that cannot tweet and are completely anonymous.
  • dmak 4y ago
    You can create an account with just your email
    • harry8 4y ago
      That might be true in some countries.
    • forgotpwd16 4y ago
      And soon after is blocked and you're asked for a phone number. Tried making an account with email few times, followed few profiles, made a reply, and always ended up in a verify with phone number wall.
• smeagull 4y ago
  This is an incentive for bad actors, which makes Twitter a worse platform. I suspect the blue checkmark will become a signifier of a scam account if this goes forward.
• XorNot 4y ago
  So two things about this: (1) Twitter verification was started as a way to dodge lawsuits about people registering fake Twitter accounts.[1] Verified Twitter was a way to ensure you couldn't register yourself as "realLocalPolitician" and be mistaken in a way which made Twitter liable. So turning it into a paid-for service puts Twitter in a weird spot, where they can probably be sued again about this because "verified only if you pay" is alternatively interpretable as a shakedown racket - and Twitter knowingly allowing people to misrepresent their identity to defame people makes Twitter liable again. But (2): this just isn't worth any money to anyone. There just aren't that many people for whom Twitter-verified is a worthwhile expense. Word-of-mouth verifies accounts easily, and once everyone knows @nyTimes is the New York Times official account or whatever, then its entirely unlike something like TLS where the process provides an active component in validating or securing the content or link. Optimistically this is worth like USD$30 million a year to Twitter...out of about USD$5.5 billion of year-over-year revenues. Or about 47 hours of revenue. [1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/tony-la-russa-twitter-lawsuit-63155/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ton...
• yazzku 4y ago
  "Half as many ads" Like paying to watch ads on television.
• jaimex2 4y ago
  Great idea that solves a lot of problems. Especially the blue bots.
• cr4nberry 4y ago
  Preparing for the next 6 months of Musk threads. Wish me luck :)
• Aleksdev 4y ago
  To be honest I think Twitter is better without any check marks. I remember reading somewhere that check marks were awarded to some user based on their connections to certain employees at Twitter.
• bedast 4y ago
  The blue checkmark started as a way to verify high profile accounts to make it more difficult to impersonate them. Twitter made a huge mistake opening this up way too broadly and failed to course correct. Now Elon wants to turn this into a free-for-all and scamming on Twitter will be easier than ever, with the low low price of $8. When asked about this potential problem, Elon actually replied "That already happens very frequently". He has no plans to solve this problem. He accepts it as the cost of doing business. He sees no problem with this. There's nothing to solve. I think I saw somewhere where he commented that Twitter wouldn't be able to survive on advertisers alone. Well that's because advertisers are likely to flee. Forget about the idea of it becoming a "free speech" hellscape. It's going to become a scammer's paradise. His lackadaisical attitude shows he really doesn't care about making Twitter better. It's now an expensive toy that he owns. And that's how it always was going to be.
• bloomingeek 4y ago
  Perhaps Elon's plan is to completely ruin and thus bankrupt Twitter. Then use it as the biggest business write-off in history? Can it work that way?
  • KindAndFriendly 4y ago
    I doubt it. It would be so much harder for him to borrow money in the future.
• takanori 4y ago
  I’d prob pay $8/month for hacker news
• SandersAK 4y ago
  I guess it's better than the 7% you gotta pay to get an Orange username on HN.
• VectorLock 4y ago
  Increasing costs for spammers is one of the few effective ways you can combat spammers. As one of the former heads of product at Twitter said they wanted to add multiple types of badges. You have a badge for verified identities, you have a badge for people who want to remain anonymous but pay to participate so they can provide a hint they're not spammer, and you provide a badge for notable personalities.
• magnusss 4y ago
  What I love most is that the new CEO of Twitter is front and center making a major product and pricing announcement to the entire customer base within 4 days of buying the company. That’s awesome execution, baby! Not to mention the best type of product marketing imaginable.
  • rubatuga 4y ago
    I mean, that seems reminiscent of Trump style politics but sure.
    • magnusss 4y ago
      Interesting point! What may be an effective management style for running a company you own could be deleterious when running a country for which you are an elected official.
• lern_too_spel 4y ago
  He's just rearranging deck chairs on the fail whale. There is no way the investors are going to make back their money. Just sell it to Microsoft or take it public again, take the write down, and try to find something that you can fix.
• sduta878 4y ago
  Finally a real change in Twitter app - this has been long overdue, the opaque verification process was such a mess
• cocoland2 4y ago
  General question, There is so much toxicity in Twitter (even on Linkedin) and very little sane conversation (May be not just twitter, many social networks in general). For example recently saw someone post with POTUS on some ground breaking work on Immunotherapy for cancer (this was their 8 year research), replies and comments were outright bad to vulgar (did he smell your hair! went one). Mind you this was not a 4th grader but senior staff, well educated MBA's. Has social media become a frustration venting outlet? Pretty sure one would come out of the browsing experience exhausted! Who would use this for 8 USD a month! P.S. not on any social network except for messaging apps (once a day with notifications off)
  • oaththrowaway 4y ago
    Why is commenting about smelling hair vulgar, but not the actual POTUS smelling hair?
    • cocoland2 4y ago
      Not sure I get it. May be it is cultural, but the flamewars after that was borderline spam and personal. Here was someone who was talking of 8 years of their work and the approval for next stage trials showing promise and we had "unrelated" (for lack of a better word) discussion and comments.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• jfranche 4y ago
  Elon on Twitter recently has reminded me of the headache I got from Trump on Twitter. Non stop. Every day. I know it’s my choice, but I’m worn out by it.
• biohacker85 4y ago
  I wonder what percentage of comments are motivated by a previous perception of Elon. "Blue checkmarks for $8/month is a bad idea..." (because user dislikes Elon), or "This is Genius! He's already fixing twitter! (user is a fan).
  • dwaite 4y ago
    I'm sure he will have plenty of shower thoughts between now and when any Twitter Blue changes go live. The problem more is that I don't believe he has anyone he trusts inside Twitter to bounce ideas off of, or whom he values input/feedback from. I honestly don't believe he knows the technical challenges of the service, only having perception as an external user. And I don't think he really sees value in understanding how Twitter currently operates, seeing how he waived all his rights to due diligence when he made his original bid.
• r2222 4y ago
  Is the bot spam a problem to any average Twitter user like Elon claims, or just him (one of the most followed account in the app) and maybe couple others?
• mason96 4y ago
• qwertox 4y ago
  The blue check mark was supposed to be a service for those consuming Twitter, so that they can have a bit more security by knowing that there's a higher chance to be following the person or thing they were intending to follow; it was not a service for those having the blue check mark. That's why I don't understand why they want to charge for it. Maybe a better thing would be to charge per-1000-followers (or per-10000 or bigger brackets) starting at a given threshold, as long as the account is used commercially, where being a star or influencer also counts as commercial use. But maybe even this is a bad idea, but in my eyes a bit better than charging for the blue check mark.
  • MarcellusDrum 4y ago
    The function of the previous blue check mark is still going to be available for free, as a label under the name (similar to what government affiliated personnel currently have). So there is nothing to lose if you don't want to subscribe to Twitter Blue. You will still be verified.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  I don't care much about Twitter, I didn't like the way the platform was policed, I didn't like the sheer amount of bots and for sure I didn't like the limit on text messages. But it seems reasonable for an app having payd and free tiers, with the free tiers being add supported. Somehow the app has to pay bills and staff. If I'll find Twitter of any use at some point in time, I will pay $8 if that will yield some benefits over free tier. Some people can't afford to pay or don't want to, which is why there is also a free tier. It isn't like Musk forces everyone to pay, but if you derive some value from Twitter it is normal to pay. I guess some people hate Musk and they are going to great lengths to justify their hate coming with puerile reasons about why Twitter suddenly became 'bad' and predicting it a quick death.
  • sedatk 4y ago
    It’s fine to support an app with subscription. It’s absolutely not fine to silence who can’t afford it. “Are you poor? Then, shut up”
    • therealdrag0 4y ago
      Who’s telling the poor to shut up?
      • xnickb 4y ago
        One of the richest people on the planet as far as I can tell. FTR: I never used twitter
      • sedatk 4y ago
        Paid users will get priority over unpaid users in replies as Elon explained.
        • therealdrag0 4y ago
          And? what does that have to do with poor people? The entire economy is run on charging money. Are you saying “Kellogg is telling poor people to starve for charging for cereal!” Or is there something special about twitter for you to complain about? Why are poor people entitled to free twitter? They’re not entitled to free cars or free smartphones or free Netflix or free WhatsApp business accounts or free Fastmail or free UPS or free TV Ads are they?
• LrQSs8Dq 4y ago
  Can someone explain what the deal with twitter verification is (I know what it is) and why everybody is so upset about that it's going to be a premium feature? Asking as someone who doesn't care about social media at all, and has never used Facebook or Twitter, except for clicking the occasional link to some tweet.
  • dwaite 4y ago
    Twitter verification is meant for people with sufficient notoriety (say, elected officials, artists/actors, leaders in their field) to prevent impersonation and fraud. So, if I get rickrolled on twitter, I can tell whether it was a post by the real Rick Astley or by some impersonator. Or for another more topical example, the tag #TrumpIsDead is currently trending on Twitter. If I click on that for more information, the verified check might tell me who has notoriety as a journalist or which accounts represent official news organizations, vs who is trying to further promote a false meme (in protest for Elon forbidding content moderation in the lead-up to the US elections)
• KingOfCoders 4y ago
  It looks now like Twitter needs to pay an additional $1B/year for the credits Musk bought Twitter with. This is going to sink them.
• Nition 4y ago
  Having some experience with Steam games and cheaters, I can predict based on these tweets that one thing that will happen is spammers will find a way to buy check mark subscriptions through the country with the cheapest price.
• yoelo 4y ago
  As much as I don't like Musk, I think there is a good proposition for the YouTube-model of paying for an ad-free experience. However, aside that YouTube is a place with much better content, YouTube costs ~$5/monthly and is actually ad-free instead of half ad-free. How one can think this is a good idea is beyond me
• davidguetta 4y ago
  Reading this comment section make me SMH to how many smart people are actually into twitter