16 ms·

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

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
  I don't follow famous people. Way too much noise. I follow dev and engineering stuff.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > Way too much noise. I follow dev and engineering stuff Now imagine the people you follow being deprioritized by the Twitter algorithm in favor of the LinkedIn-influencer types (you know they'll be first in line for the checkmarks)
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  I don't think it is convenient. These people have a website or verified profile on Google to already determine which social media profiles belong to them. All the blue checkmark will tell me in the future is these people are dumb enough to pay for snake oil.
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  >the blue mark to figure out what might be the account I am looking for If this is part of what blue checks were designed to solve, they're solving the wrong problem. Fix search and content quality / spam instead.
paxys 4y ago
That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal. So every user paying $X/mo to solidify their place in the graph makes some conceptual sense. In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are consumers. If you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value. An average user (part of the 99.9%) isn't going to care about any status or badges – they are only there to look at memes. Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line, and (2) the platform needs them as much as they need platform. So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.
- charlie0 4y ago
  But if you are a frequent creator, you're also planning on making the content a viable financial venture. At the very least, Twitter is used as a marketing platform. Which means paying $8 a month for what is essentially free hosting for your marketing, is a no brainer. I'm not sure why asking consumers to pay would be a good idea because we already have Patreon. Only a fraction of consumers would actually pay for content, so doing this would probably cause a lot of consumers to leave. Whereas the price for a content creator is very low, even at $20/month. In other words, if you want the blue checkmark, you're definitely interested in the marketing yourself. So, why not pay for that privilege?
- xtracto 4y ago
  I always felt Twitter as "old man yells at cloud" kind of communication. I've never seen proper "content" created (like pinterest, tik tok, etc). Most of the "content" I see are the asinine multi-post threads and text-pictures notices from angry people/companies.
  - felinix 4y ago
    Well, the funny thing is that Twitter itself is THE content It kind serves as a continuation of bashorg for millenials and zoomers
RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
> 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 I think this completely misunderstands why social media products like Twitter are successful. Those journalists (or gamers, or comedians, or porn stars) that you're arguing should be considering $9 a month as cost of business, they are the content creators and the only justification for a business like twitter having any value at all. Principally, twitter is a network, and these users are the highly connected nodes of that network. How fast will superconnectedness decline without them? Superexponentially. The people with blue check marks aren't your customers or clients: they are your product.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Think you're over-estimating their value, if they were posting their thoughts elsewhere without the blue check next to their name no one would be engaging with it, it's honestly such bad content.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    Oh, you mean like the articles in the newspapers that they regularly publish? What exactly do you think a journalist does, just post on Twitter?
    - carbine 4y ago
      how's that going for them
      - freejazz 4y ago
        Better than Twitter it seems!
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      There's journalism and there's "journalism". There's certainly standup publications with great authors who make names for themselves by writing great articles. I've been really enjoying Heather Knight's coverage of public waste/corruption in SF for example. On the other hand, there's a lot of really crappy journalists who churn out top 10 lists on shady publications to get paid and desperately need that blue check to add whatever legitimacy they can grasp for to their names. The former category will have no trouble without Twitter, the latter will struggle. That's the steelman anyway. Most crappy journalists would flame out with or without a blue checkmark though.
at-fates-hands 4y ago
>> But other people use Twitter in different ways. Saw a roundtable about this and a film maker said it was really hard when they're about to release a film and someone uses a fake Twitter handle that's close to theirs releases the trailer or footage before they wanted it released. Paying to have a blue check on their account would cut down this type of piracy or release of trailers before the producer wants to. They said it would be very worth it to maintain the legitimacy of what they're doing. I'm assuming other types of creators would see the value in being able to say, "If its not from my verified account, then its not (me, my work, my companies work) and you should ignore it."
- sumeno 4y ago
  If the barrier to a checkmark is $8 then all the scammers are going to have checkmarks too
  - mjfl 4y ago
    and now we have more of a paper trail to stop them
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      Yes because most scammers provide their real information when scamming
    - neaden 4y ago
      The most common scam I see on Twitter is imposter accounts replying to a real person with a link to some crypto scam. Right now you can usually immediately tell it's a different person since the reply doesn't have a check mark, this system seems like it will make it easier since the scammer can just get a checkmark.
    - CydeWeys 4y ago
      You really don't though. It's trivially easy to create new valid unique payment information with a free virtual credit card number and a fake name/address. This is a very hard problem to truly solve.
enumjorge 4y ago
To your point here's a tweet from Stephen King that was making the rounds where he protests the idea that he should be paying Twitter instead of the reverse: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  And I agree with Stephen King. YouTube rewards content creators and provides a strong platform for creators to market themselves. Twitter provides a platform for brain farts and now they want to charge for a blue checkmark. I guess Musk believes if people are stupid enough to believe in his lies before that they'll be stupid enough to pay for a blue checkmark. Wait until you see how they begin marketing the subscription.. it will be ridiculous. Might as well be trying to sell snake oil.
  - drstewart 4y ago
    How much profit does YouTube make?
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      Revenue or profit? I don't know how much profit they make but their revenue is significantly more than Twitter
  - Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > Might as well be trying to sell snake oil. Look at LV 'hyperloop' [0], and people who paid upfront for FSD [1] and are issuing a class action lawsuit and re-think what you just said about 'might.' I think this isn't about Tesla or SpaceX or any specific company he is CEO of as they are all amazing feats of tech/engineering, it's about Elon's horrible PT Barnum type marketing that worked for a bit but has lost all of it's luster at this point. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040 1: jhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040
- 4y ago
initplus 4y ago
For journalists it's not basically part of your job, it often literally is! Many media organisations require their reporters to maintain an active online professional presence on Twitter.
- tsol 4y ago
  I once wanted to be a journalist in college. Lucky for me, I had a teacher who was a former newscaster for the local Fox news station teaching a class on just that. Long story short, she connected me with someone currently working as a journalist. His advice? Everyone is freelance now, only a rare lucky few are permanent staff writers today. You have to have a social media following, first thing to do is start a Twitter account and build a presence. He also heavily hinted that I should not enter the field unless I absolutely love it because it's getting to be an awful job. Just my experience.
cyanydeez 4y ago
As Elon said, the bots are the most valuable
yieldcrv 4y ago
yep, just make account packages like a SaaS service basic is free oh you can pay to have your nft shown then additional packages for people that want to use social media managers that deal with impersonation etc
mkaic 4y ago
Personally, I'd be more than willing to pay $8/mo for Twitter if it meant no more ads and helped the company become profitable from something besides ads. I have YouTube Premium for those exact reasons. I hate what the attention economy has done to user experience, and if paying for Twitter gave me a significantly better user experience, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
scythe 4y ago
Twitter's market position gives it plenty of power if they just figure out how to use it. If they gave free blue checks to government officials, tenured professors at accredited universities, and licensed medical practitioners, they could easily get away with forcing everyone else to pay. It's the standard nightclub trick: women get in free, men pay. People will pay to be in a group with the highly regarded people you gave free entry to.
dorkwood 4y ago
> 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. One would think, but I rarely see tweets from people I follow. For example, I just scrolled my feed, and 51 out of the first 60 tweets were from strangers (the other 9 were either tweets or retweets from people I follow). One of the tweets was even from Taylor Swift. I have no idea why Twitter thought I'd want to see that, since I mostly just follow devs. Downranking people who don't pay the subscription means I'm going to see even less of those devs than I already am. If you scroll back through my post history, you'll see me singing Twitter's praises and telling people that they just need to curate their feed if they don't like what they're seeing. This is no longer the case. I admit defeat.
- FPGAhacker 4y ago
  You can make lists of people you want to follow and only see their tweets. I'd never use twitter if it weren't for this option. https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
The underlying message here appears to be that one size does not fit all. But for personal data collectors and advertisers, the largest size is the only one that fits. Quantity not quality. Audience. Reach.
vishnugupta 4y ago
> There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life. Twitter also needs them so it’s a symbiotic relationship. In some cases I’d say Twitter needs them more than they need it. Like popular music celebrities, sport stars etc. So Twitter has to tread carefully not to antagonize such crowd pullers lest they migrate to a competitor social media.
monksy 4y ago
I went into twitter hoping to find more of the SWE community. I took the approach that when you're posting it's you to everyone. I went to a few conferences and made a few connections. But often times it thins out, and you really don't maintain that connection there. It ended up feeling like it was nothing but tribes and influencers bolstering themselves or people trying to market their product (dev advocates). Theres no motivation to have productive conversations, learn new things, or really get a lot of value out of it. On top of that you have extremists trying to make sure you don't the wrong opinion.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
> Half as many ads $8/month and you don’t even get ads removed?
- bagels 4y ago
  Seemed almost reasonable until that point. That said, they probably make just a little over $8/user/no in ads or US people, I'd guess.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
That's a misinterpretation of what the blue tick mean. It's to protect the reader from impersonators. That it does help the authors to get followers is an almost unintended side effect. If you charge for it, you are essentially inverting it purpose, and eventually what will happen is that readers will no longer have that protection, since authors might not pay for it. Given that, Twitter becomes a less secure place for readers and, if people are smart [1] they will leave it in favor of networks where they can at least trust that what they read came from who they think wrote it. 1: people usually aren't, so I wouldn't be surprised if only a small percentage of people give up on Twitter after this. Still, that's what should happen. Edit: typos

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
I don't follow famous people. Way too much noise. I follow dev and engineering stuff.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > Way too much noise. I follow dev and engineering stuff Now imagine the people you follow being deprioritized by the Twitter algorithm in favor of the LinkedIn-influencer types (you know they'll be first in line for the checkmarks)
encryptluks2 4y ago
I don't think it is convenient. These people have a website or verified profile on Google to already determine which social media profiles belong to them. All the blue checkmark will tell me in the future is these people are dumb enough to pay for snake oil.
seanp2k2 4y ago
>the blue mark to figure out what might be the account I am looking for If this is part of what blue checks were designed to solve, they're solving the wrong problem. Fix search and content quality / spam instead.

paxys 4y ago

That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal. So every user paying $X/mo to solidify their place in the graph makes some conceptual sense. In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are consumers. If you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value. An average user (part of the 99.9%) isn't going to care about any status or badges – they are only there to look at memes. Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line, and (2) the platform needs them as much as they need platform. So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.

charlie0 4y ago
But if you are a frequent creator, you're also planning on making the content a viable financial venture. At the very least, Twitter is used as a marketing platform. Which means paying $8 a month for what is essentially free hosting for your marketing, is a no brainer. I'm not sure why asking consumers to pay would be a good idea because we already have Patreon. Only a fraction of consumers would actually pay for content, so doing this would probably cause a lot of consumers to leave. Whereas the price for a content creator is very low, even at $20/month. In other words, if you want the blue checkmark, you're definitely interested in the marketing yourself. So, why not pay for that privilege?
xtracto 4y ago
I always felt Twitter as "old man yells at cloud" kind of communication. I've never seen proper "content" created (like pinterest, tik tok, etc). Most of the "content" I see are the asinine multi-post threads and text-pictures notices from angry people/companies.
- felinix 4y ago
  Well, the funny thing is that Twitter itself is THE content It kind serves as a continuation of bashorg for millenials and zoomers

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago

> 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 I think this completely misunderstands why social media products like Twitter are successful. Those journalists (or gamers, or comedians, or porn stars) that you're arguing should be considering $9 a month as cost of business, they are the content creators and the only justification for a business like twitter having any value at all. Principally, twitter is a network, and these users are the highly connected nodes of that network. How fast will superconnectedness decline without them? Superexponentially. The people with blue check marks aren't your customers or clients: they are your product.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Think you're over-estimating their value, if they were posting their thoughts elsewhere without the blue check next to their name no one would be engaging with it, it's honestly such bad content.
- freejazz 4y ago
  Oh, you mean like the articles in the newspapers that they regularly publish? What exactly do you think a journalist does, just post on Twitter?
  - carbine 4y ago
    how's that going for them
    - freejazz 4y ago
      Better than Twitter it seems!
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    There's journalism and there's "journalism". There's certainly standup publications with great authors who make names for themselves by writing great articles. I've been really enjoying Heather Knight's coverage of public waste/corruption in SF for example. On the other hand, there's a lot of really crappy journalists who churn out top 10 lists on shady publications to get paid and desperately need that blue check to add whatever legitimacy they can grasp for to their names. The former category will have no trouble without Twitter, the latter will struggle. That's the steelman anyway. Most crappy journalists would flame out with or without a blue checkmark though.

at-fates-hands 4y ago

>> But other people use Twitter in different ways. Saw a roundtable about this and a film maker said it was really hard when they're about to release a film and someone uses a fake Twitter handle that's close to theirs releases the trailer or footage before they wanted it released. Paying to have a blue check on their account would cut down this type of piracy or release of trailers before the producer wants to. They said it would be very worth it to maintain the legitimacy of what they're doing. I'm assuming other types of creators would see the value in being able to say, "If its not from my verified account, then its not (me, my work, my companies work) and you should ignore it."

sumeno 4y ago
If the barrier to a checkmark is $8 then all the scammers are going to have checkmarks too
- mjfl 4y ago
  and now we have more of a paper trail to stop them
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Yes because most scammers provide their real information when scamming
  - neaden 4y ago
    The most common scam I see on Twitter is imposter accounts replying to a real person with a link to some crypto scam. Right now you can usually immediately tell it's a different person since the reply doesn't have a check mark, this system seems like it will make it easier since the scammer can just get a checkmark.
  - CydeWeys 4y ago
    You really don't though. It's trivially easy to create new valid unique payment information with a free virtual credit card number and a fake name/address. This is a very hard problem to truly solve.

enumjorge 4y ago

To your point here's a tweet from Stephen King that was making the rounds where he protests the idea that he should be paying Twitter instead of the reverse: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144

encryptluks2 4y ago
And I agree with Stephen King. YouTube rewards content creators and provides a strong platform for creators to market themselves. Twitter provides a platform for brain farts and now they want to charge for a blue checkmark. I guess Musk believes if people are stupid enough to believe in his lies before that they'll be stupid enough to pay for a blue checkmark. Wait until you see how they begin marketing the subscription.. it will be ridiculous. Might as well be trying to sell snake oil.
- drstewart 4y ago
  How much profit does YouTube make?
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Revenue or profit? I don't know how much profit they make but their revenue is significantly more than Twitter
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > Might as well be trying to sell snake oil. Look at LV 'hyperloop' [0], and people who paid upfront for FSD [1] and are issuing a class action lawsuit and re-think what you just said about 'might.' I think this isn't about Tesla or SpaceX or any specific company he is CEO of as they are all amazing feats of tech/engineering, it's about Elon's horrible PT Barnum type marketing that worked for a bit but has lost all of it's luster at this point. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040 1: jhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040
4y ago

initplus 4y ago

For journalists it's not basically part of your job, it often literally is! Many media organisations require their reporters to maintain an active online professional presence on Twitter.

tsol 4y ago
I once wanted to be a journalist in college. Lucky for me, I had a teacher who was a former newscaster for the local Fox news station teaching a class on just that. Long story short, she connected me with someone currently working as a journalist. His advice? Everyone is freelance now, only a rare lucky few are permanent staff writers today. You have to have a social media following, first thing to do is start a Twitter account and build a presence. He also heavily hinted that I should not enter the field unless I absolutely love it because it's getting to be an awful job. Just my experience.

cyanydeez 4y ago

As Elon said, the bots are the most valuable

yieldcrv 4y ago

yep, just make account packages like a SaaS service basic is free oh you can pay to have your nft shown then additional packages for people that want to use social media managers that deal with impersonation etc

mkaic 4y ago

Personally, I'd be more than willing to pay $8/mo for Twitter if it meant no more ads and helped the company become profitable from something besides ads. I have YouTube Premium for those exact reasons. I hate what the attention economy has done to user experience, and if paying for Twitter gave me a significantly better user experience, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

scythe 4y ago

Twitter's market position gives it plenty of power if they just figure out how to use it. If they gave free blue checks to government officials, tenured professors at accredited universities, and licensed medical practitioners, they could easily get away with forcing everyone else to pay. It's the standard nightclub trick: women get in free, men pay. People will pay to be in a group with the highly regarded people you gave free entry to.

dorkwood 4y ago

> 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. One would think, but I rarely see tweets from people I follow. For example, I just scrolled my feed, and 51 out of the first 60 tweets were from strangers (the other 9 were either tweets or retweets from people I follow). One of the tweets was even from Taylor Swift. I have no idea why Twitter thought I'd want to see that, since I mostly just follow devs. Downranking people who don't pay the subscription means I'm going to see even less of those devs than I already am. If you scroll back through my post history, you'll see me singing Twitter's praises and telling people that they just need to curate their feed if they don't like what they're seeing. This is no longer the case. I admit defeat.

FPGAhacker 4y ago
You can make lists of people you want to follow and only see their tweets. I'd never use twitter if it weren't for this option. https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

The underlying message here appears to be that one size does not fit all. But for personal data collectors and advertisers, the largest size is the only one that fits. Quantity not quality. Audience. Reach.

vishnugupta 4y ago

> There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life. Twitter also needs them so it’s a symbiotic relationship. In some cases I’d say Twitter needs them more than they need it. Like popular music celebrities, sport stars etc. So Twitter has to tread carefully not to antagonize such crowd pullers lest they migrate to a competitor social media.

monksy 4y ago

I went into twitter hoping to find more of the SWE community. I took the approach that when you're posting it's you to everyone. I went to a few conferences and made a few connections. But often times it thins out, and you really don't maintain that connection there. It ended up feeling like it was nothing but tribes and influencers bolstering themselves or people trying to market their product (dev advocates). Theres no motivation to have productive conversations, learn new things, or really get a lot of value out of it. On top of that you have extremists trying to make sure you don't the wrong opinion.

barbariangrunge 4y ago

> Half as many ads $8/month and you don’t even get ads removed?

bagels 4y ago
Seemed almost reasonable until that point. That said, they probably make just a little over $8/user/no in ads or US people, I'd guess.

HeavyStorm 4y ago

That's a misinterpretation of what the blue tick mean. It's to protect the reader from impersonators. That it does help the authors to get followers is an almost unintended side effect. If you charge for it, you are essentially inverting it purpose, and eventually what will happen is that readers will no longer have that protection, since authors might not pay for it. Given that, Twitter becomes a less secure place for readers and, if people are smart [1] they will leave it in favor of networks where they can at least trust that what they read came from who they think wrote it. 1: people usually aren't, so I wouldn't be surprised if only a small percentage of people give up on Twitter after this. Still, that's what should happen. Edit: typos