5 ms·

> 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 soft

> 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.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      I wouldn't call anyone from buzzfeed a journalist but okay!
TeMPOraL 4y ago
I think you're wrong. The network is stronger than that. Yes, those highly-connected nodes could easily kill the network... if they all coordinated to leave at once. Which is a real risk here, because of how high-profile and controversial the issue is right now. But normally, they're just as glued to the network as everyone else. Perhaps even more so, because... ... they aren't creating content for fun. They're creating it to make money off the audience. So they have to stick to where the audience is. People with blue check marks would like to think they're special and valuable to the platform, but they're not. At this scale, they're a commodity too. They play a different role on the platform, but for the platform, users with different roles is just what makes the whole thing tick and print money.
- spiffytech 4y ago
  This is exactly right. It's the same as how some popular YouTubers hedge their bets by publishing in parallel to their own sites or to other video platforms, yet they keep letting YouTube dictate their business decisions because it's the only place they can make money.
- _djo_ 4y ago
  Nope. That may be true for a thin slice of Twitter's most active and popular users, but not at all for the long tail of people posting in niche interest areas that keep people engaged. The scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers, OSINT researchers, etc who post interesting content and keep people returning to Twitter to engage with it. Some of those get some reward from it in terms of added publicity, others in terms of building out their network, but a bunch even do it anonymously and seem to get no real world financial benefit from it other than sharing what they're working on and having discussions with other people interested in the same things. Musk seems to fundamentally misunderstand not only how and why regular people use Twitter, but also how popular but non-celebrity people use it. He only sees it through his own lens, which is as a marketing tool, a way to move markets, and a place to shitpost freely. His changes make sense in that context only.
dan-robertson 4y ago
If you’re a journalist (or your other suggestions) then you’re basically using Twitter as free advertising to (a) your followers and (b) people who read your tweets which have been retweeted. Having people coming towards the way you actually make money is probably worth a lot more than $8 per month to you, even considering that journalists aren’t so well paid (the idea of blue checks getting paywall bypass could be very good for journalists too – they could end up more directly getting value out of people coming to their work from Twitter). Paying $8 per month for this free advertising seems pretty great. How much would it cost to send this out via actual ads or eg mailchimp (but of course it is much easier to have new people see your tweets than your marketing emails)?
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc. Blue checks should never be pay to play. They weren't designed that way. The problem is the ambiguity of the blue check leads to arbitrage that it seems all parties are interested in cashing in on. If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. Elon's backtracking about price parity just illuminates the capitalist nature of the entire thing. Charge what we can, not what we should. We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc. And those areas don't proportionally don't matter to Twitter. Even so, the very next tweet by Musk, in reply to the linked one, says: > Price adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity So that addresses this complaint. > If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. (...) We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole. Since when is Twitter our "modern Greek forum"? Just until a few days ago, being critical of Musk was strongly correlated with the belief that social media companies are private entities, free to do as they wish (and in particular ban whoever they want). It's ironic how fast things change :).

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.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    I wouldn't call anyone from buzzfeed a journalist but okay!

TeMPOraL 4y ago

I think you're wrong. The network is stronger than that. Yes, those highly-connected nodes could easily kill the network... if they all coordinated to leave at once. Which is a real risk here, because of how high-profile and controversial the issue is right now. But normally, they're just as glued to the network as everyone else. Perhaps even more so, because... ... they aren't creating content for fun. They're creating it to make money off the audience. So they have to stick to where the audience is. People with blue check marks would like to think they're special and valuable to the platform, but they're not. At this scale, they're a commodity too. They play a different role on the platform, but for the platform, users with different roles is just what makes the whole thing tick and print money.

spiffytech 4y ago
This is exactly right. It's the same as how some popular YouTubers hedge their bets by publishing in parallel to their own sites or to other video platforms, yet they keep letting YouTube dictate their business decisions because it's the only place they can make money.
_djo_ 4y ago
Nope. That may be true for a thin slice of Twitter's most active and popular users, but not at all for the long tail of people posting in niche interest areas that keep people engaged. The scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers, OSINT researchers, etc who post interesting content and keep people returning to Twitter to engage with it. Some of those get some reward from it in terms of added publicity, others in terms of building out their network, but a bunch even do it anonymously and seem to get no real world financial benefit from it other than sharing what they're working on and having discussions with other people interested in the same things. Musk seems to fundamentally misunderstand not only how and why regular people use Twitter, but also how popular but non-celebrity people use it. He only sees it through his own lens, which is as a marketing tool, a way to move markets, and a place to shitpost freely. His changes make sense in that context only.

dan-robertson 4y ago

If you’re a journalist (or your other suggestions) then you’re basically using Twitter as free advertising to (a) your followers and (b) people who read your tweets which have been retweeted. Having people coming towards the way you actually make money is probably worth a lot more than $8 per month to you, even considering that journalists aren’t so well paid (the idea of blue checks getting paywall bypass could be very good for journalists too – they could end up more directly getting value out of people coming to their work from Twitter). Paying $8 per month for this free advertising seems pretty great. How much would it cost to send this out via actual ads or eg mailchimp (but of course it is much easier to have new people see your tweets than your marketing emails)?

soulofmischief 4y ago
Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc. Blue checks should never be pay to play. They weren't designed that way. The problem is the ambiguity of the blue check leads to arbitrage that it seems all parties are interested in cashing in on. If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. Elon's backtracking about price parity just illuminates the capitalist nature of the entire thing. Charge what we can, not what we should. We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc. And those areas don't proportionally don't matter to Twitter. Even so, the very next tweet by Musk, in reply to the linked one, says: > Price adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity So that addresses this complaint. > If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. (...) We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole. Since when is Twitter our "modern Greek forum"? Just until a few days ago, being critical of Musk was strongly correlated with the belief that social media companies are private entities, free to do as they wish (and in particular ban whoever they want). It's ironic how fast things change :).