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The idea that someone who is addicted to Twitter and worth $500M would leave because they lose their special Blue Check over $20 is hilarious. He's just butt h
by memish 4y ago
The idea that someone who is addicted to Twitter and worth $500M would leave because they lose their special Blue Check over $20 is hilarious.
He's just butt hurt because the VIP room and symbol is being opened to the proles. Now any schlub with $8 can have the once exclusive symbol.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y agoStephen King is addicted to Twitter? He's posted an average of 2-3 tweets per day — I wouldn't call that addicted.
- prmoustache 4y agoThat is quite a lot.
- gonzo41 4y agoNot for someone who's fulltime job is writing and reading fiction.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y agoIt's quite a lot, but I wouldn't put it in the realms of addiction. It seems to be quite typical compared to even the personal (i.e. non famous) people I'm following; the higher profile accounts I follow tweet multiples of tens per day.
- acjohnson55 4y agoIt's really not
- paxys 4y agoWriting 3 lines of text a day is a lot for a professional writer?
- IncRnd 4y agoI would.
- auntienomen 4y agoKing writes 300-500 page novels at an age when most people are retired. 240 characters here and there is not evidence of much effort for him.
- IncRnd 4y agowhoops! I misread, and didn't see the reference to King. I had thought it was a personal reference. Thank you!
- bee_rider 4y agoI mean we could ask Stephen King I guess, he knows something about the topic.
- sangnoir 4y agoAnd yet Musk was in his replies, haggling.
- memish 4y agoHe wasn't haggling. He was mocking the blue check status symbol in King's face and audience. $8 makes it cheaper than a Netflix subscription for something that previously exclusive and had no dollar value attached to it. It was literally unbuyable.
- tptacek 4y agoWe're not really discussing reality if you believe that Stephen King gets status from the blue check rather than it working the other way around. There are people that do (sadly, pathetically) extract status from blue checkmarks, but they're only able to do that because people like Stephen King play ball with this system. The "blue checkmark status" could literally be phrased as "people as high-status as Stephen King and those like him". Obviously, substitute Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, and LeBron in as appropriate to your particular interests.
- sangnoir 4y agoWithout people like Stephen King sharing their halo, the blue checkmark will soon be the mark of tryhards
- jjfoooo5 4y agoTo some degree it already is, for people who have the checkmark you haven't heard of outside of Twitter. It's a well worn meme to mock people throwing a fit over not getting a checkmark.
- tptacek 4y agoWhen some dipshit pundit throws that hissy fit, the meme is dead on. When Twitter annoys people like Stephen King, it's exactly backwards.
- tptacek 4y agoAnywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience. That's what's so funny about this particular example. There are indeed Twitter celebrities who depend on Twitter for their audience, but King isn't one of them: he's pumping more credibility into Twitter than he's extracting from it, and the platform (and all the Twitter celebrity remora attached to it) depend on people like him to keep doing it. He's right: Twitter should be paying him. That's not true of all blue-checks, but it's true of many of the most popular of them.
- juliusdavies 4y agoInstead it should be $1/month to be allowed to post replies to blue-check tweets! (But leave quote-tweeting alone).
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoThe Elon Musk dunk tank?
- bee_rider 4y agoI think it is true of most. If your identity is worth verifying by Twitter, it is apparently worth something to Twitter. If you wanted to prove that your twitter account was you, you wouldn't need their permission, right? Surely you could sign a file on your Twitter account with your PGP key or whatever.
- tptacek 4y agoThis has always been the bullshit story Twitter tells itself about the blue check. In reality, the value of the check has practically nothing to do with verifying identities, and everything to do with conferring status on people "notable" enough to qualify. The energy source for that status is, in fact, people like King, Swift, LeBron, Obama (and Trump), J. Lo and Jimmy Fallon; Twitter trades off the idea that the check puts its users in the same status tier as those celebrities. How you know this is, there's a huge population of well-followed Twitter accounts without blue checks, and identity verification controversies virtually never occur. If you found a non-checked 50k-follower account tomorrow and tried to spoof them with a fake account, you'd get shouted down quickly enough that it wouldn't be worth the effort. My point, again, is that the "verification" part of this is horseshit. It's not the value. It's not why anyone cares about the checks. The checks are endorsements of popularity and importance, and that's all they are. Diluting that value (to zero, as seems to be the Twitter Blue plan) probably won't chase many celebs off the platform. Why would they care? Twitter isn't doing them any real favors; it's rather the opposite. But it'll lay bare the real dynamics of those stupid blue checkmarks. That might be a positive development for Twitter! But it's not going to make blue checks the next Bored Apes. (Again: who knows? Maybe a critical mass of Twitter randos will pay for Twitter bling. Weirder things have happened; see apes, above.)
- pyrale 4y ago> Now any schlub with $8 can have the once exclusive symbol. And as a consequence, it is not worth the $8. King's analysis is correct.