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I keep seeing people say BlueSky should be a paid service, but X gets mocked ruthlessly for this.

by cglong 2y ago

rswail 2y ago
What X gets mocked for is that the feature of being "verified" by Twitter was worth paying for. But X turned the "blue tick" into "this person has paid" which totally removed any value for the blue tick. It was yet another self-own, along with things like getting promoted on the feed. X could have made money by selling features (eg tweetdeck) and other useful things, but they didnt. Of course, then politcally it became a "this person is a MAGA person" so Musk had to start handing out "free" blue ticks to big accounts to avoid that appearance. To the point that people were putting in their name "didn't pay for blue"
- exodust 2y ago
  > "...other useful things, but they didnt" But they did. Nobody pays for X premium just to get a blue tick. Being verified I guess is part of it, but they're paying to get other things including less ads, Grok access, longer posts & videos, communities, media studio, monetization, and other things.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are playing for the blue tick solely because it makes their posts rank higher in the feed.
    - exodust 2y ago
      The blue tick doesn't cause the reply boost. The paid plan level does, from small to large boost. Blue tick means you supplied a valid phone and credit card - a strong indicator of a genuine account. I'm trying it to check out Grok, which is impressive now that it can handle current events and return posts and web links. On the negatives, they claim "download videos" as a feature of paid plans. This is false advertising. Many videos cannot be downloaded. The uploader must specifically set the video as downloadable, and many do not. X is deliberately misleading about this. It was a key reason I paid. Screenshot of page comparing tiers and features: https://imgur.com/a/AMEppji https://imgur.com/a/AMEppji
_djo_ 2y ago
You're misunderstanding why it gets mocked. Twitter launched a paid tier, Twitter Blue, before the Musk takeover. It was a sensible move, offering additional features such as edit functionality for power users, but not harming the experience for those who chose not to buy into it. Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts. In fact, there was as far as I know no visual indication that someone was a Twitter Blue user. When Musk took over, one of his first changes was to combine Twitter Blue and the verified programme, removing any actual verification in favour of a claim that anyone who had paid was 'verified'. The company also artificially boosts the posts of those who have bought this new premium tier, which disadvantages everyone else. Buying a blue tick is seen, quite rightly now, as buying an artificial boosting via the algorithm and that's just pure vanity.
- Amezarak 2y ago
  > Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." They were handed out randomly to some celebrities. bigcorps, and friends of Twitter employees. As far as I know a bluecheck was never handed out to anyone who wasn't who they said they were (although you could get them under pseudonyms too), but the "wrong" celebrities or normal people could not get them. It was a mark of social cachet, not authenticity.
  - _djo_ 2y ago
    That’s false. The programme was explicitly launched to highlight accounts that Twitter the company had verified as actually representing the person. [0] It was launched after the company was sued by a sports star who was impersonated. Until Musk took over it could always be relied on as proof of an account’s authenticity. What you’re complaining about isn’t that it represented something else, but that as with any large scale verification process it doesn’t scale well and the process was opaque. Twitter cycled through various approaches to solve the problem. At first they merely reached out to people, based on the popularity of accounts representing them, their level of fame, and their risk of impersonation (or evidence of prior impersonation) and as and when the team had capacity. Therefore celebrities, politicians, and journalists were prioritised. However, this was a flawed process that was too US-centric and too US West Coast-centric on top of that. They later opened up public applications but closed it down when they were overwhelmed with requests and couldn’t process them all. They ran into all the usual verification challenges, including language differences and the difficulty of verifying across countries. So they reverted back to the previous model while working on a way to use external factors to allow for a scaled up verification process in the future. That process stopped when Musk bought them. The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks. The company even verified Jason Kessler, though that stirred up a public controversy that forced it to pause the programme for a bit. [1] It wasn’t a perfect programme of course, but it did what it said it would: If you saw that an account had a blue tick you could trust it meant it was an authentic account that Twitter had verified. That aspect of the system never failed. [0] https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-verified-accounts-2 https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-verified-accounts-2 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/technology/jason-kessler-twitter-verification.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/technology/jason-kessler-...

I keep seeing people say BlueSky should be a paid service, but X gets mocked ruthlessly for this.

by cglong 2y ago

I keep seeing people say BlueSky should be a paid service, but X gets mocked ruthlessly for this.

What X gets mocked for is that the feature of being "verified" by Twitter was worth paying for. But X turned the "blue tick" into "this person has paid" which totally removed any value for the blue tick. It was yet another self-own, along with things like getting promoted on the feed. X could have made money by selling features (eg tweetdeck) and other useful things, but they didnt. Of course, then politcally it became a "this person is a MAGA person" so Musk had to start handing out "free" blue ticks to big accounts to avoid that appearance. To the point that people were putting in their name "didn't pay for blue"

exodust 2y ago
> "...other useful things, but they didnt" But they did. Nobody pays for X premium just to get a blue tick. Being verified I guess is part of it, but they're paying to get other things including less ads, Grok access, longer posts & videos, communities, media studio, monetization, and other things.
- int_19h 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are playing for the blue tick solely because it makes their posts rank higher in the feed.
  - exodust 2y ago
    The blue tick doesn't cause the reply boost. The paid plan level does, from small to large boost. Blue tick means you supplied a valid phone and credit card - a strong indicator of a genuine account. I'm trying it to check out Grok, which is impressive now that it can handle current events and return posts and web links. On the negatives, they claim "download videos" as a feature of paid plans. This is false advertising. Many videos cannot be downloaded. The uploader must specifically set the video as downloadable, and many do not. X is deliberately misleading about this. It was a key reason I paid. Screenshot of page comparing tiers and features: https://imgur.com/a/AMEppji https://imgur.com/a/AMEppji

_djo_ 2y ago

You're misunderstanding why it gets mocked. Twitter launched a paid tier, Twitter Blue, before the Musk takeover. It was a sensible move, offering additional features such as edit functionality for power users, but not harming the experience for those who chose not to buy into it. Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts. In fact, there was as far as I know no visual indication that someone was a Twitter Blue user. When Musk took over, one of his first changes was to combine Twitter Blue and the verified programme, removing any actual verification in favour of a claim that anyone who had paid was 'verified'. The company also artificially boosts the posts of those who have bought this new premium tier, which disadvantages everyone else. Buying a blue tick is seen, quite rightly now, as buying an artificial boosting via the algorithm and that's just pure vanity.

Amezarak 2y ago
> Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." They were handed out randomly to some celebrities. bigcorps, and friends of Twitter employees. As far as I know a bluecheck was never handed out to anyone who wasn't who they said they were (although you could get them under pseudonyms too), but the "wrong" celebrities or normal people could not get them. It was a mark of social cachet, not authenticity.
- _djo_ 2y ago
  That’s false. The programme was explicitly launched to highlight accounts that Twitter the company had verified as actually representing the person. [0] It was launched after the company was sued by a sports star who was impersonated. Until Musk took over it could always be relied on as proof of an account’s authenticity. What you’re complaining about isn’t that it represented something else, but that as with any large scale verification process it doesn’t scale well and the process was opaque. Twitter cycled through various approaches to solve the problem. At first they merely reached out to people, based on the popularity of accounts representing them, their level of fame, and their risk of impersonation (or evidence of prior impersonation) and as and when the team had capacity. Therefore celebrities, politicians, and journalists were prioritised. However, this was a flawed process that was too US-centric and too US West Coast-centric on top of that. They later opened up public applications but closed it down when they were overwhelmed with requests and couldn’t process them all. They ran into all the usual verification challenges, including language differences and the difficulty of verifying across countries. So they reverted back to the previous model while working on a way to use external factors to allow for a scaled up verification process in the future. That process stopped when Musk bought them. The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks. The company even verified Jason Kessler, though that stirred up a public controversy that forced it to pause the programme for a bit. [1] It wasn’t a perfect programme of course, but it did what it said it would: If you saw that an account had a blue tick you could trust it meant it was an authentic account that Twitter had verified. That aspect of the system never failed. [0] https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-verified-accounts-2 https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-verified-accounts-2 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/technology/jason-kessler-twitter-verification.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/technology/jason-kessler-...