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Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

theverge.com

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Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

#91

Post by MontyCarloHall »

joecot wrote: post #86
kortex wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Even in a bloated, red-tape bureaucratic hellhole, that's maybe a few engineer-weeks at absolute most. Wire up a payment processor, plug into whatever api sets the blue checkmark, have some expiration logic, done.

Not even that. They already have Twitter Blue, a premium service that's 3 bucks a month. So they already have payments, they already have subscriptions and membership periods. They literally just need another plan tier added.

Not even that, the article says that the plan is to just repurpose Twitter Blue, not add another tier.

>The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge.

Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

#92

Post by reustle »

dclusin wrote: post #76

I think this is smart. The blue checkmark is in practice just a symbol of vanity. That you're a genuine somebody, worthy of extra verification. There are so many self-important people in life and on social media that think they are in a class above everybody else, I bet a large percentage of these not noteworthy but need to be verified people will happily pay for it.

Telegram recently launched a very similar feature to the verified checkmark

https://telegram.org/blog/700-million-and-premium

Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

#93

Post by reilly3000 »

jeanlucneptune wrote: post #37
ClayM wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same -i'm an extremely heavy user, now i'm investigating what alternatives are out there

Jack's launching Bluesky soon, which is apparently just repurposed Twitter stack. Tribel looks like another option that many people have been talking about. Lately, I've been spending more time on Reddit. Another option is to replacement Twitter with ... nothing. Food for thought.

I’m not really read up on it, but I think Bluesky and Twitter are not really operating in the same space, and certainly not in the same way. Bluesky is building a protocol and selling a hosting platform. I started thinking about that model years ago, making a social protocol makes sense and it’s time for a Mastodon for the masses.

Twitter has built an incredibly resilient and scalable real-time message delivery over all IPN, email, and cell endpoints the world has to offer, and world class search, data, and ad stack. It used to make news when Twitter when down. It still does, and it set a record in July of being down for 45 mins. It doesn’t break at 1 billion messages/day. I forgot what the fail whale looks like.

If Bluesky the protocol rocks but the open source hosting sucks, Bluesky the business will do great. I’m sure their team can build a magnificent stack. I worry the business will be greedy, but the protocol will be widely adopted and centrally governed.

From their site https://atproto.com/:

Federated social

Connect with anyone on any service that's using the AT Protocol.

Algorithmic choice

Control how you see the world through an open market of algorithms.

Portable accounts

Change hosts without losing your content, your follows, or your identity

Twitter is crippled with debt and bursting with defectors. Bluesky or anyone else who wants to win the future needs to handle mass migration, user engagement, scaling issues, support, and needs to be able to do so quickly.

I love the idea of a marketplace for algorithms, and I think there will be a new class of moderation filters as a service. Perhaps there is a community baseline, and tools to make your own, but mostly people will pay to eliminate noise and curate their experience.

Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

#94

Post by newaccount2021 »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #57
MBCook wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verification isn’t/wasn’t (supposed to be) about how often you used the platform. It was so journalists and celebrities and such could be identified and you could tell if you were intersecting with the genuine article or a fake account impersonating them. 90 days to sign up before people lose their check mark. So 90 days until the clones come out. I’m sure this has nothing to do with the MASSIVE amount of debt Twitte…

> Who comes up with a feature and gives the programmers a very short deadline with a threat to fire them if they can’t make it? That’s horribly cruel. This has to be a pretext to turn a layoff into a firing with cause, right? 7 days is absolutely ridiculous for something like this, even though they already have some (most?) of the plumbing laid via Twitter Blue. Also, tomorrow is a non-governmental holiday in the US…

No post body was provided.

Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

#95

Post by [deleted] »

muglug wrote: post #54

Even with the hiring freezes across Silicon Valley, good engineers will right now be trying to leave Twitter in droves. The stress of all this will have an additive effect, and make a salary cut more bearable if they have to change jobs. Instagram has about 20,000 employees. Twitter has about 7,500. How many of those can it lose before advertisers start leaving in droves? At that point, whatever monetisation strategy…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

#96

Post by dragonwriter »

abnry wrote: post #75
datalopers wrote: post #25

Quoted post unavailable.

The article never even says what the "alt-right conspiracy theory" is. Just that it the source is disreputable.

He RT'd a link to this article, saying “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.”

https://www.smobserved.com/story/2022/10/31/opinion/the-awfu...

Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

#97

Post by cirrus3 »

senectus1 wrote: post #33

$20 a month... rofl I grouch about $5 a month for a static IP, not a chance on earth I, or anyone I know would pay $20 a month to twitter for anything they could provide. (and that $20 a month will be USD.. so it'll be like $28 a month for Australians) not a chance.. if they billed me a few cents per tweet maybe (if they threw in no adverts).

>I, or anyone I know

Pretty much sums up the usefulness of your comment.

Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

#98

Post by donohoe »

dclusin wrote: post #76

I think this is smart. The blue checkmark is in practice just a symbol of vanity. That you're a genuine somebody, worthy of extra verification. There are so many self-important people in life and on social media that think they are in a class above everybody else, I bet a large percentage of these not noteworthy but need to be verified people will happily pay for it.

Beyond celebrity it addressed the issue of impersonation - which will return as a problem

Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

#99

Post by Hamcha »

reustle wrote: post #92
dclusin wrote: post #76

I think this is smart. The blue checkmark is in practice just a symbol of vanity. That you're a genuine somebody, worthy of extra verification. There are so many self-important people in life and on social media that think they are in a class above everybody else, I bet a large percentage of these not noteworthy but need to be verified people will happily pay for it.

Telegram recently launched a very similar feature to the verified checkmark https://telegram.org/blog/700-million-and-premium

And it depends on existing verified pages (you get verified by.. having two other verified social network accounts). If you can pay to get one of those, that's half of the job done for 20$.

Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

#100

Post by incompatible »

Nicksil wrote: post #66
MBCook wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

>So if [insert celebrity here] decides not to pay, I can now pay $20 to officially impersonate them as backed by Twitter. Do you have the necessary documentation to prove this identity? Aren't you concerned with violating federal laws?

Somebody may already have the same name as a celebrity, or think it's worth changing their legal name. It seems to be already possible to have multiple verified accounts with the same name, e.g., https://twitter.com/thejohnsmith and https://twitter.com/Harryslaststand are both verified as "John Smith".
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