A move in the right direction. Social networks should never be monetized with ads.
who said they won't be ?
Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
171–180 of 190 posts
Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good? Why are there people who think it should be a status symbol, to by recognized by twitter staff of all people as "noteworthy?" It's ridiculous and more than a little pathetic that people considered it a valid status symbol to begin with, and it should be dismantled as such. It's not called a "status symbol and we like this person mark" it's called "verified".
Good for everyone else, potentially. Not really great for the strategy of charging for it, if they think that the blue checkmark is going to be a valuable part of charging for Twitter. The second it's available to the general public, it loses 99% of its value and doesn't really do anything to serve it's purpose of making Twitter Blue / paid twitter more attractive.
Considering verified accounts are less than 1% of twitter, there is a lot more upside to average Joe paying $20/mo for it. Beyond status, it's a way for influencers to communicate they are the official accounts for their followers.
Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
#173Twitter poll: >Would you consider paying $20 monthly to get or retain a blue check? https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1586902284948148228
dont listen to what they say
Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
#174I'm a twitter "heavy user" - logging in daily and tweeting > 4x per week. Users like me make up 10% of users, but 90% of tweets. I've been a heavy user X 15 years and I'm still not a blue check. I perceive no benefit in being verified and I doubt being verified would have/will change my experience as a user. If they verified me for FREE I wouldn't care. $20/month to be verified on a site controlled by a maniac in the…
he's counting that people like you won't leave, because the platform obviously matters to you and you already consider yourself invested. But now you have to kinda justify paying $20 ... probably by monetizing your audience or something. Going from $0 to $1 is a huge change for almost any social media following.
Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
#175I 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
Anybody famous enough to warrant a special verification process can probably afford $20/mo.
Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
#176Unrelated- but I think Elon is going the way of Trump and Kanye to being cancelled or his businesses being doomed. All the goodwill he had as the underdog at Tesla, he's throwing away with his "I'm better than you, I'm here to save you, Nothing I say will hurt me cos I'm invincible and people love me" complex.
My first take was to agree with you. But after a bit of thought I'm not so sure. I've been talking to friends and neighbors, and there is a lot of anger building of late about [inflation, crime, government handling of Covid, media aligned with government] that makes me think more people will be supporting alternate voices because the entrenched power is so disliked. Like literally any alternate voice will stand out,…
I don’t doubt those feelings are sincere. But I will note that there is already an alternative media ecosystem dedicated to amplifying and enhancing exactly those issues.
For example: someone will be a lot more concerned about crime if they’re getting steady messaging reinforcing the message that crime is out of control.
Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
#177I was thinking that they should charge blue checkmark by the # of followers you have. the more followers you have, the more you have to pay. I wonder if it would incentivize people not to pay for fake followers as at least was a problem in the past.
Buying followers for someone you dislike and then accusing them of doing so has been a strategy for quite some time; increasing the load on the victim does not help. Also, this would force large users into monetizing their account (assuming they are not super-rich).
Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
#178A move in the right direction. Social networks should never be monetized with ads.
who said they won't be ?
Let's not confuse necessary and sufficient here. Of course, they can charge money and show ads. Getting paid is necessary if we want social media to become ad-free and start catering to user needs, not to advertisers' needs.
Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
#179Even 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…
The assumption you're making is that all of 7,500 of those staff are worthwhile staff who are worthy of being hired. I doubt it. If the indication is true that Twitter is carrying a lot of deadweight, then Elon's purge is going to make Twitter a very lean and profitable tech company, not unlike Netflix.
I think you'll find the most capable engineers at Twitter will be the first to leave, not the deadweight. These people will be able to get a job anywhere, or start a company, and they're not going to sit around and be screamed at by a capricious dictator who doesn't know anything about how long things actually take (and if Elon did, he wouldn't be promising FSD "real soon now" every year)
If I was working at Twitter and Elon strolled in and said "Ship this (non-emergency fix) in one week or you're fired", I'd tender my resignation immediately. First, it's ridiculous. Second, we already know he wants to get rid of 1/3 to 2/3rds of the company, so there's no guarantee if you pull 80-hr weeks, weekend all-nighters, that you won't get fired anyway. And honestly, a CEO expecting people to regularly pull crazy hours like that is a red flag.
Re: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
#180seems risky to do anything that decreases twitter's reach. it may seem counter intuitive but there is a reason the blue check mark was free of charge in the first place. I am not sure advertisers want a smaller twitter user base, since the one that exists is quite heterogeneous and geographically distributed.