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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

#101

Post by miked85 »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #83
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.

>The blue checkmark is in practice just a symbol of vanity. That you're a genuine somebody, worthy of extra verification. Absolutely. But if anyone who pays $20/month can get a blue checkmark, it is no longer the status symbol you describe and its appeal totally disappears.

The verification process doesn't change, you just need to pay for it.

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

#102

Post by fzeroracer »

kortex wrote: post #55
throwaway5959 wrote: post #21

Might as well have just fired them. There’s no way a feature like that can get released in most companies on that timeline, even without the scale issues.

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.

This is spoken by someone that's never had to work in a global environment.

Like payment stuff and subscriptions is a nightmare when you have to deal with legal issues across the world. This is without going into needing to actually scope out the work, figure out how to integrate the changes safely, test them, roll them out and more. Plus it's disruptive to whatever work engineers were already doing to suddenly tell them 'do this thing NOW or you're fired'.

I really start to wonder how many people have actually worked as professional engineers.

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

#103

Post by dorkwood »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #91
joecot wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds more difficult to me. You need to create a pipeline to migrate all existing users to your new pricing model, and you need to create all the messaging around that in all different languages. Seems it would be easier if it was just a new feature with a clean slate.

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

#104

Post by miked85 »

jeanlucneptune wrote: post #24

I'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…

A blue check has never had anything to do with how many times you login to the site.

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

#105

Post by throwawaylinux »

kortex wrote: post #55
throwaway5959 wrote: post #21

Might as well have just fired them. There’s no way a feature like that can get released in most companies on that timeline, even without the scale issues.

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.

> engineer-weeks

The executive sponsor and their focus groups, product managers and their review committees, finance and their budgetary approvals, HR and their headcount approvals, the project managers and their technical working groups and sizing estimates, dev, UX, legal, test, deployment, DEI, customer advocacy, competitive analysis, etc all have to have representatives to develop a plan and sign off on it, meetings have to be scheduled, documents have to be created, approvals have to be stamped.

If you've ever worked in a true bureaucratic hellhole, you can understand how a few engineer-weeks turns into a 3 year 20 million dollar that can't be killed because too many "important" people would get egg on their face so it eventually gets rolled out, promotions and handshakes all around, and then it gets scrapped 2 weeks later because it is so terrible and nobody speaks of it again.

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

#106

Post by dontbenebby »

So for approximately the price of just two Something Awful dot com forums accounts per month, you too can opt into being a public figure? There's something to be said for being a private citizen, a consumer, in this wintry economic climate.

I still remember a Google interviewer where the guy jumped from being almost BDSMlike in the attention to detail he paid to my CV after I explained the CIA triad, then jumped to getting ornery when I pointed out my mind is weirdly visual, and I can remember the textbook - the very next page had a paragraph on nonrepudiation.

(That means we're getting out of this cycle of treating ambiguities during my resumé gap as chances for fishing expeditions -- I'm spending Halloween wandering around Appalachia in a Bernie shirt thanking people for putting their dogshit into a little bag.)

Rather than be at all deferential I should have said something to the effect of "You control the email service I registered as a child, it begins to make you people look like full on pedophiles if you keep someone this smart economically precarious long enough, stop being cute in these if you don't want civil unrest."

(I got kicked off Twitter for being too... partisan. I thought I made it clear -- call whoever you want? Just don't get mad if folks tell you "Oh, we knew about that. They sell mace at the sporting goods store. You were warned your ideas suck LOLbertarian."

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

#107

Post by ascagnel_ »

MBCook wrote: post #45
datalopers wrote: post #25

Quoted post unavailable.

Seems to me he did it to avoid what would come out in the lawsuit. What was so bad he was desperate enough to take on a $44B boondoggle of a purchase (he’s a bad fit, it wasn’t worth near that) to keep off the official record. What did he do??? What would be that bad?

There were reports that he had deleted Signal messages, which could have led to significant sanctions if the deletions were made after discovery requests had been made.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/5/23389568/musk-twitter-sig...

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

#108

Post by pfraze »

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.

> which is apparently just repurposed Twitter stack.

What makes you say that?

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

#109

Post by LightHugger »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #83
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.

>The blue checkmark is in practice just a symbol of vanity. That you're a genuine somebody, worthy of extra verification. Absolutely. But if anyone who pays $20/month can get a blue checkmark, it is no longer the status symbol you describe and its appeal totally disappears.

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".
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