A perfect example with the recent changes at Twitter: > Most Twitter users barely tweet and don't care about followers - a "heavy user" tweets on average less than three times a week. So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good. > It is exactl…
> enough to be willing to pay $8 a month you realize $8 a month is nothing to the majority of adults who would be in the "knowledge worker" category? a month? a couple of coffees is $10 and that's a day.
That the "heavy user" threshold is 3 posts a week is surprising to me, and seems like a bad threshold I'm sure that actual Twitter data is likely more accurate and shows different numbers, but it's not really about the usage I guess, it's about the promise of more followers and engagement. But demonstrably this is not the case, and many persons who did buy the Blue Check complained they didn't see the increase in activity it was advertised that the Blue Check would give. The signal behind what a Blue Check means has been quite noisy for a very long time, even before Musk's take over, and the decisions post-Musk on what a Blue Check really means/does is very confusing and unclear.
Why would I pay $8 a month to maybe get some followers by being promoted when I could just spend a few hundred USD once and just buy followers from some follower farm, which is arguably a better signal of "hey, this person is worth following?" as opposed to the Blue Check? It doesn't matter if it's just a "couple of coffees", why pay for something that arguably provides 0 benefit for me?
Twitter should not have tried to sell identify validation as a major marketable service; they already try to validate your identity even without it, and it doesn't seem to benefit anyone, not even Twitter.
Game companies figured out how to monetize useless things with cosmetics and such, and if Twitter wanted to monetize heavily, they should have just done that. Fancier reactions, more edits and stupid stuff for the changeable usernames, etc. The idea that they can somehow sell the user attention is a folly; yes, they gate and can control the feeds, but the users always have the option of just not following or even just not looking. It's a resource Twitter _never_ really had control over; they might as well have been selling ocean wranglers, offering that someone will beat the tide with whips for you if the ocean pisses you off for some reason; it's about the same effectualness, and equally useless service.