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

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

#151
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.

Pay for a different badge exists in LinkedIn. Most people do not wear it as a status symbol, and it doesnt get such treatment from non paying members. The current value of check mark is a proof of a person's influence vs the proposed one means I can spend $20 this month

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

#152

> told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of > November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired Why the heavy-handed cartoon villain boss thing though? Is this effectively another way to cut people? Changing the subscription price is presumably technically doable on short notice. But merging it with expanded verification for any and all who want it? Is that a one-week sprint to develop, test, and put…

Musk doesn't care about anyone as himself. Simple as that.

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

#153

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.

I would argue it’s very doable.

Are you missing the point of either it works or they get fired?

It's not about doable or not, it's about employee leadership.

I doubt that threats like these lead to high quality code.

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

#155
I 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.

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

#156

The part about the deadline really enrages me. I think about all the people in society who have intense and demanding jobs and demanding quotas and schedules and compare that to the soft and lazy lives of FAANG developers. Why is it okay that an Amazon driver pees in a bottle to hit delivery quotas, but a Twitter developer making ten times as much can't be asked to launch a feature in a week? I don't know if this is…

The answers is because software developers have leverage to improve their working conditions. The answer is to reduce exploitation in other industries not increase it for FAANG company staff...

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

#157
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…

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.

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

#158
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.

> 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, meeti…

When there's top executive will to drive things ahead and to cut short bureaucracy, all those that you listed - though common - become moot. Especially when someone as driven as Elon is leading the fray. It's not like the changes will be as slow as with Tesla, where you have serious safety and regulatory issues to deal with.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That balance is going great given Elon's recent content on Twitter /s. "Blatantly left leaning" is a joke. My trans friends wouldn't receive constant drive by harassment if that were the case.

Twitter is very left leaning.

Again, why then do my trans friends experience regular drive-by harassment?

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

#160
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.

Twitter was so so much better without the checkmark, it went down hill from there.

I liked it was it was people, pretty anomalous Tweeting. That was an exciting time.

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