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Twitter Blue for $8/Month

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Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#151

Post by Yoofie »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #69
hunglee2 wrote: post #40

The good news is that this should definitely reduce the volume of bot / troll accounts, by making it prohibitively expensive to run. That will mean a reduction of disinformation on aggregate - as what other purpose would there be to run a bot network? The bad news is that it recreates the lords vs servants dynamic that Musk is claiming to want to get rid of. $8 is not much for everyone reading on HN, but guess what,…

$8 won’t necessarily price out spam accounts. As a counter example, on Tinder there are many fake/spam accounts with premium membership.

But with spending money, you can theoretically have more information on the buyer which you can use to help identify and fight spammers/bots & their networks. For example, you can limit one twitter account per credit card or registered user (identified via payment method). If they are found to be spammers, you just kill the account and ban the payment account(s). They can still obviously work around this, but the cost and difficulty for the spammer increases.

I don't know how the financial transactions & stuff work in the background, but the point is that you have more information and more options.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#152

Post by Imnimo »

I don't really grasp the value proposition here. I can have "Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam", but is that valuable to me or to my audience? If I'm a regular no-name user, do I care if I'm lost in replies and search? And if I'm the Steven Kings of the world, that other users want to see content from, does it do more harm to me or to Twitter if my posts are hidden because I'm not paying $8 a month?

It feels like I'm being asked to pay $8 to solve a problem that belongs to Twitter (too many bots), not a problem that belongs to me.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#153

Post by dgudkov »

MopMop wrote: post #150

Freedom of Speech is not free if you have to pay a monthly fee to express your opinion. We can already see them lining up to part with their salaries.

There are lots of places where you can express your opinion absolutely free of charge. For instance, HN ;)

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#155

Post by mikkergp »

bombcar wrote: post #115
dieortin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don’t want to live in a world in which so much depends on impulsive individuals. Your example sounds like a nightmare. That’s no way to make decisions.

If you read the stories of many "successful" CEOs (I'm thinking Jobs here, but there are others) the decisions they'd make often would come out as quite impulsive. If you dig significantly you might find that they're not as impulsive as they seem, that the person was actually considering many aspects but playing their cards close until cut-off time.

This is true, and so far Elon is doing exactly the thing everyone says you can’t do with a social network. If he succeeds, it will completely change the space. Also interesting change of strategy during an economic downturn.

But I do think one difference at least from where I’m sitting, is usually the response is, that’s crazy, but if it works you’ll be rich!

I’m not even really clear on what the “if it works” is in this situation, I guess if he proves that people are willing to pay $8 per month for a social network?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#156

Post by rcarr »

Here is what the next big aspiring social media company should put on their website.

"$COMPANY_NAME is currently free to use. Unfortunately, we do have employees and computers to pay for to keep things running. When we hit 1 billion users, we intend to start charging all our users a very small fee: 1 hour of minimum wage in whatever country you live in for an entire year's access. For example if you live in the UK, this means you'd only pay £9.50 for the entire year. If you live in Portugal, you'd only pay €4.38 for the year. Your first year will always be free to see if $COMPANY_NAME is right for you.

Your IP address currently shows you're from $COUNTRY_NAME. This means a year's access for you would be $COUNTRY_MINIMUM_WAGE. This fee will only ever increase if your government increases the minimum wage of your country and will always stay pegged to that rate.

This means that, regardless of where you live in the world or how much you earn, access to $COMPANY_NAME only requires, at most, a single hour of your time each year to continue using. This allows us to keep the platform free from ads, tracking, and from wasting money on useless VR products nobody wants. Help us build a better, fairer future for everyone: not just shareholders."

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#157

Post by UncleMeat »

minimaxir wrote: post #5

The price 100% was $20/mo as previously reported by journalists until Twitter dunked on it, and Elon's interpretation of the backlash is "the price is too high" and not "any price makes no sense at all." This pricing clarification is most likely due to Stephen King's complaint: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 > We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How…

Imagine making pricing decisions for a 40 billion dollar business on a fucking whim based on feedback from a famous author. I guess this is in character, given that Musk likes to price things with meme numbers already.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#158

Post by jjfoooo6 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #16

"Half as many ads" fascinates me deeply. Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"? How do I know what half should be? We've all been there: "it feels like YouTube has cranked the ads way up lately..." Will "half" just become "full" when "full" gets doubled next year?

In other words, it is that it's going to be very difficult for users to intuitively understand what "half ads" means and why they should pay for it.

It's a completely nonsensical compromise. Musk's product ideas for Twitter seems to assume that what everyone wants is for Twitter to be more complex, with more knobs to fiddle with.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#159

Post by UncleMeat »

Waterluvian wrote: post #51
mikkergp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such... odd behavior. For sure Stephen King who has a net worth of $500 million dollars does not mean "the price is too high". If Elon is successful, even I will read the business school case study on it, because it flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems and... well just about everything. The only way this works is if Elon's internal processes are way different from his public persona…

One of the things I admire about Elon (which is saying a lot...) is that for whatever reason, he's ready to bet the farm over and over. Whether he's some genius tactician or an impulsive moron, he just bought Twitter and is poised to drastically alter it. "flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems" indeed! Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day, "y…

I don't quite think it is luck - but a weird second thing.

Musk has a reality distortion field. I think he is a bloviating jerk but I know a lot of really really smart and dedicated engineers in software and in more traditional fields like mech-e and aerospace who would rather work for Musk than any other person and are willing to take pay cuts to work for him. This means he really can surround himself with very skilled people who can distill his "fuck it, we are doing FOO" commands into real plans.

What this tells me is not that Musk is a visionary but that a lot of shitty visions are nevertheless achievable if you've got enough smart people around you.

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