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Twitter Blue for $8/Month

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Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#161

Post by memish »

ssully wrote: post #85
memish wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For King and many other blue checks it's a status symbol. A way for the Lord to distinguish himself from the peasants. King (aptly named) would be happier if it was a Veblen good that cost $100,000/mo, which he could afford, but the peasants can't. Elon is mocking King and his status symbol by saying "fine, how about $8?", which from the King's perspective, is worse than $20 because even more peasants will have it. T…

I don’t think you could have misread this interaction more than you already have.

I can see how you think that if you're not familiar with how blue checks are awarded and what they mean to the nobility class of Twitter.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#162

Post by jjfoooo6 »

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…

Elon completely miss the point in this exchange, which is that Twitter needs people like Stephen King far more than people like Stephen King need Twitter. Why should Stephen King care about how Twitter pays it's bills?

The entire point of the blue check is that Twitter has an impersonation problem, what happens when some fraction of users find it worth paying $8 to impersonate a celebrity?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#163

Post by drawfloat »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #113
danpalmer wrote: post #14

The good: Twitter should not be editorally curating people through verification, making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change, as long as it's not necessary for participation. Brands, celebrities, those in the public eye could benefit from this. Needs to be implemented with care and ideally with a branding change so as not to confuse users as the semantics change. The bad: $8 is…

Agree with most of this, but: > Paying $8 [...] At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter Really? That seems completely contrary to my experience. In every online community I've seen, a higher barrier to entry has always been positively correlated with the quality of the conversation. Not saying there won't be downsides to this, but I very much doubt a lower quality of conversation will be one of them.

But it's not a higher barrier to entry – you can read and respond freely. It's a higher barrier to having a good experience, which I can't think of many successful examples of to be honest.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#164

Post by 411111111111111 »

codemac wrote: post #123
cmelbye wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported user. I don't think so. Twitter's ARPU from advertising in Q2 2022 was around $4.50. ARPU from advertising in the US was more than $14. Users likely to subscribe at $8/month (power users in western countries) are more valuable than average for advertising. No ads for $8/month would probably be a very bad idea.

Exactly, thank you. I was going to say - $8/mo per US user would be a failing ad business.

YouTube is 13€ for ad-free and they're actually hosting videos (High bandwidth) AND share over 50% of this with the content creators.

$8 is a lot - relatively speaking.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#165

Post by ProfessorLayton »

DeRock wrote: post #48
danpalmer wrote: post #14

The good: Twitter should not be editorally curating people through verification, making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change, as long as it's not necessary for participation. Brands, celebrities, those in the public eye could benefit from this. Needs to be implemented with care and ideally with a branding change so as not to confuse users as the semantics change. The bad: $8 is…

> $8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported user. There's no excuse for "half the ads", it should be none at all. Adverse selection. The people willing to pay to remove ads are probably your most profitable users to show ads to.

The people willing to pay, the heavy users, are also the people most engaged and posting content on the platform. Content that twitter needs for less heavy users to consume, bringing in eyeballs for advertisers.

Continuing to show ads to paying content creators is double-dipping.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#166

Post by ljosifov »

marktangotango wrote: post #63

I really wish twitter didn't exist. The utility I see in it is limited. For example, I don't have an account, but I do view tweets from time to time. The tweets I generally view are related to some real time event I'm interested in (ie news). I find the fact that even then, there is usually an endless stream of mostly banal, vapid responses to be very off putting. Not only do I find the content vastly uninteresting,…

I find Twitter good. Many interesting people and ideas, that I'd never would've come upon on my own probably. I find the short message format forces people to really distill their idea. The SNR on my TL seems fairly high imho.

It looks like I'm using it exactly the opposite of your "real time event" mode. I follow people that are not journalists and don't comment on people nor events. Strictly ideas. There are other media much better suited to covering people and events and in real-time.

Not having an account - don't see how that can work. In incognito - which I presume is similar to me not having an account - I get to see only a single page with few messages, nothing more. And ofc not possible to follow accounts and thus shape the TL.

I never subscribe to trends, themes, areas of interest and similar devices used by Twitter to guess what tweets I'd like to see. Twitter is hopeless there (as is the rest of social media). Just "show me what the account I selected to follow posted" is plenty good. I can't divine why Twitter does not do that only, why the extra complications wrt what messages I see on my TL. It's not like it can't show me enough adverts while showing only messages from accounts I follow.

Aside: I'm mystified how one goes from "don't like it" to "should not exist". Why, what's wrong with "live and let live"?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#167

Post by Waterluvian »

mikkergp wrote: post #143
Waterluvian wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Speaking of impulsive, I didn't realize he fired the top exists for-cause blowing up their golden parachutes: https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/elon-musk-fired-twi...

That'll be a fun half-decade of lawsuits...

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#168

Post by Waterluvian »

jjfoooo6 wrote: post #158
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.

Because every engineer knows that 99% of the customer base of their products are fellow engineers.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#169

Post by TremendousJudge »

ftio wrote: post #121
TremendousJudge wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that?

From a user perspective it's messy and confusing. What does "half as many" even mean? The experience is only different in degree, not in kind. There's less value, both real and perceived, in such a position. It's hard to imagine that the conversation started from "half as many." My hunch is that it started as "no ads" and somehow backed down to "half" for one reason or another. A couple reasons I can imagine are: - T…

Why do you have that hunch? Do you presume good will? My hunch says, what if the conversation started as "how do we make users believe there will be less ads"?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#170

Post by CodeWriter23 »

croes wrote: post #142
fluidcruft wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting a chuckle thinking about Elon as ThePirateBay and Stephen King as the MPAA.

Since when does ThePirateBay demand a fee and the MPAA says it's too high?

I don’t think the price is what bugs him so much as the newly-diminished elite status of the blue check.
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