Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Blue for $8/Month

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#221

Post by ericd »

uoaei wrote: post #215
memish wrote: post #202

A lot of people aren't groking what this means, even on tech and startup savvy HN. Naval and Balaji said it well: Charging for the blue check moves it from a status symbol to a utilitarian one. It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money. https://twitter.com/naval/status/1587523978456748033 The blue checks wanted to abolish billionaires, in the name of equality. The billion…

More mental gymnastics... I'm not even sure what point is being made by this move, other than devaluing the blue check to the point of meaninglessness. It's not even "utilitarian": if leveling the playing field was Musk's interest, he would have eliminated the blue check altogether. There is no mechanism for anti-impersonation if all it takes to get a blue check is payment. Bot farms can also pay money for blue check…

It substantially changes the economics of bots - cheap for a person, expensive for a person running 10,000 bots that want to appear legitimate.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#222

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

memish wrote: post #202

A lot of people aren't groking what this means, even on tech and startup savvy HN. Naval and Balaji said it well: Charging for the blue check moves it from a status symbol to a utilitarian one. It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money. https://twitter.com/naval/status/1587523978456748033 The blue checks wanted to abolish billionaires, in the name of equality. The billion…

> Everyone who needs one can pay for a blue check.

At $8/month, that's patently not true. Why should verification be anything other than a pay-once deal, if it has to be paid for at all?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#223

Post by weinzierl »

memish wrote: post #202

A lot of people aren't groking what this means, even on tech and startup savvy HN. Naval and Balaji said it well: Charging for the blue check moves it from a status symbol to a utilitarian one. It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money. https://twitter.com/naval/status/1587523978456748033 The blue checks wanted to abolish billionaires, in the name of equality. The billion…

It's more like the peasants will get a useless blue checkmark and the Lords will get a tag, which eventually will have the same meaning as the checkmark today. Everything stays the same but everyone pays.

"There will be a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587527711228149765?s=46...

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#224

Post by tfsh »

concinds wrote: post #195
paxys wrote: post #182

It's funny how quickly the conversation has jumped from "Twitter will be a bastion of free speech" to "$8/mo is a fair price to pay for prioritizing your speech over others". Power to the people indeed.

Verified users are already boosted in replies and search. That's been the case for many years. The only change is that since verification will require payment, boosting will require that same payment. It's a complete non-story.

How's it a non-story if you now just need to pay to boost your replies and search presence?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#225

Post by apeace »

muttantt wrote: post #192
tough wrote: post #181

What if I already have the checkmark and cant afford to pay? Will they take it away?

I think if someone can't afford $8 for Twitter Blue, they should probably get off of Twitter and find more ways to make money. There is plenty of work all around.

There are plenty of hard-working people who wouldn't want to budget $8/month for something nonessential like a social media app. There's no need to disparage them.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#226

Post by ncallaway »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #95
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…

My gut instinct is that the right price for verification is something like $1000 as a one-time fee. Lots of people who are active Twitter users will find that fee useful at some point in their life (as a business marketing expense), and Twitter will likely extract a lot more from them by charging $1000 once rather than $8/month.

I think it should just be 3x the cost of their verification process, and something that disappears and needs to be re-done if you edit your name/bio/handle.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#227

Post by james_pm »

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?

Thought the same thing. How do you prove top me as the user that I'm seeing "half as many ads" now that I'm paying $8? No ads is easy. They are there or they aren't.

I'd considering paying Twitter $8/month if it was no ads. Or, you know, I just keep using Tweetbot for $10/year and there's zero ads there and a straight reverse chronological timeline to boot.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#228

Post by res0nat0r »

memish wrote: post #202

A lot of people aren't groking what this means, even on tech and startup savvy HN. Naval and Balaji said it well: Charging for the blue check moves it from a status symbol to a utilitarian one. It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money. https://twitter.com/naval/status/1587523978456748033 The blue checks wanted to abolish billionaires, in the name of equality. The billion…

Some better takes on this from what I've seen:

https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/1587381512500125699

> If one in five current blue ticks paid $20 a month that would raise just under $15 million a year for Twitter…Twitter’s current revenues (mostly from ads) are $5 billion a year. Musk’s apparent plan would generate about 30 hours’ worth of annual revenue.

https://twitter.com/ashtonpittman/status/1587509202401927168

> Absolutely no one should pay $8 or $20 a month to support Elton Murk's latest scam. Asking low-income Twitter users to pay $92 a year so their tweets don't get hidden and deprioritized alongside bots is not giving "power to the people."

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#229

Post by colinmhayes »

rcarr wrote: post #156

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, t…

I really just think that this would mean people don't use the service. The internet has shown again and again that people will do practically anything to avoid paying for digital goods.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#230

Post by james_pm »

praisewhitey wrote: post #49
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?

On the instagram feed every fifth post is a sponsored post

Every other "Story" is an ad lately.
Post reply on HN