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Twitter Blue for $8/Month

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Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#281

Post by lupire »

legitster wrote: post #134
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. Than an average user. But if you are a power user, you have just sent a valuable marketing signal. > Paying $8 to get your voice heard by more people biases towards those with means Strong disagree. Twitter currently only exists as a bullhorn for already famous people, or a few lucky early adopters.

I mean, being too online, at home, in sweats, doesn't make me a big spender.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#282

Post by [deleted] »

UncleMeat wrote: post #159
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…

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 skil…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#284

Post by TeMPOraL »

pavlov wrote: post #254
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 fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media profile flag. I don’t think anyone cares except those same billionaires/VCs and journalists who both write this drivel (one of the links is on a16zcrypto.com which I guess is the ideological enemy base of “establishment journos”). Will anyone else be left on Twitter when their private war is done?

> It’s fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media profile flag. I don’t think anyone cares except those same billionaires/VCs and journalists (...)

Would you say the same about GitHub stars? There's no end of people obsessing about those, completely oblivious to the fact that they're first and foremost bookmarks, and do not confer any particular sentiment for a starred repository. And yet, they're a popularity contest.

Journalists and VCs care about this because enough users care about this that it can be used to print money.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#285

Post by dan-robertson »

The dynamics on Twitter are quite weird. There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life. If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is basically part of your job so maybe you should have to pay a bit more just like the customer of some business software ($100 pa seems pretty cheap there). Indeed maybe media publications should be paying for the blue checks for their staff. But on the other hand, these people are going to represent a large part of the draw of Twitter and so maybe Twitter should be paying them instead.

But other people use Twitter in different ways. If you mostly use it as a social network between your friends you might not care because they’ll presumably see your tweets because they follow you rather than because they found them in search or whatever.

If you’re using Twitter as a forum for discussions about some topic of your interest, maybe you’ll end up feeling crowded out in replies by people with the check. But if you’re at risk of being crowded out then maybe Twitter isn’t working so well as a forum. And I think that if eg A follows B and B retweets you, A should see your tweet whether or not you have a check. Maybe that isn’t so true with the non-chronological feed. If people in the community follow you then, depending on the dynamics, your opinions could still be spread via retweet rather than getting lucky in your position in the replies, no?

If you’re some reply guy, maybe your tweets should be downranked but then if you’re serious about it then I guess you’ll pay.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#287

Post by atYevP »

They keep solving weird problems in weird ways. My $0.02 ->

They should have:

1. Created a new “VIP status symbol” icon (diamond?) for people who care / need / want the prestige (charge for it or don't) - I'd almost fork the existing checks over to it for simplicity.

2. Kept blue check for actual identity verification (this is a real human).

3. Added features people care about (editing / etc…) to Blue and charge for them.

Tying the verification to features is...just odd. #sigh

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#288

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

meragrin_ wrote: post #274
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> At $8/month, that's patently not true. Who needs one that cannot afford $8/month? Does anyone really need it? > Why should verification be anything other than a pay-once deal, if it has to be paid for at all? It is not just verification though. Verification is just part of the subscription.

> Who needs one that cannot afford $8/month? Does anyone really need it?

A lot of freelance writers, in my experience.

> It is not just verification though. Verification is just part of the subscription.

That's a fair point, but why not make verification free (or a one-off payment) and remove it from the subscription feature package?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#289

Post by TeMPOraL »

cycomanic wrote: post #271
TeMPOraL wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a simple way to make this legible to the user: instead of slashing ad frequency, eliminate half of ad surface . I.e. if there are N places on the page where ads are being served, turn off half of them for the paying users. This will be an obvious difference, and remain so even as the ad intensity/frequency increases.

Yes and be just as anoying. I'm not sure that anyone would see a value of just seeing half the amount of ads on a page.

Half of ads is strictly more valuable than all of them. Whether or not it's worth $8 is another question, but people still forget it's all a supplier-driven market: there is, and is not going to be, an option to pay $8 and get no ads. You choose out of what's being made available.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#290

Post by rchaud »

booleandilemma wrote: post #178

It would have been great if, after taking Twitter private, Musk just immediately shut it down. Would it have made any financial sense? Of course not. Would it have been the ultimate post-modern, trollish, liberating move imaginable? Absolutely.

To be honest, this sounds more like a child's revenge of taking his ball and going home.

It really wouldn't even be worth it either, because Musk is worshipped on Twitter and Reddit and nowhere else. He isn't Trump, he can't mobilize half a country to love him unquestioningly. This is the only place where his childish taunts about turning Twitter HQ into a homeless shelter will find an audience.

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