351–360 of 1001 posts
This would align the value and goals for both Twitter and blue checks.
1. Charge $8/mon and a bunch of people will pay 2. Fire a bunch of engineers 3. Twitter looks way better on paper 4. Flip the company in 18 months when rates go down and market is better esp tech
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct, which is odd that Elon responded to him, "How about 8?"
I might be wrong but I read that as a veiled insult. i.e. "Are you such a povvo that you can't afford $20?"
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…
The old money (journalists of mainstream newspapers) can leave and take all the audiences with them. Their audience is there for the narrative and ideology, not because they are fond of Twitter.
Twitter does not have a "native" audience, because it claims to be a platform. If they engaged deeper with content producers (like substack does) they might have. It's a solely megaphone, hence useless without a voice behind them.
Old money reigns supreme because the "new" voices are not independent. They go on twitter so they can graduate to mainstream media (or to onlyfans)
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…
> 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 I think this completely misunderstands why social media products like Twitter are successful. Those journalists (or gamers, or comedians, or porn stars) that you're arguing should be considering $9 a month as cost of business, they are the content creator…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Influencers and hustlebros will pay that, celebrities won't. If the celebrities leave, Twitter dies.
Whatever else the blue checks are, they're also a solution to a problem for Twitter, and those blue-checks and their activity are a huge part of why everyone else engages with the platform. If they make people pay, they better hope the adoption rate is incredibly high among existing blue checks (who cares about the unknowns who pony up for it, in addition) or they're gonna be in for a bad time.
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…
> 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 I think this completely misunderstands why social media products like Twitter are successful. Those journalists (or gamers, or comedians, or porn stars) that you're arguing should be considering $9 a month as cost of business, they are the content creator…
Yes, those highly-connected nodes could easily kill the network... if they all coordinated to leave at once. Which is a real risk here, because of how high-profile and controversial the issue is right now. But normally, they're just as glued to the network as everyone else. Perhaps even more so, because...
... they aren't creating content for fun. They're creating it to make money off the audience. So they have to stick to where the audience is.
People with blue check marks would like to think they're special and valuable to the platform, but they're not. At this scale, they're a commodity too. They play a different role on the platform, but for the platform, users with different roles is just what makes the whole thing tick and print money.
Blue checkmarks are not just about verification and extra features. They’re a status symbol. They mean you are cool and notable enough to deserve one according the shadowy and mysterious Twitter checkmark committee. If they become a commodity that anyone with a little money can buy, they lose a big part of their appeal to the average person.
I mean so is the Github "pro" badge. You don't need it if all you're using are free features. And yet a lot of people buy it to showcase support or have that "cool" badge. If the same happens for twitter then good for them no? They get more funding to develop cool shit.
I wonder how big the exodus from Twitter has been-- (seems noteworthy from what I've seen)-- and whether it will be covered by journalists? They seem to have already decided that Twitter = news, ignoring the fact that most people don't use Twitter at all. If (say) 5% of people leave Twitter, will journalists notice? Of course not, they'll just keep pretending like "people on twitter" == "people".