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.
"half" means less annoying. It's not complicated for users.
It doesn't mean "less annoying" in a meaningful way when the baseline can change drastically and without warning.
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...
Matt Levine has an interesting take on this [0], basically that nothing in that Musk claims of their behaviour meets the specification of "cause" in their employment contracts, and further that the golden parachutes are a good thing in that they prevent the C-suite from being focused on their continuing salary: "The basic problem with Musk’s efforts to walk away from these severance agreements — beyond the lack of ac…
"And then Elon Musk showed up for his first day of work as Twitter’s chief executive officer — technically its Chief Twit — and said “hey, do you have any other contracts I could violate?”
Oh, this is going to be a fun read.
In response to your quote, I guess he did it as revenge for making him go through with it.
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…
If you’re a journalist (or your other suggestions) then you’re basically using Twitter as free advertising to (a) your followers and (b) people who read your tweets which have been retweeted. Having people coming towards the way you actually make money is probably worth a lot more than $8 per month to you, even considering that journalists aren’t so well paid (the idea of blue checks getting paywall bypass could be very good for journalists too – they could end up more directly getting value out of people coming to their work from Twitter).
Paying $8 per month for this free advertising seems pretty great. How much would it cost to send this out via actual ads or eg mailchimp (but of course it is much easier to have new people see your tweets than your marketing emails)?
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.
You hit the nail on the head in your post. The mysterious Twitter checkmark committee that got to gatekeep who could be in their group. Then people (probably the committee itself) started pushing the idea that blue check marks are more reliable and trustworthy. I am not okay with a random group of people being able to decide whether or not someone is trustworthy. I prefer the checkmark to mean this person pays x doll…
It’s not a trust mark, it’s an authentication mark: this person is who they say they are. It really is Stephen King. Your grandmother doesn’t need an authentication mark because you can call her up and ask “Hey, granny, did you really tweet that?” Nothing to do with actual trust, other than that the famous name really is famous name.
It substantially changes the economics of bots - cheap for a person, expensive for a person running 10,000 bots that want to appear legitimate.
Expensive for a person running 10,000 bots, irrelevant to a hostile nation doing the same.
Almost everything is irrelevant to a hostile nation state, because by its very nature it can outspend your security if it cares badly enough. In the immortal words of James Mickens[0], "If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT."
Raising the costs has a general effect of cutting out people who do not care enough to pay - be it individuals, companies, or governments.
Funny, I was just listening to Naval Ravikant talking about it being better to seek wealth than status, because the latter is a zero-sum game. hard to unsee that dynamic once it's pointed out.
After subsistence, wealth doesn't provide value except as a way to buy status.
Not really true. You can buy better versions of products and services.
That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal. So every user paying $X/mo to solidify their place in the graph makes some conceptual sense. In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are c…
> So you want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money. I think it's only Onlyfans that can get away with such a business model.
Twitch, Patreon etc. etc.
Arguably also Netflix, Roblox and free-to-play mobile games run on this sort of scheme as well.
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.
Strictly more valuable, sure. But if it's only 10% less annoying, there's very little incentive to buy. And adblock is an option sitting in the wings.