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Twitter Blue for $8/Month

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Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#451

Post by Ar-Curunir »

threatofrain wrote: post #433
koonsolo wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. There is a very big difference between Twitter and YouTube, and it's obvious once you know it. Look at the most popular people on twitter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitte... All celebrities outside of twitter. Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT... Almost all made famous by YouTube.…

There's not enough "room" to produce interesting content solely on Twitter vs YouTube — you have to hiccup out your value in segmented tweet threads. Thus if Twitter does provide value to followers it is in referencing outside material. Elon is supposedly directing Twitter engineers to go full-steam on reviving Vine so we'll see if that can turn things around.

The vine crowd has long moved to Tiktok; even IG and YT couldn’t steal mindshare from them. Vine has no chance, given that they’re starting with a 6yr old product

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#452

Post by jmathai »

seydor wrote: post #342
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…

There's nothing good. When everyone can buy a checkmark, it becomes nothing. The next step is "only allow replies from blue checkmarks" both are bad ideas, and solely because of musk's obsession with bots. Without a mob to prop up people with retweets, twitter will be useless. You cant have the good parts without the ugly parts

I assume a small fraction would pay $8/mo for Twitter. Limiting who can reply seems like a useful feature - I think this already exists for "only people I follow".

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#453

Post by koonsolo »

thorum wrote: post #24

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.

Maybe they lose the appeal as you say. But on the other hand, maybe everyone now wants to avoid not having it.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#455

Post by ProjectArcturis »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #284
pavlov wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Weird, I've never heard of people obsessing over GitHub stars. I guess if you're not actively contributing to open source projects, it's not something you care about.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#456

Post by zzleeper »

madeofpalk wrote: post #361
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…

I think this would do the complete opposite. Create two tiers of of users: Lords with the money to spend $8/month on getting a blue tick next to their name, and the peasants who don't cough up. I can't wait to be disregarded just as a spam bot because I thought it's an embarrassing waste of money.

Can't it actually be the opposite? Like, sure I could pay $8/no (a coffee plus croissant) but it signals that I care so much about being heard on twitter that I'm willing to PAY for it... Only losers do so, so blue checkmarks a are that.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#457

Post by corytheboyd »

My goodness the weight people put behind the verification check mark sounds absolutely insane as a person who is not at all invested in Twitter. As an outsider, this sounds like the only way to combat scammers on the platform, assuming non-paying viewers have an easy way to only see content from paying users.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#458

Post by ericd »

uoaei wrote: post #347
ericd wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So you've limited the success of bot farms only to the set of state actors. Yay, such a great improvement...

Well yeah, that actually is. Most spammers aren’t government backed.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#459

Post by sliken »

Seems pretty weird to me. I read an article that the top 5% of users are responsible for 90% of tweets and most of the profit. Said 5% have been leaving the platform for the last few months.

Now there's a $8/Month incentive for the top users to leave ... seems backwards. They should be paying the top users to stay so the 95% has something to read.

Imagine if youtube creators had to pay instead of be paid.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#460

Post by initplus »

dan-robertson wrote: post #285

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…

For journalists it's not basically part of your job, it often literally is! Many media organisations require their reporters to maintain an active online professional presence on Twitter.
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